Admit it, when you hear the term "deadbeat dad," you immediately think of a black rapper rocking Gucci stunna shades in a perfectly dimmed room, pants drooping to his ankles.
Truth be told, hip-hop dads would be wise to step up and heed Ed OG's words: "Be a Father to Your Child."
Relationships may come and go, but kids are here to stay. So when Rocks Off heard that fresh-out-of-jail Lil Wayne - already a father four times over, by four different women - had been slapped with a paternity suit earlier this week, we knew we had to act.
Here are five hip-hop fathers destined for the Deadbeat Dad Hall of Shame.
5. Uncle Luke, 2 Live Crew: Who says mothers have a monopoly on blasting deadbeat dads? Uncle Luke was called out by his own daughter, Lacresha. Though Lacresha appeared on her father's reality show Luke's Parental Advisory, she says the show couldn't be further from reality.
"He is not a good father," Lacresha said in an expletive-laden video. "He's an asshole. Let me just tell you from my opinion that show was wack and I was on it!" We were ready to believe her until she faltered when talking about an incident between Luke and her mother:
"Luke used to beat my mom. Abuse? Yes. That was him. He even, like, shot her in the leg...I think. I don't know. But still, he used to beat her down 'til she couldn't even move or walk." OK. We can't decide if Lacresha is an airhead or a pathological liar.
4. Joe Budden: When Joe Budden failed to cough up an alleged $13,000 in child support payments last month, the state of New Jersey quickly issued a warrant for his arrest. Budden is a serial offender--he was also arrested back in August 2009 for, yep, you guessed it, dodging child support payments.
He laughed at the whole thing on Twitter: "So I'm on the front page of the paper & the headline reads "unpaid child support".. It SHOULD say "babymoms is back on her bullsh*t", lol."
3. Dame Dash: You know him as Dame Dash the hyperactive co-founder of Roc-a-Fella. His ex Linda Williams knows him as Dame the Deadbeat. In a 2008 lawsuit, Williams filed a suit in a family court claiming that she and her son were living in dilapidated conditions. According to the suit, their son was "at imminent risk" and living in an unstable home with no electricity or running water.
2. Swizz Beatz: You won't find a harsher critic of newlyweds Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys than his ex-wife Mashonda, with whom Swizzy had 4-year-old son Kasseem Jr. Mashonda wrote an open letter to Alicia Keys accusing her of destroying her marriage to the stanky rich producer. When she found out that Swizzy had fathered another child with a Russian woman living in London, she probably kicked a midget.
1. Ol' Dirty Bastard: Dearly departed Ol' Dirty Bastard had 13 kids - that were accounted for - so imagine how many child support checks he had to mail out. Problem is, he didn't. In 1997, Dirty was arrested for failing to pay court-mandated child support of over $35,000 for the three children he had with wife, Icelene Jones. It didn't end there.
The late Clansman was arrested so many times that he had a mugshot for every day of the week. Somehow, he still found time to enhance every Wu-Tang record with his inimitable flow.
