The exact moment the atomic bomb stopped being abstract, a symbol of America’s cultural and military superiority, was partway through my first and — so far — only viewing of the anime adaptation of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen. I don’t remember exactly when I saw it, but I googled around and it was probably around 1994 or 1995. I’d have been a pre-teen at the time, old enough to rent movies but not old enough to have my own money to rent those. I cajoled my mom into bringing that one home because the other options were probably some Masami Obari flicks with sexy girls on the cover. Barefoot Gen was the safest choice, I guess because it looked like a movie for kids. It had a little boy running on the cover, right?
It’s about Gen, a young child living in Hiroshima, and it chronicles his life before and after Little Boy was dropped on the town. It’s really good, but I’ve only ever watched it once. I dubbed it off onto a tape after, and I later bought it on DVD, because I feel like it’s a movie that I need to own. It feels important.
It feels important because it devastated me as a kid. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember every little detail, or even how it ended. But I do remember the shots of the plane flying over the town, the way the map of the town snapped from color to black and white with a bright orange cloud once the bomb went off, and the horrors that followed. Humans flashing to dust, melting in the heat, and dying slowly in their own homes while begging and praying for someone to help their children.
I still don’t really cry at movies, but I sobbed my guts out watching Barefoot Gen and probably would if I watched it again. The last movie to give me that reaction was Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke. I got so mad and sad at the utterly pointless loss of life and needless trauma that I just couldn’t take it. I bought the sequel, God Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, like 18 months ago and still haven’t watched it, because I figure I’ll react the same way again.
Barefoot Gen is an important movie to me because it turned an abstract idea concrete. “The atomic bomb is awe-inspiring and amazing, a true triumph for America!” turned into “The atomic bomb is awful. We murdered innocent people and the effects are still being felt today.” I’ve spent most of my life on or around air force bases, and as a kid, war was exciting. Fighter pilots, right? Glamorous. Awesome. But I didn’t understand the cost. I didn’t understand collateral damage, acceptable losses, and war crimes.
I was a kid then. I’m glad I learned better.
Keiji Nakazawa died of lung cancer on 12/19/2012. He was born on 03/14/1939, and was in Hiroshima when Little Boy was dropped out of the Enola Gay at 0815 on 08/06/1945. He survived, but many of his family members didn’t. His baby sister survived the bombing, but died later.
Barefoot Gen is on DVD, but it looks like prices have skyrocketed since Nakazawa died. If you can find it at a price that works for you, give it a watch.
You can never lead if you only follow. What I mean is, if you sit around, and you look at people, and you wait for them to give you permission to do something great, you will never do anything, so get up, brothers! Get about your grind! If you have a boss, maybe you should fire your boss. Maybe you should change your life.
It’s a real inspirational album, as opposed to being merely aspirational, like most flossy rap records. Mike’s entire point is that you, you sitting there reading this, you need something of your own. You need something that’s yours that you can be proud of. It’ll improve your quality of life and open doors for you that were previously closed. If you’re lucky, and by “lucky” I definitely mean “talented at your thing and in the right place at the right time” and not “lucky” because luck is worthless, it might let you make money, too.
I heard this at the right time and it really sunk in. Working for someone is all to the good, if it works for you, but it’s not the same as owning your own thing. “Maybe you should fire your boss” is a mantra. You need to have something of your own.
4thletter! is mine. It’s Gavin’s and Esther’s, too, of course, but the parts I wrote are mine, like the parts they wrote are theirs. I do what I want to do when I want to do it, and I can’t understate how important that is to me. It’s freeing. It’s freedom. 4l! is like a refuge, if that makes sense. I know that I can come here and write posts about rap music with a little stinger at the end that’ll make my friends laugh. I can try and improve my craft in public and try new things. I feel comfortable failing here, and that sometimes counts for more than succeeding elsewhere.
If you’re an adult, you’ve got to be about your grind, even if you spend some of your time being about someone else’s grind. You have to make money, but money isn’t everything. You need something that makes you happy, too. You have to dream, and sometimes, you need to dream a little bigger, darling. Aesop Rock got at this a little in “9-5ers Anthem” on the exquisite Labor Days when he said, “We, the American working population, hate the fact that eight hours a day is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us. And we may not hate our jobs, but we hate jobs in general that don’t have to do with fighting our own causes.”
It’s true.
Cycling back to Mister Michael Render, alias Killer Mike: Lauryn Hill once said “And even after all my logic and my theory, I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me.” That’s close to what Mike does, but it isn’t right. It’s not about ignorance. It’s about meeting people on their level. It’s about knowing that you can’t just preach to people and expect them to listen. You’ve got to get in the door and show and prove before people listen. Meet them on the couch and talk face-to-face, rather than hollering at them from the pulpit.
That’s what Mike does. He effortlessly switches from inspirational talk to drug raps to jiggy raps and back again. It’s not even a switch, if we’re being real. He’s just reflecting the full spectrum of our lives. Sometimes smarty-art types just want to fool around, and sometimes that listless stoner you know has some real smart ideas. And who doesn’t like having money?
Common, on “The Questions,” asked “Yo, if I’m a intellectual, I can’t be sexual?/ If I want to uhh tah uhh does that mean I lack respect for you?” (Uhh tah uhh is I guess onomatopoeia for sex. It makes more sense if you can hear it. Kinda.) There’s this idea that if you’re one thing, you can’t be another thing at the same time, but we all know that ain’t true. Everybody’s got their hands in all types of pots. We all like a wide spectrum of things, even things that may go against what we or others perceive as what we’re all about.
One song I like a lot off Pledge II is “Can You Buy That,” featuring Rock-D. It’s a good song, and pretty representative of Mike’s style and the way he can flip any subject. It’s about having things that other people don’t have, which is undoubtedly a rap staple. But when viewed in the context of the thesis of the album — “Work hard and get yours” — it’s not just braggadocio. It’s an example. It’s rejoicing in having things of your own. I like that.
“Can You Buy That” opens with and features a sample from The Mack, a 1973 film directed by Michael Campus and starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. You can hear the source of the sample around three minutes into this video:
The Mack is a classic. I know that Shaft and Superfly are probably more respected or whatever whatever, but The Mack will always be a favorite of mine. An uncle showed it to me when I was (too) young and hyped it up super high, and it somehow still delivered. It’s a raw blaxploitation flick, sleazy and violent and wonderful.
Blaxploitation is weird, isn’t it? It came hot on the heels of the collapse of the civil rights movement, and a lot of people feel like it puts black people in
a bad light. Which is maybe true, but it was also a chance for black people to get their foot in the door of Hollywood and make the types of movies they wanted to make. But when I think about the genre, I feel like blaxploitation was something that black people owned. (Aside: a lot of people don’t know that Shaft was created by a white guy. True story.) Not entirely, obviously, but Ron O’Neal, Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, and a dozen others made a mark that Hollywood will never be able to forget, no matter how far they run from it. They proved that a market was there.
They made their mark.
Another thing about blaxploitation is how it was an answer to the decade before. It was a statement. “This is what life is like. This is what our dreams are like.” You saw scumbag slumlords and people fought “the man” in whatever form the man chose to take. Why? ’cause the man was screwing up the country in real life, too. A lot of those movies were sublimated revenge fantasies, like how Punisher comics in the ’80s were ripped from the headlines. What do you do when the man is keeping you down? You tell him to move over and let you pass ‘fore they have be to pullin’ these Hush Puppies out his motherfuckin’ ass! Can you dig it?
The Mack is a good example of how art imitates life and vice versa, too. The Mack is where the player’s ball, an annual gathering of pimps, originated, or at least that’s how the story goes. You don’t get Snoop Dogg without The Mack, either. And surely you’ve heard OutKast’s ode to the ball? It’s an all-time classic.
Rappers keep going back to The Mack for inspiration. “Now we can settle this like you got some class… or we can get into some gangsta shit” is a pretty incredible threat, one that’s been sampled or used or spoken by everyone from Snoop Dogg to your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. Ghostface borrowed Pretty Tony’s name for his Pretty Toney alias, and I’m pretty sure you could make a case for Goldie having inspired Goldie Loc’s name, too. If you ever hear somebody say “stick yourself, fool” or talk about throwing someone in a trunk with rats? They either got it from The Mack or got it from somebody else who got it from The Mack. This movie looms large.
I know you’ve heard this song before. It’s UGK’s “International Player’s Anthem (I Choose You)”, featuring none other than Antwan Patton and Andre Benjamin.
(I love it when Andre 3000 says “I know you ain’t a pimp, but pimp, remember what I taught ya.” This came out at a point when Three Stacks was killing every song he got on, and this is no different.)
The sample on this song is Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You.” It’s from The Mack‘s soundtrack.
Ain’t it the most majestic-sounding thing tho? It’s about getting married to the prettiest girl you ever did see, which is exactly what Andre’s verse is about on the UGK version. He’s homaging the original song on a remix that’s all about pimpery and divorce. Kinda wild. I like how deep that goes. It’s like a tribute, a thank you note, for Willie Hutch.
I think my favorite use of Willie Hutch in any song not actually by Willie Hutch is in Sugar Tongue Slim’s “Sole Music,” a love song about shoes and girls. (I straight up love this song because those are two of my favorite things.)
In the second verse, he says, “Okay, so now she’s in the mood, I got her in the groove/ She into soul music, no pun on the shoes/ I turned on some tunes and rolled up a dutch/ ‘I Choose You,’ she don’t know ’bout Willie Hutch” and right when he says “I Choose You” that melody comes in and a voice starts singing the original song.
It’s clever, like pretty near everything else STS does, and I like how it adds to the song. If you know about “I Choose You,” you get that he’s talking about a girl he’s really, really into. He’s doing that dorky dude thing where he puts on a song that’s actually a hint, right? Y’all never did that? That was just me? Yeah, right. Okay.
I like this love song because it flips the script. It’s not just about bubble butts and make-outs. STS makes the shoe and fashion comparisons work, and if you’re looking to be put on game with regard to sneakers, he’s got you. I’m an Air Force 1 type of dude personally — six pairs and counting, scholar at your boy — but I like certain Jordans, too. But it’s still cool how STS flips his encyclopedic knowledge of shoes into useful and clever commentary on dating and relationships. I especially like the bit where he talks about how if a girl chills with her shoes off in your place, it means she’s pretty comfortable. It sounds dumb, but when you think about it, what do you do when you kick back and relax? You kick off your shoes. It’s a sign of comfort and safety. (“The way she rock Dunks got your boy in love” is all about how dumb little inconsequential things can be incredibly endearing and make your heart jump into your throat.)
I can especially relate when he says that “Let me slow it down, I’m moving too fast/ I don’t wanna scuff it up/ I’m hoping this might last.” You want to keep your shoes clean because yo, shoes are wild expensive and you need to show them off to people. The same is true of relationships. I remember the second day I wore my pair of Chris Pauls (CP 2’Quicks in White/Dark Concord/Black), I had my bike accident. At first, I could recognize that my bloody knee was going to be a problem and was actually hurting kind of a lot, but I was more upset over the fact that I’d just put a big fat scuff on my new sneakers. I had just got them and didn’t even really get a chance to show them off before I ruined them. I was so mad that I went to Walgreens on my way home from work, bought toothpaste, and was in the process of trying to scrub it out when I finally decided to hobble to the hospital. Now, take that feeling and apply it to a relationship. You’re the person who says something dumb too soon and blow everything. Hurts times ten, yeah? The shoe comparison works. “This could’ve been something cool!”
STS is another rapper that was influenced by The Mack, I figure. It’s not as overt as it is with Snoop or Kast, but that aura is there, plus the fact that Slim was the name of another cat in the movie. STS is a self-professed former pimp turned poet, which is shades of the marketing that OutKast got buried under in the ’90s (The Pimp and The Poet, screamed the label, not realizing that both men were both things and so much more.). He’s one of those rappers that never met a pun he wouldn’t make or joke he wouldn’t tell. I forget when I first discovered him, probably on an album from The Roots or a mixtape somewheres, but I dig this remix of La Roux’s song “In For the Kill” that I heard fairly early on.
STS has turned flipping songs into a solid gimmick with his GOLDRUSH series of mixtapes. It’s fun to see how he incorporates the original themes of the song but turns it into his own specific thing. I think it works because dude is funny, even when he’s saying things that would make me grimace.
I like how he flipped Gotye’s song into a really good breakup tale:
Rapping, at its best, is a kind of acting, I think. You have to play a character and do it well enough to convince people that your character is you. He’s acting here, and pulling from a lot of different sources. That “crazy bitch, crazy bitch” bit is straight outta OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, specifically Andre 3000’s “Roses,” Which is interesting in terms of rap geography and influences, because STS is from Atlanta, but moved to Philadelphia and connected with The Roots, who he shouts out in this song as being real important to him. I can hear OutKast and Black Thought and The Roots in him, but his sound is all his own. He builds on what came before him and pays homage to it with his skill, like how Andre and Big Boi paid homage to The Beatles (amongst others, including Motown in general) in a couple different ways with that “Hey Ya!” video.
“Sole Music” is a straight-up storytelling song, too, which is one of my favorite kinds of rappity-rapping showcases. It’s kinda Slick Rick-y in tone. He was killer at that singsong/half-serious storytelling style. Both of these guys just ooze charm, like hanging out with somebody’s cool uncle, so when STS is talking about how he thought he saw his girl, but it was just somebody who reminded him of somebody he used to know, you feel a little sad for him. It’s a pretty great take on the original song, I think, and the conversational format is a whole lot of fun.
Where was I…. oh. You want to learn something?
Listen to rap music. You just gotta scratch the surface to get started, because this stuff runs deep, pimp, like Iceberg Slim.
(I didn’t even talk about how Willie Hutch doing the soundtrack for The Mack relates to Curtis Mayfield doing the soundtrack for Superfly, did I? Or the influence of Mayfield on Anthony Hamilton, the best R&B singer alive today? And how he works with several rappers on songs that generally turn out to be awesome? Or how Hamilton got a shout-out in Santa Inoue’s Tokyo Tribes, a manga that’s basically a rap-oriented sensational crime comic set in Japan? Blaxploitation by way of Shibuya, 1997. Follow the breadcrumbs. History is amazing.)
I walked into a record store the other week after doing some apartment hunting. I was feeling good, the kind of good I haven’t felt in weeks. I felt like I was getting things done.
I hit the rap section and the first thing I saw, the very first record, made me stop in my tracks. It was sitting there in the used vinyl section, right at the front. I honestly couldn’t believe it, but there it was: Lyricist Lounge Volume 1. Four discs of some of the most important music I’ve ever heard. Twenty dollars.
I bought it. Even if I’d been broke at the time, I’d have bought it. I saw it and realized that I couldn’t live without it.
I still remember the day I first discovered Lyricist Lounge Volume 1. Not the specific day — it was the summer, it was boring, and that’s all I got — but the day is what I remember. That moment in time. I was at the Mall of Georgia with my aunt, my cousin, and my cousin’s friend. It was a warm summer day in 1998. My aunt went off somewhere to do grown-up things like shop at JC Penny and buy towels or whatever, and us teenagers had the run of the mall. It took me about twenty minutes to realize that shopping with two teenaged girls in a gigantic mall is secretly like being on an exclusive level of hell, but I stuck it out for the whole six hours, in part because I had no choice. I was too young to have my license, and that meant I was trapped. They weren’t trapped in there with me. I was trapped in there with them.
A couple hours in, we wandered into a music store. Maybe an FYE, but probably something else that has since gone out of business. I had a little money in my pocket — we used to clean houses with my aunt and she would pay us in small faces at first and eventually big face twenties — and I had to do something to drown out the trauma. I poked around and found a tape for cheap. A double-tap set, actually. It was Lyricist Lounge Volume 1.
I loved rap before I heard Lyricist Lounge, but after I heard that tape, that loved turned into something else. I went from a passive and “oh that sounds good, who is this? I like this” listener to an active one. I started paying attention and I started demanding more, two things that have served me well in life.
The thing about Lyricist Lounge Volume 1 is that it was my introduction to underground rap. I wouldn’t become a backpacker for another couple of years, but this set me down that path. At that point in time, underground rap was as much a reaction to mainstream rap as it was an attempt to reclaim past glories and invent new ones. All these gangsta rappers, these jiggy dudes, were fakers. They weren’t about that life. They’re actors. The underground is where the real raw is. If you want true rap, you had to head underground.
This probably sounds familiar to you. It happens in comics, too, and probably your favorite genre of music.
Underground rap was new to me at the time, and I was caught flat-footed by how lyrical these guys were. Don’t get me wrong, either. Jay-Z is nice, and has been nice for years. He knows his way around a similar and he can murder a metaphor. But like… this was a whole other level. It was like opening your front door and seeing your neighborhood different. Everything is thrown into high definition and you see details you never noticed before.
Lyricist Lounge is a paradigm shift. At the time, it was just a dope, funny album with weird skits. With the benefit of hindsight, though, I can see that it shattered what I knew about not just rap, but communication. It showed me a new way to use words. I learned, even though all I wanted was something that sounded cool so I wouldn’t have to answer whether I wanted to go to Claire’s or Spencer’s next.
This album was my introduction to the Indelible MCs, a crew composed of Queen Heroin, J-Treds, Breeze Brewin, and El-P and Bigg Jus of Company Flow.
Queen Heroin:
Flows aquatic like fishes’ surroundings
Underground and it’s pounding, like pregnancy
with the expectancy of three times three
J-Treds:
I can be a bit demanding, accepting nothing less than the best
I don’t just flip shit. Anyone can, kid, I stick the landing
And stand out amongst most, so don’t stress
Trying to touch us? You can’t come close like phone sex
Jus:
Background posers fiend for limelight exposure
When we rally back and touch the microphone playtime is over
Who’s trying to see the CF graf crew that visualize top to bottom
and stand out in New York like an LA gang tag do?
Brewin:
You talking about “Respect mines,” steady missing your layups?
Hoes to foes, I start staring, wild truculent
Heart-tearing style, fuck you then, order your demise
El-:
Prophets turned skeptics, skeptics found Jesus
Right-wingers turned leftist, everybody jumped on the dick of independence
Sorry, we don’t want you any more.
Get lost, kid, find the exit!
But is it live, you fucking suckers?
It’s the words plus the music plus the confidence that unlocked something in me. And not just this song, either. It’s the whole album. The thing about this type of rap is that you’re expected to keep up whether you understand what the lines mean at all. Breeze ends his verse with “Listen, you’ll hear voices like ‘Damn, that’s a sucker’/Paranoid, looking like Fuzzy Zoeller at the Rucker.” I didn’t have the internet as a kid, so Fuzzy Zoeller was as opaque to me as whatever the Rucker was. But I got it. I didn’t need to know the specifics to get the line. All I needed to know that it sounded great and that it’d make sense in time. “Be like water.”
It’s about magic tricks, basically. That’s what made me turn a corner in how I listened to rap and how I used words. School essays were nonsense. Five paragraph structure: introduction, thesis, content, conclusion. They were stiff and confining. I phoned them in when I had to write them and I skimmed them when I had to read them.
But raps? Raps demand close attention. “We’re bringing rap back like Wu did Wallabee Clarks” is nonsense at first glance, but once you learn about Ghostface making Wallabees some of the illest shoes ever, you get it. Literally: Ghostface made Wallys cool like Cipher Complete is about to make rap worthwhile again. Metatextually: Wallos were tired and busted before Ghost got to them, and then he hit them with that dye like boom, and check it: they’re cooler than glaciers of ice now. Rap is old and busted, behold to corporate interests, but Cipher Complete’s about to bring it back through the strength of sheer spitting.
The best rap punchlines work on several levels, no matter how dumb it is. When Jeezy’s talking about “my passenger’s a redbone, her weave look like some curly fries,” you’ve got color-based play and some incredibly evocative descriptions. You know exactly what this chick’s weave looks like. It’s like chicken & broccoli Timbs.
Clarity through obscurity.
It’s like jargon. There’s in and there’s out. If you’re in, you can listen and enjoy it. If you’re out, you’ve gotta consult white devil sophistry like RapGenius (shoulda stuck with OHHLA). Even the most basic of slang is segregated along regional lines. Everybody gets their own thing. You might want to cut or smash or drill (Black & Decker!) when you meet a pretty girl, and none of them have to do with hurting somebody else. You can shoot the fair one or scrap. Some people might squab, and the soft hearted might get their face rocked. Your girl can be your shorty or earth or ma or wiz or bird. Corner boys, d-boys, dope boys, and trap stars might hit you with the chopper or the ‘K or the nina or the ratchet or the roscoe if you’re not careful. Knahmean, yadadamean, knahmsaying, you feel me, g/gangsta/god? You can rock ice grills and mean mugs without ever seeing diamonds or coffee. Some people speak with criminal slang, and they’ll never stop speaking it.
The obscurity lets you own your words. No one can listen in and peep game unless they’re already in the know, and that in and of itself makes people want to pay attention to you. It’s yours and they want it. So they’ll do that work and figure it out, and that means you’ve won. You spun that web. You set up that trick. You made them come to you.
It’s not gibberish. It was never gibberish. You can’t treat it like gibberish and expect to ever actually understand it.
It’s a new way of thinking.
It was Lyricist Lounge first. That put me on game. I had a bunch of names to look out for now, so when Soundbombing 2 came out, I was right there. And Soundbombing 2, after the intros, starts with Eminem’s “Any Man,” a song I still know by heart. Em, at his nicest, is one of the nicest ever, and he goes off on that song.
It sets the stage for the album, because every song features somebody going off in a different way. It’s mind-expanding. “B-Boy Document ’99,” by the High & Mighty featuring Mos Def and Mad Skillz, is nuts. “1-9-9-9” by Common and Sadat X, is nuts. “Cross Town Beef,” “Next Universe,” that interlude with Tash and Dilated Peoples, and don’t even get me started on “Stanley Kubrick” (Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick…) and “Patriotism.”
A couple songs off Soundbombing 2 were too weird for me at first. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Pharaohe Monch’s “Mayor” because he had a weird flow and the song was awkward and weird. “7XL” was just aight, even if I kinda sorta knew about Brand Nubian at the time. I just didn’t get it, basically. I wasn’t on that level yet.
But the older I got, the more things changed, and now “Mayor” is one of my favorite songs. Pharoahe has some of the most amazing breath control in rap, despite his asthma, and “Mayor” is transcendant. The storytelling, the flow, the chorus, that beat, all of it is so real. Monch paints a perfect picture and gets across the stress and horror of the situation extremely well. “Peripheral vision now, doorknob shifting… optical illusion from all the coke that I’m sniffing.” dzed waggling my leg imagining i’m not afraid
But my jam is always going to be Company Flow’s “Patriotism.” I hadn’t heard Funcrusher Plus yet — good luck finding that stuff in Smalltown, GA — but I knew I liked those CoFlow cats from Lyricist Lounge. And “Patriotism” is like a blast of hate. It’s political, in the “a pox on both your houses” sense, but it’s so much more than that. The beat is dirty, dusty, digital ish, full of creeping menace, and DJ Mr Len the Space Ghost’s cuts make it sound even filthier.
The entire song is just El-Producto blacking out like so:
I’m the ugliest version of passed down toxic capitalist
rapid emcee perversion — I’m America!
Your bleeding-heart liberal drivel gets squashed
Wash em with sterilized rhyme patriot-guided weaponry bomb
from the makers of the devious hearts — I’m America!
You bitchy little dogs don’t even phase my basic policy
The bomb’s smarter, my Ronald Reagans crush Carter
With Bay of Pig tactics makin young men into martyrs
It’s coded, but the code is content, too. He’s saying things, layering words on top of words, but it gives the song an oppressive feel. You’ve gotta sprint to keep up. Who will survive in America? “Patriotism” has the answer.
It was a one-two punch for me. After Soundbombing 2, I was lost. The allure of coded language was too much, and I got big into this stuff. The homey Darryl Ayo was talking about Jadakiss freestyles on tumblr the other day, and how rappers are proof positive that writers’ block is only as real as you think it is. Rappers write and write and write and they’re always on, year after year. They produce an insane amount of content. I want to be able to do that.
All of my favorite writers, the most important inspirations for my craft, are rappers. Nas: being able to paint a photorealistic picture with just a few short lines. CoFlow: understanding that sometimes absurdity and opacity can make things crystal clear. OutKast: never, ever resting on your laurels and always pushing the envelope. Scarface: being real. UGK: being country. Jay-Z: confidence. Canibus: knowing how to stack wordplay on wordplay and come up with something ill. Lauryn Hill: carving out your own place and saying damn the consequences. Eminem: bending language to your will. Mos Def: talking about something bigger than yourself. Jadakiss: crucial punchlines. Method Man & Redman: the importance of having fun while you do it to it. Ghostface Killah: creating a new style and daring people to dislike it. Big Daddy Kane: being smoother than the average. CoFlow: being independent as fox. Rakim: being better than everyone else.
These are my heroes.
It’s only obvious to me in hindsight, but I haven’t been chasing Stephen King or Fred Saberhagen or Ezra Pound or Candide or whatever other writers I was really into as a kid. I’ve been chasing these other guys.
Lyricist Lounge changed my life, and I don’t mean that in the trite way where people actually mean “Oh, I just like this a lot and it means a lot to me.” I mean that buying those cassettes that said Lyricist Lounge down the side actually, literally, legitimately changed my life. It changed how I think and though it took a while to show, it changed how I write. I never struggled with writing, exactly, but I definitely felt more comfortable with it once I started trying to lace the phrases with magic tricks, even if every paragraph needed a translation attached to it. Make people keep up, but still keep it simple. That felt right.
Rap’s in my blood. It’s in how I approach conflict — “Be a man, say my name if you’re talking to me/ You ain’t said it? Well, I guess you ain’t talking to me” — and how I think. I love turns of phrase and dumb puns and stories and rap has all of that, and rap does it better than most everything else. I don’t think I’m that great of a dancer, and it’s probably because I grew up listening to songs that made you want throw bows or two-step rather than get down on the floor on the floor. “See, me and my niggas don’t dance, we just pull up our pants and do the rockaway… now lean back.”
Variations on a theme, off the top of my head:
Method Man, 1995: “I call my brother son ’cause he shine like one.”
Big Pun, 1998: “Been sonning niggas so long I think I got a grandson.”
Sauce Money, 1999: “Hammers fly, might miss you, but your man’ll die/ What’s the difference? Either way I’m sonning your crew.”
Talib Kweli, 1999: “I told him to slow down, he said the sun don’t chill.”
Angel Haze, 2012: “Naw, I run shit. I’m Ra, I son shit.”
There’s so many ways you can use the word son. It’s such a small word, but you can load it down with meaning.
I’ve been listening to Lyricist Lounge and Soundbombing 2 near-constantly since I picked up that album. It’s been a weird trip down memory lane, but it’s like tumblers falling into place. The act of listening, of living in these albums, has been revealing things I already knew to myself. I get it. I understand it. Just the fact that I own such a big album feels good to me.
Rap is a source of infinite inspiration for me. I went through that phase when underground rap was the only real rap, but now I realize that all rap is real. I get down with Kitty Pryde, 8Ball & MJG, the Dungeon Fam, Black Hippy, Rakim, Angel Haze, Azealia Banks, XV, Esso, Kilo Ali, and Kilo Kish. It’s whatever, man. If you’re coming with hard punchlines and speakerboxxx music, I’m there. If it’s murda muzik, I’m there. If it’s laid back music to smoke a blunt to, I’m there. If it’s goofball rap, I’m there. If it’s Jim Jones over an indie rock or dance band, I’m definitely there. If it sounds like the soundtrack to a black black mass, I’m there.
I don’t like everything, but I love it all. I love that it exists. I want it all. I want to be as prolific and diverse and amazing as my heroes. I’m trying to be That Dude, not just that dude. I want Pun’s punchlines, Vast Aire’s metaphors, Nas’s grace, El-P’s off-kilter ferocity, Killer Mike’s knowledge, The Clipse’s contempt, and Jadakiss’s steez. Bone Thugs’s style, Fabolous’s track record with punchlines. OutKast’s creativity, Goodie MOb’s sense of place and self. 50’s swagger, Weezy’s charisma. Even Drake knows how to build a situation with perfect clarity. “And promoters try to get me out to their clubs/ and say I’ll have fun, but I can’t imagine how/ ’cause I just seen my ex girl standing with my next girl/ Standing with the girl that I’m fucking right now.”
I want to do it all.
I tried rapping, back in high school. I wasn’t good at it. I can be spontaneous, but rap requires spontaneity within a structure. I can’t freestyle, but I could write. Me and my friends would kick raps over pause tapes full of homemade instrumentals. We’d load mp3s into our lackluster computers and create instrumentals out of hot singles, assuming there was enough of an outro for it. But what I wrote was a pale imitation of the people I liked. It wasn’t mine. I was trying to be them, instead of trying to be me, who had been influenced by them.
Evidence said that “emcees without a voice should write a book.” Aesop Rock said “That means when I wake up and decide to comprise the new shit/ It’s not some watered down version of what my favorite crews did.”
So I quit rapping after I graduated and focused on writing. You have to destroy to build, and you have to build to destroy.
I found my voice. I figured out how to move the crowd.
Here’s a video featuring yours truly that I’m kind of super happy about. Check it out.
(you like that shirt, don’t you? Go get you some black swag from Ray’s shop.)
I got in a bike accident earlier this year, maybe you heard me being a big baby about it? The doctor kinda laughed when he told me what was up with my knee, which was that I “hurt it about as bad as you can hurt it without requiring surgery.”
After the accident, I got caught up in that cycle of feeling bad about myself and then feeling worse about myself, so I spent a lot of time chilling on my couch eating half pound hamburgers (throw some basil and A1 peppercorn sauce inside and whooooooo) and eating uncooked chocolate chip cookie dough like that’s a reasonable thing to do outside of special occasions. But it felt good, so I did it, and I enjoyed every slow bite, every crunch of chocolate in my teeth. I watched a lot of Netflix, too. You know how that goes. “Wah wah wah I can’t lock my knee any more, life sucks, I keep getting into stupid fights by accident, I have to stand differently now, my pace has changed, and can someone help me shovel chocolate chips down my gullet, thanks in advance.”
Anyway, it turns out if you sit on a couch eating crap all the time, you gain weight. Who knew, right? I definitely noticed after a while. It wasn’t hugely obvious, but I try to pay attention to myself (doubly so post-accident) and I was feeling kinda ehhh about it. I figured it was okay, because I’m getting older and metabolisms slow down and I’m not biking every day because of my leg and these things happen and blah blah blah I’m okay, you’re okay.
I’ve got this friend named Larry Leong. I’ve talked about him on here before or whatever whatever. He’s a good dude, and we hang out whenever I visit LA. Last time I visited, me and my death squad played some basketball, played some video game basketball, and just chilled out for a while. It was a nice weekend, the sort of weekend where you’re trying to figure out the best place to relax in the sun and thinking about walking absurd distances just ’cause it feels so good outside. You know those days? Those days drive me crazy. Tank top days. Frisbee days.
Anyway, on my way out of a mutual friend’s house and out of LA, me and Larry said goodbye and he hit me with the ol’ “Hey, catch you later, man. You gained some weight, huh?”
:negativeman:
He got me so good. I don’t know what I peaked at, but when I weighed myself and decided to get right, I was at 184. I’m a hair under six feet (well, including my hair, a hair over at this point, but pedantic points are less than trash), so that ain’t too bad, but it is too much for my frame. It is too much for me, personally. On top of that, a couple of my oldest friends were getting married in LA in September, and I wanted to fit into my suit, you know? What if I met my next ex-wife there? I gained enough weight that I felt bad about it, because I knew that I shouldn’t have done it.
So, when I got back to SF, full of shame and thinking of ways to get back at Larry, I decided to start running. I haven’t really run since high school, but it’s mostly flat in my hood, so I figured I could do it. I asked around, bought a pair of shoes to make sure I couldn’t punk out, and started running a minimum of a mile each time out. I ran eight days straight, sprained my right ankle on night eight, and then made it worse on day nine, when I finished my run and realized that my ankle hurt so bad because I’d sprained it, not just because I wasn’t used to running.
That is 2012 in a nut shell. I decide to do something and immediately pay for it in blood.
I decided to fix my diet after that, since I was going to be benched for a couple weeks. I didn’t decide to eat less or eat healthier. I decided to eat smarter. Diets don’t work because diets need to last forever, but if you change how you eat, and I mean genuinely change it not just change it for a fad, you can do big things.
I cut my portions and paid closer attention to what I ate and when. No more half pound burgers, no more full bowls of rice, no more cookie dough. I rarely drink soda outside of root beer floats, and I don’t really get down with candy either, so that wasn’t an issue. I stopped cooking dinner at midnight, too.
I started weighing myself three times a day. That really helped, because it let me see exactly how what I ate affected my body. Fatter burger than usual? Up 2lbs on the day? Forgot to eat dinner? The point is to figure out how what I do affects my body, and figure it out in a way that lets me act on it. Eat too much one day, scale back the next. Lose the right amount of weight one day, keep it going the next.
Once my ankle was well again, I ramped up the exercising, too. I came up with a schedule. Wake up at 6, crawl out of bed eventually, and then spend the next two hours and a half hours before work writing, working out, or both. Usually both. My goal is to run three days a week, but I knew I wouldn’t always be able to make it. So I use free weights, resistance bands, and basic push-ups to get active for the off-days. If I’m chilling and playing video games for a few hours, I’ll stand up and do 40 curls with the resistance bands, just to make sure I’m not totally lazing about. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it gives my brain a break from staring at a TV screen.
Between late July and early October, I shed around 20 pounds, going from 184 to 164ish. I tend to hover between 163 and 166 these days. It feels good. I wake up earlier almost by default now, as I found out this weekend when I was up before the sun every day despite going to bed super sleepy. I feel better and more alert in the mornings after running or working out, which in turn makes my days better. My focus is better, I do more things, and I have more time to do those things. I feel more like me. I fit into my suit, too, and balled out at that wedding, looking like I just came fresh from the Harlem Renaissance.
Larry’s video series is called Move, Damn You. It’s great advice.
So yeah. That Hurricane Sandy thing happened. I figure I can break some writing rust talking about it.
As many of you know, I live in northern New Jersey. I’m just on the border into New York. Word of Hurricane Sandy brewing came maybe a week and a half prior and the talk at work was how it was supposed to be worse than the storm from the Perfect Storm. I chose not to really take it seriously and instead made jokes about George Clooney. As it got closer and my boss became a bit more wary on us being open for certain days, there was still a bit of denial in there. One of my coworkers figured that in situations like this, the supermarket chains pay the weather channels to sensationalize everything so more people go on food shopping sprees.
As it got closer and closer, the reality started to set in some more. Especially when on Sunday night, the district manager called our store to say not to open on Monday at all. Keep in mind, the storm wasn’t supposed to kick in until 6pm on Monday. I guess they were just afraid of people coming in for the early shift and then being stranded in the mall when it was time to go.
I at least prepared enough. I got extra food. I loaded my tablet with movies and CHIKARA shows. I stayed glued to all the weather stuff on TV. On the Weather Channel Sunday night, it made it seem REALLY bad. The next day, watching local affiliates, it seemed less bad. Mainly because there was some kind of big CONE OF DESTRUCTION or whatever they were calling it that was going to cause the most trouble and my county was outside of that direct path. As I sat there with my dad, watching the storm start up outside, we figured that if things hold out for just a couple hours, we’d be all right. That optimism faltered when I’d watch the news and see them have multiple technical difficulties every other minute.
The power cut out at 7:30pm.
I still have two major storms fresh in my mind, both from last year. There was Hurricane Irene and that nasty Halloween snow storm. Irene wasn’t really all that bad outside of cutting out the power for so long. I went to sleep with the power on, woke up with the power off, walked outside and the weather was absolutely beautiful. Sure, there were twigs littering the street, but everything had dried up by that point and you’d hardly even believe that there was a drop of rain. The snow storm was a bad trip because it was too early for there to be snow. All the trees still had leaves and they acted like catcher’s mitts, holding onto more snow and weighing down trees to dangerous extents. That ended up causing far more damage than Irene did. Plus having no heat when there’s mountains of snow outside is a minus on its own.
Waking up on Tuesday, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the storm had passed, going against the warnings from the news that it would be a 36-hour situation. It rained on and off that day, but nothing worth worrying about. The bad news was that it didn’t share the same, “Oh, there was a storm?” aftermath of Hurricane Irene. With Sandy, the sky was still dark with clouds and the streets looked just a little bit post-apocalyptic.
This tree fell two houses down from me. The homeowner was lucky that he/she moved the cars up so far. I walked around for a couple hours, mainly to see if I could get some kind of cell phone signal. I wasn’t getting too much luck, so I’d turn my phone off for six hours at a time, since roaming for a signal caused it to drain too easily. The streets were filled with threes tearing down phone lines and I saw a couple trees buried into the nearby houses. There were also exposed wires on the sidewalks and other pitfalls.
Today’s the big voting day, because apparently it is an election year? Who knew.
Anyway, go out and vote if you feel led to do so. If you’re in California, here’s a guide to the state propositions. Some of them are tricky. I mean, obviously you want to vote against human trafficking, but apparently that prop is slanted to unfairly malign sex workers and makes colored folks even more vulnerable to arrest? Read up before you go out! Politics is an ugly, lie-infested, dissembling business, so don’t get caught out there. Here’s another guide, if you want to compare/contrast or check for biases in whatever direction. I haven’t looked at the latter one yet, but my main man Shumphries just put it on twitter and I figure having two sites to look at is better than just one.
Don’t be a dick to non-voters today, either. Not voting is in no way, shape, or form a vote for “the other guy” (whichever other guy it is you hate). It’s choosing the third option, the “you’re both terrible” option. Mitt Romney hates women, Barack Obama has been killing brown faces overseas. Pros and cons, cons and pros. Neither of these dudes are perfect, and both of them are beholden to corporations who are not Us. If you feel strongly about something, don’t let people peer pressure you into compromising your values. Vote with your heart and your mind, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, you don’t have to do it. Voting and not voting are both valid political choices.
Pundits are saying 40% of eligible Americans aren’t going to vote today. This isn’t a sign that they are lazy or stupid or hateful. That opinion is as dumb as the old “Oh, high schools are just meant to turn out unthinking moronic robots” nonsense. If almost half of eligible people aren’t voting, then that’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with our process. If they don’t care, what made them not care? If they don’t feel like their vote counts, that needs to be addressed.
“Vote for the lesser of two evils!” is a thing I’ve heard over and over this election, but somehow voting for an evil is more acceptable than rejecting evil outright. We don’t have to compromise if we don’t want to.
Vote or don’t. All I ask is that you think real hard before you do either, because doing either one of them just because doesn’t help anyone. I, personally, know what I’m doing. I’ve put a lot of thought into it. Rev up your mind, crank up your conscience, and make the decision that feels right to you.
Faith Erin Hicks continues her streak of being one of the most interesting people in comics by talking about finding a balance in your career. She’s talking specifically about comics, but it’s really good advice regardless. You can’t do everything, and if you want to do anything well, you’re going to have to sit down and dedicate time to that thing. THat requires removing time from another thing, because time management is a zero-sum game. You’ve got twenty-four hours, so there’s a limit to what you can do.
Her solution was giving up videogames. I don’t really have that option, on account of my day job, but I can relate. I’m real picky about games these days, pretty much only playing AAA titles or weird downloadable stuff that I heard good things about (Tokyo Jungle, whattup). I buy maybe four or five disc-based games a year, and then I play them over a period of six months or more. I like PSN titles, the downloadable joints, if only because they’re cheap and they’re usually built for bite-size playing sessions. NBA 2k13 is about the only game I binge on these days. I even do a mission or two of Sleeping Dogs and call it a day most times.
I had to sit down and hammer out a schedule earlier this year, because of Issues. I alternated between not sleeping well and sleeping too much, and I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be. I came up with two rules. First, evenings and nights are sacred. Once I get home from work, I’m free from work. Evenings are for relaxing, decompressing, resting, video games, and what little tv I actually watch. Second, I needed to do something about my mornings. I’d wake up tired, go to work tired, and come home tired. So I needed to sort that out.
What I ended up deciding to do was pretty easy to pull off. I used to wake up early to go to high school and watch Sportscenter with my granddad and uncle. They were out of the house by 0530. I told myself that I would wake up at 6, and use the three hours before work to handle writing and other stuff. I exercise in the mornings anyway, so I’m just waking up a little earlier, so I still have time to run, lift, stretch, or whatever’s on deck for that day (abs, ugh). I don’t play games in the morning, though I will download games or demos for playing later in the background. No TV either, outside of streaming youtube videos off my Watch Later playlist, which is almost exclusively music videos, at this point. I try to avoid tweeting in the evenings, but sometimes the allure of dumb jokes is just too much and I relapse. I don’t IM at home, though, or do that email-tumblr-twitter-email loop.
Write in the mornings, work during the day, and relax in the evenings, only writing after the sun goes down if it’s absolutely necessary.
It worked, mostly. I feel much more alert when I work out or run before going into work, and it’s nice to have a demarcation of what I do and when. Previously, I’d write whenever, willy-nilly. Come home, play some games, and then write ’til midnight, or come home, write, and then stay up past midnight. Now, I go to bed earlier and wake up more rested and better equipped to handle a hard day.
I’m still tired sometimes, and getting up to do anything in the middle of the night is usually a pretty bad idea, but I’m pretty happy with this schedule. I’d always thought of schedules, of rationing your time, as a thing that stinky grown-ups did. Schedules are boring, yeah? I knew that schedules provide a structure to make sure things get done, but I didn’t realize that it could have an overall positive effect on your life. If I know what I’m doing, then I can be flexible and change plans and know exactly what I need to do to make up for it. I can look forward to getting home and doing a thing, instead of look forward to getting home, at which point I will write, and then, if it isn’t too late, maybe have a chance to have some fun.
I don’t cook dinner at midnight any more. I have more free time. I’m super excited about watching a bunch of basketball games as they air (and one or two in person!) this year. I feel good about getting off work. The schedule works. I’m that much closer to finding a balance.
-Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city is out today. Amazon’s got the regular version of good kid, m.A.A.d city for five bucks. You can also get the deluxe edition for ten bucks, which includes three extra tracks (“Black Boy Fly” is heat and shoulda been on the album) and a digital booklet. You should buy this album. I preordered the vinyl, which I feel like was a great idea, now that I’ve heard the album. I dunno if it’s a promo or what, but Lamar’s debut album Section.80 is $5.49 right now, and that’s great, too.
–good kid, m.A.A.d city opens with a prayer played off a cassette tape and spoken by young men. “Lord God, I come to you a sinner and I humbly repent for my sins. I believe that Jesus is Lord. I believe you raised him from the dead. I will ask that Jesus come to my life and be my Lord and Savior. I receive Jesus to take control of my life and that I may live for him from this day forth. Thank you Lord Jesus for saving me with Your precious blood. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.”
It’s a common prayer. It immediately put me in mind of Yasiin Bey, bka Mos Def. He opened Black On Both Sides (and his other albums) with the phrase “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” It means “In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the most Merciful,” and it is an expression of faith on the part of Mos. It’s always delivered in his own voice, almost a whisper. (You’ve heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” probably — “Bismillah” is used there, as well.) It’s Bey giving thanks and publicly expressing his beliefs.
Kendrick’s is different. It’s recorded, which is already one step of separation from Kendrick-the-character and Kendrick-the-artist. The men are unidentified and speak with no real intonation, two more steps of separation. It’s rote. It’s men at church going through the motions. It won’t make sense until you finish the album.
–good kid, m.A.A.d city has a lot of skits, which puts me in mind of Prince Paul’s near-flawless A Prince Among Thieves. Sometimes it’s Kendrick’s parents calling to ask about their van, sometimes it’s him talking to his friends. Sometimes it’s something more violent.
But the skits work. Instead of being speed bumps, they aid the album into sounding like a cohesive work, rather than a collection of songs. They provide a narrative, or at least a through line, from song to song. It enhances the songs, rather than getting in their way. It’s probably half as good on shuffle, but as far as skits go, Lamar has the right idea.
The skits bleed back into the songs and vice versa. Sometimes a line of dialogue kicks off a song, and sometimes a bit of dialogue recalls Lamar’s past work. They don’t feel like they’re just skits. They’re connective tissue.
Tracks 1-10 form a story that ends where it begins. The last two tracks, “Real” featuring Anna Wise of Sonnymoon, and “Compton” featuring Dr Dre, are a… coda? An epilogue? Something.
-In thinking about it, it’s structured similar to A Prince Among Thieves, too. We start on Y, then we see A through Y, and then we catch up with Z. “Pain” segues into “How It All Started” which leads up to “You Got Shot,” and then we get the cruel finale of “The New Joint (DJ’s Delite)” b/w “A Prince Among Thieves.”
good kid, m.A.A.d city goes from “Sherane a.k.a. Master Splinter’s Daughter” to “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe,” and then leads you through “Poetic Justice” before the cycle completes four songs later on “Sing About Me/I’m Dying of Thirst.” “Real” and “Compton” are the outro.
Less cruel and more uplifting than “A Prince Among Thieves,” but still similar in structure. Hook, then pull back, then stack tension until it’s too late to turn back.
-Son, there’s even a freestyle skit that’s explicitly presented as Kendrick Lamar rhyming in his homey’s car! Remember “What U Got (The Demo)” with Breezly Brewin and Big Sha?
My heart done hardened, ready to put the world on a milk carton
Fuck it, no one else deserve to live
I done gave all I got to give and still ain’t got shit (What?)
So who mad? You grab and ransom
And I’ma pierce his soul and touch the heart of his grandson (oh shit!)
I’ve been wanting to jack “ready to put the world on a milk carton” for a story or SOMEthing since 1999, man.
Anyway: parallels!
-Rap is influenced by real people living real lives, and then those same people allow themselves to be influenced by rap, creating a cycle that feeds on itself. Put differently, Cam’Ron didn’t invent “pause” or “no homo”, and Kanye didn’t invent “ham” or “cray.” But, after Kanye, a lot of people who aren’t from the south like to talk about going ham. After Cam, “no homo” became a phenomenon. It doesn’t take much for an idea to go global.
At one point on good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar and his friends take inspiration from a Jeezy song. “Last time I checked, I was the man on these streets,” Jeezy says. Lamar’s boy, in response, says, “Yeah, yeah, that shit right there. I’m trynna be the nigga in the streets.”
Rap album feeding on a rap album feeding off real life feeding off a rap album.
-On “Sing About Me,” Lamar takes on the role of the sister of Keisha, a woman he talked about on “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)” on Section.80. It’s the kind of song rappers make about how it sucks to be a lady. He name checks “Brenda’s Got A Baby,” you know? It’s a good example of those types of songs, probably on par with Lupe Fiasco’s “He Say She Say” or that verse out of “Kick Push II.” Patronizing, right? But in a way that makes me just feel like I get it, even if I don’t particularly dig the execution, rather than frustrated. His heart’s in the right place.
But on “Sing About Me,” Lamar directly addresses himself by way of the role of Keisha’s sister. “What’s crazy was, I was hearing about it, but doubted your ignorance. How could you ever just put her on blast and shit, judging her past and shit?” and later, “You lying to these motherfuckers, talking about you can help with my story. You can help me if you sell this pussy for me, nigga.”
“Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)” was bleak and direct and sad and maybe leans a little too far toward victim blaming and not enough toward… anything else. It’s cool to see Lamar self-correct, explicitly self-correct, himself on wax. And then the next verse is a rebuttal to the sister, of sorts, as Lamar explains where he was coming from. No easy answers. That shows a thoughtfulness and fluidity that I really dig.
-Fluidity: good kid, m.A.A.d city doesn’t sound like Section.80 much at all. Lamar adopts multiple flows and crosses a broad range of subject matter over the course of good kid. It’s not as stridently focused on life as an ’80s baby like Section.80 was, but it’s just as sharp.
Lamar trades the post-Reagan Era trauma of Section.80 for life growing up in Compton on good kid, and it totally works. They’re two of a kind, as far as subject matter goes, but it gives each album a different texture. Section.80 is borderline funereal at times, a checklist of horrors and injustice. This one is more even, less focused on the foibles of a generation of young men that learned how to do everything spiteful and more focused on just how they live their life.
I mean, son made a song about peer pressure in 2012 and it’s subtle in all the right ways. That’s dope.
–good kid, m.A.A.d city is an ill album. I ended up preordering the vinyl, just going by how much I liked Section.80 (it hasn’t left my iPod, Schoolboy Q’s Habits and Contradictions neither). I never do that, but I felt strongly that Kendrick Lamar would come through. And come through he did. It’s an album, a proper, listen to it front-to-back and let it simmer, album. Upbeat enough that you could spin it at a relaxed party, but down enough to spark deep thoughts. (Those voice mails, boy.)
-I’ve been thinking a lot about how little black boys grow up lately, in part because of real life and the Little Brother documentary project. What goes wrong, what goes off, and what goes down to make a good kid into something else. All kids are good, but it’s the poison we put in them that screws them up.
“Compton, USA made me an angel on angel dust” kind of sums it all up, in a way.
-I like this outro from Section.80 even more now, because good kid, m.A.A.d city builds on its blueprint:
“See a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar, because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God, and history all in the same sentence. You know what all them things have in common? Only half of the truth if you tell it. See, I spent twenty-three years on this Earth searching for answers ’til one day I realized I had to come up with my own.
I’m not on the outside looking in. I’m not on inside looking out. I’m in the dead fucking centre looking around.
You ever seen a newborn baby kill a grown man? That’s an analogy for the way the world make me react. My innocence been dead. So the next time I talk about money, hoes, clothes, God, and history all in the same sentence, just know I meant it, and you felt it, ’cause you too are searching for answers.
I’m not the next pop star. I’m not the next socially aware rapper. I am a human motherfucking being over dope ass instrumentation.
I’ve been doing questions on Tumblr here and there. I had it turned off for a while, after it turned from “here and there” to “more often than I blogged music videos and pictures of Anna Karina and girls in hoodies.” But it’s back on now and at a much more reasonable pace. I’ve answered a few that I think are relevant here, too, so I’m going to ~crosspost~ a bit. Maybe it’ll spark some convo or something? No sé qué, but I’m doing it anyway. Original post. I don’t think I edited this one much at all, though. Fixed a typo here and there, tightened up a sentence or two, cut the weird bit about the comic-con sex parties…
David, I’ve been following you ever since Spurgeon or MacDonald linked to your piece about Frank Miller’s ability to render acrobatics. I’ve noticed you’ve got a pattern of writing with conviction. I’m even noticing as I type this– your tumblr theme is “brutal simplicity.” I’m personally real interested in how faith systems affect folks’ art– do you have some sort of faith background that informs your writing and worldview?
I’ve been thinking about this question since you sent it in, mulling it over and feeling out the edges of it. I think the answer is yes, I do. I’m Christian, and protestant is as close as I’ll get to claiming a denomination beyond “Christian.” I went to a baptist church growing up, and a mission off and on, but I don’t know that I’m particularly baptist. I don’t go to church much at all any more, but I still believe, pray, give thanks, etc, and I figure I could go bar for bar with anyone in a casual religion conversation. I used to know the Bible really well, but it’s probably down to mildly well at this point.
Anyway, yeah, the things I prize most come from or are a reaction to my background in the church. Let me run down a couple:
Clarity: say what you have to say as clearly as possible, but don’t be afraid to throw some swing off in there to keep people paying attention. I hate it when preachers vamp, because I feel like that’s performance getting in the way of teaching, but when you find a speaker who’s charismatic and interesting, there’s a 90% chance that speaker isn’t just some schmuck who read a book. There’ll be some type of swing, a joke, a smile, a way of speaking that keeps you in.
Directness of speech: the church, the black church at least, can be pretty passive-aggressive and guarded. “Situation” was the one word I always picked up on. “I’m going through a situation, I’ve got a situation,” everybody’s got a situation. Nobody ever says that they’re so depressed that getting out of bed takes twenty minutes every day. Nobody ever says that they’re feeling the weight of the entire world on their shoulders and needs somebody to talk to. It goes in the other direction, too. If somebody thinks you got something going on, “I’ll pray for you.” And naw, I hate that. I understand not letting people know your business — I’m including myself in this for sure, I hate asking for help — but be specific! We can help each other if we know the deal. That thing you’re having trouble with, someone else has had that same problem and might be able to talk you through it. Be direct and be clear.
Well-reasoned arguments: A side effect of knowing the Bible reasonably well is wanting to fight people who know the Bible less well than you but still manage to talk louder. Last time I was back home, this guy was preaching from the Old Testament. I don’t remember the exact verse, maybe 1 Chronicles 12:8 but possibly not. (It probably was.) It was about how certain soldiers were like lions, at any rate. And when this false prophet was like, “Yes, back in the day, there were lion-men and–” I got up and walked out.
I dunno if dude wrote his lecture the night before or what, but how do you get to be like 45 years old and not understand how metaphors work? Or do any type of research? Why would a shepherd lie to his flock out of ignorance and arrogance? because the verse was CLEARLY referring to strength and fearsomeness, not dudes with lion heads tromping around. That’s moronic. But it’s a sermon, and you don’t interrupt those. (My favorite church format is essentially a college class, with back & forth and all. Sunday School > 11 o’clock sermons.)
But I could’ve eaten that guy alive any day of the week because he didn’t think his thing through. So one thing I try and make sure to do is to work the angles on whatever I end up writing about. I think about this stuff a lot more than you might expect, and even dumb posts like the thing about Miller drawing acrobatic moves was the result of like three weeks of thought and jokes/threats to friends about doing that exact post. And it’s such a nothing post, “Frank Miller draws jumps good,” but I still researched, read a lot of books… I knew most of it already, but I wanted to confirm that what I knew/believed was accurate/true. “I work the angles, sharp and precise.”
(I think this is also why I hate seeing underinformed people open their mouth about race & comics or creators’ rights & comics. They have the opportunity to do so much damage due to their own ignorance, and that’s not what people in a position to exert influence others should be doing.)
Honesty is another big one, and it ties into directness. I’ve amped up an opinion for dramatic effect (“The Winter Men is better than Watchmen”), but I’ve never expressed an opinion I didn’t hold for hits or whatever. I don’t argue things I don’t believe, and I only argue things I really believe in. I try to make sure that the person I am online is an accurate picture of who I am in real life. The only real difference is that I’m way smarter online (everyone sounds smarter in text) but way funnier in person (glib tumblr answers aren’t just a gimmick, they’re a lifestyle). I curse more offline, too, and generally don’t online.
But like, past that? I think if you meet me in real life, I would be the exact person you expect if you were familiar with my work. I’ve got a black power tattoo on my arm, I’ve done a pretty detailed job of documenting why I like certain types of music, and I’ve even written about fashion. That stuff derives from my life and feeds back into my life. Writing about black history & comics is like pulling teeth, but it enhances my knowledge of black history and myself, which in turn alters (altered, at this point, I think I’m done with BHM) the approach I take next year.
I try to be honest with my readers and with myself. What you see is what you get, you know? If I’m being a turbodick for no reason, I’ll apologize. I’ve written a few awkward apology emails in my time, and I’ve definitely apologized on the site. I never like when people demand an apology because screw you, I’ll apologize when I actually feel sorry. It’s worth more if you mean it, and I try to make sure that I mean it if I have to apologize. If I don’t mean it… ah well, them’s the breaks. Which sounds like something a turbodick would say, but as a dude who has given and received insincere apologies… I’d rather you hate me for me than fake like I like you. That’s just another type of lie.
That’s also why my name is on everything I do, too. I shed pseudonyms entirely a few years back (I think Twitter’s the last holdout, but my name’s on that, too) because I think it’s important that I be held accountable for what I do and do not do. I’ve never said anything online I wouldn’t say in real life if you gave me half a chance, and I feel good about that. I might say it better or more eloquently online — it’s sorta hard to get obscure rap quotes right when dissing someone on the fly I guess — but I keep it as real as I possibly can.
(Eloquence = rap quotes??? what is wrong with me)
There are a few other things, too. At its best, Christianity isn’t so much a religion as a blueprint for self-improvement. Constant self-interrogation, carving out the parts of you that aren’t Christ-like, pushing for a better you by any means necessary. I apply that to my writing, looking for new ways to do old tricks, better ways to deliver points, and just getting better. I attack my work to find out what doesn’t work and turf whatever doesn’t fit.
So yeah, I hadn’t realized it until recently, but faith, and the structures we’ve built up around faith, have definitely affected how I work. I think I chalk a lot of this stuff up to a Malcolm X influence, especially the directness and swagger, but I guess I’ve got a lot of fathers.
Word on the street is that the Big Pun hologram went off without a hitch… and then went off. The night is young, and the Big Pun hologram is already fighting and hiding his gun. The debate moderator is bugging, screaming, “Who the FUCK invited Pun?!”
is one of those albums that means a lot to me. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:
when he said, “We, the American working population, hate the fact that eight hours a day is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us. And we may not hate our jobs, but we hate jobs in general that don’t have to do with fighting our own causes.”
, a 1973 film directed by Michael Campus and starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. You can hear the source of the sample around three minutes into this video:
and 
‘s soundtrack.
, specifically Andre 3000’s 
. Four discs of some of the most important music I’ve ever heard. Twenty dollars.
came out, I was right there. And Soundbombing 2, after the intros, starts with Eminem’s “Any Man,” a song I still know by heart. Em, at his nicest, is one of the nicest ever, and he goes off on that song.
is about the only game I binge on these days. I even do a mission or two of 
and call it a day most times.
for five bucks. You can also get the 
for ten bucks, which includes three extra tracks (“Black Boy Fly” is heat and shoulda been on the album) and a digital booklet. You should buy this album. I preordered 
, which I feel like was a great idea, now that I’ve heard the album. I dunno if it’s a promo or what, but Lamar’s debut album 
is $5.49 right now, and that’s great, too.
(and his other albums) with the phrase “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” It means “In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the most Merciful,” and it is an expression of faith on the part of Mos. It’s always delivered in his own voice, almost a whisper. (You’ve heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” probably — “Bismillah” is used there, as well.) It’s Bey giving thanks and publicly expressing his beliefs.
. Sometimes it’s Kendrick’s parents calling to ask about their van, sometimes it’s him talking to his friends. Sometimes it’s something more violent.