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.