To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
got Is more stitches than you —Big L
The above is just one of innumerable such sentiments, issued almost automatically, almost without thought, from the mouths of way too many rappers. This reality is what made songs like Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Nas’ “Black Girl Lost,” and De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled a Pistol On Santa” truly exceptional. In each case, the artist stepped outside the conventions of hip hop to pen sympathetic narratives about the sexual exploitation of young women.
To reckon with these sad elements is to reckon, by necessity, with the fractured history of black manhood, and the tentatively constructed ideals of black masculinity in America. Out here, on the wasted and wind-blown plains of human conflict, the concept of being both black and a man is and ever was dealt with as a breathing contradiction in terms. And if, for a moment, the Fifteenth Amendment attempted to reconcile that adjective with its noun, the tax on black male suffrage was to be black male life itself. Roughly 3,500 lynchings took place between the passage of the amendment, in 1870, and 1920; the victims were overwhelmingly black men who had been targeted for the South’s blood rituals. It was no coincidence that the lynched black body was literally disassembled and distributed to the gleeful white masses—with the penis reserved as the prize token: recreational terrorism.
Georgia, 1899. Sam Hose shrieked at the sight of the knife and quietly urged his tormentors to kill him swiftly. This was plea none was inclined to heed … The torture of the victim last almost half an hour. It began when a man stepped forward and very matter-of-factly sliced off his ears. Then several men grabbed Hose’s arms and held them forward so his fingers could be severed one by one and shown to the crowd. Finally a blade was passed between his thighs, Hose cried in agony, and a moment later his genitals were held aloft. Three men lifted a large can of kerosene and dumped its contents over Sam Hose’s head, and the pyre was set ablaze.
Denial, as the saying goes, is a long river, but it is also the psychological irony that made daily life possible in the buckwild frontier of Racial America. And out of this tendency arises the long tradition of boast, hyperbole, and signifying. What we have is a culture that arising in the context of two centuries of terrorism that habitually, ritually—desperately—rephrases reality, flips the script, and declares the black men indestructible despite all evidence to the contrary. A coping mechanism raised to the level of aesthetic statement. The sages say that a boast is best taken at its opposite face value: the shouted claims of omnipotence, they tell us, serve to highlight one’s own fragility. Yet it is equally true that no exploited class of humanity can survive while remaining focused on their own collective impotence.
I was born in the backwoods, for a pet I raised a bear I got two sets of jawbone teeth and an extra layer of hair When I was three, my crib was a barrel of knives A rattlesnake bit me and crawled off and died.
—Stagolee, ca. 1896
I tussled with an alligator, rassled with a whale handcuffed lighting and threw thunder in jail. I murdered a rock, and hospitalized a brick I’m so mean I make medicine sick.
—Muhammad Ali, 1963
Verbal assassin, my architect pleases When I was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus … I melt mics til the sound wave’s over Before stepping to me, you’d better step to Jehovah.
—Nas, 1994
These are lies. But our lies ultimately reveal as much as our truths. And without these lies, it would be impossible to have this specific truth:
Jacksonville, Fla. Jack Trice fought fifteen white men at 3 A.M. on the 12th, killing James Hughes and Edward Sanchez, fatally wounding Henry Daniels and dangerously wounding Albert Bruffum. The battle occurred at Trice’s humble home to prevent his 14 year-old son from being “regulated”—brutally beaten and perhaps killed by the whites. On the afternoon of May 11th, Trice’s son and the son of Town Marshall Hughes of Palmetto fought, the white boy being badly beaten. Marshall Hughes was greatly enraged and he and 14 other white men went to Trice’s house to regulate his little boy. The whites demanded that the boy be sent out. Trice refused and they began firing. Trice returned the fire, his first bullet killing Marshall Hughes. Edward Sanchez tried to burn the house, but was shot through the brain by Trice. Then the whites tried to batter in the door with a log, which resulted in Henry Daniels getting a bullet in the stomach that will kill him. The “regulators” then ran. —Cleveland Gazette, May 30, 1896.
The hope is to make one’s claims to bad-motherfuckerdom a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Self-praise, as the maxim tells us, is a half compliment. But on another level, it was insurrectionary for black boys to hail themselves in song and story and right down to names they adopted: Grand Master Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, the Grand Incredible DJ Scott La Rock. Literal self-aggrandizement. Walter Mosley once pointed out that within the black tradition, heroism is defined simply as survival against great odds—and on another level, the mere attempt to survive when one is always outnumbered, always outgunned. The boxer can scarcely afford to admit to his opponent that his unseen shot hurt him all the way down to the chromosomes. Thus: the overblown self-praise that is the cornerstone of hip hop indicates the scar tissue of black male powerlessness—and at the same time it testifies to the unrelenting will to survive in the midst of a deck loaded with wild jokers and stacked way against you. Call this Stagoleeism.
But hip hop has no room for the antiheroic, no sympathy for the weak, no blues-like tales of the man lamenting the fact that he sent his son out to face the regulators. The one who ain’t have no choice as he saw it: surrounded on all sides, no way to protect your boy without sacrificing your pregnant woman and the two young daughters. Jack Trice and his boy escaped that night in 1896, but a new mob found his elderly mother and burned her house to the ground. The lines between hero and coward, thug and bitch-nigga become blurred when choosing among rival worst-case scenarios. The truth is that some men are larger than life, but life looms large over very many more. When you boil away the excess, the hero might just be the coward with a better plan B.
The two most identifiable American folk heroes are the cowboy and the gangster, men who conquered the frontiers of sod and concrete, replaying the age-old conflict of man versus nature and at the same time, man versus human nature. In hip hop, so-called Gangsta Rap is an echo of the folklore tradition of lionizing the outlaw, the robber of banks, and stealer of men’s lives—a tradition that gets its start in black music with the blues. Within blues and hip hop, the outlaw has a distinct hue—his crimes are the inevitable product of a system that has made slaves of human beings and left babies to inherit despair. The bluesman may ask, “What did I do to get so black and blue?” but that same sentiment is being echoed by Tupac Shakur’s line that “I was given this world/I didn’t make it.”
The critic Robert Warshow has written that the gangster is an American catharsis figure. In a society where official power requires a state-sponsored public optimism in order to preserve the perception of order, the gangster’s monochromatic world, with its pessimistic symbols and the inevitably bloody demise of the protagonist, is subversive—in a way that is most useful to those in power:
I watch a gangster flick and cheer for the bad guy And turn if off before the end because the bad guy dies.
—50 Cent
In the case of hip hop, the gangster has become the means by which the lives of the marginal, the lesser, the weak have been transformed into entertainment.
It is this gangster ethos that makes gems of sympathetic rendering like Talib Kweli’s “Get By” or the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where’s the Love?” so hard to come by in hip hop. The unanswered question is whether or not hip hop as a genre, as an approach to life, will persuasively deal with human weakness and the ways in which the “weak,” the marginalized, and exploited are able to flip the script and instill their lives with meaning. This is the message implicit not only within the musical expression of blues, but also to the blues-contemporary phenomenon of social realism—the aesthetic philosophy underpinning the work of Dos Passos,