I don’t have any particular expectations that an entertainment medium like rap music should be political.
All music speaks to the politics, ideology and identity of the forces that create them. In 2012 hip hop is a particular series of almost mockable ultra-capitalist tropes. It makes sense that right wing pundits would continue to amplify moral panic out of rap music because most of music and imagery is created to be increasingly outrageous.
The fun part is that twenty years of cultural saturation has shared the tools to make rap music with millions of young people. Quite a few of them grew up and made rap music. Some of them currently make excellent rap music.
I agree with El-P (shown here with Killer Mike). There is a lot of good rap music out there.
The people who make rap music have a certain investment in the art form. Stalley’s new video “Live at Blossom’s” from the Savage Journey to the American Dream mixtape is a good example of the internal reflection about materialism, violence and sexism in hip hop.
Edward Said would call this kind of poetic monologue autocritical. To encourage the listener to layer their own political awareness against books, movies, videos, songs, and unpack the politics represented in the media artifact.
Killer Mike’s rant rap is always excellent. You can basically buy anything he has put out or download any of his mixtapes and you’ll get something quite entertaining from it. Here Killer Mike represents his deep seated loathing for the Reagan era in “Big Beast,” a horror movie/jacker/gore fest. Assists from Bun B, T.I. and El-P in this almost ten-minute mini-movie. Not safe for work.
You could argue that the cannibalism of T.I. and Killer Mike is a thinly veiled mockery of consumers of violent hip hop. David Banner makes those arguments explicit, calling out rap music in a particularly dramatic fashion. Enjoy “Malcolm X” for that critical perspective on hip hop.
I’m a fan of almost everything MF DOOM has ever done. I also like So-Cal sampling star/emcee Oh No.
I guess Oh No got access to Dolomite AKA Rudy Ray Moore’s back catalog for sampling. That was enough to lure MF DOOM to contribute. What do you know, you get a tasty/nasty video to celebrate the collaboration.
Recent wins don’t undermine these tragedies in any way. In fact, it’s all that much harder to see the most marginalized in our community facing violence at the same time that we’re winning victories. Changes in our laws don’t mean people automatically stop hating us. Sometimes increased visibility can mean increased violence. We have to continue working to change people’s minds while we also work to change the laws. Trans women of color continue to face the worst transphobic violence. So we have to continue working deliberately to lift up the voices of trans women of color, to make sure the community most impacted can speak for themselves and humanize themselves.
Last week a simmering dislike erupted into a battle of words between Pusha T and Lil Wayne. Pusha T is fifty percent of the Clipse, a Virginia Beach rap group whose hallmark is ridiculously hard lyrics and a cozy relationship with hit-maker Pharrell. Lil’ Wayne is the impish high energy pop rapper with a legendary work ethic who sells a lot of ring tones.
The themes of this “beef” could have been foretold. Pusha T was likely to argue that he was more real, having sold crack more recently than Lil Wayne (and since his former manager Anthony Gonzales, was recently sent to prison for 32 years for drug trafficking). Wayne is likely to argue that his sales numbers put him out of the reach of a little guy like Pusha T. Pusha was going to have some exceptionally clever jokes about neon fashion. Both of the rappers would insult each other’s masculinity, intelligence, and strength. They would both go after the other emcees they are affiliated with. (In fact they had almost this exact beef seven years ago.)
Here is Lil Wayne following the insult script including calling Pusha T “softer than a motherfucking nerf ball.”
The topic of this conflict that I would have forgotten about is the kiss. In 2006 Birdman, the CEO of Cash Money Records and Lil’ Wayne smooched.
Turns out they’ve been doing it for years! (There is no way to read sarcasm through the internet, so I’ll just tell you – I’m not bothered by two men kissing. ) Here is a video from years back of the Big Tymers, Mannie Fresh and Birdman on Rap City. When Wayne shows up he drops a quick kiss on Birdman’s lips.
Birdman explains that he basically raised Wayne from the age of a young kid and considers him his actual child. In family relationships kissing each other isn’t uncommon.
In a recent interview, Baby, who calls Wayne his son, discusses/justifies the kiss. “That’s my son, ya heard me,” he explains. “If he was right here, I’d kiss him again. I kiss my daughter, my other son, I mean, you have children? Well, if you did you’d understand what I meant with it. I just think people took that too far man. That’s my son. I’ll do it again tomorrow, I’ll kill for him. Ride and die for him.”
I don’t think that Birdman and Lil’ Wayne have to justify kissing each other. The framing that Birdman has used to help viewers interpret the kisses have been particularly masculine and patriarchal. One spin has been that the kiss is a mafia symbol of closeness. Another positions Birdman as a literal father of Wayne.
We need to be really careful here because Birdman is not Wayne’s parent or guardian. Birdman AKA Bryan Williams was a rap star and label head when Wayne was onstage in grade school plays.
Lil Wayne was born Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. and grew up in the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana.[3] Carter was born when his mother, a chef, was 19 years old. His parents were divorced when he was 2, and his father permanently abandoned the family. Carter enrolled in the gifted program of Lafayette Elementary School and in the drama club of Eleanor McMain Secondary School.[4]
He wrote his first rap song at age eight.[5] In the summer of 1991, he met Bryan Williams, rapper and owner of Cash Money Records. Carter recorded freestyle raps on Williams’s answering machine, leading him to mentor the young Carter and include him in Cash Money-distributed songs. He also recorded his first ever collaboration album True Story with rapper B.G.. At the time, Carter was 11, and B.G. was 14, and was billed as “The B.G.’z”.[6] When he was 12, he played the part of the Tin Man in his middle school drama club’s production of The Wiz.[7] At age 13, he accidentally shot himself with a 9 mm handgun, and off-duty police officer Robert Hoobler drove him to the hospital.[8] At McMain Magnet School, Carter was an honor student, but he dropped out at the age of 14 to focus on a musical career.[9]
If you’ve seen The Carter documentary on Lil Wayne then you’ve seen the disturbing scene where Wayne describes being raped as a kid.
In the middle of The Carter, an obviously high Lil Wayne jokes openly about being raped at the age of 11 with the encouragement of his surrogate father, Baby—and informs Lil Twist, a 15-year-old member of Wayne’s record label Young Money, that Wayne is going to help him get raped, too.
This gives some insight into the relationship between Wayne and Baby Birdman. I’ve been thinking about using parts of this clip and the Jimmy Kimmel interview referenced in Amanda Hess’s Washington City Paper essay to talk about male sexual assault. In particular the idea that because men are socialized to be sexual all-the-time, then any predatory sexual attacks against men are okay. This terrible notion is essentially the idea that anyone who says “no” is really saying “yes,” and that men are saying “yes” all the time.
I wonder if kissing Birdman isn’t a power thing? A move of control? A sign of closeness? I don’t think it quite counts as parental given the exploitative sexual history between the two. The kisses don’t seem particularly sexual or erotic. Perhaps Wayne and Birdman are lovers. I don’t know and honestly it seems a little bit junior-high for a person with a Ph.D. to spend so much time writing about two grown ups kissing.
But then again, I’m not the only person fixated on this kiss.
The song Exodus 23:1, Pusha T’s diss track is actually fairly generic. Pusha T had to explain that the song was about Lil Wayne. Wayne confirmed it by tweeting: “Fuk pusha T and anyone who love em.”
This morning No Malice, the non-violent, higher road-taking, reinvigorated Christian half of the Clipse tweeted his opinion about the Pusha T/Lil Wayne beef.
“Well I LOVE Pusha! That’s my blood and I ain’t never kiss em.”
Obviously beef sells records, but I think that Pusha T chose Lil Wayne because he thinks that the kiss gives him some annihilating ammunition against him. You might call it a Ronald Reagan electoral strategy of fear. Making your arguments based on the assumption of prejudice in the general population. At the heart of the attacks on Lil Wayne so far is simply homophobia — and a particularly twisted desire to police male sexuality.
The Based God, Lil B gave a lecture at NYU a couple of days ago. Here are a few of my favorite gems:
I tell you, bruh, I was looking at insects. I do my observations when I go out. If I become a neurosurgeon or I’m about to come into some bugs, I’m rocking. With the bugs, man, you just be looking at them. Because I was having these big ant problems in my house. It was crazy. And these are people in their own way, too. As I was studying these ant colonies infesting my house daily, I’m not kidding you, I left food out and 20 minutes later r-r-r-r-r and I’m like, man, they already know! They get it down pat! And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it’s like, man, they’re in their own community too. They’re trying to survive. They love. They fight. They telling themselves something. We can’t understand, but one day we will. I’m trying hard to figure it out. I’m there with them. We’re very smart animals, you know, or whatever we are. Organisms? What are we? What do y’all think we are? Is there like a fact? Does anybody have any proof what we are? Live that life, experience it, travel, and come up with your theories man. Read the books, too, but experience your own. It’s crazy.
Real talk: Don’t ever deny the voices in your head either. When you’re sitting at home alone, right, we all go through depression, anxiety. You’re by yourself and you hear those voices going wild in your head, in your unconscious, those angels by your side, your mental, your gut feeling, your heart. Listen to them. Let your mind tell you how you feel. Let your body tell you. Be in tune with your rare—this is a very rare thing. I’m like a robot. Hey look, tell your hand to do this. [Raises hand]. It’s like, man, that’s amazing! That’s amazing to me.
I was a product of the media and my environment. I seen the people I like with gold teeth, and I was like, man, I want gold teeth. He looked like me and I wanted gold teeth. Everybody can get a grill in here. Everybody should embrace that. Get gold teeth! Don’t be thinking so hard, like, “Oh, man, I can’t get gold teeth.” Who is going to say what to you? We got love in our heart. We good people. Can’t nobody tell you nothing if you doing it from the love and you’re embracing people. Try to have fun and try to be as less ignorant as possible and meet people. I’m trying to set a tone for the younger generations.
My grammar and spelling and how I say things might not be technically what we hear or textbook, but as long as you understand me? You have to work as a human with empathy and love in your heart, staying positive and staying based and staying normal. You have to make an effort to learn about people. You have to make an effort at your job. You have to make an effort to care.
[Audience member: “Do you like to paint?”] I definitely do, man. My mom was a painter. Ay, bruh, feel me. But you know what I do rock with? My favorite is watercolors. I’m a watercolors type of dude, so definitely collect some of my rare paintings.
Stalley released his savage journey to the american dream mixtape this weekend. No doubt, there will be juicy videos and promos with caustic imagery. But for now, just enjoy “Route 21,” a simple song about driving and, well, being.
Plies is one of the least conscious rappers I know. Despite his cultural fifteen minutes crossing over with Gucci Mane’s fraternity party anthem “Wasted,” Plies has made music discussing his problems associated with the representation of young black men and violence. His song about Trayvon Martin covers some of the predictable landscape and I find surprisingly poignant.
Perhaps the massive resonance of the murder of Trayvon Martin is because the crime is so obscene. The victim seems so innocent and the killer seems so enthusiastic to kill. The crime is enraging because of the 911 tapes, the images of Martin in his football uniform, and his desperate phone call to his girlfriend. We are invited to view a real injustice.
But of course racist killings take place all the time. The difference is the victims are often blamed for their killing. The usual way this is done is to associate some socially unacceptable behavior (sex, drugs, rap music, clothing) with the murdered victim and call them a “suspect.”
For people who regularly experience police harassment, the inaction taken probably seems like a confirmation that the system works against you. For people who do experience privilege of not having to regularly deal with police (corrupt and otherwise) the inaction taken against Zimmerman probably seems like a grotesque aberration of the system.
Both of these groups of people will don hoodies to march for justice for Trayvon. A big part of that anger is fueled by the perception that this violence was exceptional. I would argue that it is ordinary. What is exceptional in the Trayvon Martin case is that the victim blaming is particularly hard. *
Lets take a quick look at the ways the press and police did Sean Bell dirty after he was killed. Undercover police officers shot fifty bullets into Bell’s car the night before his 2006 wedding.
Five of the seven officers investigating the club were involved in the shooting. Detective Paul Headley fired one round, Officer Michael Carey fired three, Officer Marc Cooper fired four, Officer Gescard Isnora fired eleven, and veteran officer Michael Oliver emptied two full magazines, firing 31 shots from a 9mm handgun and pausing to reload at least once.
Although Sean Bell’s case is used as an example of police misconduct, there was a lengthy series of public relations attempts to blame Bell for the murders.
Initially it was claimed that the officers were afraid of gun violence from Bell and his companions. Never found a gun or evidence that there had been a gun in the car.
Then the press and police pointed out that that Bell had been legally intoxicated at the time he took the wheel, usually adding in that he was drunk at a strip club. In essence suggesting that Bell had been shot because he had been drinking and driving or cavorting with strippers.
Michael Wilson from the New York Times makes this idiotic statement:
Further, trial testimony showed that Mr. Bell may have played some role, however unwitting, in the shooting, as he was drunk by legal standards when he pressed down on the accelerator of his fiancée’s Nissan Altima and struck Detective Isnora in the leg in an attempt to flee.
Despite being a poster case for injustice, the victim blaming helped to let the police killers go free. The cops were acquitted because they were found to be confused and it’s okay to kill people if it’s a mistake. Scratch that, it’s okay to empty your magazine into a car and then reload and empty the second magazine into the car before figuring out what is going on.
But yesterday something interesting happened. The cops who killed Sean Bell, some eight years ago were finally released from their jobs as cops. One is getting fired! Huh? I wonder if the public scrutiny in the Trayvon Martin case raised up enough public discussion to pressure the New York Police Department to clean house.
For an interesting view on the construction of public information. Check out the discussions about the editing of the Sean Bell Wikipedia page. Note the battle over how to talk about Sean Bell’s arrest record. Fascinating discussions about what to include and how to write the information. A great place to view the articulation of victim blaming.
There is an interesting campaign to mail a package of skittles the police chief who chose not to arrest Zimmerman. I’m thinking about mailing some skittles to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
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Life of refinement 