6 Foot 7 Foot

“6’7” by Lil Wayne ft. Cory Gunz is the jam of the year.

I want to start talking about this tremendous jam by drawing attention to the beat: a topic sorely lacking in these posts I’m aware.  Partly that’s because, for me, each of these jams feature adequate to excellent production, none of them sound like they were made on a cell phone, etc.  But “6’7’” is the one of the crop that deeply engages the content of the rap.  A key historical context for “6” is that it was not just the first single from the anticipated Carter IV, but it was the first full Wayne jam to be released after, well, he was released from Riker’s.  It’s a sheer manifesto, and the signature Bangladesh low-end minimalism that worked so goddamn perfectly on that masterpiece “A Milli” works to similar effect here. 

But even more than the sonic continuity, one which effectively translates Wayne’s absence into a mere hiccough, is the sample, Harry Belafonte’s “Day O (the Banana Boat Song)”  The relation of this sample to the content of Wayne’s verses point to my general take on the jam.  On one hand, “Day O” is a work song, but not just any kind of work: the brutally exploitative work of agricultural workers in a post-colonial setting, arguably only a slightly more permissible form of slavery.  One might be tempted to think that the choice of sample here refers to Wayne’s incarceration by the state—a more knowable form of racist incarceration.  At the very least, one might think that the use of a traditional work song would lead to some consideration of work itself, even in the perverse sense that work appears in much contemporary rap as a blingy Protestant work ethic. 

But far from orchestrating any sort of critique, “6’7” tactfully refuses to engage an activist politics.  And this refusal is one among many—the song’s mode is refusal, is withdrawal, is an affirmation in the form of hedonic denial.  So I’ll try to suggest that although “6” is in some ways a version of the carpsi diem jam, it refuses the conventions (indexing obstacles, narrating abjection as a counterpoint to triumph) and creates something new.  And in direct contrast to Drake’s euphoric depression and melancholic relation to a lost object in a different time, Wayne here deemphasizes the sensible object.  Wayne experiences the world not through but as language, even when “the world” arrives in the most painful, oppressive shapes.  That is, even his time in prison: I got through that sentence / like a subject and a predicate.

Narrative is key to the carpsi diem jam, generally as a way of strengthening the case for the completeness of the verb in the perfect tense.  So key narrative strategies have centered on highlighting the abjection of the life before the day was seized and likewise hypertropaizing the articles which constitute the life after.  Wayne obviously celebrates his possessions, sexual prowess, success, etc.  But there is hardly a sense of history outside literary history.  Even the figures of ancient mythology (thanatos, hypnos, etc.) are brought into the argument only to be used as instances among others in Wayne’s bizarrerie of the reiterated present, his grammatical dominion over everything.  

The way that Jay-Z, especially, insists on a series of obstacles which he had to, like Hercules, overcome in order to become a deity, is much removed from the way obstacles function in Wayne.  The history of state mandated racism becomes in “6 Foot” a negative image for the rapper’s jewelry (“black and white diamonds / fuck segregation.”)  The sort of romantic reversal Drake semi-ironically laments in “Marvin’s Room” can’t possibly occur, because objects have been discarded in favor of signifiers.  Thus, the one potentially emotive line in the entire song, “I had my heart broken by a woman named Tammy” is neutralized by an ambivalence tied to (misogynist) semantics: “but hoes gon’ be hoes / so I couldn’t blame Tammy.”  There’s a strange fatalism in all of this, a tacit affirmation of an imminent meaning in linguistic expression that other kinds of conscious experience cannot disrupt or overturn. 

Even the many brags of the song undermine themselves by the particularity of their verbal expression.  One of the discursive highlights of 2011 has to be “paper chase until that paper look I’m right behind ya / bitch real G’s move in silence like lasagna.”  And yet, notice how this brag devises its own impotence!  In the world of contemporary rap post-“Juicy,” an intricate suspension of disbelief has been espoused concerning rappers and their raps.  That is, the “authentic” experience of the rapper bears some relation to the life about which she raps.  It follows then, that the normative expression which brags about being a G yearns to be understood as an authentic statement of the rapper’s G-ness.  Not so in “6’7’” where the only possible meaning of “G” is its function as orthographic symbol.

Finally, “6’7” is a wild declaration of autonomy derived from a negation of the political object, an autonomy which thrives in the realm of purely symbolic exchange.  Despite the fact that his lived-life hardships  are harder than,  say, Drake’s, Wayne’s pattern of reaction is always away from the melancholic and towards sublime transformation.    It sounds hungry because it’s like desire itself, only superficially rooted to a specific object, maximally engaged with its own existence.  As a manifesto, it endorses an aesthetics of hedonism, tactical delusion, play, and learning.  For me, Carter IV didn’t fully meet the promise of this opening gambit.  But “6’7,” because of its perplexing and perverse turn from even the virtual world of consumption to a poetics of denial, effects a true innovation in the rhetorical realm of jams. 

Oh, and Cory Gunz does a verse on it too.

Marvin's Room

On “Underground Kings,” the song following “Marvin’s Room” on Drake’s second LP Take Care, Drake offers a revision to one of rap’s classic (misogynist) formulations, “If you ask me what I care about / rapping, bitches / rapping, bitches / bitches and rapping.”  The formulation I have in mind of course is Ice Cube’s take on 1988’s “Gangsta Gangsta,” to wit, “To a kid looking up to me / life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”  There’s no doubt that Drake enjoys hoarding treasure, and there is no dearth, to say the least, of paeans to his own accumulation on Take Care.  Still, it’s arguable that the two main themes of Take Care are affairs of the heart and the state of the art, both of which appear in terms of the hyper-condensed time of Drake which I wrote about concerning “Headlines.”

Before going all the way into that, I want to mention some of the features of the setting, and the formal structure, of “Marvin’s Room,” finally to my mind the standout track on Take Care.   Lauren Berlant discusses the “situation tragedy” of contemporary life, and that’s an excellent place to start thinking about what’s going on in “Marvin’s.”  The song is set in the club, at the end of a party that Drake and his comrades have thrown.  The night in question is not named, but definitely takes place after the crisis which has brought Drake fame and fortune—and it is a crisis, literally, separating two times.  These times can overlap, but the absolute difference between them is itself one of the themes of Take Care.  In any case, in this club, Drake is recalling a woman from the time before his becoming wealthy and famous—signaled by the fact that her number is located in his “old phone.” 

Despite the fact that he’s extremely inebriated, and that the woman he desires has an adequate partner, he decides to call her anyway and explain his feelings about this new partner (“fuck that nigga / that you love so bad.”) Surveying the club scene around him, he absorbs the force of her rejection with a mixture of disbelief and stubborn insistence that she still has feelings for him.  A final verse moves between male bonding braggadocio and a tender plea to reconsider her rejection.  Finally, a white person recklessly says “you niggas crazy” and Drake begins to feel concern about what might happen next.  The jam ends as a cliffhanger—the suspense of which resounds in counterpoint to the surprising rejection of the object d’ drunk dial.

Drake’s alternation between rapping and singing frequently signals an emotional transition or development, and I think to no greater effect than here in “Marvin’s Room.”  The first two verses and choruses are all sung, although they do vacillate between apostrophe and description, highlighted by two almost identical lines (“I’ma call her anyway” and “I’ma call you anyway.”)  The rap introduces a group which includes Drake, a non-royal but certainly regal “we” behind the throwing of the party in question.  These rapped lines are of a totally different affect: breezy, sober, macho.   I think of as this hemistichal episode as suddenly transitioning from the scene of the phone call to the scene of exclusively male speech. 

But just as suddenly as the rap appeared, it turns again into singing.  And as it does, with the words, “I need you right now, are you down to listen to me?”, the tender, imploring speaker returns as well.  After one more turn of the verse and some muffled suggestions of a phone conversation, the final rapped lines introduce what seems narratively like the end of the night: “Just throw up while I hold your hair back / her white friend said ‘you niggas crazy’ / I hope no-one heard that”  Ostensibly Drake has settled for an overinebriated object choice with a white friend, abandoning the initial, nostalgic object choice and choosing not to resent his time.

That is, one of the important political consequences of “Marvin’s Room” is the affirmation on Drake’s part of the crisis by which he has attained fame and wealth, the existing libidinal objects that populate these two times, and the incompatibility of these objects as they absorb into the time after the crisis.  The Italian economist Christian Marazzi, considering time and progress in Capital and Affect, writes “We can’t go back; either we go with the flow or we keep resenting our time…the new does not erase the past, but only that which makes the past a kind of ballast, a dead weight preventing us from facing the future with intelligence and with the capacity for producing new affect and new political struggles.”  I find this a compelling description of the economy through which the precarious laborer drifts, and moreover I think it pertains absolutely to the subject position of the activist, and is finally precisely what’s at stake in “Marvin’s Room” vis a vis the beloved.

For the activist, the “capacity for producing new affect, and new political struggles” is a critical demand which requires some of the admittedly trademark qualities of semiocapitalist employment: flexibility, versatility, the ability to “go with the flow” and not be overburdened by the legacy of previous forms (whether they succeeded or failed.)  For Drake, in “Marvin’s Room,” the question of the situation tragedy is not which girl Drake goes him with at the end of the night.  Rather, it’s whether or not he will be able to find a present livable relative to the libidinal zeniths of a life no longer accessible to him.  What’s ironic of course is that the “present” Drake describes is one which he assumes most people would “do anything” to attain.    I find “Marvin’s Room” to be a powerful affirmation, by virtue of its refusal to solve that problem, its unresolved denouement, its paradoxical and realist portrayal of simultaneous tenderness and brutality.

I think, too, that this halting affirmation of the object in time relates to the history of North American r&b.  After all, the song isn’t called “I’m Just Saying.”  “Marvin’s Room” was recorded in the same studio that Marvin Gaye recorded Here, My Dear, a classic record of romantic heartbreak and closure.  In that way, I like to read “I’m just saying / you could do better” as a sort of address to Drake himself, his audience, and his sister and fellow artists especially.  Drake’s obsession with his career, condensed as it is, includes a sense of history and futurity as critical and formative influences on the present.  On “Make Me Proud” he raps, “I like a woman with a future and a past.”  Drake is no nihilist—objects of his desire are materially available in a historical narrative he’s struggling to understand—the difficulty and attendant pain of which constitutes the affective temperature of Take Care.  Although there’s plenty to brag about along the way, naturally. Still, the record is a document that richly proposes a melancholy euphoria, an optimism racked by existential despair, a set of emotive tragedies in direct counterpoint to a fairy tale of victory and accumulation.  In “Marvin’s Room,” all of these emotive poles inhere, preserved, not abandoned, able to at any time be (re)called.  Drunk dialed.

Did It On 'Em

I’m not sure what the locus classicus is in rap for a rapper claiming or threatening to defecate on an antagonist.  My earliest reference is DMX’s “I shit on niggas like the toilet,” and is somewhat recently reiterated by Big Boi’s “I’m shitting on niggas / and I’m peeing on the seat.”  Of course, nobody should be surprised about the relative frequency of shit imagery in hip hop: given the traditional association of shit and money, one should expect no less from an art form which has so profoundly sublimated the possession of treasure.  Still, Nicki Minaj’s tremendous “Did It On ‘Em” sets a new benchmark for the trope. 

Obviously, I don’t want to reduce the act of shitting on someone or a group of people to any one meaning.  There are of course whole indices of pleasures associated with excrement that aren’t easily assimilated in what I’m about to claim might be Nicki’s intention, or the intention of conventional rap symbology.  I shouldn’t even conflate those two, because by setting this benchmark as I’m suggesting, “Did It On ‘Em” far transcends one of the key qualities of traditional “I shit on them” moments in rap.  That is, in DMX’s or Big Boi’s formulations, shitting on someone positions the rapper in space relative to the antagonist(s) but underscores that relationality by insisting on a disinterestedness of affect in the act of excretion.  The transformation of the other into the “toilet” is the transformation of an individual with unique qualities into furniture one routinely visits without much care.  When Big Boi says “and I’m peeing on the seat,” it even emphasizes his lack of consideration concerning the object contains his excrement.

“Did It On ‘Em” proposes an coproeconomy of such nuance and sophistication that it can hardly be careless or disaffected, although it certainly maintains the power relation inherent to the trope.  This is articulated and achieved through three key sets of imagery, which describe Nicki herself in terms of motherhood, class position, and artistic virtuosity.

The motherhood theme is cued by the very first line of the first verse, “All these bitches are my sons.”  One of the striking features of “Did It On ‘Em”s syntactical economy is the troubling of grammatical (and semantic) gender, person, and number.  Are these “bitches” women? If so, how can they be her “sons?”  If the bitches can be of any gender, how do we read the choice of addressee, which vacillates from the 3^rd person (the “them” of “did it on ‘em”) to the 2^nd person (“If you  could turn back time / Cher.”)  And for both persons, are we to always understand a plural number, or is the “you” somehow a singular apostrophe? But the gender troubling doesn’t stop with “All these bitches are my sons.”  While the sentiment that the speaker stands in a domination power position relative to the addressee is absolutely consistent and insistent, other sorts of typically stable contexts are ambiguized.  Hence, the mother in this role adopts the classical mantle of paterfamilias and appropriates one of his great privileges, that is, the determination of paternity (“you ain’t my sons / you my motherfuckin’ stepsons.”)  And this dominant relation and privilege is expressed by a multi-gendered figure with, “If I had a dick / I would pull it out and piss on ‘em.”

The idea that the mother would piss and shit on xir children highlights the power relation, which means that inasmuch as it elevates the mother figure, it denigrates the children.  I am not a sophisticated Lacanian, but I would like to welcome a commentary about the maternal vision in “Did It On ‘Em” as one in which the mother is absolutely turned into the father, with the attendant power to let the children die.  Because it’s not just pissing and shitting on the children; there’s a real sense that the children (again, “these bitches” or “us”) are, by virtue of being the excremental property of the mother/father figure, in a precarious state of being at any time disappeared.  The song’s final imagery: “terminator,” “you my seed / I’ma spray you with a germinator,” and of course the last lingering menace, “You used to be here / now you’re gone: / Nair.”  The denouement of the song, by associating the antagonist with unwanted body hair, actually transforms the antagonist into excrement.

All of which is fairly complicated from an economic standpoint.  The remarkable universe of “Did It On ‘Em” is one in which being shat upon transforms you into shit yourself.  It makes sense, then, that what the rapper feels upon encountering this object upon which sie has shit is precisely disgust.  And, again recalling the conventional association of shit and money, it’s interesting that these disgusting, excrement-covered others are actually impoverished.  This is what characterizes the specificity of the encounter with the antagonists in “Broke bitches crusty / disgust me” and the totally memorable “Keep some wet wipes / in case a bum tries to touch me / Ew.”

A last association I want to draw attention to is that “Did It On ‘Em,” despite the beautiful ambiguities that mark its fecal economy, is absolutely unambiguous about the spatial relation of the rapper and the addressee.  This picture is not so clear as to the time of the boast, and one thing I’d like to suggest is that the centrality of the word “just” actually refers to “Did It On ‘Em” itself.  That is, I shit on ‘em by performing the rap “Did It On ‘Em.”  This would be a page from the Wayne playbook, and I’m thinking of the beautiful moment in the “We Takin’ Over (freestyle)” when, as the song nears its end, Wayne raps, “I don’t know what ya’ll about / but I just spit like a dog’s mouth.”  In that line, as in “Did It On ‘Em,” the just can refer not to an unknowable period of time in which the rapper attains glory, but in the temporal moment of the song itself, just now, as you’re listening. 

There’s a way in which then, the confusion about number, person, and gender is meant to constitute the indeterminacy (and thus perhaps the immense size) of the audience.  Whoever’s listening is available for taking the role of the antagonist and risks realizing that oops! they’ve been shat upon.  This risk is in counterpoint to the inclusive balance proposed in the chorus, staged as an exhortation: “put your number twos in the air / if you did it on ‘em.”  Pick what side you’re on, folks—Nicki’s is clear: “she ain’t a Nicki fan / then the bitch deaf dumb.”

Motivation

In 1843, the French minister to the king, Francois Guizot, answered a populace speaking out against the injustice of high fees imposed to purchase suffrage by uttering the infamous slogan enrichissez vous, or, “enrich yourself.”  In other words, the bourgeois state’s response to the proletariat’s sense that equality shouldn’t be dealt as an object of exchange was to deflect the argument into the practical maxims which sustain capitalist hegemony and constitute capitalist “morality:”  hard work, thriftiness, and ruthless hoarding.

The call of course shows that the bourgeois state conflates abstract notions of merit and moral or intellectual worth with wealth in money.  Guizot’s exhortation to the proletariat can’t be read outside of that primary conflation. And is that not the message of so many of our institutional sloganeering before and since? To “better” oneself means no more nor less than an increase in accumulation.  The above is hopelessly reductive of course, but some of the aporias operative in it are reminiscent of what transpires in the astonishing jam “Motivation,” sung by Kelly Rowland and ft. Lil Wayne.

“Motivation” essentially proposes a scene, in media coitus, on the cusp of the (female) singer’s orgasm.  It forecasts a future by articulating its desires to the absolute erasure of a history prior to the lovers entering the bed.  I amuse myself by thinking that the some of the uncanniness of the social provocations it performs derive from the tumultuousness of the moment it narrates, the abdication of normative sense to the semi-articulate moans of pleasure. Indeed, one primary assertion of the singer’s desire is the erasure of auto-sentience in deference to the powerful touch of the other (“And when we’re done / I don’t wanna feel my legs / I just wanna feel your hands all over me.”) 

But “Motivation” is not all made of semi-articulations because, of course, the primary intention of the song is to promise, and therefore act as, the rhetorically persuasive catalyst to action. This doesn’t rule out the rhetorical power of semi-articulate moans of pleasure, far from it. The real aporia of this persuasive rhetoric, though, is what exactly it intends to effect. That is, what is the singer motivating the lover to do exactly?

I’m not being totally stupid.  But in the heteronormative economy of the jam, I want to draw attention to the ambivalent tropes which characterize the male sexual performance and its discontents, its deep gender trouble and stamina anxieties. It seems to me there are two great gendered fictions being signaled in “Motivation,” the desperate impenetrability of the female orgasm as read by heteronormative masculine desire, and the anxiety concerning heteronormative male stamina as insufficient to satisfy his lover.  So there’s something extremely loaded and ambiguous about the singer’s exhortation to go go go. That imperative can mean, “hurry up and reach your destination,” but here, precisely this is not meant. In fact, the opposite is meant. What it really intends is something like “hurry up and don’t reach your destination.”

So part of the thrill of “Motivation” is precisely in its manipulation of “climax,” endlessly deferred and yet repeatedly implied. I mean, there is this post-coital moment which suffuses the phrase, and yet it’s a time has to be delayed, paradoxically by an expenditure of energy and self-deflecting effort. Which, of course, is a little like the social situation encouraged by Guizot’s malevolent invocation above: enriching oneself financially is obviously a pursuit with a telos that can never be attained. One can always be richer. The only practical thing to do is to continue the expenditure of energy towards perpetuating the pursuit itself.

These economies collide in the most startling image in the song, its denouement: “so go lover / go and make me rain.” Now, Weezy’s guest verse already performs the critical literalization: “I turn that thing into a rainforest / rain on my head, call it brainstorming.”  For the connoisseur, Wayne’s appearance on “Motivation” might not be one of his finest moments; one may even prefer a somewhat similar iteration on Mike Jones’ 2008 jam “Cuddy Buddy” (in which Wayne rhymes “Voila” with “Allah.”) But this couplet is about as weird and good as it gets. Inasmuch as his verse is a singular play expressing the love of cunnilinguis, the figure of the “rainforest” evokes both the “bush” which signifies the pubic hair and the “rain” of ejaculate. It occurs to me that I don’t really need to draw this out for you, my reader. Sigh. “Rain on my head” confirms that Wayne is giving head, right. But then “brainstorming.” One has to think of course of Jay-Z’s classic line, “get your umbrellas out / cause that’s my brainstorm,” inscribing forever the literalization of that metaphor we live by.  But given the stable meaning of “brain” in hip hop as itself head (although almost ALWAYS referring to heterosexual fellatio), “brainstorming” aspires to the plateau of the pataphoric, an abstract brag impossibly literal, a literalization multiply referential.

Which is all to say that Wayne’s verse grounds this pataphor as an available signifier in the jam, and Kelly’s evocation doesn’t read as perverse as it actually is.  I mean that, the first layer of metaphor parades its legibility: “rain” comfortably refers to the ejaculate accompanying orgasm, orgasm which is, after all, what the singer is motivating the lover to effect. And yet “make (pronoun) rain” isn’t a neutral phrase which lends itself to reappropriation at the expense of its own stable meaning.  “Make it rain” as you know is a verbal unit which means “to throw money at strippers at great volume, much as there are many raindrops constituting ‘rain,’ there are many bills constituting this display of wealth and gratitude.” 

So to some extent, I read Kelly’s sublating this stable epithet and the new meaning proposed by Wayne in the precipitous architecture of the jam as suggesting that Kelly is not only the privileged object of the lover’s energetic expenditures (fixated on the delayed telos of the orgasm) but also something that will produce money.  

N****s in Paris

The injunction carpe diem (“seize the day!”), which antecedes its expression in the perfect, carpsi diem, is marked by its evocation of a decision in the 2011 jams under discussion so far.  That is, the imperative requires the addressee to either seize/reap the day, or not to.  And in that way, the injunction functions as a unique kind of witness to a kairos, or “opportunity.”  In other words, the carpsi diem brag is substantiated by the speaker having had the opportunity to make a set of decisions that led to the triumph to which she refers.  I say “triumph” because these decisions are often bound to various obstacles that make it unlikely for the speaker to have seized the day.  And perhaps unsurprisingly, these obstacles themselves become the focus of the boast.

Indeed, “Juicy” dramatizes the overcoming of these obstacles by emphasizing both the totality of their abjection and the unlikeliness of anyone overcoming them—so much so that to have actually overcome them, the experience feels like a dream.  In some ways, one could say that a variation on this trope is what Jay-Z has been rapping about throughout his entire career.  Now, I’m not suggesting that Jay’s catalogue isn’t nuanced and diverse.  But it’s certainly true that his core narrative, the transition from drug dealer to rapper which contains the signature features of conflation and numerology, can be expected to appear at any time.  And “N****s in Paris” is precisely such an instance of its reappearance. 

If there’s a particular twist or emphasis in “N*****s in Paris,” it’s that the rapper shouldn’t be blamed for enjoying the comforts afforded to him by his tremendous hoarding of profit, considering the obstacles that he had to overcome to hoard as he has.  The tremendous extremity and excess of his purchases (watches so laden by jewels they no longer work and the like) can be justified by the extreme unlikeliness of his having overcome them (“if you’d escaped what I’d escaped / you’d be in Paris getting fucked up too.”) 

Kanye’s narrative has at times resembled the Jay-Z narrative minus the drug dealing past, but whereas Jay throughout his career has offered thoughtful analyses of the racist, classist superstructures (“Blame Oliver North and Iran contra / I ran contraband that they sponsored”) by which neoliberal policy perpetuates the ghettoization and desperation which leads to so much of drug crime, Kanye’s antagonist is primarily himself.  That’s not to say that Ye has avoided overtly political content, far from it, and all sorts of examples could be cited.  But his core conflict is his own narcissism and infantile unwillingness to accept responsibility for the social nightmares to which he constantly instigates and returns. And in a way, this makes Kanye one of the supreme artists of the minor or weak failure.

For every time Jay has considered Reagan, the CIA, the FBI, the police state as operative actors in an attempted suppression of his genius, Kanye has lamented the agents by which those actors elaborate the spectacular representation of that suppression: “media” broadly taken, the paparazzi state, the “groupie girl,” etc.  I’m overstating this a little bit, but the generalization basically holds for the dominant imagery of “Paris.”  The trope of the minor or weak failure is used by both rappers in the course of the song, but Jay’s use still differs from Kanye’s in terms of scene, episode, and scope.  So for Jay, “the Nets could go 0 and 82 / and I look at you like it’s gravy.”  The small failures which Kanye brags of having vanquished are interpersonal (a girl doesn’t want to dance with him) or absurd (Louie Vuitton somehow murders Kanye.) 

And yet one of the great meanings of Kanye’s art has been that the minor failures of the personal, emotional, psychological are as profoundly obstacular as the major economic and juridical ones aimed at macrosuppression.  In this way, the entirety of “Watch the Throne” could be read as an attempt to legitimate the coherence of these obsessive antagonists.  And finally a comment about the power of art to express the usurpation of those antagonists.  Which is why the citation of Blades of Glory (both as the intro and functional finale of the song) is a powerful intervention, for that film is exactly concerned with demonstrating the power of asymmetrical collaborators, faced with a range of deceptive enemies, ranging from the bureaucratic to the romantic to internal depression and addiction. 

Finally, “Paris” is perhaps a reiteration and affirmation that the achievements these artists have reaped, indeed in large part as a result of a decade-long collaboration, are not very often achieved.  A reminder that for every crisis of action which emanates from a kairos, more often than not the addressee is unable to emerge a winner.  And moreover that such achievement is not just statistically improbable, that such a situation feels weird.  That’s how I read the insistence on the uncanny, the insane, the bizarrerie which results from having seized the day.  That shit cray.  This shit weird. We’re going gorillas.

I'm On One

I sometimes think of DJ Khaled as an executive assistant.  I mean that his considerable contributions to culture might have more to do with coordinated the schedules of treasured geniuses and yelling “We The Best” as a desperate plea to be included in the corporate “We” than a quantifiable contribution to the business concept. Anyway, there’s nothing to be mad at Khaled for, finally.  “We Takin' Over” was a terrific posse jam, and “Welcome to my Hood” wasn’t an unwelcome contribution to jams in 2011.  I mean, any jam where Plies is the most culturally conscious voice is remarkable on that count alone.  But it had nowhere near the cultural traction and temporal duration of “I’m On One,” with Drake, Rick Ross, and Wayne contributing verses complementing Drake’s hook.

That hook, which delivers the fundamental premise of “I’m On One,” collapses the three rapper’s individual accomplishments, concerns, anxieties, and boasts into one unanimous declaration, which is to be recklessly high and drunk.  Specifically, the hook considers competing sets of claims or questions on the rappers’ attentions. To iterate that “All I care about is money / and the city that I’m from” and reiterate “fuck it I’m on one” is to suggest that there are other sets of questions and concerns that might require consideration and action.  But not only will the rappers not give their time and energy to considering any problem not related to fiscal accumulation or local conflicts and resolutions, a surrogate decision is installed and affirmed, to wit: what color is the drink.  “It might be purple / it might be pink” is the sublimation of a kind of uncertainty as an apotropaic totem warding off more severe or less personal issues the rappers might have to confront.

Drake’s verse essentially rehearses many of the temporal vicissitudes and nuance of “Headlines.”  Drake even assumes the role of the wise elder, invoking a carpe diem inside of a carpsi diem verse: “But get it while you here boy / Cause all that hype don’t feel the same next year boy.”  Earlier  he asks rhetorically, “And what’s up with these new niggas / and they think it all comes so easy?” The resurgence elaborated in “Headlines” appears here as completed, preserving the melodramatic stretching out of a relatively short amount of time. What’s more, Drake ties the carpsi diem to the etymological activity belying the verb.  Rather than the labor-neutral English word “seize,” carpere is an agricultural verb meaning “to reap.”  So Drake’s specific sense of achievement is tied to a work ethic: “me and 40 back to work / but we still smell like a vacation.”  Even this work ethic is absorbed into the Drake’s unusual autobiographical narrative: “I ain’t work this hard since I was 18,” presumably referring to his decision to focus on rapping rather than acting.

Ross’s verse is typical of most of his work over the last year.  Color is absolutely critical to Ross’s lexicon, complicating the chromatic clichés of “flashing” and “shining.”  On Wayne’s “John,” he even compares the blood he sheds while murdering enemies to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.  In “I’m On One,” he opens with an evocation of the “purple flowers” that he’s burning.  From this ivory tower of stoned omnipotence, King Ross indexes a series of maneuvers and moves that he wills on other objects.  He buries cash, burns the rest, walks on clouds, moves the kids to the hills, bends shawty on the sink, kiss you on ya neck, runs with the same niggas til he dies, calls Marc Jacobs, and finally reiterates that he stays on one.

Wayne too delivers a standard issue Wayne-in-’11 performance.  I’d like to treat this in much greater detail a little later, but the essential tendency of Wayne’s verse is to drastically minimize the number of propositions and rhetorically maximalize the forms in which they’re expressed.  His verse in “I’m On One” is, it follows, less full of action than Drake’s and Rick’s.  Drake is, as we mentioned, obsessed with the amount of work he’s done (logically enabling him now to be on one), and Ross with the many troop moves and orchestrations he constructs (despite being on one).   Despite the fact that the opening phrase of Wayne’s verse, “I walk around the club,” describes an action, the rest of it is marked by the absolute stasis of linguistic celebration.  Almost everything he does is described in the negative or the anticipatory (“It’s a slim chance I fall / Olive Oyl,” “I’m about to go Andre the Giant”), or else is concerned with the play of paradoxical clauses in conjunction, as in the finale, “I’m killin’ these hoes / I swear I’m tryna stop the violence.”

Despite the various kinds of anticipations or messages concerning futurity in the text, essentially the jam describes a state of accomplished carefreeness in which the major domain of uncertainty is to what degree codeine cough syrup has been diluted with soda.  But such stakes are in striking contrast to other kinds of typical rap brags and anticipations.  Even in the diluted political arena of contemporary jams, the ambitions here are minimized.  And, therefore, the triumph has to be taken in that context.

Headlines

One of the key features of the orthodox carpsi diem jam is a critical distance between the now of enunciation and the then of drug trafficking activity.  While it’s true that Biggie and Jay-Z in particular stress the conflation of these two genres, they both emphasize that drug dealing is an activity that took place in the past.  Jay, for instance, is obsessed with historicity and the numerology of his narrative remains insistent in his work.  1996, the year that Reasonable Doubt was released, marks the material evidence of his transformation from drug dealer to rapper, a transformation he takes pains to minimize even while he aggressively narrates it.  The Black Album (2003), especially given its frame as a retirement piece, is perhaps the canonical “looking back” document, and features some of the finest word groups ever fashioned to express the paradoxical shift, saturated with continuity, that marks his narrative (“from bricks to Billboards / grams to Grammys.”) 

The 7 years that elapse between 1996 and 2003, of course, parallel the extremely rapid emergence of the internet for daily American life, and the concomitant hypertrophic affective dilation of lived time.  Thus, like some deified dog, the technological innovations of one year appear as semi-knowablerelics the following, and lived encounters with the machine rapidly move from the “cutting edge” to “feeling like (they emerged) a million years ago.”  This era of hyperdilated progress provides a background for what would otherwise, perhaps, sound like a hyperbolic obsession on Drake’s part with a story of an artist who has to return from an sunken social position.

The song’s initial set of imagery expresses this renaissance in miniature, from being “strung out” and “overdosed” to “drinking every night / because we drink to my accomplishments.”  And the rest of the jam is oriented towards one central claim, that despite the rumors you might have heard to the contrary, Drake has not fallen off, but is in fact “back.”  Moreover, other people are certain about this (and the facts which ensue from the state of being back.)

In a world whose collective sense of time had not seen a drastic increase in speed, the 13 months that elapsed between Drake’s first LP, Thank Me Later, and the release of “Headlines” would not seem sufficient time for both enjoying a recent resurge to the top and a sinking to the necessary depths requisite for a bona fide rebound.  And yet that’s precisely what Drake achieves, or attempts to achieve, in “Headlines.” The description of a life in which the depths Drake experienced during a span of 13 calendar months is meant to correspond to the young Chris Wallace suffering the ignominy of several consecutive impoverished birthdays. 

Of course, part of this results from the facts of the life being expressed.  The Rick Ross syndrome, by which documents from the administration of everyday life are discovered and interrupt the suspended-disbelief monologue of much contemporary coke rap, can’t apply to Drake because those very documents are widely available.  A quick search for Degrassi High will show any viewer exactly what Drake was doing at the age at which Shawn Carter supposedly hustled cocaine, that is, co-starring in a situation comedy produced for a mainstream teenage and largely white Canadian audience.  Drake’s real life orientation relates to “Headlines” specifically in that it’s one of the few times on Take Care that he indulges in threats on his adversary’s life (“don’t make me catch a body like that”): a patently ridiculous claim that teeters so far from authenticity that it’s literally laughable. 

And yet for the most part “Headlines” appears as a sincere affirmation of imminent victory, which is why, like other critical jams of 2011 (specifically cf. Wayne’s “6’’7’” and Kanye West and Jay Z’s “H.A.M.”) it might best be understood as a manifesto.  And after all, a close listening suggests that perhaps Drake is fully aware of the paucity of time he supposedly languished in obscurity and powerlessness: true, he’s “strung out” but it is after all on “compliments.”  He’s experienced an “overdose,” but it is finally an excess display of “confidence” that he’s overconsumed.  In other words, the affective richness of the victory makes a claim to be the same as one in the more traditional rags-to-riches tale, even if the obstacles and labors have been far less vicious (Degrassi High vs. Marcy projects) and far more rapid (the drug-dealing era of Shawn Carter vs. the music-making era of Jay-Z.)

A final note about certainty.  While it’s status quo on Take Care as a whole to recite a catalogue of the tokens belying Drake’s wealth and success, “Headlines” is markedly empty of them.  Arguably the only material possession besides “money” which Drake boasts to own is the napkin in his shirt.  Even the money only makes one stable appearance (“Drizzy’s got the money / so Drizzy’s gonna pay it.”)  Elsewise, money merely occupies Drake’s mental space.  Even “the real,” a substantive brag concerning Drake’s authenticity as an artist, is merely “on the rise,” which could be read as “unestablished.” 

This conspicuous absence of luxury items is foregrounded too by the dislocation of affirmative knowledge concerning Drake’s wealth, success, and authenticity.  Whereas, in “Juicy,” the chorus seems to address the childhood Biggie in the 2^nd person (“you know very well what you are”), “Headlines” transfers gnosis to those who surround Drake.  In the first place, his entourage, who he pledges financial fealty to, fealty which he won’t have to express because “they know, they know, they know.” 

 I think finally this gesture can be read two ways.  One, that the necessity for Drake to make boasts about his talent and wealth has dissipated, concomitant with the rise of a fixed certainty in the minds of others about the splendor of that talent and the depth of the wealth. But on the other hand, the “they know” could be read as a shortcoming in narrative reliability, i.e. “I could tell you that I’m talented and wealthy, but if you need to be further convinced, I have witnesses.” 

carpsi diem

God, when was the last time you listened to “Juicy?”

In some ways, the first three jams I’ll talk about on this blog could readily be described / accused as being further reiterations of the basic themes of “Juicy.”  Clearly not just these three: “Juicy” has proven to be a jam of enduring relevance and, I’d argue, freshness. For me the key innovation of “Juicy” is the total conflation of two market genres (drug dealing and rapping) as anchors in the narrative of a lived life. Let me qualify the use of the word “innovation” and say what I mean is that the particulars of Chris Wallace’s presentation of this conflation are the direct antecedents to the dominance of coke rap as it emerges.  Anyway, I like my coke rap with the coke and the rap, and “Juicy” sets the tone for that inwrought awareness sublimely.

I like to think of “Juicy” as helping to solidify a genre within hip hop I refer to as carpsi diem.  Carpsi is the 1^st person singular perfect form of the Latin verb carpere, to reap or pluck, which finds its proverbial form in the cliché carpe diem, which in English becomes “seize the day.”  Pop music including rap has made much of this cliché, cognizant as it is that stirring rhythms are fundamentally optimistic. But when the perfect replaces the imperative, the meaning shifts from an exhortation to a declaration: “seize the day” figures as a boast in the present tense, “I seized the day.”

My Greek teacher used to say that the force of the perfect is to express the fact that something is “on record.”  Which I think neatly applies to the acrobatic braggadocio of jams like “Juicy” and those that come in its wake.  Consider the “catalogue of ships” trope that runs through so many of these works, subsuming Sega Geneses, jackets made by obscure Belgian designers, Rolex watches so burdened by decorative jewels they cease to keep time, etc. into an economy of wild possession that constitutes “the record” of the rapper having seized the day. 

Having seized the day, the rapper has recourse to use narrative to describe this triumph.  The particulars of the narrative in “Juicy” are well-known and I don’t need to rehearse them all here, but I would like to refer to a feature of the chorus which is certainly pertinent: the certainty which bolsters the brag.  “You know very well / who you are.”  The lyric and financial certainty which characterizes “Juicy” in 1994 seems out of place in the financially precarious global atmosphere of 2011.

In 2011 jams, knowledge is located not in the psychology of the rapper but the society, small or large, over which he excels.  The security concerning financial gain is also brought into question, as the admission of minor defeats become increasingly prominent in these songs.  And while drugs and alcohol are a major feature of Biggie’s ecoscape of pleasures, I hear more anxiety in the “I’m high and don’t give a fuck” tropes this year than “We drink champagne when we thirsty.”  Finally, perhaps, the oneiric scene of “Juicy” has replaced the certainty of “you know very well.”  Maybe prosperity was all a dream.  And if so, jams in 2011 negotiated this late instability with a mixture of swagger and doubt.

It’s December, and it’s time to discuss the crucial jams which qualify as honorable mentions for JAM OF THE YEAR 2011.  First, a few methodological notes.  I’ve picked these seven jams for discussion because I think taken together they describe particularly illuminating or stellar moments in mainstream rap and r&b music and, moreover, I wanted to write about them. 

 Jam of the Year is always a subjective choice, and almost anybody could find seven different jams to draw up their own short list.  I’ve chosen from mainstream songs that basically performed well on the charts and appeared on urban radio, but those were not final criteria for selection.  This will explain one key omission, LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” which is, I’m afraid, probably the JOTY.  It’s a song I have no love for, no patience for, and no desire to ever again aurally experience.  And yet in terms of popular appeal and cultural saturation, what could match it?  I could say that I found the content too vapid and obvious to write about, or that the quality of the electronic tones underneath the “rapping” conflict with the sonic conventions that typically constitute “rap” and “r and b” music, but that would ultimately be misleading.  My leaving LMFAO off this list is cowardice, plain and simple.

Finally and speaking of cowardice, above and beyond the ubiquitous debatability of any given JOTY  I’d be willing to call almost any of these 7 jams the JOTY (I exclude 2006 from that debatability simply on the strength and undeniability of “Gold Digger,” but I digress.)  For the first time since writing these annual wrap-ups, I’m not burning to make a choice between the top 2 or 3.  Also, for the first time, one’s choice between upper echelon jams feels like an essentially political one. That is, the preference for a jam insisting on euphoric and optimistic action versus one that abandons the social in favor of a linguistic and hedonistic nihilism is a highly charged preference, a resonant moment of decision.

Which is all to say, I’ll look forward to everyone else’s JOTY lists, most of which will likely be topped with the letters L, M, F, A, O.