Rap’s influence on the English language is palpable in the currents of contemporary, everyday speech. It is a vivid vocabulary, stylish and often explicit. Reading rap lyrics rather than simply hearing them underscores both their originality and, occasionally, their offensiveness. It calls attention to the fact that rap is often intended to confuse and even to affront many members of the listening public.
Readers of this anthology will undoubtedly come across lyrics with unclear meanings, whether in a slang term or an obscure reference. It is important to remember that such lack of comprehension is often by design. Slang is born of the desire to find new and compelling ways to speak about familiar things, but it also emerges out of the desire for coded communication. The young hope to confound the old; the poor, the rich;
the black, the white; the people from one part of town want to distinguish themselves from the people in another. When confronted with uncertainty in rap lyrics, it is constructive to bear in mind the following: (1) not even hip-hop insiders are likely to understand everything in every song; (2)
meaning changes over time, depending upon the particular circumstance of the language’s use; and (3) obfuscation is often the point, suggesting coded meanings worth puzzling over.
Even the names rappers assume for themselves are a kind of coding, a way of transforming identity through language. A handful of MCs go by their given names—Kanye West, Keith Murray, Lauryn Hill—but the vast majority take on one or more rap aliases. Names in rap help define a persona, allowing for the necessary distance between person and performer and announcing certain defining qualities of the artist before he or she has said a word. They can suggest criminal personas: Capone (like Al) or Noreaga (like Manuel) or Rick Ross (like “Freeway Ricky”
Ross, the drug dealer responsible for introducing crack cocaine to Los Angeles). They can suggest linguistic virtuosity and erudition: Punchline or Wordsworth or Saukrates. In short, they can suggest a range of meanings that help define an MC’s style and persona.
MCs with multiple aliases often flow differently depending on the lyrical identity they choose to inhabit. The RZA rhymes one way, but as Bobby Digital he rhymes another. Kool Keith has a certain style, which changes when he becomes Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, or Black Elvis.
Eminem is a study in persona; he embodies three distinct poetic identities in his work: Slim Shady, Eminem, and Marshall Mathers, the latter his given name. “When does Slim Shady kick in, when does Eminem step in, where does Marshall begin?” Eminem asks. 5 His rhymes provide the answer. Rap aliases are a means of linguistic transformation; like slang, they fashion new expressive possibilities.
When rap first emerged, most of the slang that MCs employed could be puzzled out in context. When Biz Markie, on 1988’s “Vapors,” describes his friend TJ Swan’s stylish attire as “fly Bally boots / Rough leather fashions and tough silk suits,” we can glean that “fly,” “rough,” and
“tough” are all superlatives. As rap spread across the United States in the 1990s, the varieties of slang often served as geographical markers, sometimes with quite specific relevance. Consider, for example, the different ways that rappers in the early-to-mid-1990s would refer to their friends: 2Pac’s “homies,” DMX’s “dawgs,” Mobb Deep’s “duns,” the Wu-Tang Clan’s “gods,” Mac Dre’s “cuddies,” E-40’s “pardners.” These differences in terminology reflect both regional and individual styles.
They speak to the artists’ identities and to their communities.
At the other extreme from these regional variations are those terms that have left hip-hop culture to become part of the general American lexicon,
thereby undoing their value as coded speech. The word dis (for dismiss, disrespect, or insult) is now so prevalent that many are unaware that the term was popularized in rap. The source of such crossover words is often impossible to isolate, but occasionally it can be traced back to a specific point of origin. The term bling bling, or simply bling (to describe diamonds or any other form of jewelry that glints in the light), was popularized by the New Orleans rapper B.G. and a teenaged Lil Wayne on their 1999 hit
“Bling Bling.” Now suburban grandmothers use the term.
The lifespan of a given slang word is fleeting, as new ways of saying the same thing evolve and gain popularity. Thus certain words and phrases can become markers of particular historical moments. When Malice of The Clipse rhymes on “Zen” that “I’m from the old school when the gat was a jammy,” he is calling attention not only to the shifting street terminology for firearms, but also to the power of words to define time and place. (This example is especially ironic since “gat” as used in hip-hop is itself a slang term more than a century old derived from the Gatling gun.) Using the term def, for instance, to say that something is great means that you are most likely somewhere in New York in the 1980s. Def waned in popularity as other terms (phat, dope, fly, official) took over, only to fade out as well; back in 1993, Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons, even held a mock funeral for
“def”—complete with casket. Just like “gat,” it will probably be resurrected.
Slang is so prevalent in rap that it supports a cottage industry of online and even print lexicons, the most prominent of which is the Web-based
“Urban Dictionary.” The Web site Rap Genius offers line-by-line analysis of rap lyrics, interpreting slang and uncovering nuances of expression.
We encourage readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the words in the lyrics to use such resources to explicate these poems of the present, just as one might use the Oxford English Dictionary to discern shades of meaning in poems of the past.
Most of rap’s language, though, is quite plain and often explicit. Rap, after all, was the first musical genre to make cursing a customary practice. Because it emerged out of an underground scene, at first relatively heedless of commercial considerations, rap was free to stick more closely to the ways people actually speak. Ironically, this renegade attitude contributed to rap’s commercial success. NWA went platinum in the early 1990s despite the fact that almost none of their songs were suitable for airplay. Music video viewers have often found themselves
subjected to the farce of rap songs made incomprehensible by bleeped and edited lyrics. The Recording Industry Association of America essentially invented the parental advisory sticker in response to rap artists like 2 Live Crew and Ice-T.
But rap’s explicit language and content is about more than simply causing a stir. Rap was born as a form of necessary speech. It provided young people, many of whom were from difficult and impoverished backgrounds, with a voice and a means of vivid expression. “When I was young,” the pioneering rapper MC Lyte remembers, “I was like, how else can a young black girl of my age be heard all around the world? I gotta rap.” 6 This new art form would be passionate, plainspoken, and at times profane. The young artists would take as their themes both the hardscrabble realities of everyday life as well as the aspirational imaginings of wealth, comfort, and success. In his memoir, From Pieces to Weight (2005), 50 Cent describes what rapping meant to him when he was just beginning: “I wrote about the things I had seen in my life and what was going on in the ’hood. I was able to express myself in rhyme better than I ever had in a regular conversation.” 7 The fact that rap’s rhymed expression is often blunt and confrontational, aggressive and offensive, makes profanity a necessary, even defining, element of its art.
This anthology is filled with explicit language, from garden-variety curse words to terms of more specific offense (the n-word and the b-word being most prominent). Rap’s early years offer surprisingly little in the way of curse words; indeed, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that explicit language and content became commonplace in the music. Set to a beat, such words endow rap with transgressive power rarely matched in popular music. But rap’s most incendiary element may be its subject matter. Rap lyrics contain violence, misogyny, sexism, and homophobia.
One must come to terms with these qualities when studying the formal elements of rap’s poetry. As Tricia Rose observes in The Hip Hop Wars (2008), discussions of rap’s content are increasingly reductive and politicized, with neither detractors nor defenders willing to engage in fruitful debate. “The hyperbolic and polarized public conversation about hip hop that has emerged over the past decade,” she writes, “discourages progressive and nuanced consumption, participation, and critique, thereby contributing to the very crisis that is facing hip hop.” 8 The purpose of this anthology is not to adjudicate such matters, but to present rap’s lyrics in such a way that these discussions about content and value might be better grounded and contextualized.
Rap is a reflection of a broader culture that too often sanctions the same sexism, homophobia, and violence found in the music. By including lyrics with such content, we present occasions to challenge pernicious influences by confronting them directly rather than simply pretending they aren’t there. At the same time, studying lyrics of targeted offense offers occasions to underscore the often-overlooked fact that hip-hop has formulated its own critiques of sexism, misogyny, and violence. “Most successful female MCs recognize that for them the only place where they can negotiate race, class, gender, and sexuality with relative freedom is the hiphop world,” writes Marcyliena Morgan, describing one such homegrown response to hip-hop’s own failings. “It is not an ideal space but rather one populated by those searching for discourse that confronts power.” 9
In addition to instances of sexism and misogyny, readers are urged to consider ways that rap’s default tone of aggression might promote harmful attitudes toward women. Is hip-hop inherently unwelcoming to women, even when the lyrics are not specifically targeting them? Is there something in the very spirit or attitude of rap that can be identified as misogynist? These are important questions to ask as we seek to expand the discussion of gender in rap beyond the conventional critique of rap’s overt sexism and use of derogatory language. In addition, we should explore how women artists have expanded rap to embody their own voices. Are artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, who flaunt their sexuality in a manner similar to their male counterparts, doing subversive and revolutionary work or are they simply succumbing to commercial pressures or adhering to the template established by many young men who’ve made rap their own? “It’s up to female rappers to stand strong to create the yin and yang in this music,” says Medusa, the Los Angeles–
based underground MC. “There’s a lack of connection with the male and female energy.” 10
Similarly, hip-hop culture is often hostile to the very idea of homosexuality. Though there are openly gay MCs in hip-hop’s underground (e.g., Medusa, Deep Dickollective), to date there are no openly gay rappers who have made it into the mainstream. That said, rap lyrics offer rich ground for discussions of sexuality, particularly in its relation to masculinity. What are the broader implications of a hip-hop culture that sanctions, supports, and extends certain negative characteristics of young male behavior? What progressive futures suggest themselves that might redress rap’s wrongs?
Such questions are crucial, but they are not the only ones to be asked;
nor should the heated debates, deep concerns, and political posturing that often revolve around hip-hop culture obscure the music’s other sides. The lyrics in this book were selected to demonstrate beyond a doubt that rap embodies the full range of human experience, not simply the brash and offensive content often associated with hip-hop in the public imagination.
Rap is more than the sum of its offenses; it is a testament to human creativity at work.