“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment