An Apologia Even for Biggie’s Child-Rape Lyrics (ROUND TWO)
Let's workshop this essay, which highlights the redeeming role of vile rape lyrics (in a way that I hope would have moved C. Delores Tucker more than Tupac's and KRS-One's responses to her).
An Apologia Even for Biggie’s Child-Rape Lyrics
For the late C. Delores Tucker*
Only when we realize that part of ourselves which we have not hitherto seen or preferred not to see can we proceed to question and find the sources from which it feeds. . . . [N]o progress or growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted. . . . It is not until we have truly been shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are . . . that we can take the first step toward individual reality.—Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow
1
Mainstream rap, perhaps the most popular music on Earth, contains some pretty vile material. Murder and lying and greed, homophobia and misogyny and racism, unhinged consumerism and rampant drug use—all these themes, typically presented in glorifying fashion (through first-person narration that at least suggests the artists are speaking in their own voice), fill the billboard charts. Themes specifically concerning deviant sexuality reign supreme, no doubt at least in part because they enliven a fantasy at the very heart of our national culture (a fantasy, in a ghoulish switch-up even frightening to its architects, now celebrated by those meant to be brutalized by it): that black bodies remain jungle possessed, if you will, by an insatiable hankering for sex.
To give examples is to run the risk of minimizing the point. But to pluck a few lyrics at random from my own past, and now from my own present (especially as a professor who keeps a rapport with his freshmen), we get Foxy Brown’s “I’m sexin' raw dog without protection, disease infested" and Cam’ron’s “I ran into my aunt / with the fat ass and the thin chest” and DMX’s “I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse / I got blood on my dick cause I fucked a corpse” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “You better get on your knees and eat this pussy right / before I have another nigga do it for me” and Mulatto’s “Double-hand hand twist the pipe but I ain't even plumbing / He like 'em nasty-nasty, bitch, I'm Mrs. Put That Thumb In” and Doja Cat’s “Spank me, slap me, choke me, bite me. . . . Give a fuck 'bout what your wifey's sayin'. . . . I just want to fuck all night.” After centuries of portraying blacks as irrevocably tainted with bestial sexuality, which for a good swath of time had to have made using them as fuck-toy chattel extra hot, we still cannot get enough—as the record executives of decades back were perspicacious enough to see—of black artists corroborating (and now even augmenting) the stereotype of black hypersexuality: the stereotype that has become a warm home, given its relative fixity across so much anxiety-producing social change; the stereotype that continues to reinforce the cultural practice of treating blacks primarily as primal sex objects (ever-dripping twerkbots and big-dicked dominators) instead of rational citizens with assets beyond ass.
Among the various themes of sexual depravity in rap music (themes of using sex to extort and emasculate, themes of objectification and degradation, themes of nymphomaniacal infidelity and extraordinary raunchiness), rape and pedophilia loom large. As far as rape goes, we get—to pluck but four examples—Tyler the Creator’s “You call this shit ‘kids,’ well I call these kids ‘cum’ / and you call this shit ‘rape’ but I think that rape’s fun” and Chief Keef’s “Ain't gon' let me fuck, and I feel you / But you gon' suck my dick 'fore I kill you” and Vado’s “Never fucked? Nut you ate that / My niggas fucked and we raped that” and Finess2tymes’ “Take this dick, bitch, stop pushin' me / Face in the pillow, bitch, don't look at me.” As far as pedophilia goes, we get—to pluck but four examples—NWA’s “And she's only 14 and a ho' / But the bitch sucks dick like a specialized pro” and Tyga’s “They say she young, I should've waited / She a big girl, dog, when she stimulated" and Big Daddy Kane’s “But in the case of not becomin’ my lady / I’ll take ’em eight to eighty, dumb, crippled and crazy” and Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Backstage, underage, adolescent. How ya doin’? Fine, she replied. / I sighed. I like to do the wild thing. / Action took place. Kinda wet. Don’t forget.”
Even if we make the somewhat-controversial assumption that not all cases of sex with minors are rape, the topics of rape and sex with minors explicitly converge at times. When we go off the billboards into “underground” domains the times are countless. But pedophilic rape has a solid place in mainstream material as well. Many of us know, for instance, DMX’s classic lines: “And if you got a daughter older than fifteen, I’ma rape her / Take her on the livin' room floor, right there in front of you. . . . / Now watch me fuck just a little while longer, please, will you?” Many of us know, as well, Cam’ron’s lines: “I’ll rape your child / They won’t make the trial.” And then then following from Tyler the Creator might count too—well, at least in the artist’s mind it seems to: “Rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome.”
DMX, Cam’ron, and Tyler the Creator are some of the biggest rap stars of all time, let alone on the list of rappers whose lyrics feature underaged holes getting “beaten up like Emmett Till” explicitly without consent. All three are dwarfed, however, by the supergiant on this list—the man memorialized on our t-shirts and mugs; the man immortalized in statues and murals; the man taught in universities and with streets in global cities named after him; the man celebrated as the greatest rapper of all time: Biggie Smalls. Biggie dips into child-rape territory in several places. Many of us still find ourselves singing the line from “What’s Beef?”—well, at least I do: “Don’t they know my nigga Gutter fuckin’ kidnap kids? / Fuck ’em in the ass, throw ’em over the bridge.” The Biggie singsong chant that “lives forever rent free” in my own head, waking me up at least once a month in its incessant looping, is no doubt the last two lines from a verse in “Dead Wrong”: “I'm using rubbers so they won't trace the semen / The black demon got the little hookers screaming / Because you know I love it young, fresh and green / with no hair in between, know what I mean?” Yes, we know what he means! He means that the age standard set by the already-questionable maxim—you know the one: if there’s grass on the field, play ball—is not inclusive enough.
It gets wilder when we turn to “Dreams.” This song details all the “R&B bitches” with whom—or, so it seems more accurate to say, with which—Biggie fantasizes about having sexual relations. Although other lines repeat in my head more often (lines like “Pimping ain't easy but it sure is fun” or “Smack Tina Turner give her flashbacks of Ike”), the pedophilic rape couplet is the boldest taboo-violator in the song. Indeed, it is one of the boldest in rap history, however understated it might appear at first glance. It is the one on which I want to center my focus: “You can 76 the 69, try 68 / Make Raven-Symoné call date rape.”
Why focus on these lines when there are much more shockingly vivid ones across billboard rap? There are two main reasons. First, the song’s chorus explicitly brings out important subtext behind these lines, subtext that reasonably extends more or less to most other wicked songs throughout rap (and beyond). Second, these lines are pretty much “as low as it gets.” Biggie is saying, if it is not already clear, that we have to scrap (that is, 76) the idea that the inverted position where two people simultaneously suck each other’s genitalia should be called “69” in the case of he and Raven-Symoné. More accurate would be to call it “68” since that captures how much shorter she is—while also perhaps, in what would amount to a clever double meaning, highlighting her age. Yes, Raven-Symoné, having just finished her album Here’s to New Dreams, was eight at the time Biggie penned these lines.
If one can find redeeming qualities here in such darkness, then that would reasonably carry over to most other examples of “problematic” lyrics. That is my idea anyway.
2
When it comes to offensive rap lyrics, especially ones involving rape of an eight year old, some interpreters—yes, even those not propelled by antiblack bigotry and, yes, even those (like C. Delores Tucker) who in fact make black uplift their life’s mission—fly into a moral panic of censorious proportions, insisting that “Such artists, if not themselves the predators they’re supposedly ‘playacting,’ promote deviance (if only ‘lesser’ deviance) and so need to blocked for the health of society, need to be quarantined from impressionable youth—especially from black youth who, only just now blessed with the burden of being able to shape their fates to the degree that whites can, already struggle with poor self-esteem and poor ideas of excellence and poor models of intimate relationships.” Other interpreters—yes, even those who face the lyrics head-on in all their vulgar glory and, yes, even those who are neither irreverent artists themselves nor simply contrarians—laugh at “the narrow-minded idea” that these lyrics are anything more serious than dark-but-still-playful fantastical art, insisting that “Even younger audiences understand as much (just as they understand that their freedom to shoot people in video games does not translate into freedom to shoot people in real life).” There is some truth in both extremes.
One thing needs to be said right from the jump. On top being incentivized by an industry that sees big-money value in sexual shock (especially from black mouths), rappers with sex-heinous lyrics are most often young and thereby not only more sexual but also more prone to engage in boundary pushing. Boundary pushing, characteristic of hormonal youth, is essential for keeping that precarious social balance crucial to our thriving, the balance between adventuring-progressive energy and cautious-conservative energy. For finding new meaning and restoring renewed appreciation for old meanings, it is important to explore beyond the walls given to us at birth from the explorations and upkeep efforts of past generations. The youth dare to plunge into chaos. They are open to the contagion of diversity. They are the creative-visionary side of humanity: a side necessary—although not sufficient—to being the adaptable creatures we are; a side necessary—although not sufficient—to our flourishing (if not to our very survival). To be sure, we need the conservative side too. Without order, without a border-walled homebase of custom and security, there can be no adventure in the first place. A bird first has to be cared for with regularity before it can leave the nest. And it needs a nest to come back to. Once a new territory is opened by the visionary youth, the conservative spirit is crucial to making that new territory a stable home, to nesting it, to managing it. Balance is crucial, though. Too much traditionalism, too much sticking with old ways, too much safety in some incubator bubble, and we become rigid and inbred and unable to handle the anomalous. These young rappers, in exploring beyond the walls of taboo, in the very least exercise a muscle important for a healthy society.
It would not be unreasonable, however, for someone to say that—true as it might be, in effect, that these rappers are fulfilling the adventure-seeking part of the balance between chaos and order—some boundaries, for the sake of the stability of our homes and communities and country, should not be pushed. Some walls are high for a reason: perhaps crossing them might invite too much chaos for our own good. To produce lyrics that hint at normalizing or at making seem cool the rape of an eight year old, one might insist, is to cross one of those walls. So especially since they get so much mainstream attention, so many opportunities to leave their mark on impressionable minds, moral panic in the face of such lyrics seems warranted (if not necessary). Contagion no doubt is important, in other words, for the health of our immune systems. But some bugs are just too deadly to allow inside the body politic.
Do these lyrics really amount to the musical equivalent of something like Ebola or the Marburg virus, though? It seems important not to overlook what our intuition tells us. Look into your heart. Be empathetic, especially to the young person you once were. If you do, I think you will see that these rappers are largely just messing around. They are playing with shock, yes, to draw attention and to stand out (and thereby to make money). But they are playing with shock also for a more fundamentally human reason: to explore for themselves—in the safety of a mere simulated reality—what it is like to cross the limits. Being allowed to play with all sorts of fantasies, dark as they sometimes can be, seems crucial to our very humanity. It seems crucial, that is, to our being those beasts with the freedom to envision the wildest scenarios—the freedom that allows us to foresee and adapt and innovate, that allows us to question our norms and resist stifling status quos, that allows us to foresee the dangerous possibilities of going down certain paths, that allows us to understand who we are, that allows us to experience and learn the lessons of diversity with less risk, that allows us to feel renewed hope, that allows us to discharge our bestial forces in healthier ways. Biggie himself is explicit about the fact that he is just playing around. The chorus of “Dreams” repeats “I’m just playing.”
Perhaps the main issue, then, is not so much what Biggie and others express in expressing their humanity. Perhaps a bigger issues is that their fiendish expressions overshadow the others in our culture (the more positive lyrics). And bigger than this perhaps is that, due to lack of education in the private and public spheres, we are unprepared to digest such expressions, unequipped to integrate them into a larger narrative—a narrative of striving for purposive ideals in the face of harsh realities. Perhaps we are out of balance in that regard. Perhaps well-intentioned worriers misplace their energies by focusing so narrowly on the lyrics themselves and into censoring and silencing and shaming the artists.
3
To be fair, directly after Biggie says “I’m just playing” he adds a crucial clause that no doubt will enflame the moral-panic interpretation (especially when we recognize the high likelihood that something like that clause, something like what it means, is implicit in most cases of reprehensible lyrics in rap and beyond). Biggie says, “I’m just playing / but I’m saying.” Now, everyone who speaks contemporary American English understands the force of this “but I’m saying,” understands its force simply seeing it on the page—simply seeing it, that is, without the benefit of hearing it from Biggie, whose cadence and tone rules out any delusions as to its subtextual significance. Anyone steeped in contemporary US mainstream culture will picture Biggie, as he says this phrase, raising his hands from his sides at about a ninety-degree elbow bend—palms turned up, head cocked to the side—while giving a slightly asymmetrical shrug. The phrase, in effect, plays the same role here as it does in, say: “Yeah, I know winning the mega-lotto wouldn’t guarantee my happiness. But I’m saying.” Putting the Raven-Symoné couplet together with the chorus couplet, then, we all can gather Biggie’s full meaning. It is something like: “I wouldn’t really do that shit. I just be bullshittin’. Ya’ll know that. Still, though—and, yeah, your ass knows it too—being able to suck her brand-spanking-new pussy (“no hair between, know what I mean?”) while pumping that little mouth full of cum, no cop worries and shit: God dayum!”
Does this mean that the moral-panic side is the right side, at least in Biggie’s case? There is reason for worry, yes. But the reason for worry is not coming through Biggie for the first time (or through the many other rappers that talk about raping minors). We are beasts at the end of the day, as much as we refuse so often and so thoroughly to face it. Denying our animality is important for denying what frightens us most of all: our mortality. Biggie is shining a light on a dark part in all of us. That dark part might not involve skeeting up little Raven-Symoné’s yellow holes while we choke her into silence—or, perhaps better (and taking a cue from her on-screen dad, Cosby), just drugging her into placidity. The dark resides within us all, nevertheless.
A good deal of heterosexual men—and, given our maniacal drive to reproduce, I would say “pretty much all” were it to come to a girl a bit older (with at least some “hair on the field”)—are supposed to feel an air of camaraderie, a sense of cohesion and of “being seen,” when Biggie says, in effect, “Even though I wouldn’t do that shit, still it would be nice to beat those baby holes up a bit with impunity.” “Speak for yourself,” you might say at this point. But the likelihood is that you, as a heterosexual man, are lying to yourself if you deny it. And when it comes to those to whom this truly does not apply, there are other twisted lyrics that speak to them, evoking a sense of solidarity, by means of celebrating the desire to participate in sleaze. Think of Maliibu Miitch’s lines about how she likes her boyfriends to shoot any person that upsets her. “I like a shooter that steady / be trigger happy in the Camry / Now he gon shoot at niggas like they Bambi / Now he gon shoot at niggas 'cause they offend me.” Or think of the cruel taunting by the City Girls: “Your baby daddy fuckin' me and suckin' me / He don't answer you, bitch, that's because of me.” Or think of the infanticide fantasies, the colicky-baby-in-the-microwave ones on subreddits, we might get one day soon from female rappers: “What happens when that nappy head scream again? / Microwaved dead and yet I’ll blame it on my boyfriend.”
4
The problem with going so far as banning such lyrics, or even just thinking to ourselves how such lyrics reflect the desires of merely the criminal weirdos of humanity, is that doing so—as well-intentioned and sincere as we might feel we are in doing so—serves as a convenient way to hide from ourselves. It serves as a way to say to ourselves “Those are not my fantasies. Those fantasies belong to other people: deviants”—where, for whatever it might be worth to say (although it is not really the point here), those other people, those deviants, are (somewhat understandably, given the hegemony of hypersexual lyrics in the black-artist-dominated mainstream) especially black people.
The danger in thinking that such darkness is only in the other (the outsider, the deranged) should be clear. Just as those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it (as the famous maxim goes), those who are ignorant of the dark parts of themselves are—if not doomed to act them out, then at least—ill-prepared to stay one step ahead of them; ill-prepared to tame the Mr. Hyde when he threatens to arise. Disavowing our shadow elements, pretending they are not there, does not make them go away. It can give them, rather, more control. Denying you have a pedophilia problem, for example, leaves you susceptible to making choices that put you in precarious situations potentially disruptive to public and private relationships as well as to your direct wellbeing. Thinking these dark parts belong to others and not ourselves, which is a common way (along with drug use, of course) for us to avoid facing that they belong to us, can make us more susceptible to acting sordidly or destructively in good conscience and with a sense of moral superiority.
We are strangers to ourselves. The fact that Nazism spread through so many regulars testifies to the envy-driven bit of Hitler we all have in us—the cruel bit we deny and suppress, the amazingly-ancient vicious bit we project onto others, to our own detriment (to our own detriment at least in the sense, to speak by analogy, that it would be a detriment for elementary schools never to practice fire drills on the assumption that “fires do not happen here”). Biggie and so many other rappers, in reminding us of our ruthless and toxic parts, serve to keep us honest with ourselves—honest about how we are not as saintly as we present ourselves or a virtuous as we assume we are. This way we have a chance at being less fragmented as individuals. This way we are better prepared to handle rocky times. Biggie and so many other rappers, in reminding us of the shadow elements we are ever tempted to say belong to others, serve to keep us on guard from becoming their slaves. This way we can make more informed decisions about how best to engage in the world. This way we can even draw upon our dark sides for positive ends (as does a person who, to give an extreme example, uses his firsthand knowledge of serial killing to help police capture serial killers). Awareness of our dark parts in most cases increases the chance of finding nondestructive (if not healthy) outlets for them—outlets such as creating fantasy rap lyrics instead of actually hunting down a Raven-Symoné!
Vile lyrics in rap do play a well-evidenced role in encouraging vile behavior among impressionable youth. But the issue, as I suggested above, might be less about the lyrics themselves, or even about their troubling monopoly over the billboards. Somewhat analogous to the pitiful sex-education in certain abstinence-only communities in the southern US, the issue might be more about our culture’s pitiful efforts to prepare people (especially kids) for handling these lyrics—efforts whose pitifulness is sustained, heartened, by the notion that censoring and silencing and shaming artists are the only ways to go.
* Here I imagine what I might have said to the late civil-rights activist C. Delores Tucker, former secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and former chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus. Tucker famously felt that the depravity glorified in rap lyrics—especially violence, hypersexuality, and drug use—were detrimental to black people and to society as a whole. I contend, although in an approach more empathetic than what we have seen from Tupac and KRS-One (and various other rappers who have responded to Tucker), that even the most abominable rap lyrics serve a positive role for both artist and audience.