Book of Rhymes (23 page)

Rap was born in the first person. It is a music obsessed with the “I,” even to the point of narcissism. MCs become larger than life through rhyme, often projecting images of
impervious strength. The flipside, of course, is vulnerability, something one sees only rarely, but which is powerful when it appears. When rappers talk about themselves, there is more at stake than the individual. Through self-exploration, they expose an expanse of meaning.

This chapter is about what MCs rhyme about when they aren't telling lengthy stories—in other words, what MCs rhyme about most of the time. While this includes innumerable topics, we can summarize them in just a few: celebrating themselves, dissing their opponents, and shit-talking in every other possible way. This form of lyrical celebration of self and denigration of others can be puerile, but it can also be gratifying. It is fueled by one of rap's great intangible and essential qualities:
swagger.
Swagger, or just
swag,
is the essential quality of lyrical confidence. It expresses itself in an MC's vocal delivery, in confidence and even brashness. Swagger is difficult to describe, but you know it when you hear it. You can hear it in these lines from Lil Wayne's “Dr. Carter,”

 

 

Wayne displays the very swagger he's rhyming about in his deliberate meaning and assured ownership (“That swagger, I got it . . .”). Swagger is not new to rap, of course. It has its roots in the African-American verbal practice of signifying.

Over centuries, black expressive culture has developed a tradition called signifying. Signifying is a rhetorical practice that involves repetition and difference, besting and boasting. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in his groundbreaking study
The Signifying Monkey,
signifying is “the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse” with roots that stretch through slavery back to West Africa. Among black Americans, signifying has taken on many forms over the years. The dozens, familiar to many through “Yo Mama” jokes, involves a ritualized exchange of insults, with the winner being the one who could marshal creativity without breaking cool. Another product of the signifying tradition was the toasts, long narrative poems often recited by black men in barbershops, on street corners, and in penitentiaries. The toasts detailed the exploits of street hustlers and outlaw heroes like the signifying monkey and Shine. As in so many of today's raps, in the toasts the underdog almost always ended up on top.

In the decade before hip hop was born, the toasts and other “raps” gained great popularity. Artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets and other masters of signifying like Muhammad Ali and H. Rap Brown are often mentioned as forefathers of rap. Certainly they deserve credit as major influences—sometimes even direct influences, particularly in rap's early years. H. Rap Brown's famous “Rap's Poem” from the 1960s might easily be mistaken for a rap verse with its profane braggadocio:

 

Brown was employing the rhetorical figure kenning, popularized a few millennia ago in
Beowulf,
which joins two terms together to form an eponym, a self-descriptive alias. It's impossible not to hear echoes of Rap Brown in GZA when he rhymes “I be the body-dropper, the heartbeat-stopper / child-educator plus head-amputator.” Perhaps the classic example of rap kenning, though, is Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga Tha Gambler trading bars on 1995's “Broken Language.” Spitting their brand of thugged-out linguistics, they deliver fierce lines like these:

 

 

It is a testament to the staying power of the technique as well as to the skill of Smoothe and Trigga's use of it that Redman and Method Man remade the track in 2008. This kind of self-mythologizing is a common means of braggadocio, exalting the individual by making him or her too big for one name alone. It is an ancient signifying technique that seems as fresh as ever.

Rap Brown's influence is even more apparent in hip hop's first commercial hit, “Rapper's Delight.” In a striking example of signifying, The Sugar Hill Gang echoes Brown's precise language. In the original, Rap rhymes, “Yes, I'm hemp the demp the women's pimp / Women fight for my delight.” Years later, Big Bank Hank rhymes, “Yes, I'm imp the gimp, the ladies' pimp / The women fight for my delight.” Echoing across both time and genre, what unifies these two expressions is the art of signifying.

Of course, it is facile simply to draw a straight line between verbal expressions like the dozens and the toasts and rap. Rap is also music; it relies upon a rhythmic, and often a harmonic and melodic, relation to song. What rap shares with these earlier expressive practices is an attitude, a spirit of competition and drive towards eloquence. Rap wears its relation to tradition lightly, never with an onerous sense of the past. And yet the past is always there, a past that runs through Africa, but also through Europe and Asia as well. Signifying is far from dead; it is alive and well in rap. For some, that's a problem.

Rap signifying was unexpectedly held up to public scrutiny in the summer of 2008 when a clip of NBA star
Shaquille O'Neal dissing former teammate Kobe Bryant in a rap “freestyle” appeared on the celebrity gossip site
TMZ.com
. The lumbering lyricist dropped a series of heavy-handed put-downs only a week after Bryant's Lakers were eliminated after they lost game six of the NBA Finals by thirty-nine points to the Boston Celtics. Their personal animosity stems from both on and off the court tensions during their years as Lakers teammates, when they won three straight NBA titles. When Shaq took the mic at a New York club in late June, he channeled much of his animosity into the verse. “Check it. . . . You know how I be / Last week Kobe couldn't do it without me,” Shaq begins, then meanders off on a tangent about his rhyme skills not being as good as Biggie's (obvious) and how he lives next to Diddy (or, rather, Diddy lives next to him), before returning again to Kobe. At the end of the verse he spits this bit of rap invective:

 

In a lyrical equivalent of kicking somebody when he's down, Shaq takes the occasion of Kobe's defeat to settle a number of scores, including getting back at Kobe for bringing Shaq's name up in an interview with police after Kobe was
arrested for sexual assault in Colorado. At once, Shaq's rhyme is the best and worst example of rap signifying. Best, because it clearly displays how rap can be used effectively for the purposes of character assassination. Worst, because Shaq's limited skills as a lyricist keep the verse from achieving the subtlety and invention that signifying at its best always employs. Shaq's verse is a blunt instrument rather than a surgical knife; it doesn't cut out his opponent's heart as much as it attempts to smash it.

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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