#32

Rap music! If you hate it, you may read something else today. If you don't, you may read on, but odds are good you'll prefer to go the same direction the haters did, just this once. Whatever your choice, my choice today is to jot down some thoughts about rap music. My thoughts being what they are, I cannot promise they will make sense to you.

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Just to get it out of the way, no reasonable person will deny that extremely foul and deplorable music exists in the genres which loosely collectivize as rap, and that this has always been true. It is ridiculous to assert that rap possesses a virtues over and above all other music, that liking rap enough, or performing the liking of rap to a specific standard, can in any way demonstrate some personal virtue, or that dislike for the music is an indelible mark of personal deficiency or prejudice.

It comes down to this: some people hate rap because they will never be able to understand it, some people hate it because it offends their aural aesthetics, some people hate it because it offends their visual aesthetics, some people hate it because they take legitimate issue with their perception of the content's imprimatur, and some people hate it because it is associated with Blackness and Black people, and they hate Blackness and Black people. This last can be entangled with the previous, but each can also stand alone, and they make vast swathes of difference, which is why it serves no one to pass moral judgments applied broadly and generally, based on the consumption or non-consumption of what in the end amounts to a product and a bill of goods. It is worth remembering that it is perfectly possible to love all rap without question and still hate Black people of every description and everybody else besides, and no one reasonable would assert that liking classical music betokens a specific love for Whiteness or White people, or a hatred for beats, or a belief in werewolves. Get fucking real.

For example, anecdote though it is: I went to school with a Black dude who loved nothing better that to sing showtunes and play the euphonium. That dude hated rap, and loved getting good grades and not drawing attention to himself unless he was playing Jean Valjean. His little brother loved rap, and loved to rap, and also to get into fights and vandalize shit and talk extremely nasty in order to shock and provoke. I went to class with one for eight years and captained the other on a wrestling team, and they each possessed admirable and annoying qualities and characteristics, each had their own complete self and world outlook, each was, in short, a dude--each dude as Black as the other, 'cause they were brothers. Get the drift? 

Anyway, my favorite rap albums are by Aesop Rock, but my favorite rap songs are mostly by Busdriver. I like Eminem  and Outkast, also. The Historian Himself, Mos Def,  Kanye, Angel Haze, Talib Kweli, Method Man & Redman, Lil Wayne, Lil Kim, Dark Time Sunshine, Hail Mary Mallon, some others. Those are the main ones just off the top of my head, my preferred rap ensemble.

I didn't care for Kendrick Lamar until I saw some of the music videos, which is not in his favor. I heard everything he made right up to 2017 without ever seeing what the guy even looked like, and I thought it was okay, not great. Now I've seen the videos and concede that together with the music they are very awesome and important, but have not become convinced that he is an amazing rapper or that his songs are great. I like for music to get me off all by itself. Seems like a cool dude, though, and you can't deny he came from circumstances and made an honest name on a lively pen hand and an active mind.

What the hell is the point of Drake? I do not get the Drake thing. I knew a poet who loved Drake more than anybody. Try as I might, I could not understand, and he marshaled a great many words in an effort to clarify. 

Snoop Dogg's kind of an outside case. I like his stuff, but it's like the dude has a cartoon self superimposed over his actual real body at all times, and he can change the cartoons at will. I like a lot of his stuff, and a lot of his stuff is, well, I dunno; but the main thing is that it's an astonishing variety of different stuff. I don't know if this betrays a mercurial baseness of character, or mastery of self and the complete breadth of the modern culture on the level of Da Vinci. Is he a superactive chameleon with no true core to his being, or among the most authentic, free-spirited men alive? The only thing that is ironclad is that I am always interested, if sometimes repulsed, by what Snoop is up to. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. Tell me that isn't the name of a titan. A titan who happens to be in the celebrity wing of the WWE hall of fame, according to Wikipedia. Anybody see The Tenants?

André the Giant, André 3000, André Agassi, or André Holland? This is one of the litmus tests of personality, the ones that are basically impossible to cheat on.

I like woodwinds and choirs and piano sounds a lot in rap music. I like to hear classical music with tight, skittery beats or afrobeats underneath. I like creative lyrics and interesting thoughts, but I am not above some angry, pointless, hideously gross and fucked-up shit. You can find all kinds of stuff out there, in all manner of modulations, and I endorse the looking.

I've worked in kitchens a lot over the past fifteen years, and have heard a metric fuck-ton of rap over the course of those hours. Many were filled with the repetitive knell of the radio's numbing neutered bullshit, but a golden few have been touched by the grace of true fire off the dome on top of that loud wild. Rap music can really grind down your patience--about the fifty millionth thousandth five hundred and fifty hundredth time Stand Up (most Ludacris, honestly) comes on, sure, you'll want to fucking shove your head in a deep fryer, or simply take a heavy cleaver and chop off your left hand at the wrist just to drown the song in the screams of your workmates. But there are also the other moments, where you hear an idea you've never even thought of before expressed in a way you never believed an idea could be expressed, and your whole life will stop for a moment, the words inscribing themselves in crackling lightning across the surface of your soul, the grin working itself across your face so ferocious it's like the muscles in your face have never truly grinned before. Moments that turn the whole world inside out and blast a new, raw, and powerful attitude into the center of your guts. I would stomach all the bullshit twice over again for the weight of that gold in my pocket.

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Okay, I'm bored of this. More rap thoughts someday, whenever I want, perhaps never.


--JL