That Indecent Noise- part 3
a child of hiphop's Golden era considers feeling and unfeeling as a writer, an MC, a Black man with chronic illness
I started writing this piece thinking it would be the last of the series. Instead, it keeps growing. There’s lots of links in this one, branches you can take to meander, which I hope invite you to reflect further and make your own connections. Of course you can read it all through from Alpha to Omega. I already see that there’s more to come. This piece holds reflection on what hip hop means as a spokesman for the American Dream and how coming up enmeshed in it has affected me as a man, as an artist, as a Black man who writes and arts. Let’s get the convo started!
Once again, the title of this column comes from a quote by Black Thought.
The song is long liveth -
“feeling the deeper void listening to
that indecent noise
people used to tell me
boy, your brain gon be destroyed”
I was talking to a friend, award winning comic artist Breena Nuñez, about this series and how I was reflecting here on 90’s hip hop, and she asked me if my writing would be influenced by the arrest of Puff Daddy.
At first, I was like “no” or as my son would say “No Diddy!” (Am I even using it right? My son would say “hell naw, that’s new school!”). It didn’t even occur to me to write about Puffy or his arrest. In my first reaction to her question, I was thinking of myself as an underground artist, and on the surface, Diddy’s shiny suit materialism represented the opposite of everything we stood for. I touched upon this in part one of this series.
Then I sat with it further.
As I finished my last piece, I was aware that I had averted my gaze from looking at misogyny in rap. Something itched at my chicken scratch radar. Puffy has something to show us here. Combs is charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and transportation to engage with prostitution. From what I understand, Diddy is charged with racketeering, but not coercion or abuse on women and men and their bodies. The “crime” that Sean Combs is charged with by the American legal system are business crimes, not crimes that recognize the damage that one person can do to another. The case is peculiar, and I hesitate to dip my toe into it too much. It’s still uncertain what it will reveal about the entertainment industry and how hip hop stands as a global corporate brand.
In the 90s underground culture, many of us were steeped in narratives of the Illuminati and wondered if the global Black celebrity brands were sacrificing Black people for success. No Diddy! This is not the focus of this piece, but it does go to show that we thought of the shallowness and commercial materialism and willingness to exploit violence as not being inherent within these Black hitmakers. Instead, these were weaknesses that the devils/aliens/power brokers/ reptilians/ elites were exploiting, part of the arrangement in making them famous was their willingness to inflict and encourage violence upon their own people.
But these conspiracies of the global capitalists and their rhythmic wanna be’s are not the main thrusts of this essay. No Diddy.
Hip hop as the American brand!
The self reflection in Natural Mysticism by Kwame Dawes compelled me to ask about the impact this music has had on me. Again I want to reiterate that we come from frameworks that view commercial hip hop as an extension of the American entertainment/propaganda industry so I reject the intention of making Black men/hip hop the site of a unique depravity.
As James Baldwin observes, “The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.“ This helps us to understand why this particular Black music was parasitically latched onto and ridden into the light to become a global brand, commodity and message. And towards the topic at hand, let us consider why USA corporate entertainment ambassadors would choose to broadcast amplify messages created by pimps and abusers.
Kendrick Lamar’s “They Not Like Us” continues to echo. This anthem is so much more than a “shot fired” in a personal beef with another rapper. It’s a call for urban/Black communities to separate ourselves from the abuse, deviance, and dishonesty of the global pop industry. That’s why the song is in the plural, not the singular. “They Not like Us!” I’ve written about this previously, though not with the full consideration it deserves.
“Since its early days, hip-hop has gone from subculture to beyond mainstream, making millionaires and billionaires in the process.” An article in Marketplace proudly announces to celebrate hip hop’s 50th anniversary. Unfortunately, as much as I like this song, I don’t think Kendrick is the one to lead us to get us to analyze this direction of the culture. That Hip Hop Messiah shit, King Kunta one might call it, distracts us from the memory of the time when a vibrant underground and hip hop culture was a counterbalance to the ascension of the mainstream airwaves. For the 50th anniversary, the celebration of the culture was too often drowned out by the celebration pf the commodity. As the Pan-Africans and internationalists remind us, we don’t have to yearn to be Kings and Queens to reclaim our African heritage and connect with an African Diasporic present. Asé!
Regarding the “aestheticization of the unfeeling”
The idea for this Lil Essay hit me as I was listening to “hide my tears” by Roc Marciano in an obscene song filled with slurs and swagger, as do many of the rhythms that deify the dollar and align hip hop vibes with the pimp narrative.
The chorus sings “I hide my tears from the crowd/ by smiling/ I spend my money. I spend my money/ so they can see/ me stylin’”
The line which ends the second verse catches my attention: “Model chicks on Prozack. Lil homie, that’s just show biz”. The signs are all there pointing to the numbing going on. Lil homie, that’s just the way it is in this business that produced this hip hop that is so influential to me. Model chicks are the women we were all conditioned to desire, to look towards, to yearn for. If we focus only on the rap, we’d be ignorant, but do I know now how American wives take Prozack too in order to numb themselves from abuse or lack of fulfilment in order to fulfill their responsibilities and meet their expectations. So although hip hop is my thing, it’s not just a hip hop thing, I reiterate.
I’ve already sat with this essay for weeks and let the thoughts tumble around for so long. I’d have to listen to more music, my favorites and most personally influential. I’d have to listen to popular music that was ubiquitous and seeped into my mind. I’d have to dig in the crates and explore the underground music that shaped me as an MC and culture creator. These realms created in the infancy of the internet. These gems passed around hand to hand as Compact Discs. What was the emotional impact of this hip hop shit on my development as a rapper, as a writer, and as a man?
There’s an aspect to hip hop that caught my attention for this essay. Some of it, much of it encourages the “aestheticization of the unfeeling.” I see it and feel it more as I explore my identity as a writer on the page. There’s so much hip hop beauty created without acknowledging our reality as feeling beings. There are so many lyrics, intricate and incessant as the waves of the river that rise and pound against shoreline, shaping the course of the land, taking consumer goods and travelers from here to there, so many lyrics with no emotional content.
That takes us back to Puffy and the art form he helped to popularize. We hide our tears as the Roc Marciano samples sing. The women who are abused and manipulated must hide their tears. Probably the trophy wives are hiding their tears too. We call it survival, putting on a face for survival. Hip hop is full of examples of people (men) getting high or drunk in the face of strong emotions. Ask Diddy, or more likely the aspirants who sought to get close to him and his fame, how much abuse lingers beneath the rhythmic patterns of survival? It’s a dynamic capitalism loves to encourage, the minimizing or masking of emotion to punch in, punch the clock, or punch down. Capitalism thrives on the neglect of intimacy and reflection. We see it from the top to the bottom, from the ads encouraging us to get rich in an “opportune market” to the Presidential encouragement to get back and shop in the midst of national grief and racial reckoning.
A few bars of intimacy
Not only the hiding of our tears. For most of my adult life, it felt wrong for me to be photographed smiling. I literally would smile after photographs were taken. I didn’t want to leave evidence of myself as a smiling being. Specifically, I felt fine being a Black man smiling in real life but I didn’t want to leave that around as my image.
What does it mean to be an artist who was raised in the art form of hiding tears and putting on a face to express dope creative shit? How does the art work we inhale shape our emotional landscape?
Professional writers who read my shit keep on asking me to write with “more intimacy.” Part of me doesn’t even know what the hell they are talking about. Another part of me knows that I’m bumping up against the conditioning of masculinity that I’ve internalized as a hip hop listener and embodied as an MC in the Detroit undergrounds. With my experience as an MC behind me, I’m bumping up against the conditioning not only of how men talk to other men, but also how we men talk to audiences. To call it “performative” would only be seeing the point. Part of where I’m coming from is that my smile, my intimacy is a private affair, not the image I give to the world that would commodify and consume me. So how does a n!$$a write with “more intimacy?”
I write this reflection as a man who came up in the middle class, son of social workers. College, then community organizing, then creativity and coaching paid my bills. While I enjoy getting paid under the table, I never had to depend on illegal economics. My relationship to the Day 2 Day struggle for survival comes from the realm of health. I’ve been in ICU, had feeding tubes, struggled to breathe, cramps and aching muscles; I’ve been dependent on machines and pills; I’ve closed my eyes not knowing if I’d wake up the next morning. The kidneys relate to the emotion of fear in Chinese medicine. For me and my fucked up kidneys, finding a new relationship to my emotions, including my fear has been a key to survival. It may not be the expected African-American narrative coming from my generation, but I’ve found stuffing down my emotions to be detrimental to my survival.
And also on the flip side, there is something about the energy of hip hop. I am far from the only person who listens to it for motivation, will power, and the energy of overcoming. I’ll touch on this aspect of “the indecent noise” in my next post.
Till then… Keep flowin’
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TELL ME:
How do you relate to the unfeeling, to the struggle between feeling and not-feeling? How does hip hop affect your identity? Has hip hop been a part of your growth, of your survival? Are you still f’ing with hip hop the way you used to?