Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  Kept within the confines of rap culture, it’s unlikely that Shaq’s performance would have garnered much notice. It was only after it spilled over into the mainstream media that it became a minor controversy. When first asked for comment, Shaq appealed to the expectations of signifying in rap, which call for an individual who’s been dissed to diss back; getting mad means you’ve lost the battle. Speaking to ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, Shaq responded: “I was freestyling. That’s all. It was all done in fun. Nothing serious whatsoever. That is what MCs do. They freestyle when called upon.” The explanation of “that’s what MCs do” was undoubtedly befuddling to the average viewer. And yet Shaq’s appeal to the conventions of the art form, while perhaps something of a rouse, nonetheless speaks to the importance of signifying in the MC’s craft. For most people unfamiliar with these conventions, however, Shaq’s performance was nearly inexplicable. NPR and Fox News commentator Juan Williams responded to the incident by suggesting, quite seriously, that O’Neal seek psychological assistance. While rap’s been around for decades, many still find it difficult to make sense out of dissing and braggadocio, two sides of the same signifying coin.

  Dissing at its best employs as much wit as it does insult. When the Pharcyde recorded “Ya Mama” in 1992, they delivered their lyrics with playful panache and inventiveness.

  Ya mom is so fat (How fat is she?)

  Ya mama is so big and fat that she can get busy

  With twenty-two burritos, when times are rough

  I seen her in the back of Taco Bell in handcuffs.

  Like in a schoolyard snap session, the group trades verses back and forth, trying to outdo each other with their originality. Listening to the track, you can hear them responding to one another’s lines with laughter and appreciation. This same spirit is alive in 2008’s “Lookin Boy” from the Chicago group Hotstylz featuring Yung Joc. Joc begins by introducing the track (“We gonna have a roastin’ session”), then each rapper takes turns inventing disses, not at anyone in particular, but for the sheer joy of conceiving the wildest and wittiest put-downs they can. Raydio G opens the track with these lines:

  Weak lookin’ boy, you slow lookin’ boy,

  Dirty white sock on your toe lookin’ boy,

  You rat lookin’ boy,

  “Will you marry me?” Splat! lookin’ boy,

  Whoopi Goldberg black lip lookin’ boy,

  Midnight Train Gladys Knight lookin’ boy,

  You poor lookin’ boy, Don Imus ol’ nappy headed ho lookin’ boy

  What makes these lines, and the ones that follow it, work is that they exploit stereotype, maybe even getting you to laugh at something you might not otherwise consider funny (like the Imus comment). Combining sound effects, off the wall references, and straightforward insults, the song exemplifies the range and meaning of the diss in rap signifying.

  While dissing concerns someone else, braggadocio centers on the self. More than just bragging, braggadocio consists of MCs’ verbal elevation of themselves above all others. Like the diss, braggadocio can range from the straightforward (like Miami’s DJ Khaled screaming “We the best!” on most of his songs) to the more ingenious (like Los rhyming that “I’m so out of this world I make telescopes squint” on his freestyle to Lil Wayne’s “A Milli”).

  Braggadocio is one of the most commonly misunderstood elements of rap, in part because it seems so straightforward on the surface. Play rap for someone who doesn’t usually listen to the music or only listens to it casually and one of the first things you’re likely to hear is: “Why are they bragging so much about themselves?” Even an otherwise astute observer of culture can end up making false assumptions about rap based upon this singular element of its boasts. I was reminded of this in 2007 when I attended a taping of Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time. His guests that week included Rahm Emanuel (then-Democratic congressman from Illinois, now President Barack Obama’s chief-of-staff); journalist Pete Hamill, and professor Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University. Maher led them, as usual, through a discussion of the week’s news: Iraq; the recent racial incident in Jena, Louisiana; the 2008 presidential race. Then Bill launched into one of his trademark rants. What was unusual in this instance, however, was that the subject of his attack was hip hop.

  Maher isn’t a knee-jerk critic of rap. He often takes provocative, contrarian stances on many social and cultural subjects—rap included. He’s a familiar face at the Playboy Mansion and, perhaps more important for hip-hop heads, he once dated Karrine Steffans, also known as Superhead, the most infamous “video vixen” in hip-hop history. His problem with rap was its braggadocio. “I’m a fan of hip hop, but I don’t have kids,” Maher said, “And I gotta say if I had kids would I want them to listen to a steady diet of ‘I’m a P-I-M-P’? No, I wouldn’t. . . . Ninety percent of it is affirmative action for the ego. Ninety percent of it is bragging, and I’m sorry, but modesty is a virtue.”

  In most rap modesty is anything but a virtue. But how did extolling one’s own greatness take on such a vital role in rap from its earliest days? Why is braggadocio so vital to the art form? The answers are as obvious as they are insufficient: partly as a consequence of rap’s birth in the battle; partly as a consequence of rap’s origins in a black oral tradition that celebrates individual genius; partly as a result of the interests and attitudes of its primary creators and consumers—young men; partly as a result of it being the creation of young black men seeking some form of power to replace those denied them. Hip-hop historian William Jelani Cobb makes this point, “In hip hop—and inside the broken histories of black men in America—respect is the ultimate medium of exchange. And that is to say, in battling, the rapper is gambling with the most valuable commodity available: one’s rep and the respect that flows from it.” What Cobb elsewhere terms “the scar tissue of black male powerless-ness” might be just another way of identifying Maher’s “affirmative action for the ego.” Both are ways of identifying a defensive, recuperative gesture and, largely, a symbolic one. But beyond seeking an explanation for why rappers boast, it is equally important to understand how they boast. And what rappers boast about is not always as straightforward as many assume.

  Rap is a musical form made by young men and largely consumed by young men. It is music about those things generally on the minds of young men: sex, cars, money, and above all, their own place in society. But rap has never been just about this. From the beginning what made rap different from other forms of braggadocio is that it extolled excellence not simply in the stereotypically masculine pursuits—wealth, physical strength, sexual prowess—but in something new: in poetry, eloquence, and artistry. Here were young men boasting of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Just listen to a young LL Cool J, for instance, in these famous lines from one of rap’s quintessential signifying songs, “I’m Bad”:

  Never retire or put my mic on the shelf

  The baddest rapper in the history of rap itself

  Not bitter or mad, just provin’ I’m bad

  You want a hit, give me a hour plus a pen and a pad.

  That “hour plus a pen and a pad” is proof that LL Cool J’s badness is nothing less than a revelation. It suggests that in hip hop, artistry is a commodity right alongside money, power, and respect.

  To understand rap’s braggadocio, it is useful to look to the birth of so-called gangsta rap. While gangsta rap came to public attention in the late 1980s with West Coast artists like N.W.A. and Ice-T, it is an East Coast MC, Schoolly D, who is most often credited with pioneering the genre. Schoolly D took as his subject urban crime on the streets of his native Philadelphia. Long before curse words became commonplace in rap, Schoolly D routinely cussed up a storm on his albums. More than that, the subject matter he chose distinguished him from his contemporaries. While Run-DMC was rhyming about “My Adidas,” Schoolly D was rapping about pimps, hos, and hustlers. This is not to say, however, that Schoolly D was somehow the first person to extol the virtues of criminal life in rhyme. The black vernacula
r tradition of the toasts routinely valorized outlaw characters like the pimp and the pusher. Murder and mayhem were frequent themes.

  Schoolly D himself paid tribute to these earlier influences when he recorded his own version of the famous toast “The Signifying Monkey,” something he called “The Signifying Rapper.” “The Signifying Rapper” first appeared on Schoolly D’s 1988 album Smoke Some Kill, and reached an even broader audience when director Abel Ferrera used the song in a climactic scene from his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant. Built upon a replayed riff from Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” the song lyrically embodies the hard edge of the music. As William Eric Perkins describes it, “‘Signifying Rapper’ . . . is a tour de force, a kind of ghetto Brer Rabbit tale replete with gruesome violence, homophobia, and sexual perversion. . . . Schoolly D’s twisted genius lies in his ability to paint a lyrical picture of inner-city decay. But his persona led other rappers to create equally hardened characters whose quirkiness was magnified in their lyrical and stylistic sophistication.” After Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page heard the song while watching Ferrera’s film, he filed suit against Ferrera and Schoolly D. The scene was cut from the film and all remaining copies of the CD, which had been out for nearly five years, were destroyed.

  Like the toasts, rap often relies upon the construction of a larger-than-life persona, an outlaw hero with superhuman aptitudes and appetites. The Notorious B.I.G. is not Christopher Wallace, 2Pac is not Tupac Shakur, although he seems to have pushed himself to live up to his persona, to his own detriment. Rappers’ aliases afford them the necessary distance from their own identity to fashion alternate selves, voices that are louder and bolder, anything but their own. This is true, of course, of most artists. And yet for rap it has come to dominate the form in ways unprecedented in other genres.

  Rappers create, observes music critic Kelefa Sanneh, “an outsized hero that has more sex than you’re really having, that does more violence than you’re really doing, that sells more drugs than you’ve ever sold.” LL Cool J as lover. Chuck D as new Malcolm. KRS as teacher. Pac as thug poet. Biggie as lovable gangsta. “The persona overshadows the person and the person can be crushed by the persona,” Nelson George remarks. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley picks up on this same point:

  Exaggerated and invented boasts of criminal acts should sometimes be regarded as part of a larger set of signifying practices. Growing out of a much older set of cultural practices, these masculinist narratives are essentially verbal duels over who is the “baddest.” They are not meant as literal descriptions of violence and aggression, but connote the playful use of language itself.

  Kelley’s last phrase is essential. Too often we approach rap music with a startling and willful lack of imagination that we don’t bring to heavy metal, for instance. The “playful use of language itself” is made apparent by artists like the Notorious B.I.G. whose self-deprecating wit was as sharp as his excoriating disses of others. It may be less apparent—but not to say more subtle—in an artist like 50 Cent whose celebration of a gangsta aesthetic and its trappings (bulletproof vests, semiautomatic handguns, bandanas tied around the mouth and neck) becomes so complete that it almost disguises the glamorous life he actually lives—the untold riches, VIP treatment, and award show dates with Hollywood celebrities. Yes, 50 was a small-time crack dealer for a time, but this actual experience is much farther removed from the cartel fantasies of his lyrical fictions than is the high-stakes hustling of the record executives who push him as their product. The point is that gangsta rap has always been an image, an act, and a process of signification not just with so-called studio gangstas but even with the real-life former (and occasionally even current) petty criminals who lived in the shadow of the images they create.

  For those MCs able to control the image, the gangsta persona can prove a powerful means of expression. Ice-T, the godfather of gangsta rap, drew inspiration from real life even as he consciously crafted his rhymes to serve his own imaginative purposes. On songs like “Drama” and “I’m Your Pusher,” he renders rhyme personas that are “real” inasmuch as they reflect what he sometimes saw in the streets, but are stylized in the way he crafts the stories to serve his art. “When my dad would teach me lessons, he would never just say: ‘Don’t do it,’” Ice-T explains. “He would tell me stories and he would get me into it. It would be like: ‘He was about to get a million dollars, but that night he OD’d.’ So I always used that technique. Because I do really, truly come from the game, I can’t write a story about the hustle where the dude doesn’t end up in prison or dead. Because all the real stories do. If I’m rhyming and I shoot somebody, I’m on the run in the next verse.” In this case, reality not only lives alongside fiction, it actually shapes the terms of that fiction—demanding authenticity that leads not to glorifying the gangsta aesthetic but to representing and, ultimately, challenging it.

  Rap also has a long tradition of what might be called rapping about rapping. When the act of rhyming itself becomes the subject of the rhymes, MCs turn their attention to the tools and the process of their art. Out of this we get Nas describing himself as “a poet, a preacher and a pimp with words.” Such artistic self-awareness contrasts with an equally established tradition of rappers outwardly rejecting rap’s poetic identity—in other words, of rapping about not needing or wanting to rap at all. This occurs when MCs either downplay their creative process or assert a counter-identity in its place. Out of this we get Malice from Clipse insisting that “I’m not a rapper,” or Jay-Z asserting that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” Hustler or commodity, these are clever fictions meant to disguise the true process of the poet’s work. All rappers are poets; whether they are good poets or bad poets is the only question.

  At different times in rap’s history it has been fashionable for MCs to project either interest or indifference in relation to their craft. After Jay-Z began boasting that he never wrote down his rhymes, or that he could compose an entire verse in fifteen minutes flat, or that he could record it in a single take, it became fashionable for other rappers to do—or at least to say—the same. Of course, what might be true for Jay-Z, the self-proclaimed “Mike Jordan of Rap,” does not necessarily hold for your average MC, nor, in fact, does it always hold for Jay-Z himself.

  What do rappers’ stand to gain by downplaying their artistry? It is in the interest of the MC to make rap seem effortless. Hip hop as a culture celebrates virtuosity, excellence that expresses itself with ease. Like b-boys executing a series of complex kinesthetic motions only to end by brushing off their shoulders with feigned indifference, MCs often boast a “Look, Ma, no hands!” lyrical aesthetic that downplays the work it takes to create the rhymes they spit. An audience listens to rap to be entertained, not to be impressed with the formal sophistication at work. The purpose of sophisticated poetics is not to call attention to itself, but to absorb itself so fully within the art that it is invisible to the naked eye—or ear. Downplaying the work they do is just one strategy MCs use, both within and without their rhymes, to maintain the necessary illusion of ease.

  The tension between inspiration and craft, between the conception that great art emerges fully formed or that it is the product of conscientious labor, is a matter of great discussion and debate in almost every literary tradition in the history of the world. Aristotle mused upon it in the Poetics. Wordsworth and Coleridge troubled over it in their writings in the nineteenth century. What’s new in rap is the commercial element. A major consequence of rap becoming a global industry is that it also attracts individuals primarily motivated by profit. Those hip-hop heads who long for a golden age of rap when the MC did it for the love must realize that the moment rhyme started to pay, or showed the potential to pay, which is to say only a few years into its existence, rap opened itself up to commercial interests.

  We’ve reached a point in rap culture in which 50 Cent will admit to Forbes magazine that rhyming for him is a business decision. We’ve moved beyond boasts about collecting fat royalty checks
to rhymes about business deals with multinational corporations. This opens up an important question for those of us interested in rap’s poetics: Can rap be both good business and good poetry? Do the calculations that a rap businessman must make to account for market conditions leave any space left for the motivations of the wordsmith?

  Rap’s artistry, some critics argue, is in inverse proportion to its profitability. But this argument is too absolute. “Commercial success and artistic integrity are not mutually exclusive,” writes Stic.man, half of dead prez. “Just because you are a starving artist does not mean that you automatically have more skills or that you lack them. And conversely, just because you are a platinum selling artist it doesn’t mean you have no integrity to the roots and artistry of hip hop. . . . You must understand that artistic credibility and financial success can, should, and do work together wherever possible.”

  While commercialism may not have killed rap’s poetry, it has certainly changed it. The influences of corporate labels and commercial radio as gatekeepers separating true MCs from their audience are obvious. Of equal importance, however, is how rap’s profitability affects the MC’s craft before distribution and radio play even become factors. What impact, in other words, does commercialism have on MCs writing in their book of rhymes?

  Chuck D, for one, has decried what he calls the “rise of the culture of black animosity” that emerges when rampant commercialism meets a gotta-get-mine perspective. In many ways, rap has become the soundtrack to this cultural malady, expressed in gun claps and diss tracks. Rap at once reflects and helps create a cultural climate of black violence and black response. “I just think in general our society limits the range in which men can express their emotions. You just have to have your game face on all the time.” Consequently, rap is often obsessed with image. One of the dominant rap personas consists of presenting yourself as someone worthy of respect through physical domination rather than through the exercise of often unattainable “virtual powers” like money and social and political standing—things historically denied to black Americans. Indeed, as is evident in an artist like 50 Cent, these modes of power sometimes converge, but always return to the base of physical domination and violence as the anchor of their strength.