The number of hip-hop hits penned by someone other than the person rapping them doesn’t even need to be mentioned at this point. And we’re all well aware that rappers are not so much diarists as storytellers, bigger-than-life characters, and ciphers for their neighborhood or region, all at once. Fact, fiction, and fantasy are merged together, as they are in every art form. So, outrage over ghostwriting is a regressive way of approaching rap music. Trumping lyrics over all else sends the genre back even further than the already problematic celebration of ‘skills’ that dominated during the golden era and still lingers. The betrayal fans muster up about ghostwriting turns rap music into nothing more than words on paper. Back in 2007, Ghostface was accused of using ghostwriters on Supreme Clientele, but does it matter? He most certainly owns every insane utterance on that album.