Note:  This cites Lil Wayne lyrics, so it’s a tad raunchy. 

A couple of weeks ago, Young Money boss Lil Wayne made news when, at the last second, he pulled Nicki Minaj from Hot 97’s Summer Jam 2012.  It turns out one of the station’s personalities, Peter Rosenberg, had disparaging comments about Minaj’s song “Starship,” which he (rightly) described as “bullshit.”  Lil Wayne didn’t appreciate the dis, so he pulled Minaj from the concert to show how much he respects women.

That’s right, the rapper who routinely drops some of the most repulsive, misogynistic lyrics in the business has apparently had some kind of epiphany.  “Nicki Minaj is a female,” he said, quickly scoring a point with his correct gender identification.  “I don’t know what anyone else believe, but I believe females deserve the ultimate respect at all times, no matter what, where, when, or how.”  When I read this, there was something about his repetition of “female” here and elsewhere in the interview that felt a little off, but I was probably reading into things too closely, I decided.  Good for Wayne.  Good for rap.

This morning, I decided to give Tech N9Ne’s new-ish album (from 2011) a listen–it got pretty good reviews when it came out, and even though I’m not a huge fan of his twisted tales, I admire his dedication to the industry.  He’s been around for decades.  In any case, I saw that Wayne was featured in a very respectful-sounding song called “F**k Food,” and I was excited to hear evidence of his transformation.

Having heard Wayne’s part in the song, I can now confirm that his respect for women does indeed run deep.  Right out of the gate, his opening line–“put that p**sy on my lip and dip”–puts his listeners on notice that this ain’t the same old Wayne, and a few lines later when he says, “I beat that p**sy like brass knuckles,” I almost start to feel guilty for doubting his sincerity.  I wouldn’t be surprised to read that brass knuckles line on a Hallmark wedding anniversary card. And the lucky lady on whom he’s lavishing all of this respect (surprisingly not given a name or a voice) must feel kind of embarrassed that this famous rapper puts her on such a pedestal.  Somehow it gets even better; by the end of Wayne’s verse, she’s just about achieved God-like status.  In rapid fire rhymes, he elevates her thus:  “I’m makin’ her talk, I’m makin’ her beg / I’m makin’ her crawl, I’m makin’ her run.”

Forget the sublime poetry for a moment–this recognition that women should be treated with dignity and, yes, respect is most welcome.  I’ve been worried that rappers like Wayne were beyond help, but here, I’ll say it, I was wrong.  As if compelled to make his point one last time, Wayne’s last line–“I got that f**k food, baby, come taste it”–removes any lingering suspicions.  Haters step off–Wayne means what he says.  This is the “ultimate respect at all times” that he was talking about.

WARNING:  This is the literature side coming through.  Some may find this tedious and boring.  But it’s my blog, so…

One of the arguments I’ve been making in my classes and (sometimes indirectly) in my published work is that rap deserves the same kind of serious attention that we readily accord literature.  Sure, a lot of rap doesn’t stand up well to close reading, but the same is definitely true for fiction and other literary forms.  Pick up a supermarket romance novel with a Fabio-looking guy on the cover and you’ll see my point.

Anyway, one person who’s making my argument easier is Killer Mike.  His rhymes sound good, especially over EL-P’s production, but they are often literary as well.  I’m not just talking about his use of devices like metaphor, symbolism, etc., which most rappers employ, but his frequent references to literary works.  On more than one track in R.A.P. Music, he emphasizes his love of books—at one point saying he’s “addicted to literature”—and it shows.  One of the songs I’ve listened to several times is “Anywhere But Here,” which surveys the violence against black bodies that has become a universal fact of American urban life.  He opens with “Moving through New York City in a black seven fifty / like Batman moving through Gotham,” a setting that not only matches the dark, heavily synthed backdrop (it actually sounds like it could be a Batman soundtrack) but also sets up his description of the Gotham-like violence he describes—first in New York and then in Atlanta.  It also sets him up to be the “hero” who, from the space of his black cars, is going to “peel away” the façade of these cities to reveal their gritty and disturbing undersides.  His choice of expensive cars (in the next verse it’s a Mercedes SL) is not just his bowing to rap convention; it’s establishing his wealth and power, allowing him to serve as a counterweight to New York’s “billionaire” Mayor who presides over New York’s inequality and violence.  (The blackness of the cars speaks, I think, to the dark deeds in the song, but also the black bodies always seem to be the victims of them—including, as in the case of Atlanta, at the hands of other black men.)

His rhyme scheme throughout is noticeably constant—plenty of internal rhymes, but with particular emphasis on the trailing end-rhyme.  The rhyming pattern and cadence stay smooth and even throughout the entire song, a delivery style that lends support to his early claims that he’s moving “gently” and “dodging potholes”–in juxtaposition with the harsh, rough world that “Gotham” and those potholes are setting us up for.  In addition, I think Mike’s constant repetition works to reinforce the idea that the violence and self-destructive behavior depicted in the song keep repeating as well.  Setting the song in two different cities–and recalling the murder of Martin Luther King–makes this point, too: across time and space, the outcome has been the same.

But the repetition also relates, I think, to the song’s debt to Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”  (Harlem is the first neighborhood Mike mentions, just a few lines in, obviously foreshadowing this eventual move to Hughes.)  The last verse of the song concludes with “So you ask what happens to a dream deferred / Langston, well it kills itself.”  Hughes’s poem—which opens with “What happens to a dream deferred?”—also emphasizes repetition by answering the question with a series of more unanswered questions.  It concludes with a final, italicized “Or does it explode?”—a thinly-veiled threat that if people’s dreams are deferred for too long (just as Hughes perpetually defers answering his own question in the poem) there could be explosive violence.  I have always read Hughes’s final line as a warning to the people who force those dreams to be forever deferred, but Killer Mike—calling and responding to Hughes—offers a very different reading.  For him, the result of deferred dreams is that “young black boys / seem to self-sabotage they selves.”  The alliteration in this line is yet another use of repetition that speaks to the ongoing self-destructive consequences of deferred dreams.  The dreams don’t explode; they implode.

There’s a lot more that could be done with the song.  I haven’t even touched the Emily Panic chorus or the use of a well-known BDP line.  But the point here is that Killer Mike is doing a hell of a lot more than making catchy songs over great beats—he’s calling and responding to a wide range of artistic predecessors, in the process making his songs treasure troves of poetic expression.  This is what rappers should be doing more of!

Killer Mike’s new album, R.A.P. Music, is getting a whole lot of positive press these days. Most reviews have been out-of-the-ballpark good (have a look at Popmatters, Spin, and Allhiphop for examples), with just about everybody marveling at the unlikely–and surprisingly successful–combination of Killer Mike and EL-P, the album’s underground producer whose sound does, admittedly, seem ill-suited to Killer Mike’s.  But I agree that it works on R.A.P. Music, though I’m not sure I’d give it a 9/10, as many people have. Maybe an 8. (Update:  I’ve been listening to this all morning and I’m moving it up to an 8.5.  Plus, since Killa Kill himself responded to my post, it’s the least I could do!)

What I like about Killer Mike, a lot, is that he’s a talented MC who is a lyrical throwback to rap’s politically conscious rappers–just add a southern drawl.  He engages politics and makes no attempt to straddle the fence.  Perhaps not surprisingly, my interest was piqued after I listened to the track “Reagan,” which not only attacks the legacy of our 40th president, but also draws uncomfortable–though not entirely misplaced–parallels between him and Obama.  At one point, he raps, “Ronald Reagan was an actor / Not at all a factor / Just an employee of the country’s real masters / Just like the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama / Just another talking head telling lies on Teleprompters.”

First off, you’ve got to give credit to anyone who can make “Obama” rhyme with “Teleprompters.”  Lyrical dexterity aside, here we have yet another rapper who is not feeling Obama–at all.  He goes on to note that both Reagan and Obama went after Gaddafi and in doing so suggests that there’s no real daylight between Obama and his Republican predecessor.  This may play into Obama’s strategy of winning the white independent vote–everyone loves the Gipper, right? (even though his record on a wide range of issues was absolutely horrible)–but it’s got to be encouraging to the Romney folks as well.  Obama does need a strong African American vote to win in some of his key states, yet hip hop artists are on the verge of abandoning him en masse. And who doubts that hip hop could help energize black voters, not to mention young voters of all races/ethnicities?

I don’t think Killer Mike gets it right on Libya–for me, that’s an example of multilateral military intervention done right, something Bush II never would’ve been able to pull off.  But I do confess that I sometimes  have trouble distinguishing Obama from Republicans, and that surprises (and disappoints) me.  As Fredrick Harris’s spot-on piece in the Washington Post argues, Obama’s agenda has all but left African Americans in the dust, and weren’t America’s blatant and growing inequalities something he said he would address?  Didn’t he single out African Americans as a group he planned to listen to?

Now I’m concerned about the upcoming election.  If Mitt Romney were even moderately compelling as an opponent, I’d be downright worried…