Lord Finesse, Big L, & Youth Crime

Lord Finesse "Shorties Kaught In The System (S.K.I.T.S.)"

Lord Finesse "Shorties Kaught In The System (S.K.I.T.S.)" REMIX

Big L "Street Struck"

All three songs zipped in one file

Sociologist Robert R. Alford once described how the media recasts scholarly theories as dogmatic truths that influence policymaking. Legal scholar Michael Lindsey wrote scathingly about one such concept, "super predator," which was introduced by Princeton University poli-sci professor John Dilulio in an article published in The Weekly Standard in late 1995:

... Dilulio defined his title phrase as a cohort of youthful offenders created from a moral poverty ... In academia, creating drama around an issue to ensure that editors will accept it is sometimes necessary ... this hyperbole did not end with Dilulio's article ... U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida introduced the Violent Youth Predator Act of 1996 ... References to youthful offenders has escalated from "delinquents" to "super-predators." Politicians, news commentators, journalists, and justice and law enforcement officials, now use Dilulio's postulated projections as a statement of fact.

This vision of a "demographic time bomb" lurking "on the horizon," comprised of youths who "quite literally have no concept of the future" is at once poetic, vicious, and calculated.

Dilulio does not mention music, but his "moral poverty" theory resembles studies like "The Moynihan Report" that according to Tricia Rose advance notions of a dysfunctional black culture that arises (against all logic) apart from social institutions. Rap is alleged to be this culture's "greatest contemporary promoter"; its reception as literal autobiography, she argues, is informed by historical assumptions that black men are " 'naturally' violent."

When authored by self-described insiders, such diatribes give rise to reductive binaries that persist despite being regularly disparaged by astute critics. Scrutiny is averted from "positive" songs that encourage the conflation of real crime with its verbal representation, or romanticize a prior decade. Such stances are vulnerable to co-optation by right-leaning anti-youth pundits. Hardly harmless.

Any rap lyric can be sold through charismatic, convincing authenticity. Academic texts are no different. Obtuse works can "cross over" if peppered with panache. Tucked between Dilulio's jargon slinging and number crunching is a stylized memoir: the kid from a low-rent ethnic white Philly 'hood grows into the fearless researcher who is "almost killed" conducting research in a prison. To build his case and his credibility, Dilulio cites folks with unimpeachable stripes: cons, cops, and then-Philly D.A. Lynne Abraham, known as "suite and street smart." She asserts that youth crime waves are led by "youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches," nearly mirroring Philly rapper Jamal's lyric "I'm never packing pop tarts for lunch, I'm packing .38 specials" on Illegal's "Back In The Day."

Dilulio and the Posse's wry pastiche also brings to mind Lord Finesse's "Shorties Kaught In The System," a grim account of high school dropouts who prefer shooting Glocks to skelly tops from the alarmingly titled State Of Emergency: Society In Crisis compilation. The ever-virtuosic Finesse offers rhymed statistics ("eighty out of a hundred/ all they wanna do is clock dough, scoop bitches, and get blunted") while appealing to his audience's sense of fearful urgency and insider authenticity ("if you ain't from the ghetto this undercover/ but in ninety-four, shit is realer than a motherfucker"). Dilulio could well have quoted him. While "S.K.I.T.S." is not a commentary on music nor the exact type of song that is frequently championed by purists to discredit newer trends, it stands as a forceful indictment of youth culture, ripe for the picking.

Finesse is redeemable, though. He is guilty of romanticizing his not-too-distant adolescence, but he acknowledges that violence is a systemic problem. He ascribes a level of resourcefulness and intelligence to troubled youths that Dilulio does not ("It ain't about IQ/ some of them are making more than doctors/ and didn't graduate high school"). In real life, he served as a mentor to Big L, who appears on the hook of the "S.K.I.T.S." remix as the contrary young voice ("I don't give a fuck..."). On the Finesse-produced "Street Struck," Big L credits rap with steering him from crime; Finesse's warmhearted concern for his disciple is corroborated by L's mother.

The sad irony is that Big L was shot to death in 1999, most likely over a dispute that did not directly involve him. His verses on "Street Struck" are poignant, empathetic, hopeful, less judgemental and ultimately more incisive than what we hear from his elder mentor on the same subject. Although the song is a departure from Big L's typically sadistic narratives, the trajectory of his life illuminates several truths that should be more obvious, namely that kids who consume and create violent rap are (like anyone else) complex human beings who mostly wish to pursue wealth and happiness, are fully capable of discerning fictive expression from actual reality, experience stress and frustration when presumed to be less than human, and bleed when shot.

And their bleeding is not stopped by a conscious lyric, a poorly executed album concept, or bad comedy. -- Thun

-- Thun

Public Enemy "Night Of The Living Baseheads"

"I wanted to write a song about how crack was affecting us. It was all around us, 360 degrees." -- Chuck D ^[1]

Public Enemy "Night Of The Living Basheads"

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Public Enemy's "Night Of The Living Baseheads" is a period piece with enduring appeal. On PE's debut Yo! Bumrush The Show, Chuck D's rhetorical sophistication is nascent but morphs into a new beast by 1988. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back sees Chuck blast the media's defamation of outspoken "race men" and by his strategic estimate, the black collective. A permissible lie in the closing bars of "Bring The Noise" ("a magazine or two is dissing me and dissing you") turns the media's sophistry on its head, segueing nicely into "Don't Believe The Hype," a deconstruction of the machinery that churns racial animosity out of misinformation. 

Chuck's anxiety over his entanglement in the hated system informs his most fiery works. A topic as germane and polarizing as the crack epidemic must have signalled an irresistible challenge for him. But "Baseheads" is not aimed at crack so much as the discourse that surrounds the rapidly evolving, multivalent crack meme. The groundwork for this discussion was already set, as  '86/'87 rap was knee-deep in the subject.

On "Paid In Full" Rakim documents the socioeconomic nightmare of the corner trade. Boogie Down Productions' "The P Is Free" attests to the rise of drug-related violence. Street thugs turned overnight playboy drug lords populate Ice-T's Goines-ian vignettes on Rhyme Pays. These narratives are occasionally moralizing but accompanied by the freshest beats out. The intrigue of the uptown crack dealer supplants the mystique of the downtown coke sniffer as the swagger to emulate. 

This transforms "the terrain of how you can rap." Vocal and production techniques are mutually influential. The freedoms and limitations of existing technologies shape diverse responses to the scourge. Afrika Islam's lack of sampling experience leaves him reliant on the preset sounds of the Sp1200. He replays classic breaks in a manner tailor-made for Ice-T's intentionally variegated drugstore paperback influenced raps.² Ced Gee masters the sampling abilities of the same machine to creates a different canvas for KRS-One. The respective physical, technical, sonic, and narrative terrains are incidentally different, if only slightly.  

Schooly D knows the resonant symbolic power of crack. "It's Krack" (from his 1986 debut Saturday Night! The Album) takes its name from fans who would say of his music " 'Ahh that shit is crack.' Meaning it was hype like crack.³ "It's Krack" is all Roland TR-909 drums, eerie keyboard sounds, unintelligible muttering. Chaos. It may not crack as hard as Marley Marl's contemporaneous loops, but it hints at the future. Hype is precisely the feel that PE and the Bomb Squad seek for Nation after Eric B & Rakim and BDP's innovations in "the phrasing of rap, which allowed you to be able to rhyme on a faster tempo, a faster groove" render prior styles obsolete.⁴

The allure of the faster music and its concomitant signifier is not lost on Chuck. To hook the dancers at the LQ he becomes the duplicitous journalist. "Baseheads" is the marriage of the colloquial brilliance that allows "bass" and "dope" to serve as simultaneous descriptors of music and drugs with the tricksterism that allows the contrived legal distinction between "crack" and "cocaine" to sway public perception. The video accurately depicts the group as an investigative media powerhouse, an extension of Spectrum City, wary of the pitfalls of utilizing the tactics of propaganda to find a fix.

Chuck reveres and loathes the sleazy hustle of the media, drug dealers, dope fiends and rappers. He is cognizant that the musical tradition he venerates is stained by illicit drug use. A return to the "funky" definition of "dope" is a dubious undertaking if once considers the publicized habits of Sly Stone, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, and others. The alternative that Chuck envisions is a nation of conscientious zombies addicted to his "different bass," differentiated only by an unseen letter. His hope is that dense sample collages and revolutionary rhetoric will encourage critical thought. This idealism is burdened by the knowledge that he must serve the fiends the baddest product around to get the good message across; "Baseheads" gives them exactly what they crave and throws in an alarming, yet alluring siren to drive the point home.

[1] Brian Coleman, Check The Technique (New York: Villard, 2007) 358.

[2] Coleman 238-239.

[3] Coleman 415.

[4] Coleman 352.

-- Thun

From Knowledge To Born: Lyrics Interpreted

To my T.R.O.Y./Philaflava.com nation: I've had a ton of fun writing my nine "lyric interpretation" pieces for you. The idea behind this regular feature was to provide this download-heavy, quick paced blog with a weekly "think-piece" that could incite both thoughtful discussion and increased appreciation of this music. Although I will not stop writing such analysis for this website I am in the process of shifting gears away from the analysis of individual songs back to the honeydip I arrived with - the analysis of entire albums, as well as recurring themes across artists and genres. 

Judging by the feedback and the links, I feel that the interpretation pieces have been mostly well-received among our readership. It is not my belief that my take on any particular song or lyric is an infallible critical gospel, but I do place great emphasis on carefully reading rap lyrics for their many meanings and implications. For this series I chose songs that were either exceptionally creative or especially difficult to comprehend upon a cursory listening, and some of the songs fit both categories. 

Whether or not these songs are "profound" probably depends on the listener, but I feel like each of the songs had something special going on - special enough to put them under the microscope for a few hundred words, at least. Over the course of the series, several themes emerged - racial identity formation, hip-hop's indebtedness to traditions of spiritualism and mysticism, social and artistic mobility, code switching, and multivalent narrative techniques, to name a few. The songs I chose proved to be great resources for sparking discussions on the ways in which such themes intersect in rap.

Ghostface Killah's "The Sun" demonstrates how the colorful history of a single slang term can inform a  song that tackles the theme of redemption from a variety of spiritual traditions. The Legion "New Niggas" analyzes history to inject spiritual urgency to the adoption of new slang and identity. Black Sheep's "Still In The Ghetto" tackles the formation of a forward-thinking mind-state in a society that values assimilation over collective identity, while Ultramagnetic MCs "Two Brothers With Checks" shows just how far a brother has to go to break such mind-forged manacles. Das Efx "Hard Like A Criminal" proves that there's two sides to each side of a multi-layered story, and GP Wu's "Black On Black Crime" imagines a new narrative in which freedom of choice does not fatally undermine a peaceful social order. 

K-Solo's "Tales From The Crackside" illustrates the fragility of the existing social order despite the nimbleness of the mind's imaginative power, while Juggaknots "Generally" makes the case that the cultivation of one's consumer habits often tragically precedes the development of one's interpretive faculties. And RZA's "Sunshowers" reminds us that the only truth we might arrive at in our brief lives is a return the state of ignorance that compelled our curiosity about the greater structure we desperately wish to see in the universe.

The next step? As you may or may not know, Continuum Books publishes a series of paperbacks called Thirty Three And A Third written about seminal albums and calls for submissions of proposals every year. To date, nobody has proposed to write about Brand Nubian's debut LP One For All. It is one of my favorite albums and one that tackles most of the themes I have mentioned, and I have every intention of submitting my proposal by the deadline of midnight on December 31st. No disrespect to Tom Breihan or Serena Kim, but their published reviews of this album leave quite a bit to be desired. I am more than happy to do my part to fill in the yawing chasm.

So ... is anyone out there actually interested in the prospect of a Brand Nubian book authored by yours truly? Let me know so I can start the self-promotion as early as possible.

RZA "Sunshower"

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RZA is idolized for his daring musicianship. Even more so for his likable eccentricity. The future fetish that inspired his resourceful lo-fi uprising against a stagnant rap industry keeps him employed and visible in the Internet Age. He pops up on YouTube more than he was ever featured on Rap City. Forever multi-tasking, code switching between the now-famous personas he either performs or embodies. Fiddling with knobs and levers, fucking with your expectations. But see, he's often been this way on the mic - the mad scientist, the ghetto sensationalist, the metaphysical scholar, the elaborate storyteller, the drunken digressor, they all crowd into the same skull.

Yes, RZA is a great rapper. How soon you forget!

His shtick is jarring to the listener expecting the emcee to get to the point already. Remember "12 Jewelz" from the second Gravediggaz album? The man trounces through the entirety of the track, making no attempt whatsoever to arrive at a chorus. Launches into a sloppy but admirable dissertation on earth science and cell regeneration and then ... drops it to talk about some penny-wise, pound-foolish old man? But it makes so much sense. Havelock Nelson and Michael Gonzales complained back in '91 that a certain breed of rappers treated crowd-rocking like some dry seminar. If Guru's presidential podium impersonation of Rakim in the "Words I Manifest" video is the Nation of Islam stodginess of the past, RZA's unkempt Shaolin style was the 5%ers after Clarence 13x went back to the essence. One busy hive.

Because if you attended Show & Prove or a local monthly Parliament rally (New Jersey residents had their choice of Allah's Paradise or Justice Cee) you noticed that some Gods and Earths were straight out of the ghettoes of hell and some from the upper echelons. You had those bedecked in jewels and finery, others in bad clothes, most somewhere in between. Speaking style and comportment varied as well - the break from the NOI was not ideological, it was cultural too. You couldn't presume a shaved head and a bowtie to possess the greater mind than the peasy 'fro and hoodie. RZA isn't just engaging in multivalent slang play when he says on "Sunshowers" that the new plan is to "use key notes to make g-notes." It's the God's honest truth - he came up at the exact right time to be a convincing youth spokesperson and get paid for it.

And what a come up it was. GZA once spoke to Formless at length about battling crews on the Ferry, questing on through the outer boroughs in search of conquest and experience, almost like "vagabonds" going in "ferris wheel" circles. But RZA's rhymes get right to the picture perfect point via digression: "I recall, me and GZA, Dirty hangin' in halls, bangin' on walls, kickin' rhymes three hours straight no pause." Not bars, but run-on sentences. No beginning, no end, no need to rely on rigid sequences. No need to apologize for randomly dropping a gem like "You could travel every square inch of the Planet Earth and still be ninety three million miles away from the sun, until you realize you and sun is one." A tirade against child molesters? Throw it in. Odd seemingly addled repetitions of words and turns of phrases ("the world is sick ... sick ... sick, trapped up in six, six, six)? It all has its place. That's why you rhyme off beat and off bar with such ferocity it falls on beat again. Match polo shirts to camo fatigues. Kick a lecture but kill shit.

The risk of such politicking is the accusation of contradiction, of incoherence, of ambiguity or uncomfortable hybridity. Calling yourselves the F.O.I.  MCs while you're swimming in drug culture. Up to pure fuckery in crumbling schools bearing the names of dead American heroes tainted by the gradual emergence of the sad truth. Living the lush life while nagging the listeners about coming cleansing Armageddons. Claiming that moving from "making beats on lunchroom tables" to rocking chains swinging lower than one's navel is progress knowing damned well that adolescence has been extended. How else can you keep their attention? Comprehending the "everlasting winter of hellfire" requires a nuanced perspective. Might as well get the babies used to the conflicts, the inevitable friction of irreconcilable forces, right? 

Some things are never adequately drawn up - Just Ice (ice, ice) himself is at a loss to adequately break down his moniker. The world according to RZA is rife with pleasant nonsense; he gives the people what they want before they know they want it. Mostly convenient binaries that he smashes at will, for mere sport but also with serious things in mind. Namely repackaging the shards as the next best thing. Who's colored when you redefine the terms of the inquiry? Who's grafted, and is that always a bad thing, and most importantly, why are we nervously, almost fiendishly anticipating all things digital ... digital ... digital ... digital? 

Still with us? Class dismissed. Keep the song on repeat for homework. On Sunday, Verge is going to school us on the piece of vinyl this song first appeared on, so stay tuned!

Ultramagnetic MCs and Inexplicable Mobility

Rap is acutely sensitive to borders and constraints. The claustrophobic streets, the stifling parameters of stereotype, and the glass ceiling of the music industry are exhaustively depicted in terms ranging from humorous to harrowing. Cynics may write off these lamentations as navel gazing flights of fancy or even melodramatic musings that arise out of a stubborn and outdated persecution complex; it is difficult for me to refute such claims entirely. Clearly, a part of rap's recurring crossover appeal is linked to the strategic  magnification of localized individual turmoil. How else could a crew from a desolate nine story housing project on the friggin' north shore of Staten Island convincingly and repeatedly declare itself the voice of the global ghetto struggle? 

 Rap's obsession with the limitations of youth, anonymity, and poverty is famously counterbalanced by its simultaneous embrace of excess, meteoric ascent, and conspicuous consumption. Among the many thousands of rags-to-riches narratives recorded in the '90s alone we find a few here and there that attempt to dress up materialism as a means to a more enlightened end, with Nas' "If I Ruled The World" being the most frequently imitated example. Taking a cue from the seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of D.A.I.S.Y. Age excursions to an Afro-FutureWorld of Cosby-like creature comforts and LL Cool J’s dandyish Walking With A Panther douchebaggery, Nas’ transcendent vision is enslaved to the shallow sophistry his mentors hoped you’d overlook.

In all fairness, most of rap’s forays into freedom dreams have been burdened by the kind of  flimflamming medicine show bullshit artistry they set out to subvert. Digital Underground’s P-Funk revival was purported to be something new and visionary. De La Soul, X-Clan and Dr. Dre thought just as highly of themselves. In each of these instances a vaguely programmatic upliftment of the mind, body, and soul is announced and accompanied by fresh new sounds that felt very much like a more open playing field, a breezy drive along Crenshaw Avenue, the Long Island Expressway, or the neo-Nubian ancestral crossroads. Departure. But the exodus was horrendously temporary – the carefree, libidinous appeal of this music superseded all pretenses of a noble or realist agenda. And so the liberators become the new rulers, their free flowing decrees and anthems sounding more like the stifling same ol' song.

Misguided attempts to trade one's youthful bohemianism for the rah rah du jour are quickly discarded by an insulted core audience, which is why every damned one of us prefer Low End Theory to the UMCs trying to Onyx it up on Unleashed. Hell, we even prefer it to De La Soul is Dead; innovation and departure just feel better when the artist doesn't ask that you join a cult or subscribe to a silly binary reversal. To be a hip hop junkie is to be forever skeptical - the music can cost as little as zero dollars to create and its deeply embedded codes call for the ritual slaughter of any style too stale. And yet the perpetuity of the conditions that allowed the music to flourish - from the inner-city angst of Melle Mel's "The Message" to the inner-ring suburban ennui defied by L.O.N.S. on "International Zone Coaster" - call for a frequent revisitation of themes and imagery.

How then can rappers critique the status quo, maintain artistic integrity, annunciate a future worth striving for, and flirt with the periphery of the public's tolerance for next-ness? Is this balancing act plausible or even desirable? If rappers are realistically constrained by genre, song structure, language, or sales anyway, is there a space for subversion, or even room to articulate the next version of freedom or mobility? Without coming across like a paid lecturer or a sweaty preacher or a snake oil salesman or an unkempt hippie? Has a rapper ever managed to truly break the rules without quickly reassembling them, and come off nice?

The questions I am posing are probably as insular as any rapper's lyrical voyage through the multiverse. For the sixty or so who care about the answers - exhale as soon as possible. A genre so consumed with being fresh won't tolerate these debates much longer even if YouTube guarantees this music the high-tech mausoleum it deserves. The beat goes on. And yet I can't keep my mind off Ultramagnetic MCs and their song "Two Brothers With Checks." I'm not going to bother with a line for line breakdown. Kool Keith already handles this quite skillfully on his own; peep the DivShare widget at the top of this post to hear him dissect his own madness to hilarious effect on Stretch and Bobbito's immortal show.

I will tell you this though - "Two Brothers With Checks" is worth your time. There's something going on there. A movement. Between towns and cities, between label contracts, in and out of whatever enclosures might be suffocating this incredible song made by some extraordinary artists. Ced Gee is Chuck D. on acid, wielding a style too unbearable for this world and yet sounding surprisingly comfortable over this beat. Coasting from El Segundo to Pakistan, a world of wonder and prestige unfolding at every turn. Kool Keith is much the same and yet even more bugged out, making moves on the strength of arcane baseball references. Not too different from the Popular Science reading, Sp-12 tweaking, loop and neologism inventing, Bronx-bred subway(tube?) riding goofballs that Brian Coleman depicts in Rakim Told Me. Just moved on from All City to worldwide, and not giving a fuck. 

The flyest and least celebrated to ever circumnavigate in a non-pink Cadillac, a movement without a hypebeast to revive and kill it. Mobile and unheralded and probably not paid in full. But throwing it down, presumably in the wrong era for the right reasons. Can you dig it now? -- Thun

Black Sheep "Still In The Ghetto"

There are dozens if not hundreds (maybe thousands) of rap songs that claim some version of "the ghetto" as a theme or conceit. The word has come to signify a set of communities, socio-economic statuses, and world views that have far less in common than their frequent conflation under a single term suggests. Rappers have had a field day redefining "ghetto" and its related terms only rivaled by their obsession with "nigga." Physically proximate but markedly different places like Rakim's Wyandanche, C.L. Smooth's Mt. Vernon, Q-Tip's Jamaica, and Nas' Queensbridge are all "the ghetto", so the "ghetto" cannot be interpreted as uniformly signifying one narrow set of circumstances. 

Even when we take into account the transmission of cultural notions of identity and place that occurred when the adolescents of the early '80s (new school rap's first generation) visited their grandmothers for the weekend, we are faced with an inescapable truth. The "ghetto" of rap lyrics represents a subset of the larger African diaspora. The "ghetto" has been cast as everything from a socially constructed hell to a modern plantation to the locus classicus of modern black empowerment to the fondly remembered childhood haunt, and every gradation in between. This liminal space contains today's topic - the ghetto as a shifting, ambivalent psychological state that defies the borders of the inner city along with its upwardly mobile residents. 

Black Sheep's "Still In The Ghetto" describes such a state, avoiding the temptation to indulge in standard ghettocentrist romanticism. He also avoids equating a ghetto mentality with diagnosable psychopathology (see Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "Ghettoes Of The Mind.") Dres' narrator is uneasy, perhaps a tad neurotic, but he is not stuck in a dramatized past, choosing instead to express anxiety while indulging in slick bragadocio. Why the boasts? Clever bragging is his bread and butter - the one instance in which he dropped this mode entirely to speak on social issues, "Black With N.V." feels just a bit too preachy for a Black Sheep song. On "Still In The Ghetto"  Dres goes the fuck off from the beginning, giving rival emcees and assorted dickriders "headaches over headbangin' beat breaks" and smacking fools with Street Fighter techniques. The first verse is wonderfully belligerent and flashy, virtuosic to the point of unfairness.

That is, until the last few bars where the overconfident voice who "gives less than a fuck" confesses to a day to day existence "beat in the city of scum." Now, in this case, the narrator is not your typical suffering ghetto dweller. In another smart move, Dres employs a persona much closer to his adult self than some lamentable street urchin caricature. He speaks of an uneasy tension between freedom and constraint, but in terms of his lyrics, which he gleefully amplifies "across the border" -- to ghettoes he has never visited that are likely experiencing the same social ills that run amok in his old neighborhood. As a rapper, he is inextricably tied to the ghetto. After all, the ghetto gave him his technique, his comportment, his rhythm. And more importantly, the ghetto will judge his worthiness as a representative. His bragging is slick and inventive because it has to be. 

In the second verse, Dres' confidence and neurosis increases simultaneously. He rhymes extra hard and extra clever, claiming to have seen Fritz The Cat when it was still playing in theaters (interpreted literally, this means he was the world's toughest toddler). He wears his ghetto background as an indisputable badge of authenticity ("I go back like pitching pennies on a project step") but is somewhat hesitant to glorify this association and laments the similarity of his cocky swagger to the divisive attitudes that destroy communities. He finds respite in the positive aspects of his upbringing, namely improvisational resourcefulness ("pull it off the cuff while we're wearing short sleeves")  and a knack for versatile code-switching ("I'm sliding through the door / to  kick it to the shorty with his eye on a Tec / kick it to the chick with a W.I.C. on her check"). 

In the third verse, the narrator is still conflicted and even more defensive, yet somehow more resolute in his sense that he is in fact, "Still In The Ghetto," at least figuratively. The sense of kinship, or at least obligation that he explores in the second verse is still present but he is noticeably wary about his kindness being mistaken for weakness. The wordplay gets more vicious ("now if it's checkers, chess or soul survivor, I'm going to catch wreck like I was a drunk driver") and the ambivalence loses some ground to urgent paranoia ("they hug you with your left and stab you with your right ... loved by Astoria and blammed by Corona). The implausibility of pleasing everyone back in the 'hood while being upwardly mobile is very real. The narrator is forced to master a balancing act - he must claim that his ghetto-bred swagger has allowed him to tour around the globe while insisting that globe-trotting in style hasn't softened him one bit or made him inaccessible ("I'm still the same, I still got game in Barcelona"). 

"Still In The Ghetto" does not end on an uplifting or poignant note. There is no particular moral to the narrative. Upward mobility is presented as an odd journey, and the identity politics associated with class and race are placed under the microscope. But all we know for certain is that our narrator is fixated on achieving a difficult balance and marrying outward appearance to good intentions as closely as possible. In the third verse he relentlessly insists that he is utterly incapable of falling off either as a seller of records or a genuinely concerned social commentator. He knows better. The two roles are mutually exclusive - we're only temporarily convinced otherwise because he raps so damned good. If these contradictions are what makes him "ghetto"-minded or at least accessible to the ghetto by proxy in his own mind, so be it. We all gain from hearing a reluctantly honest, sort of self-serving take on the genre's most explored topic.

Because we don't help the situation by simplifying it.  -- Thun

Juggaknots "Generally"

On Public Enemy's 1989 smash "Fight The Power" idol topplers Chuck and Flav vilify Elvis "The King" Presley and John "The Duke" Wayne as symbols of an ongoing plot to strike blackness from the historical record. The song's lyrics suggest in unsubtle terms that the incessant valorization of white faces continues the racist work began by centuries of stamp-honored "rednecks." The newer media are frighteningly powerful and pervasive, indeed, but also quite frail - if we follow Public Enemy's logic we are led to believe that a pointed "fuck you" performed to a slamming beat can undo some of this racist nonsense.

Critics have long suggested that rap stands at odds with, and yet is incurably smitten by, good ol' American popular culture (read: "white" or at least "comfortably familiar"). I am not inclined to disagree. Public Enemy's fiery invective denounces pop culture's propagandistic potential while making great use of it. The video sees Chuck and Flav swagger in front of a mural of Malcolm X, successfully announcing themselves as the new American heroes. In aligning themselves with icons of the '60s and '70s (partly depotentiated by the passage of time) a palatable revolutionary posture is created. Soon thereafter, Brand Nubian pulls the same stunt, beads and African medallions knock dookie gold chains off their pedestal, and "X" hats are ubiquitous.

"Fight The Power" gave the rap world full permission to not only satirize or subvert America's heroes, but to mercilessly defame them. Rappers followed suit gleefully. Ice Cube's "Gangsta Fairytale" takes the long censored genre and slaps it back to its bawdy origins while showing impressive initiative in slandering Mr. Rogers, the formerly bulletproof symbol of all things white, Protestant, positive, and milquetoast. Two Kings In A Cypher's "Daffy Was A Black Man" is a humorous if implausible assault on the racist implications of Warner Brothers cartoons.

Such songs demonstrate a degree of sophistication and seem to encourage critical thought, or at least, a smarter, more active form of consumerism. However, they are in my opinion somewhat less intellectually honest than those which display an unabashed enthusiasm for pop iconography (early Das Efx comes to mind). Because even if Superman is a Nazi deep down ... your angriest revolutionary second grader still enjoys the movies. And yet those rappers who revel in pop culture while only tackling race in the subtlest or most fleeting manner (or not at all) leave me cold. Mostly because I can remember television providing a perpetually disconcerting glimpse into race relations from age four onwards.

Enter the Juggaknots. They are probably best known for "Clear Blue Skies," a song usually embraced as a poignant examination of inter-racial dating when it is actually a bizarre ventriloquizing stab at white racism. Its notoriety notwithstanding, "Clear Blue Skies" is a cake walk compared to "Generally," a dissection of the racial subtext of The Dukes Of Hazzard television show (1979-1985). "Generally" differentiates itself from other rapped critiques of pop culture because it selects a difficult target, a television show replete with racially charged iconography (the good ol' boy protagonists drive around in their Confederate flag-emblazoned car named "General Lee," for Christ's sake) that was somehow enthusiastically embraced by kids of all races.

Rapper Breezely Brewin' breaks the show's appeal down to morsels so tiny one is inclined to smack his forehead upon arriving at the same realizations as his scandalized narrator - the show was crazy fun and the toys were great! Car chases and clever wholesome lawlessness are nearly impossible to resist. The passive viewer is easily sucked in to the show's ideological premise - that the illegal activities of "good ol' boys" should be overlooked because naturally "they wasn't meaning no harm."

The brilliance of the song lies in its performance of a gradual reckoning. The narrator begins by bemoaning the current state of children's entertainment. During his digression - and Brewin's rapid, nearly garbled rhyme style can sound very meandering to an untrained ear - he is reminded of his fanaticism for Dukes. He waxes rhapsodic about the protagonists' cunning and the show's unending excitement until he randomly stumbles upon the potentially racist implications of Uncle Jesse's veneration of the Duke clan. The transition occurs so quickly and is performed so smoothly the listener is tricked into believing he is directly participating in Brewin's "conversation piece," moving along at the exact speed of thought.

Of course, Brewin's narrator is actually omniscient but his poetic techniques hasten the delivery of several telling observations apart from the obvious truth that the modern media can be quite a dastardly trickster. Brewin' implicates himself and by extension the listener in a web of deceitful racism. Before revealing the ugly truth the narrator implores the listener to "stop fronting" because "you had the toys," The active consumer is reduced to passive enabler of racism; seemingly rebellious movements and heartfelt affinities seem very tainted after listening to "Generally." This is a much riskier move than denouncing a figure like John Wayne who was far removed from anyone's pedestal of cool by 1989.

"Generally" is a mind fuck similar to the one it exposes, but the sophistry can be forgiven because the discerning listener (can the Juggaknots attract any other kind?) is rewarded the jewel of a song that is reflexively critical. The tendencies of the so-called "hip-hop generation" -- to valorize lawlessness while zealously seeking the affirmation and allegiance of a mob ("represent for the clan") and slavishly revering the symbols of past and current oppression -- are placed in the crosshairs alongside America's racist hypocrisies. In locating a most hideous truth underneath our superficial wistfulness, Brewin' skewers America's peculiar form of amnesia and pathologically romanticized view of its past. But like Chuck and Flav, he also provides us with a glimmer of hope in the final verse, a charged realization of anger at being duped and an assertion of a new frame of mind.

All in under four minutes.

GP Wu "Black On Black Crime"

Critics like Tricia Rose have long argued that many common tropes and metaphor systems that show up in rap lyrics are derived from similar ones occurring in a broader Afro-diasporic continuum of oral traditions. The tendency of rappers to occasionally pen descriptions of a brighter future is thus unsurprising, but these Utopian visions are worth noting, if not always as tenable policy recommendations than as imaginative poetic expressions. Rap has given us a glimpse into a variety of future scenarios, from space-age revivals of mythologized African/Egypto-Nubian past of incalculable splendor (X-Clan "Earthbound") to vignettes of accelerated if somewhat debauched urban renewal (AZ "Sugar Hill") to surrealist trips to alternate dimensions (Del "Sunny Meadowz") to more pragmatic sketches of a linked destiny of communal uplift (Ill Biskits, "A Better Day").

And then there's GP Wu's "Black On Black Crime." Followers of my series of lyric analyses have figured out by now that I am quite partial to songs that are resistant to neat categorization. GP Wu's "Black On Black Crime" is a remarkable song before we even delve into its lyrics. Despite sounding similar to many a '90s "Wu-banga," the song resonates as a haunting, profound piece of music, and not just because of RNS' incredible beat or Pop Da Brown Hornet's rugged flow. The future depicted in "Black On Black Crime" is simply more urgently needed and more attainable then other visions, and the song's narrative rightfully resists the myopic self-aggrandizing one often encounters in songs of this ilk.

Rather than the juvenile and practically licentious world view that oozes from both Nas' and Kurtis Blow's respective renditions of "If I Ruled The World," we are presented with an outlook that is decidedly mature. Rapper Pop Da Brown Hornet begins the song with the poignant observation that cyclical violence and mass incarceration creates a dehumanized Black underclass that wages a war against itself without any long term gains ("I'm no sure no more / Constant war, what's it all for? / Everybody out here poor"). Though this is certainly not the first song to expose such truths, it is probably the first Utopian-leaning song to focus first and foremost on the metaphysical pitfalls of the street life while noting the complicity of the average street dweller in seemingly static power relationships ("Overseer got you exactly where he want you / In the projects doing fucked up things / Like selling crack").

Where Nas of the late '90s tends to describe social mobility as a mostly cosmetic reinvention of pseudo-Mafioso aspirations towards glitz and glamor, Pop Da Brown Hornet privileges pragmatic collective moral progress ("The only way we gonna get there is together"). The foreseeable agenda is not any deeper than an immediate ceasefire, and Pop names himself as an integral participant in the process ("I'm down for whatever"). This is markedly different from Nas' "ghetto monk" pretensions or even Biggie's sense of himself in "Juicy" as the atomistic breakout star obligated to share copious riches with his friends. Pop's future includes material wealth but it isn't attained by translating criminal realities into voyeuristic entertainment - it is the inevitable result of every individual in the collective making the simple decision not to slash the next man's throat over cash.

When Pop does veer into surreal territory, he conjures images of a tranquil, grateful, satisfied clan admiring the snowy Alaskan landscape. It is an odd and unexpected image, for certain, but also a compelling one because of it grander implications - Black self-determination, an unapologetic pursuit of transcendent experiences, something new and more substantive than cliched dreams of lounging velour-draped in a rented mansion. The "buttermilk fantasy" future that is constructed must continue to serve as a reminder not to slip back into the behaviors of contrasting hard times - this is a more realistic program for change than even Big Daddy Kane's "I'll Take You There," which places most if not all of the onus of improvement on the direction of a patriarch figure. And who doesn't welcome an impassioned yet logically persuasive plea for change these days?

The Legion "New Niggas"

The Legion "New Niggas" from "Theme + Echo = Krill" -- [Click To Download]

Prior to Nas's recent attempts to spark a public discussion of the merits and pitfalls of the reappropriated "n-word," A Tribe Called Quest's "Sucka Nigga" (from their multiplatinum 1993 release Midnight Marauders) comes quickly to mind as the most popular examination of the topic. In the song, Q-Tip's argues that the word's brutal past is nullified by the subversive genius of black youth who elect (in conjunction with rappers, those eternal purveyors and guardians of cool) to employ it, with a new spelling and pronunciation, "as a term of endearment." Ever the slick rhetorician, he delivers the same verse twice, as if trying to convince us that artful brevity must somehow signify infallibility.

"Sucka Nigga" is clever and powerful, and one is inclined to allow its manipulations to slide unprotested, mostly out of a fear of being lumped together with Jim Crow-cognizant elders and overmannered Bourgois establishment types. But while "Sucka Nigga" presents a lucid argument that is paraphrased to this day, it is neither the most daring nor most trenchant take on this topic. Its very pretension -- and simplistic catchiness --distracts from its inadequacy as a piece of analysis. It is a protest song that protests nothing in the end, opting to wearily accept the word as the inevitably attractive byproduct of a mutually influential interaction between rap artists and their core audience ("now the lil' shorties say it all of the time/ and a whole bunch a niggas throw the word in they rhyme").

Q-Tip's observations are surely astute but his performed submission to the will of youthful contrariness ("I start to flinch as I try not to say it/ but my lips are like an oo-wop as I start to spray it") only lends credence to the type of critique he claims to refute. Q-Tip's narrator just knows the word is toxic but refuses to examine why, defusing the possibility of articulating how the newly self-aware and assertive "neo-nigga for the nineties" represents a departure from the subordinate "nigger" of the past. Which would have been a necessary move towards swaying the opinions of people on the other side of the argument, especially those who lived through the reality of the word's most insidious usage.

"Sucka Nigga" briefly hints at the need to imagine, once again, a fresh forward-thinking black consciousness and the kind of man who might embody it, but leaves most of the hard work to the audience. Other rap songs have been less reluctant to spell out the terms of subversion. Goldmoney's hilarious "Mnniggaah" stands out for its brash insistence that an engaged confrontational adoption of the word and its entire spectrum of meanings could drain its impact as a hurtful slur. Others have gone even further, sketching out a plausible relationship between a new connotation and a new line of thought. Jeru The Damaja's "The Frustrated Nigga" for example, echoes the attempts of Harlem Renaissance era thinkers to declare a defiantly intellectual "new negro" in contradistinction to the shuffling caricature of old. Unfortunately, Jeru's narrative is too heady and surreal for its own good. For all of its poetic imagery, there is little acknowledgement of the contemporary context in which black youth find themselves at odds with a legacy of defamation.

Which brings us, finally, to today's song - "New Niggas." Mostly remembered for being Black Sheep's "weed carriers," and for their singles "Jingle Jangle" and "Legion Groove," The Legion (Cee-Low, Chucky Smash, Molecules) have been left out of any scholarly discussions concerning meaningful or even provocative rap lyrics. Truth be told, their only album Theme + Echo = Krill consists mostly of banal posturing. But lo and behold, towards the end of the bloated LP is "New Niggas," an eerie, lumbering, bassy monster of a song. The rhymes are recited with conviction, as befits a declaration of a new paradigm, and from the very outset the word "nigga" is subjected to the brutal interrogation that Q-Tip eschews.

Chucky Smash begins by expounding upon previous arguments in favor of the word's use, alternating between a denunciation of the "blind, deaf, and dumb" and the assertion of a self that is a work in progress - "history forgotten ... the first draft pick but I ain't picking no more cotton." While acknowledging his indebtedness to the Nation Of Islam's message of self-determination, he is careful not to aim above the heads of his audience. He explains that in some ways he also takes on the persona of "emcee moolie," liable to utter the ugly word for provocation's sake or to proudly describe himself and his way of being.

Molecules builds on Chucky Smash's sense that a "new nigga" can be represented by a range of personas and stances. He suggests that both the group and the collective should strive towards a balance between authenticity and versatility, as realness is swiftly and unceremoniously tested on the street. For black youths the social and the political world are never truly separate. The "fake nigga" who brags about a gun but runs from a fight is just as toxic as the one who claims to be "pro-black" but opts out of taking a definitive stand on behalf of his people in a crisis. Thus the collective must respect the "many different forms" of the new nigga, who must act as an autonomous individual to emancipate himself from his past condition. And more importantly, survive until tomorrow.

Cee-Low picks up the baton from Molecules, but shifts the focus of discussion from authenticity to the concept of originality. While Q-Tip's "Sucka Nigga" narrator passively approves of the potential of black youth to generate ideas and influence culture, Cee-Low adamantly and persuasively links original thought to black political power. Newness in itself becomes a form of resistance against repression and the looming threat of a reversion to "old nigga" behavior. Only a calculating hyper-militant, "new nigga" in possession of a functioning intellect and a sincere concern for the plight of the collective can unravel the lies of history and direct a movement towards social equality. For the "new nigga" a tacit conformity to nihilistic street life or happy-go-lucky oblivion simply will not do -- one cannot simply decry the "sucka nigga" that "fronts" or throw the word around without further analysis.

And that's one to grow on.

--Thun

K-Solo "Tales From The Crackside"

K-Solo "Tales From The Crackside" [Listen]

The observation that crack has repeatedly informed and shaped rap music is pervasive and admittedly difficult to contest. Rap's treatment of the subject shifts just as often as the slang, practices, and legal terms associated with inner-city cocaine sale and usage. Long-time rap listeners witnessed instances of both celebratory indulgence - think of the early '80s when monikers containing "ski," "blow," or even "coke" were the norm - and inflammatory denunciation - X-Clan's all-star posse cut, "Close The Crackhouse" comes to mind immediately. A middling zone of ambivalence emerges as well.

Within rap "crack" (and the exhaustively explored network of synonyms and puns revolving around "dope" and "base"/"bass") is the instrumental punctuated by insistent snares (Schooly D "The Crack"), the flow that accompanies such a beat, the racket that most closely approximates the rap game (Nas "Halftime") or even the fully stylized rapper persona (Juelz Santana "I Am Crack"). Depending on the messenger, the crack epidemic is a conspiratorial assault on urban order and potential (Public Enemy "Night Of The Living Bassheads," Nas "What Goes Around"), or the kind of dirty business one must exploit, emulate, transcend, and subversively flip into safer, more progressive ventures (Eric. B. and Rakim "Paid In Full," BDP "Drug Dealer," Jay-Z "Can't Knock The Hustle," etc).

In recent years, critics have assailed rap lyrics that appropriate drug slang or liken a recording career to a former corner hustle. Some have gone so far to claim that the popularity of such slang and imagery can be cited as a cause of the epidemic itself. Which brings us to today's actual topic - rapper K-Solo and his song "Tales From The Crackside," a narrative so arbitrary and unintentionally hilarious it appears to anticipate the lunacy of recents debate surrounding rap's social impact, while positioning itself outside of both the neatly polarizing and morally ambiguous stances.

K-Solo is neither the first nor the last rapper to depict crack through horrific or nightmarish imagery, but his effort here is commendably bizarre. One of K-Solo's principle claims to fame is his supposed conveyance of authenticity, whether it is the brutal realism of wrongful incarceration (The Fugitive) or the milder annoyance of an imperious future mother-in-law ("Your Mom's In My Business"). On "Crackside," (which appears on his 1990 debut Tell The World My Name) he chooses to retain his usual gravitas while framing the song as an unironic cautionary fable in spite of its surrealist elements. Which is great for those of us too jaded to locate a practical or even poignant social statement in all this madness.

The seemingly well-adjusted narrator begins a "regular day" by attending to his personal hygiene. By the third verse he is charged with attempted murder, 2nd degree assault, and rape. The actual verses confound more than they illuminate. After embarking on his new found dalliance at the insistence of a friend, the narrator writes a rhyme that comes to life and runs buckwild, committing the aforementioned savage acts. Or at least that's the story he relates to the understandably skeptical authorities before lucidity suddenly prevails and he owns up to his drug-fueled culpability.

The audience is given precious little information to determine if his crack binge caused him to hallucinate, or if his reported vision is merely a ruse to pin his vile actions on an art form. And we're surely not sure what to make of the implications of such a gesture in the real world of controversy and contending ideologies. The strangeness of its details and its deadpanned narrative renders it useless as a serious warning against peer pressure or drug abuse. However, the song can be credited with providing a glimpse into rap's great creative potential -- not to mention its occasional bouts of inarticulateness -- in the face of a seemingly incurable social catastrophe. Well, that and an imaginary rhyme-turned-rapist dressed as Santa Claus. No, seriously. Great stuff. -- Thun

Das Efx "Hard Like A Criminal"

Das Efx "Hard Like A Criminal" [Listen]

The EPMD-cosigned Das Efx blew the fuck up in '92, pushing a style that was unquestionably stupid and somehow instantly appealing. The silliness of their signature "iggedy"pig latin-esque prefixes and cartoon references was only accentuated set against their deadpan deliveries and rough on-camera demeanor.  While their playful singles "They Want Efx" and "Mic Checka" were fan favorites, the most interesting and arguably best song of the earlier part of their career is "Hard Like A Criminal," the b-side of their less popular "Straight Out The Sewer" single, which was curiously left off their platinum debut, the amusingly titled Dead Serious.

Not surprisingly "Hard Like A Criminal" boasts hard-hitting funk beats, courtesy of in-house producers Solid Scheme, and hard-edged deliveries. The song's greatness lies in its attention to detail -- Das Efx forgo their usual shtick to engage their audience through skillful storytelling. Listeners of the song are granted omniscient access to interior and exterior monologues as well as the dialogue that occurs between Drayze's arrogant and naive party seeker and Skoob's volatile, unrepentant thug.

Drayze's character swaggers cockily en route to a party, reveling in his  fly-as-fuck stature ("freshly dipped ... but money I'm rugged") until a subway car full of Whites and Asians takes too much notice. He pre-emptively denounces their supposed racist paranoia in an angry, mocking tone, suggesting that their suspicions stem from a historicized fear of inter-racial rape resurrected in the wake of the Central Park Jogger media firestorm (" 'They must be wildin' " a mock-White inflected ad-lib proclaims). It is uncertain whether or not his defensiveness is justified or  if the conflicted dialogue exists entirely within his head but one is inclined to empathize with the narrator as he exits the train disgusted by his perceived treatment.

In the next verse we are introduced to Skoob's dark but similarly likable character, an unapologetic repeat offender who "packs steel" and drives "the phat wheels" and actively seeks violent confrontation. His infectious bravado gives way to a telling, chilling observation: the public loves his performance of gaudy nihilism ("living the lifestyles of the rough and rugged") even as they loathe its social impact. He just happens to be on his way to the same party and in the third brilliantly constructed verse the two characters and their respective crews inch closer to collision as Skoob and Drayze exchange lines. Drayze's hard-headed narrator roams the unfamiliar East New York housing complex oblivious to impending danger, even ignoring the fact that someone (the listener knows it to be Skoob's character) is "bustin' caps." 

When the two young men inevitably cross paths, a heated exchange of mutual shit-talking results in an entirely preventable homicide. The partyseeker lies dead and his killer returns for a bar and half speaking as a convicted inmate, quickly silenced by the sound of a closing cell. Although the narrative is straightforward, the message is actually quite nuanced. Both killer and victim share the tragic flaws of arrogance and myopia, as well as similar outer appearance, comportment, and most disturbingly, a life outcome devoid of success and happiness. One might deduce from the narrative that the skyrocketing street crime of the time had a complex myriad of causes, no discernible single solution, and the paradoxical effect of defaming the very group of people most commonly victimized, many of whom actively internalize the stereotypes emerging from the media's incessant scrutiny.

Pretty heavy commentary for a crew mostly remembered for nonsensical tongue-twisting and rocking Band-Aids as fashion accessories.  -- Thun

Ghostface Killah "The Sun"

LISTEN - Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon, Slick Rick, RZA "The Sun"

Read The Lyrics

Circa 2001, Ghostface's output was dominated by inspired metaphorical whimsy. Excised from the U.S. retail version of Bulletproof Wallets, "The Sun," (featuring RZA, Raekwon, and Slick Rick) boasts happily insistent sampled horns (sometimes misattributed to The Stylistics or Sonny & Cher) that cleverly mirror the levity and profundity cohabiting in the verses. Ghost honors the life-giving, inspirational qualities of earth's closest star through secular ode (noting the sun's kiss as "scrumptious" and "nutritious"), religious incantation (citing "This Little Light of Mine," a gospel children's song turned Civil Rights anthem), and a hilariously botched science lesson.

The song takes a turn towards genius, however, when the self-described Muslim (with Five Percenter sympathies) personifies the sun as the truest street warrior who "could never be pussy," reliably coming out of hiding even at gunpoint. The normally stoic Rakewon then complicates this concept by cheerfully relating his nephew's enthusiasm for the sun, suggesting that sunshine is best enjoyed following study and refinement, but couching the advice in familiar fatherly terms that still hearken back to NOI/NGE street ministry ("probably if you clean up and read a little"). Ghost's sense that shining divinity is perceivable in "pictures and scriptures" but also within one's immutable self is bolstered by Raekwon's assertion that "you always see one in a building."

In these utterances, the mundane transforms into the heavenly, and the similarities between the Five Percenter conflation of "Sun" and "Son" (claimed by KRS-One and other to have its origins in a Christian subversion of ancient Egyptian Cosmology) and Protestant (as well as Islamic mystic) notions of an inner transcendent light are rendered momentarily apparent. Ghost and Rae deftly utilize a mixture of Christian and Five Percenter concept to describe a "mentor" figure who is "one in a million," and demands uplift ("makes me wanna climb, take a bite out of shine") but can also be associated with the promise and purity of childhood - the Son/Sun of man, the "understanding," the stars, the "best part," etc. A future messianic figure, for sure, but far from a vaporous angelic being, more like your brother or firstborn son.

Slick Rick and RZA continue in a similar manner, with the former theorizing the sun as a gateway to the heavens as well as a complement to domestic bliss and the latter paraphrasing (in a stupefying show of eclecticism I might add) both the Lost-Found Lessons and the lyrics to "The Candy Man" to illustrate his sense of the Sun/Son as the architect of a universal order (exemplified by the water cycle). Thus, while "The Sun" sits squarely within a tradition of rap artists (Sunz Of Man, King Sun, etc.) and rap songs that make reference to the word's symbolic associations (think the Roy Ayers sampling "Wake Up [Reprise In The Sunshine]" by Brand Nubian or Funkdoobiest's "Rock On"), as well as a broader Black musical legacy that makes use of celestial motifs, it is also notable for its strangeness and brilliance.

And it remains a worthwhile listen some years later. -- Thun