I was thinking, recently, about two posts Ta-Nehisi wrote in the past several months about the emotions involved in his relationship with hip-hop: braggadocio in the face of fear, and anger in the face of colossal idiocy. He touched on this a little bit in a third post, but I want to talk about hip-hop and anger. While I tend to lean furthest towards Dirty South hip-hop, and while rap is inarguably male dominated in a way that leaves women searching for voices that directly represent their experience, I remain profoundly grateful to hip-hop for giving voice to a kind of frustration and ego and anger that I think women aren't always allowed, or don't always give themselves musical permission to, address. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I've been banging Eminem's verse on "Forever," almost none-stop lately. It starts at 4:52 in this video:
The delivery is totally astonishing. And the verse is a masterpiece of self-creation and semi-righteous anger. It's an emotional place I have a hard time imagining coming from:
Here they go, back in stadiums as Shady spits his flow
Nuts they go, macadamia they go so ballistic, whoa...
He’s wondering if he should spit this slow
Fuck no! Go for broke
His cup just runneth over, oh no
He ain’t had a real buzz like this since the last time that he overdosed
They’ve been waiting patiently for Pinocchio to poke his nose
Back into the game and they know
Rap will never be the same as before...
The passion and the flame is ignited
You can’t put it out once we light it...
You dealin’ with a few true villains
Whose stand inside of the booth truth spillin’
And spit true feelings, until our tooth fillings come flying up out of our mouths...
When I slap the taste out your mouth with the bass so loud that it shakes the place
I’m Hannibal Lecter son just in case you’re thinking of saving face
You ain’t gonna have no face to save by the time I’m through with this place.
Seriously, folks, if there's a more astonishing fifty-odd seconds of rhyming out there in a mass release in recent years, I'd love to hear it. It's worth listening to Drake's nonsense about "shutting shit down at the Mall" for. Worth staying up to the end of the Grammys to hear live.
I'm having a hard time articulating what I want to say here. But I think it may be that when rappers are angry, it can be because they're wronged, but they frequently come from a place of self-assurance that I think is much rarer in women. Often, though of course not always, I think when women sing about being wronged, they're singing about being shaken internally, too. None of that in, say, DMX's "Lord Give Me a Sign":
From the moment he speaks with the voice of God in Isaiah, declaring "No weapon formed against me shall prosper / And every tongue that rises against me in judgement thou shalt condemn," there's a kind of confidence there. DMX would like Jesus to be there as he's trying to stay clear of the Devil, but so far, he's done all right on his own.
And even when they're insecure, which I think, for example, "Forgot About Dre" is, there's a quality of righteousness in it:
Dre needs Eminem backing him here, acting as the Greek chorus and passing judgement on fools who dare fail to recollect Dre's greatness. But he's still capable of enumerating the reasons for their error all on his lonesome. It's an impressive performance, even if it's a wounded one, a refusal to retreat or cede the battlefield. I admire that, even if I'm not always capable of emulating it.