History months in the U.S. separate Americans’ obligation to jump into the struggles of those who face oppression, which prevent us from experiencing and learning about the similarities and differences in their fights against systemic oppression. In February, Americans listened to protest music last month to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, but switched the dial to punk this month, embracing the white “feminist” movement of the Riot Grrrls. What goes ignored is the music that fluidly moves across the boundaries of genre/social issues, celebrating and universalizing the artists’ personal experiences, because it doesn’t shy away from the complexities of intersecting identities.
Labelled as crass, misogynistic, classist, and reverse racist, rap is actually the kind of boundary-defying music we ignore and demonize. A melodic form of poetry, it subverts the normalized power structures that enforce oppression, giving the American public an unheard form of expression.
Rap as opera, rap as tragedy
German aestheticians put opera and tragedy on opposite poles and rap acts as an intermediary. The canonical Italian opera romantically engages our senses to create artistic value: words are meaningless but the melody itself captures the truth. Oppositely, Greek tragedies, like Oedipus Tyrannus, transform the words themselves into beauty. Rap expresses the artist’s truth through both melody and verbally dense lyrics.
With mumble rap becoming mainstream, a common complaint is this type of rap is too difficult to understand. However, that’s precisely the point: the U.S. government systematically denies the necessary resources to properly educate inner-city American youth, who are disproportionately Black and brown. In a way to claim and form their own voices, mumble rap emerged, and revered music critics do not hail it as “great art” because it completely subverts Western genre and poetic form. Just because one cannot hear what is said, doesn’t mean there is nothing being said as mumble rappers craft abstraction with their tongues.
Music critics widely panned “Gucci Gang” by Lil Pump for its repetition and mumbling. However, operatically, the rap song crafts a simultaneously joyous and somber musicality. It replicates the uncertainty of newfound success, capturing the feeling of that gray state. Moreover, separately, the words and melody themselves are simple, but overlaid together, they take on a new complexity. Lil Pump constantly repeats “Gucci” and “Gang,” but those words are rhymed with “chain”, “cocaine”, “name” and “Balmain.” Each rhyme focuses on the superficiality of wealth, forming a poignant indictment of growing credit coinciding with growing consumption of popularized luxury brands. “Name” or individual identity is paradoxically combined with “Gang” to describe the presumptive loss of personal identity and the gaining of a new one as the artist enters the public eye. “Gucci Gang” protests nominal capital accumulation and advocates for collective action. “Gucci Gang” envisions the collective fight against capitalism whilst still under a capitalist system. Whatever the merits of the proposed argument, Lil Pump still has something to say, and people have heard, felt his voice, five-times certifying “Gucci Gang” as a platinum record.
Any word can rhyme
Slurs and words like ni**a, b**ch, h*e, etc. carry historically charged weights and for good reason too as they have been used to dehumanize BIPOC. In rap, the letters of these words themselves hold no power as rappers deconstruct them to create new meanings. Yet, rappers are always berated for doing so even though Emily Dickinson, the famous poet, is lauded for rhyming “boot” with “antelope”, through an arguably literally meaningless line: “And a Chamois’ Silver Boot\and a stirrup of an antelope.” Why is it that Blueface is not celebrated for rhyming “enough” with “deadlocs,” (a word, like Shakespeare, Blueface invented)? One may walk into a gallery, look at a photograph of a bleeding naked womxn, and immediately endow it with the idea that the photographer intended to comment on rape and the male gaze. The barrier in understanding is simply one of privilege. The photographer had a three-thousand dollar camera and a modern art gallery as their platform. Similarly, while American society ignored Dickinson during her time, she was a good poet born into wealth who had the time and resources not only to write but also to immortalize her writings. She was bound to be found. Yet Blueface is a former gangbanger and high school dropout who, unlike Dickinson, tattooed Benjamin Franklin on his face. Our socially, economically, and politically oppressive systems have conditioned us to believe that only white, comfortably wealthy, and supported artists can conceptualize beyond the literal.
However, all great artists can go beyond the conventions of their mediums. A unique product of Black culture, the word thotiana, popularized by Blueface’s “Thotiana,” stands for That Ho Over There, and its first recorded use was in 2014 by Jokanojoke. In other words, “thotiana,” a word that defies the categories of Western English grammar (noun, adjective, verb, etc.), emerged independently of the white patriarchy. In his song, Blueface used it to describe a Black womxn who wields her power over the word Thotiana in order to influence the “gang.” To hear the merits of “Thotiana,” one only needs to believe in the invention of new words and meaning. These inventions are useful alternatives to the English language, which is constructed out of (like everything else) oppressive power structures. They pour water on The Wicked Wizard of the West, eroding the rigid spellbook of the patriarchy through a destruction of cultural hegemony.
Reappropriating cis men’s sexualization of power
Rap has been converging towards a framework that advocates for the use of sexual power to reappropriate capital. Rappers like Lil Kim, Missy Elliot, Lauryn Hill, and more recently, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion have pioneered a new kind of rap that prioritizes the experiences of Black womxn, the group that American society has historically, disproportionately fetishized. However, cis men still dominate rap, and they have created an intriguing dialogue with today’s Black female rappers. An example is Kanye West’s song with Lil Pump, “I Love It.” Highly controversial, this song was so blatantly combative and prescriptive it was like radio stations were blasting Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” without knowing it was criticizing their bosses. The premise of “I Love It” is that someone “is such a f**king ho, [Kanye] loves it.” People didn’t like that Kanye said he “liked hos.” However, taking what he said for its literal meaning dismisses the nuance present in the entire song. At the beginning of the song, Adele Givens, a comedian, says, “Cause you know in the old days they couldn’t say the sh*t they wanted to say/ They had to fake orgasms and sh*t/ We can tell n**as today, ‘Hey, I wanna cum, mothaf**ka.’ Like Givens, Kanye, in this song, satirizes the sexual domicile and shows the new power womxn may wield. He explains he’s a “sick f**k” who is in only relationships for a “quick f**k” but he buys partners “sick truck[s],” “new tits,” and “that nip-tuck.” Womxn may deploy their sexualities as their weapons of power, to take back the capital they’re owed, to accumulate wealth by turning an oppressive construct on its head and dumping it straight into a bucket of water.
Noah Tavares ’24 (noahtavares@college.harvard.edu) would like to surf on the 3rd wave.