Book of Rhymes (21 page)

Rap shares most of the rest of its basic storytelling conventions with other narrative forms, poetic and otherwise. In a rap narrative, chronology usually moves from beginning to middle to end. It most often presents an initial situation
followed by a sequence of events that leads to a change or reversal, culminating in a revelation of insight enabled by that reversal. It puts characters in relation to one another; for rap this usually means the first-person narrator in relation to others who sometimes are given voice as well—either through indirect quotation or through the introduction of another (or several other) MCs. Finally, it involves patterning of formal and thematic elements that support and extend the narrative action. All of these conventions are open to revision and even rejection. The one inviolate element of rap storytelling, however, is voice.

Voice in storytelling is the governing authorial intelligence of a narrative. Voice would seem to be a given in rap: the MC and speaker's voice are one and the same. We assume that MCs are rapping to us in their own voices and, as such, that what they say is true to their own experience. All along, however, MCs have been taking far greater liberties with voice than their public stances of authenticity would suggest. Rap becomes much more interesting as poetry and rappers become more impressive as poets when we acknowledge rap as a kind of performance art, a blend of fact and fantasy, narrative and drama expressed in storytelling.

Storytelling is, at its base, a form of communication between artist and audience. Its vehicle of expression is voice. Voice is, of course, the physical instrument of expression, the sound we hear when an MC is rapping. It is also the term that defines the perspective poets take in relation to their audience. Used in this sense, a given rapper might employ multiple “voices,” even in a single song. T. S. Eliot distinguished three possible voices in poetic narrative:

 

 

Rap rarely employs the first voice, the cosseted tone of a poet addressing him- or herself in isolation. When they do use it, it can have powerful effects, as when Nas reflects upon his own life, or when Biggie contemplates his own death. The second and third voices, the narrative and the dramatic, are both common in rap. The narrative voice is that of the MC directly addressing an audience—this is by far the most prevalent voice, employed in braggadocio and battle raps. The dramatic voice, by contrast, uses the persona of a constructed character to address an audience (or another constructed character in the rhyme).

Narrative and dramatic voices often interpenetrate in rap. The consequence of this fusion is that audiences often don't know what to make of the rapper's poetic voice. Is the “I” speaking to them simply a narrator relating his lived experience, or is it a character in a poetic drama the rapper imagines for us? As a genre, rap has found great artistic success in having it both ways; but it has come at a social cost.

Rap most often combines the intimacy of the narrative voice with the imaginative freedom of the dramatic voice. It shares this impulse with the tall tale of the oral tradition. As an audience we have yet to condition ourselves to understand rap's tall tales as acts of projection. Rap's relation to reality is
like an inside joke that much of the listening public doesn't get. The joke lies in the MC's winking assertion of the “truth” of obvious fictions. Taken to the extreme, like in the short-lived “horrorcore” rap genre in which rappers like the Gravediggaz (a group that included both the RZA and Prince Paul) described macabre tales to rival the dark imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, this interplay is obvious to all but the most obtuse listener. But rap usually resides in the indeterminacy found in between the narrative and the dramatic voice.

As a narrative form, rap can be usefully compared to the dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologues are “poems spoken by a character through a persona (Greek for ‘mask'), rather than by the poet or an unidentified speaker.” Think of Marshall Mathers rapping as Eminem rapping as Slim Shady, for instance, or Troy Donald Jamerson rapping as Pharoahe Monch. “On 99 percent of the songs that I do,” Pharoahe explains, “I take on a presence or a character.” This is far from unusual in rap. So where does the poet's direct expression end and the persona begin? Answering this rests upon how we interpret the “I” in rap.

The dramatic monologue is most often associated with the Victorian poets. Robert Browning's poems like
My Last Duchess
and
Fra Lippo Lippi
offer powerful first-person poetic narratives that illustrate the speaker's descent into madness. In their poetic voice, they involve both the subjectivity of the “I” as poet and persona as well as the element of impersonation—of rendering, often to the point of exaggeration, the characteristic vocal qualities of another. This is precisely what we see happening when Eminem raps as Slim Shady. The voice takes on a nasally whine, the flow becomes ecstatic and erratic,
all while the lyrics describe exaggerated and comic acts of violence.

Dramatic monologues extend MCs' first-person narrative voices, freeing them to say things they might not say in their own voice and explore territories of experience they might not otherwise visit were it not for the liberation of imaginative distance. MCs have written rhymes that leave their persona incarcerated (Ice Cube's “My Summer Vacation”) or even dead (Cube's “Alive on Arrival” or Nas's “Undying Love”)—a host of circumstances that the MC might not, or even could not, have the firsthand experience to describe.

In its use of dramatic monologue rap extends a tradition with deep roots in African-American expressive culture. The dramatic monologue is the model upon which such aspects of the oral tradition like the toasts and the stories of John Henry and Stagolee emerge. “In both Stagolee and the dramatic monologue,” notes Cecil Brown, “the narrator creates a character who gives the audience a look into his special world. The audience sees through the eyes of the character the rapper creates. It is the ‘I' that makes the bridge between the ‘I' of the rapper and the ‘I' of the character.”

By severing—or at least loosening—the bond between personal identity and first-person narration, rappers find a new expressive range for their rhymes. Occasionally, rappers have gone so far as to relinquish the “I” entirely as the focal point of the lyrics. The effect is to demand that the listener understand as fiction the story contained in the lyrics. Rapping in the third person, while certainly uncommon, forces listeners to acknowledge the constructedness of the narrative. Common's “Testify” does precisely this, rendering a taut
story of deception and betrayal while staying entirely in the third person. By relinquishing the first-person focus on the narrative, Common establishes a new relationship with his audience as equal bystanders in a drama of his own creation.

More common are those instances in which the MC retains the first-person voice, but retreats to the peripheries as a first-person narrator of other characters' actions. This highlights the rapper's role as storyteller even as it retains a direct connection between the story and the teller, the teller and the audience. Tupac's “Brenda's Got a Baby,” Nas's “Sekou Story,” and Slick Rick's “Children's Story” all come to mind. The “I” of the MC becomes the eyes of the audience, revealing a host of experiences both real and imagined.

But how do rappers see themselves in relation to the stories they tell? Do they self-consciously assert the dramatic, the fictional element, of the their storytelling? The question of authenticity in rap is phrased as a question of sincerity in literary poetry: “It may be of great interest to discover how accurately a poem reflects its author's experience, attitudes, or beliefs; but this is a question that belongs to biography not to criticism.” Testifying before a Congressional subcommittee on profanity in rap in 2007, David Banner made a clear and compelling case for rap's respect as a dramatic medium: “The same respect is often not extended to hip-hop artists as to those in other arenas. Stephen King and Steven Spielberg are renowned for their horrific creations. These movies are embraced as art. Why then is our content not merely deemed horror music?”

One could answer Banner's question any number of ways. Perhaps it is a matter of racial, generational, and socio-economic bias. Perhaps the difference is formal, having to do with the relation between creator and creation, the speaker
and the spoken. Rap, after all, relies upon a near collapse of the distinction, while the other forms keep them clearly separate. Perhaps the best response comes from Jay-Z. He addresses in broad terms the very question taken up at the Congressional hearing: the perceived virulence of rap as an influence on popular culture. His answer gets to the bottom of the question of the “real” in rap.

 

 

Hip-hop storytelling is what happens when elements of the real become a “fantastic story.” Devin the Dude echoes Jay-Z's point about fact and fiction, playfully dividing the sources of his storytelling down by percentage: “I'd say 60 percent is really just personal shit I went through; 20 percent is stuff I know about somebody who's close, or a story I heard. Ten percent is wishful thinking. And the other 10 percent is some high shit we just thought of [Laughs.].” Regardless of how it breaks down, rap storytelling is the vernacular product drawn from multiple sources—fact, fiction, and everything in between.

If we understand rap simply as fact—as it would seem many Americans do—then it's no wonder that so many are
scandalized by it. But if we treat it as fantasy, as entertainment, then its offensiveness becomes indistinguishable from that of other explicit material that those very same Americans who criticize rap seem to have a voracious appetite for consuming when it comes in the form of movies or television, books or graphic novels. Rap's difference from these other forms is not one of substance but of rhetoric, not of content but of packaging. That packaging is both the product of corporate media and the stuff of the artists themselves.

Unlike writers or filmmakers, rappers rely upon the assumption of first-hand experience with their subject matter. Some have called attention to the irony of the rapper who finds fortune and fame by rapping about already having fortune and fame. Rap relies upon this slippage. “Others talk about it while I live it” is a common boast. Both artist and audience consciously create this illusion and tacitly agree to overlook its artificiality. But this fiction has a way of intruding upon fact, be it through acts of actual violence by concertgoers at rap shows—a problem that almost doomed the rap-concert business in the 1990s—to the artists themselves trying to live up to their own lyrics.

As a result, some of rap's greatest fictions have become “facts” in the public consciousness. Audiences tend to accept uncritically what rappers say as the truth. Even rappers themselves sometimes buy into their own fictions. When Tupac Shakur was in high school he wasn't gangbanging, he was in the drama club. He didn't have a criminal record until
after
he constructed the Thug Life persona that both he and his fans came to see as “real.” It is a credit to Tupac as an artist that he rendered such a vivid character in rhyme that people could mistake it for the truth, and yet that identification may
have cost him his life. Rarely are the stakes of rap storytelling as high as they were for Tupac, and yet almost every story rappers tell plays upon the line that divides fantasy from reality.

Undoubtedly the themes of sex and violence are disproportionately represented in rap. This seemingly impoverished range of subjects, however, has produced stories of exquisite complexity and nuance. The theme of a story is also an occasion for expression, a way of making new meanings out of familiar circumstances.

In the mid-1990s, perhaps the dominant narrative voice belonged to its dominant MC, the Notorious B.I.G., who weaved tales of gangster excess drawn more from films like
Scarface, Bad Lieutenant,
and
King of New York,
than personal experience. What makes Biggie's stories stand out is his genius in pacing, and his ability to match violence with rueful comedy. “I Got a Story to Tell,” from
Life After Death,
the last album completed in his lifetime, released just two weeks after his death, shows him at the height of his creative powers. To a spare beat set by a wicked kick and snare he rhymes of a dangerous liaison with another man's woman.

What begins as a tale of sexual adventure quickly becomes one of ingenuity as the satisfied couple (“She came twice, I came last / Roll a grass”), resting in the bed of the absent cuckold—a player from the New York Knicks—is interrupted by the door opening downstairs. While the woman panics, Big stays calm (“She don't know I'm cool as a fan / Gat in hand, I don't want to blast her man / But I can and I will, though”), and directs her to stall him while he disguises himself for an ambush. When the player comes upstairs, Biggie is waiting, gun drawn and scarf around his face, ordering the man to give him all his money. Not only, Biggie tells us,
does he leave with $100,000 in cash, but also with the knowledge that he has duped the man into seeing an unlikely robbery in place of a dangerous liaison. Triumphant, Biggie concludes: “Grab the keys to the five, call my niggas on the cell, / Bring some weed, I got a story to tell.” The verse clocks in at less than three minutes, but the track continues for an additional minute and a half as Biggie tells the story
again
to his boys, this time talking instead of rhyming. By amplifying what was already a dramatic narrative, Biggie has, in effect, enshrined his own verse in legend.