The only organization going on here is to break through the “battery” of “flattery” which promotes rap for affect-ive community building. This is “straight coffee” that can make everyone act like an “army brigade” because it only takes an “ounce” for “you to bounce.” Much too powerful for anyone, track revels in its ability to both “lynch” the listener and “jack off wack MC’s”; the less pity, the better. Theory of organizing: the bigger the game, the less we have to “toke” for our minds.
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” By invoking the tradition of the “seventh son,” a figure of creative power aligned with werewolves, witches, and sorcerers, Du Bois makes clear that double-consciousness is more than alienation and deficit; and, in Willie Dixon’s case, he can heal the sick (i.e., grasp doubleness as a double-edged sword), raise the dead (produce a history of and for Africans and African Americans, for example), and even predict the future. And all of these powers have something to do with the experience of being racialized and the special knowledge of language that it provides: “Now I can talk these words that sound so sweet/I can make your little heart even skip a beat.”
In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama declared that a “defining project of our generation is to restore [the] promise” of “the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead” despite the “accident of [your] birth.” With the introduction of the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, however, we’re encouraged to think structurally, from increased pre-school (“public savings” and a return on investment!) to “fair discipline practices” in schools and criminal court systems. Lest we think he’s appealing to crusty Baby Boomers in the former and white liberals/wonks in the latter, keep in mind that young men of color are a “drag on State and Federal budgets” that should be salvaged in order to “unlock their full potential.” (But as Michelle Obama points out, if her parents “did everything right,” their children would just “have a chance.” Slim odds, slimmer hopes.) Enter Chief Keef, avatar of Chicago lawlessness. There’s a whiff of racial discipline all around. Reviewers called his album everything from “irresponsible, unforgiving, and often infectious” to a representation of African American culture. How can young black and brown men account for themselves given these odds? Here, the trax flounders: snitches, whiners, pregnant women, wanna-be drug kingpins are all objects of derision. Then again, it’s also about cuckolding you. A monetization of the outlaw—both ways. Isn’t this what the whole conversation is about?
As a remix of an earlier, forgotten single often described as “sinister” and having “stakes in the streets,” it’s the claim that the trax is an example of “rap vérité” which proves (unintentionally) helpful. From jump, Prodigy exploits this: the listener is “stuck off the realness” of affect-less characters with gang loyalties. Yet the stakes of realness aren’t in the streets; they reside in those who are slumming it, vicariously rehearsing the rags-to-riches-to-rags (-to-grave) persona (and keeping their “shook” sensibilities at bay). But there’s no “halfway” engagement when “react[ion]s” between those of “no relation” are all this world asks of you. Moments of anxiety are nested within, manifested through questions of doubt (“do I deserve to live[?]”), motive (“thirsty for recognition”), and legitimacy (“I’mma live illegal”). Read against voyeuristic tendencies, the rub: “I’m creeping” beyond the “petty thinking” and watching you watching me.
Verbal whipping of “niggers,” who are “everything but themselves” these days. Which is to say: American Blacks are degraded, violent, sex-obsessed, pimping fools, and need to be shocked into recognizing who they really are, if the Revolution is to come. Background drums make it crystal clear: these figures must recover their African roots, and get behind the beat. But where’s the Revolution in such disciplinary maneuvering? Or: if patrolled identity normativity is the pre-condition of Revolution, then the Revolution is everything but itself.
Rapping’s not a “tribe,” but even if it was, it wouldn’t be “fancy” or adorned with the lust to enforce tribalisms. Impossible, but it’s the strategic maneuver that allows for agency: claiming minimal racial identity instead of having a “Romi-et-oh or Juliette romance story” over it. “No stunts,” “sorrow,” or “pity.”
“Gift wrap” without a material gift. Aliens offer alternative frequency (“naughty noise”) to dispossessed; droning and swaying as response and revision. The sample as the “fa-so-la-ti,” with no guarantee of a next. Conduit logic.
Thirteen-year-old songwriter Ian notes that the conclusion, in which a white girl from New Jersey tells her African American crush object that “I can’t see you anymore, baby,” was motivated by a sense of logic and realism: “I don’t think I made a conscious decision to have the girl cop out in the end, it just seemed like that would be the logical thing at my age, because how can you buck school and society and your parents, and make yourself an outcast forever?” Intriguingly, the trax suggests that “one of these days” the singer will overcome society’s pressures to conform, and will buck the system. But let’s also remember that even those who refuse their parents and peers are also part of the “system,” too, and that the concept of “society” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s hands, for example) accounts for both conformists and refuseniks. Indeed, as renegade African American historian J.A. Rogers documented in a mountain of publications, the social world has sexually crossed color lines in all times and places. So this trax documents not “realism” per se, but merely Ian’s particular probability. Another logical realist, down the street, didn’t manage to write a song, but already is packing her bags.
Purportedly part of the soundtrack for the alleged Malvo sniper shootings, professing the 5% knowledge of holy black masculinity. With only the mind “free,” dualism of war/peace favors the former in the mode of Black complacency/suicide; put another way, survival becomes a “revolutionary war” unto itself. Seeking the “black nation” that can be “absorb[ed]”; submerging the necessity of taking arms in order to purify, but never exceed, the white supremacist state. To mind, much more has been taken in the name of purity. The ballot in this formulation, though, is the bullet.
Overall strategy to document (and eventually attack) the hitch/delay: the “one” is muted (surrounded by two bass notes), main bass line hobbles before the “four,” and community is waiting for the “comer[s].” “Don’t wave your hand” if you’ve “been plugged in” to the white hierarchy; revolution through active unplugging—“Don’t let ’em do it”—to avoid distractions. Free-form guitar solo and main, picked riff (no hammer-ons) lay down the formula: attack the smooth, middle-class aspirations with stiff uppercuts. The fifteen-rounder doesn’t have to last a lifetime, but you better commit to going the distance.