a paradox we call reality So keeping it real will make you a casualty Of abnormal normality.
But abnormal or not, the rapper, unlike the blues artist, is pressured to adapt (or adopt) his fictive persona in real life. The rapper is judged by a different standard—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the roots, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms.
Hip hop is clearly indebted to the blues in terms of its reigning iconography. In hip hop we have the reconstituted trickster—in the absence of the his ironic worldview, or what we might say is the trickster sans tricksterism. Even as the music allows room for tricksterish characters like Ol’ Dirty Bastard—alias Big Baby Jesus, alias Dirt McGirt—Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000, and Flavor Flav, its perspective is most often materialist and as literal as a fundamentalist. The trickster is secondary in hip hop; in this arena the boulevard ’hood—at least since the inception of Tupac’s ghetto ontology “thug life”—has reigned supreme. And the lauded Thug Icon is nothing if not the remix version of the blues’ Baaad Nigger archetype. Whereas the Baaad Nigger and the trickster exist as parallel types in the blues, the thug alone has become the patron deity of hip hop: St. Roughneck. Faced with the asphalt bleakness of this world, stripped of the existentialist irony that we see in blues, the result is a perspective that despises weakness, the weak, and everything associated with them.
Whatever else it might be, hip hop is not generally a music of sympathy for the dispossessed. This is a genre that has come to be dominated by a brand of boulevard Darwinism. And on this last point, all distinctions of style, region, and flavor start breaking down. Look close enough at the righteous rage prophets Public Enemy and the Ghericurled gangsta villainy of NWA, circa Straight Outta Compton, and what you get is two contrasting images of the same thing: the cult of the Indestructible Nigga. For all their moral indignation and pro-black advocacy, the closest P.E. came to crafting a song sympathetic to the lost and the least was “She Watch Channel Zero”—a moralistic screed about an underachieving soap opera-addicted woman that could’ve found favor with the Republican National Committee. And in the NWA universe, weakness or loss was a moral felony. The hustler’s way is to despise the very addicts he helps to create, and in hip hop the hustler’s ethic has come to reign supreme. The damage done by this ethic is widespread, but perhaps nowhere as devastating as in rap’s treatment of women. There is, for example, no parallel infamy in popular music to hip hop’s so-called bitch-nigga—a category that combines the two worst race and gender epithets into a toxic new whole.
I got more riches than you More bitches than you Only thing I don’t got Is more stitches than you —Big L
The above is just one of innumerable such sentiments, issued almost automatically, almost without thought, from the mouths of way too many rappers. This reality is what made songs like Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Nas’ “Black Girl Lost,” and De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled a Pistol On Santa” truly exceptional. In each case, the artist stepped outside the conventions of hip hop to pen sympathetic narratives about the sexual exploitation of young women.
To reckon with these sad elements is to reckon, by necessity, with the fractured history of black manhood, and the tentatively constructed ideals of black masculinity in America. Out here, on the wasted and wind-blown plains of human conflict, the concept of being both black and a man is and ever was dealt with as a breathing contradiction in terms. And if, for a moment, the Fifteenth Amendment attempted to reconcile that adjective with its noun, the tax on black male suffrage was to be black male life itself. Roughly 3,500 lynchings took place between the passage of the amendment, in 1870, and 1920; the victims were overwhelmingly black men who had been targeted for the South’s blood rituals. It was no coincidence that the lynched black body was literally disassembled and distributed to the gleeful white masses—with the penis reserved as the prize token: recreational terrorism.
Georgia, 1899. Sam Hose shrieked at the sight of the knife and quietly urged his tormentors to kill him swiftly. This was plea none was inclined to heed … The torture of the victim last almost half an hour. It began when a man stepped forward and very matter-of-factly sliced off his ears. Then several men grabbed Hose’s arms and held them forward so his fingers could be severed one by one and shown to the crowd. Finally a blade was passed between his thighs, Hose cried in agony, and a moment later his genitals were held aloft. Three men lifted a large can of kerosene and dumped its contents over Sam Hose’s head, and the pyre was set ablaze.
Denial, as the saying goes, is a long river, but it is also the psychological irony that made daily life possible in the buckwild frontier of Racial America. And out of this tendency arises the long tradition of boast, hyperbole, and signifying. What we have is a culture that arising in the context of two centuries of terrorism that habitually, ritually—desperately—rephrases reality, flips the script, and declares the black men indestructible despite all evidence to the contrary. A coping mechanism raised to the level of aesthetic statement. The sages say that a boast is best taken at its opposite face value: the shouted claims of omnipotence, they tell us, serve to highlight one’s own fragility. Yet it is equally true that no exploited class of humanity can survive while remaining focused on their own collective impotence.
I was born in the backwoods, for a pet I raised a bear I got two sets of jawbone teeth and an extra layer of hair When I was three, my crib was a barrel of knives A rattlesnake bit me and crawled off and died.
—Stagolee, ca. 1896
I tussled with an alligator, rassled with a whale handcuffed lighting and threw thunder in jail. I murdered a rock, and hospitalized a brick I’m so mean I make medicine sick.
—Muhammad Ali, 1963
Verbal assassin, my architect pleases When I was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus … I melt mics til the sound wave’s over Before stepping to me, you’d better step to Jehovah.
—Nas, 1994
These are lies. But our lies ultimately reveal as much as our truths. And without these lies, it would be impossible to have this specific truth:
Jacksonville, Fla. Jack Trice fought fifteen white men at 3 A.M. on the 12th, killing James Hughes and Edward Sanchez, fatally wounding Henry Daniels and dangerously wounding Albert Bruffum. The battle occurred at Trice’s humble home to prevent his 14 year-old son from being “regulated”—brutally beaten and perhaps killed by the whites. On the afternoon of May 11th, Trice’s son and the son of Town Marshall Hughes of Palmetto fought, the white boy being badly beaten. Marshall Hughes was greatly enraged and he and 14 other white men went to Trice’s house to regulate his little boy. The whites demanded that the boy be sent out. Trice refused and they began firing. Trice returned the fire, his first bullet killing Marshall Hughes. Edward Sanchez tried to burn the house, but was shot through the brain by Trice. Then the whites tried to batter in the door with a log, which resulted in Henry Daniels getting a bullet in the stomach that will kill him. The “regulators” then ran. —Cleveland Gazette, May 30, 1896.
The hope is to make one’s claims to bad-motherfuckerdom a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Self-praise, as the maxim tells us, is a half compliment. But on another level, it was insurrectionary for black boys to hail themselves in song and story and right down to names they adopted: Grand Master Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, the Grand Incredible DJ Scott La Rock. Literal self-aggrandizement. Walter Mosley once pointed out that within the black tradition, heroism is defined simply as survival against great odds—and on another level, the mere attempt to survive when one is always outnumbered, always outgunned. The boxer can scarcely afford to admit to his
