Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis
"What's Good is, among a great many other things, a byproduct of joyful obsession and immersion into both language and sound, an intersection that offers a rich and expansive land upon which to play." —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
" . . . an often hilarious, surprisingly moving and always joyful paean to rap’s relationship to words."—Jayson Greene, The New York Times
"Rap, he is not afraid to say, is as close to a universal tongue as we have."—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies.
Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What's Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between.
"For those of us who love rap, What's Good is a gift. The book offers a new set of eyes and ears through which to see and to hear the language of rap. Its brief and brilliant chapters are like the best kinds of freestyles: spontaneous and structured, startling and profound. A remarkable achievement." —Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
"Could this be the rap equivalent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift or Marina Warner's Once Upon A Time? Anyhow, it's an electrifying book, full of wild epiphanies and provocations, an exhibition of a critical mind in full and open contact with their subject at the highest level, with a winning streak of confessional intimacy as well." —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest: A Novel
"What's Good is a feat of critical precision and personal obsession: Daniel Levin Becker's deep appreciation for rap is rangy and illuminating, and his delight in language is infectious. What a thrill to swing so gracefully from Lil Wayne to Mary Ruefle to the lyrical evolution of 'tilapia'; pure pleasure. A generous, joyful exegesis."—Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780872868762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | City Lights Books |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2022 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 692,222 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PREFACE
If you’re reading this, no Drake, it’s too late. Rap has moved on. This book cannot be held responsible for or looked to for comment on who is newly canonized or canceled or dearly departed, who’s just been handed a jail sentence or an honorary Ivy League degree, how we’re currently feeling about Kanye West. This book wishes those people the best in whatever awaits them, but it has no insight into the future, which is to say your present. At most it has modest hopes and expectations—that words like opp and twelve will sound as canonically worn-out to your ear as sucker and five-o do to mine, that you have come to lionize Dreezy and Kash Doll and think Desiigner is a typo and need someone to explain the Drake thing (read on)—but it doesn’t know anything beyond its now, the end of 2020. We can’t move through time that way, this book and I, and I bring it up because one of the magical and confounding things about rap music is that somehow it can.
This book is, was destined all along to be, the product of a moment: an interval of joyous immersion and contemplation and study that lasted the better part of a decade but whose subject spills past its temporal limits in both directions. My intent was less to write anything definitive or exhaustive than to propose a sort of interpretive mesh whose specific examples—novel vegetal euphemisms for marijuana, best practices for credit card scams—could be replaced intuitively, productively, by fresher material. “Write like something you don’t mean to be erased but one day know will,” as Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album: “then let them try.” I wanted to highlight, in between the specifics I did manage to inventory, some things that seem to me to be timeless in rap, transcendent or unchanging or in permanent flux. I wanted to think out loud about why I can’t get them out of my head, about how they work and what they mean about language, that amber in which timelessness is visible when you squint.
I finished fussing over the mesh some time in 2018. The world continued to spin. I had written about the weird life some rap lyrics come to lead when commodified beyond context, and about Jay-Z’s wanton borrowings from other people’s raps, and then Jay sued an Australian company called The Little Homie over a book called A B to Jay-Z, which contained the line If you’re having alphabet problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but my ABCs ain’t one. (The Little Homie pointed out, craftily, that Jay-Z had appropriated those words from Ice-T. You probably know better than I how the case ended.) I had written about the worrisome trend of criminal courts in America admitting rap lyrics as evidence, and then I learned that rappers in England were getting court orders amounting to five-year censorship sentences. At some point Donald Trump pulled some strings to get A$AP Rocky out of jail in Sweden; later his reelection campaign scored endorsements from Ice Cube and Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, who praised his criminal reform efforts. At some point Kanye, who appears here in a song glorifying the Grammy Awards, tweeted a video of himself pissing on one. At some point opp was an answer in a Times crossword. I could go on listing these screw-turns of complexity, these slippages of reality from where I left it, but my point is that eventually the list will just be this book itself. So it goes. I’ve expanded or nuanced or corrected some things, but even now what follows feels like a time capsule from a time remembered only distantly.
At the end of this book I wonder about the notion that we speak a common language in America, about whether we can really take it on faith that we do if “black lives matter” is a controversial sentence and Eric Garner can say I can’t breathe plainly, repeatedly, and still be choked to death by police. And then this year George Floyd was murdered in the same way, in spite of saying the same words. A grim slippage, a terrible kind of rhyme. By then, and ever since, rap had begun to seem like a smaller and smaller subplot in a story about the world. Has it always been irresponsible to conflate rap with the black experience in America? Is it frivolous to think it can help us learn to understand each other? Maybe, maybe not. But rap is always present, its language, its attitude, its technologies of storytelling and misdirection and economy, the way it dramatizes pleasure and sadness and anger and pain. It finds its way into everything. It’s history telling itself in real time, it’s a telescope and a megaphone. It’s a loop, at least for me, that makes the present that much richer, that much more intelligible.
Floyd was a rapper too, for a time. He didn’t make a career of it, but he made some moves in one of the most magnetic and strange rap scenes of the twentieth century, and if his talents were modest he still fit in perfectly there, sounded buoyant and airy and free even over the glacial grind of a DJ Screw beatscape. The thing is he still sounds that way now, however many years hence. His loss is senseless and tragic, and neither this book nor I need to see the future to know it will still be true at the moment you’re reading this, no matter many new bad things have happened since. No matter how late it’s gotten. But what a joyous, generous, weightless way for his voice to stay alive. What a place to spend forever.
dlb, December 2020
*********
WORD MACHINES
Coke like a caterpillar, I make butter fly
Cam’ron, in Clipse, “Popular Demand (Popeyes)” (2009)
**
As promised, we’ll start small. Poetry, said Mallarmé, is made of words, not ideas; so too is it too with rap. I know I said there was so much more to rap than words, but that was pages ago. We’ve all grown so much since then.
Lots of the lyrics that commandeer my rewind button are what you’d call one-liners: they’re self-contained thoughts, single servings of imagery and wit rather than subordinate parts of a larger rhetorical proposition. (Lots of great rap songs, in fact, are sprawling assemblages of essentially unrelated one-liners.) Coke like a caterpillar, I make butter fly is a good example; I’m coming after you like the letter V is another, one that in fact so fully assumes its one-linerness that I’ve forgotten the line it rhymes with. I know it comes toward the end of a seven-minute Midwest-rap posse cut, but I’ve retained little else, and in a way that’s exactly what I’m talking about: one line from a rap song may be a single brick in an entire wall, but one brick can be the reason we take note of the wall in the first place, remember it when we don’t even remember what rhymed with letter V.
The funny thing about one-liners—funnier, at times, than the one-liners themselves—is that as a rule they take several lines of explanation to unpack with any precision or utility. They’re mechanisms that require more energy to assemble than to release. I’m coming after you like the letter V is not a particularly complex construction, meaning-wise: the pronoun you sounds like the letter U, which the letter V comes after in the Roman alphabet, much as one might vengefully come after an enemy, that enemy being you, the pronoun, and voilà, sentence diagrammed, joke autopsied, spring-loaded snake stuffed back into novelty can of mixed nuts. There is all the same a deliberate functionality to it, a specific sequence in which the words, few as they are, have to hit. The ironic part is how many more words you have to throw at it afterwards just to reassemble it.
Same, then, with Cam’ron on coke and caterpillars. One line, eight words—you’re supposed to hear seven, but this particular mechanism doesn’t engage until you parse apart the last two. By my count, there are three simultaneous meanings in the second half alone, distinct but overlapping:
- I sell crack (butter) so quickly it appears to fly away;
- I make crack fashionable (fly);
- I turn the ugly act of selling crack into a thing of beauty (a butterfly).
I’m already getting ahead of myself. How did we get to (a)? What makes butter crack? Why not give equal consideration to an interpretive scenario where Cam whiles away a slow day by making macramé butterflies or flinging pats of Land O’ Lakes at passersby?
In a word, context. I happen to know that Cam’ron is the capo of the Harlem crack-rap syndicate The Diplomats, and that this line concludes his guest verse on a record by the Virginia crack-rap duo Clipse. (Crack-rap is in no way a dig at either group, by the way, both of which rose to fame and greatness by rapping with tirelessly inventive gusto about selling crack, one convention of doing which is that you almost always call it something else, such as rock or krills or yams or butter.) If you have some inkling of these connections—and it’s not like Cam keeps them a secret in the rest of his verse—you may also surmise that caterpillar pertains in some oblique way to the drug trade, that indeed any unexpected word in a crack-rap lyric will probably bend toward drugs, connotatively speaking, like a flower toward the sun. If you don’t, not to worry: that’s what the word coke is for.
So you rewind the thought, turning it over, looking for the seams. How do the two halves of the lyric fit together? Coke is like a caterpillar, and caterpillars become butterflies, so what does coke become? Why would Cam say I make butterfly rather than I make butterflies or I make a butterfly? This is the mechanism starting to work, defamiliarizing the thought in its constituent parts, raising questions you would never think to ask about the individual words by themselves. You know perfectly well what a garden-variety word like butterfly means until suddenly you don’t—until you see it reacting strangely to the words around it, bending at odd angles, splitting itself apart, somehow making butter fly while the rest gives chase.
Some rappers enjoy unpacking their lyrics at the craft level, or at least oblige when asked to, but I’ve never heard Cam’ron break down any of the sharp gems he drops so routinely. The differential between talking and doing crops up a lot in hip-hop, and being able to create a perfect little word machine like this is different from being able to explain it, much less wanting to explain it. But that’s the final beauty of a confection like Coke like a caterpillar, a riddle and its resolution contained in eight words: in spite of its clockwork construction, its elaborate internal contingencies, it asks nothing besides patience and experimentation to teach you to make sense of it.
********
SLANG EVOLUTION
Speakin’ my language if you talkin’ ’bout tilapia
Say you want this money, nigga, so what the hell is stoppin’ ya
Young Jeezy, in U.S.D.A., “Black Dreams” (2009)
**
I once got about a third of the way into what I thought was a marijuana purchase before I realized I was buying cocaine. The misunderstanding had nothing to do with the word tilapia, but the situations feel similar. Patience and experimentation alone won’t get me to the bottom of what Young Jeezy is telling me here; if someone in a dark alley this evening whispered tilapia at me, I’m sure I wouldn’t know whether I was being offered food or offered drugs or insulted or incited to a sex act. The first thing any dictionary will tell you about tilapia is that it’s a freshwater cichlid fish, which is also the last thing I’d expect to be discussing in an alley, or for that matter in a Young Jeezy song.
Because, once again, context. I’ll go ahead and assume Jeezy is talking about drugs here, since, like Clipse and The Diplomats, he built his whole career on a remarkably steadfast foundation of talking about drugs. There have been times, though, when I’ve heard tilapia in a rap—it happens more often than you’d think—and context suggests it does refer to the freshwater fish, or to a meal made of same, or to a woman. (Maybe she has pursed lips or beady eyes? I don’t know what her deal is.) Sometimes it could plausibly be any of the above: We get respected in the streets like the mafia / Young Future in the cut with tilapia.
In principle, there’s nothing weird about this. We use the same word to mean different things in different circumstances; if we didn’t, the English lexicon would number in the millions of words rather than the hundreds of thousands. The operative meaning of ride depends on whether you’re standing in an amusement park or a parking lot. Ditto park, for that matter. But it is a little weird to discover that I can’t account for all the things tilapia means, even though if you’d asked me I would have said I knew how to define it. It’s a funny feeling, to know a word perfectly well until suddenly you don’t. Here I’ve been talking about tilapia for three paragraphs, and I still can’t say with confidence that I’m speaking Jeezy’s language.
In principle again, it would be hard to imagine a better example of a word that exists to name a particular thing. A tilapia is a fish; that fish is a tilapia. But the world is a complex three-dimensional space, and language works overtime to keep up. There are actually multiple species of fish that share the name, some of which aren’t even in the genus tilapia, some that spend their lives swimming around in the south of Africa and some, rather unluckier, that get caught and eaten in any number of preparations. We use the same word for all of these—individuals and groups alike, too, because at some point someone decided to make fish words in English both countable and uncountable—which means that in practice, within this one apparently specific word, there are multiple senses, multiple tilapia, between which new tilapias sometimes sprout like semantic moss. Something that has an anonymously fishy look or smell? Close enough. A drug? A beady-eyed woman? A nonce rhyme for mafia? Sure, if you can make it sound good. The word has its finite number of stable, attested meanings, but the intermediate values between them, like the fractions between zero and one are theoretically infinite.
This is just how languages grow. Words extrude new facets all the time, getting more particular or more general through invention or cooptation or corruption, and one of the truly enthralling things about language is that the old ones don’t disappear—they just recede into these deep pockets of ancillary signification, distinct from one another but held in place by ghostly affinities. Why does rare mean bloody? Why is the quick part of a fingernail? Did you know picturesque had a Victorian sense? Ho used to be unisex; cock meant vagina in some places until the middle of the twentieth century. A dude was a dandy, a fop, a city slicker, an east coaster; now it can be as general as “male person” or as precise as “you’re being very un-Dude” depending on how you inflect it. Swag has eighteen senses (plus two draft definitions) over four entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, spanning 1303 to 2002, from “a bulging bag” to “bold self-assurance in style and manner.” Rock and roll doesn’t mean fucking anymore, but you can see why it used to if you think about it for a minute.
Sometimes two wholly unrelated ships come to dock in the same phonemic port—like bat or fluke or doge, which is both a sixteenth-century Venetian magistrate and a Shiba Inu surrounded by captions like very excite and such delishus—but most often the senses connect across time, through back channels forged by metaphor or memory or accident, a whole network of tunnels under the surface of contemporary spoken English. The most modern usages of viral and tweet and drone would be unintelligible to a person born in 1900, but once you showed them what those words mean now (along with an apologetic recap of late-capitalist techno-utopianism, I imagine) they could probably trace a path from past to present.
And so my best guess for tilapia is that it’s fallen under the gravitational pull of fish scale, which has become common rap slang for high-purity cocaine due to the shiny flakes it contains in uncut form. Someone pointed out the resemblance once, someone else riffed on it, then it happened a few more times, and before long the semantic bridge between fish and drugs was sturdy enough to support a whole piscine menagerie: tilapia, sea bass, snapper. Shorty sniffing haddock in the attic. Likewise, because the dime novelist Ned Buntline used cheese to mean money way back in 1850, we have no trouble now putting two and two together when Cardi B talks about that queso or Dr. Dre calls himself young black Rockefeller, hella swiss and mozzarella. Touch my cheddar, feel my Beretta, warns the Notorious B.I.G. Real mannish with my Spanish, says E-40: If it ain’t about no gouda, partna, you can vanish.
None of this is unique to hip-hop vernacular; all words in all registers are fair game for semantic repurposing by hooligans and druggies and marketers and soulless app developers. But rap is restless and easily bored. It abhors linguistic stasis. So the symbolic placeholder for “money” shapeshifts from cheeses to quiches to curds—I turn my concerns into words I could earn a couple curds and whey with—even as it wanders into other associative chains based on its color, on the form factor of its protuberance (You know it ain’t nothing to drop a couple stacks on you; Can’t wear skinny jeans ’cause my knots don’t fit), on the number of commas required to write out the full amount, on the white guy depicted on the bill (It’s all about the Benjamins; Pocket full of ivy and you know the faces blue).
Thinkin’ of a master plan
’Cause ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand
So I dig into my pocket, all my money’s spent
So I dig deeper, but still coming up with lint
So I start my mission, leave my residence
Thinking how could I get some dead presidents?
Guns get distilled to make (Uzi, Glock, Desert Eagle) or material (chrome, steel, stainless) or metaphorical function (Not toes or MC when I say hammer time; Keeping my toaster in a shoulder holster). Oral sex has been head since the forties, hence brain; hence face and neck and skull; hence dome, which was already slang for head in its nonsexual sense.
A hundred thousand dollars just in two days
I don’t fuck with niggas ’cause they two-faced
I only fuck with bitches for that toupee (the top, nigga!)
These Givenchys, I ain’t worried ’bout no new Js
Once upon a time I’m leaving forked off into parallel chains: I’m out became I’m outie became I’m Audi, and I’m gone became I’m a ghost became I’m ghost, thereby opening the way to all things spectral including, thanks to Patrick’s starring role in the movie Ghost, I’m Swayze. (The path from rappers’ use of this construction almost exclusively to brag about peacing out right after sex to the contemporary sense of ghosting—abruptly severing communications with no explanation—is a great example of two distinct inflections that have a much greater affinity than they appear to at first glance.)
Women flash us, don’t know? You better ask us
A bastard with more contacts than Lens Crafters
Tear down the rafters, venereals couldn’t clap us
You need practice; hit chicks then I’m Casper
We know butter means crack, but it also stands in for luxury, for smoothness, for anything yellow—sometimes more than one at once. Not long ago I heard Roc Marciano refer to the drug hustle as weighing grams of Land O’ Lakes and then, a verse later, threaten to butter your slut up like a waffle. We also use the same words in the same language to mean different things at the same time. It’s chaos and it’s beautiful.
This is, again, how languages grow: constantly, digging ever deeper into the pocket and finding new intermediate values and metaphors and substitutions, expanding degree by degree of separation. I like to string together these clusters of near-synonyms and consider the connoted concept at the center—heater, burner, toaster, biscuit; bail, bounce, dip, duck, jet—and listen to what they say about the difference between knowing words and understanding things. It feels a bit like growing constantly too.
***
SLANG AND SLIPPERINESS
Keep searching all you want and try your local library
You’ll never find a rhyme like this in any dictionary
EMD, in UTFO, “Roxanne, Roxanne” (1984)
**
“The slang we be sayin’, G, it could mean whatever at that time,” Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan told The Source in 2000. Take the word lobsterhead, which he uses in the song “Wildflower”: “If a nigga fit that type of category, then he a lobsterhead. It’s just that—slang. It’s real, but it’s what it means at that time.”
Ghostface, whose fifth solo album is called Fishscale, calls to mind Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking-Glass, when he explains “in rather a scornful tone” that when he uses a word “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” This sounds good but is mostly not actually true, slang tending to be both more and less than what the speaker intends, depending on the interpreter. More when we connect with it—I don’t know any lobsterheads personally, but maybe you do and didn’t know it until right now?—and less when we don’t even register it as slang.
Lobsterhead isn’t particularly challenging as slang goes, but it’s as handy a case study as any on how well Humpty’s argument from mastery comes to life when exemplified by Ghostface and the rest of the Clan, who bend the English phrase to their will in a way that’s almost always accessible without being altogether clear. Wu-Tang’s resolute, practically reckless inventiveness with language earned them an entry all to themselves in Alonzo Westbrook’s Hip Hoptionary, under “Wu-bonics”: “the comingling of words that sound good but don’t always make clear sense, i.e., using the name ‘lobster head’ to make a rhyme.” Lobsterhead doesn’t actually rhyme with anything in “Wildflower”—Ghost just calls a dude this lobsterhead-ass nigga—but how do you hear that and not want to know more? And once you want to know, where, besides through the looking glass, do you go to find out?
**
“I heard they had a hip-hop slang book,” says Method Man, also of the Wu-Tang Clan, beaming ecstatically in a scene from the 1997 rap documentary Rhyme & Reason. “And they had words in there like b-boy, b-girl, fresh, chill… we ain’t used them shits since we was like nine years old out this motherfucker, man.” He turns to dap a guy sitting on a couch behind him whose face is obscured by an off-white balaclava. “We don’t even be saying cool anymore,” Meth continues, back still to the camera. My best guess is that he’s referring not to Hip Hoptionary, which didn’t come out until 2002, but to Lois Stavsky’s and Isaac Mozeson’s 1995 A 2 Z: The Book of Rap & Hip-Hop Slang—but the identity of the book isn’t really important. It should be obvious why rap’s constantly expanding vernacular is a descriptivist lexicographer’s dream, and also why the hope of ever doing the job authoritatively or comprehensively is insane. A 2 Z is out of print, as are most of the other glossaries that bubbled up around the end of the twentieth century. Ironically, a lot of the hip-hop slang books I know of are available only at my local library.
Slang is insular and fleeting by nature and purpose, committed to and energized by its own novelty and indecipherability to all but a select in-group of outsiders. “Nonstandard words for nonstandard people,” as Paul Beatty puts it. Rap has the wiry restlessness of any vernacular art form and the don’t-call-it-a-corpus unruliness of any slang corpus, but that’s not all. There’s another wrinkle of richness and resistance in signifying, which anthropologist Claudia Mitchell-Kernan says “incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or messages.” Plus, subcultures need antagonists, and the norms of “standard” English have always been white ones, which means we’ve got a pretty sound straw man in the dictionary. “The words given the special Black semantic slant tend to lose their linguistic currency in the black community,” wrote Geneva Smitherman in 1977, “if or when they move into the white mainstream.” Per John Russell and Russell John Rickford, the language is “forever morphing” by design, “constantly reinventing itself, bumping off words that were considered tony just the other day (but that have now been mainstreamed and co-opted by Madison Avenue to hawk everything from cereal to soda pop).”
The idea of a dictionary of hip-hop slang, then, sounds as necessary to some as it is invasive to others. But the longstanding paradox of black escape is how reliably it attracts and enchants the white mainstream. “Already entrenched in the teen-age vocabulary are superlatives like ‘def’ (the best),” the New York Times reported in 1988. “Words like ‘stupid’ (terrific) and ‘wack’ (awful) are now established in both the urban and suburban teen-age lexicon irrespective of class or color.”
Rap keeps it moving. What else is there to do? It concerns itself only occasionally with policing usages or reclaiming wack and cool from overeager lobsterheads such as myself; mostly it just goes on steepening its semantic slant, slinging new slang faster than the dictionary can keep up. Some rappers sound a little scornful when they talk about this, like Method Man; some are triumphal. “Everything that hip-hop touches is transformed by the encounter,” Jay-Z writes, “especially things like language and brands, which leave themselves open to constant redefinition. With language, rappers have raided the dictionary and written in new entries to every definition—words with one or two meanings now have twelve.” Some rappers, maybe most, come across as merely unconcerned, the hare’s obliviousness to the tortoise plodding along in its dust.
**
The internet turbocharged the tortoise, of course, good news for those of us on the invading side. If it was far-fetched to think in 1984 that EMD’s rhyme would eventually wind up printed in a book—which it was, for the first time to my knowledge in Lawrence Stanley’s 1992 Rap: The Lyrics: The Words to Rap’s Greatest Hits—today it’s hard to imagine not being able to call up a song’s lyrics, or at least a rudimentary approximation, and likely some discussion of what they mean. The internet was built for this shit, hypertext for a hyper literature. None of that manual cross-referencing, that print lag, that latency that made it so by the time you could look up a bit of slang in a print dictionary it would have ceased to be, ah, fresh. Between the moderated annotation platform Genius, which offers interpretive glosses and close readings that are usually enlightening and sometimes fantastically implausible, and Urban Dictionary, where you can visualize the historical baggage of the English language as reconstructed by a horde of clever- but endlessly anal-fixated twelve-year-olds, you can probably put together your own gloss of whatever song you want. I use both all the time; I happen to like the taste of the grain of salt with which it’s necessary to take them. At best they double as everyone’s local library, a lightweight amalgam of glossary and archive and oral history and rewind button, expanding in real time and curated, in Genius’s case, by community editors and savant hip-hop heads and barely lucid lunatics and sometimes rappers themselves.
On paper, as it were, all participants in this collective effort love rap and speak its English, or are at least making a good-faith effort to learn. Perhaps inevitably, though, not everyone is wild about so much frictionless assimilation and dissection. You see intimations of appropriation and establishmentarianism; you see plausible accusations of shady practices, like Genius lifting a few thousand early transcriptions from Matt Jost’s Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive without attribution; you see reminders, more or less eloquently stated, that foiling this exact kind of intellectual materialism is what signifying is for in the first place. Rap Genius dot com is white devil sophistry, argued Kool A.D. of Das Racist in 2011; Urban Dictionary is for demons with college degrees.
For my part, I like to imagine that a productive relationship is possible between slang’s semantic slant and these technologies of documentation and decipherment. It pleases me, however naively, to picture more popular attention begetting more mischief and subversion, every list of known euphemisms for money or marijuana or fellatio driving the discovery and coinage of further uncharted ones. I was taught never to say the dictionary, lexicography being as alive and multiple and necessarily unfinished as language itself—but while we’ve got the definite-article version on hand, why not let it represent a formal challenge to keep coming up with figurations so novel, so unique, so unaccountably fly as to resist mainstream cooptation forever?
**
An early contender for Rap Genius’s slogan—it ultimately lost to Biggie’s If you don’t know, now you know—was Pay attention and listen real closely how I break this slang shit down. That’s the introductory patter to Big L’s 2001 hit “Ebonics (Criminal Slang),” a song brassily framed as a rhyming glossary and containing and defining about six dozen terms, many of which were new to me the first time I heard it:
Your bankroll is your poke, a chokehold is a yoke
A kite is a note, a con is a okey-doke
“Ebonics” is a terrific song, though you could argue, to take Geneva Smitherman at her word, that what makes its conceit so appealing to a novice listener is also what makes it kind of a seditious gesture. If slang is actively exhausted by being made accessible, unencrypted, to the white mainstream—“This song is like the OG Rap Genius,” an early annotation of “Ebonics” says: “It explains rap music slang for anthropologists and Orientalists”—then aren’t we just watching the song short-circuit the words in it by pinning them down, revoking their status and potency as slang, leaving them as toothless and commonplace as head or chill or fresh? Two decades later, isn’t learning these new meanings just watching old news, navigating by the light of stars that burned out centuries ago?
Sure, maybe, if you take the short view. Rap can always forge new nonstandards, after all, always will. But here’s the more provocative question the song poses: what does it mean, when you’re inventorying and glossing criminal slang, if some of the words are deep drug jargon but some of them are moderately jaunty Times crossword answers? Doesn’t that come to say more about how you define criminality than anything else? Big L’s greater genius here, so to speak, is to include under the banner of “criminal slang” not only rap lingo that scanned as relatively esoteric at the time, and arguably still does—I’ve never heard poke or vine or bull scare used anywhere else the way the song defines them—but also words and phrases that would be familiar to any anglophone alive during the twentieth century:
Your apartment is your pad, your old man is your dad
The studio is the lab and heated is mad
That is, it’s one thing to find out that krills means crack, and a very different thing to be told that cocaine is nose candy or movies is flicks. For both to happen in the same song, for the recherché to coexist with the corny in this way, casts into sudden relief just how much of the vernacular we accept today as mainstream, sometimes so much so that it’s quaint, itself originated as slang. No doubt people who call their heart their ticker and their father their old man are by now the ones who most need something like Rap Genius to keep up, whether or not they choose to use it. But it’s instructive to imagine, if only for the sake of imagining it, that at one point they were the scofflaws, the speakers of criminal slang, who most needed something like rap.
Table of Contents
Table of ContentsWhat’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language
By Daniel Levin Becker
Preface
Rhetorical questions
I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love
Rewinding
To be the man on the mic, to be the man on your mind
On cool
What’s normal to us is an illusion to them
On me
I heard the beat and I ain’t know what to write
Serious rap
What you hear is not a test
Word machines
I make butter fly
Slang evolution
Speakin’ my language if you talkin’ ’bout tilapia
Slang and slipperiness
You’ll never find a rhyme like this in any dictionary
On rhyme
Try me, try me
On register
Bitch I’m morose and lugubrious
Haunted roots
Hangin’ on for dear life
Code and contraband
I got twenty-five lighters on the dresser
Intelligences
They don’t call me Big for nuttin’
Power play
I’m on point like a elbow
Word as bond
Speech is my hammer bang the world into shape
Anti-simile
I’m the motherfucking king like Oedipus
=, ≠
Flip the script just like Marlon Brando
#
I got bars sentencing
Economy and time
Four Seasons, three words: do not disturb
Signifying chains
I take seven MCs, put ’em in a line
Recycling
Flow retarded, I’m on some Special Ed shit
Elective chronology
Once upon a time in the projects
Ancestor worship
We’re holdin’ on to what’s golden
Writing/biting
I got ninety-nine problems and a bitch ain’t one
Aggravated quotation
Beat biter, dope style taker
Hyperlinks
Wikipedia that, if you didn’t know
On cliché
Kickin’ the fly clichés
Who wore it better?
Now I’m butt naked in a Lamborghini
Deniable plausibility
Might look light but we heavy though
On first person
I live it, I see it, and I write it because I know it
Truth and consequence
Calling her a crab is just a figure of speech
Criminal slang
I’m the biggest Dope Dealer and I serve all over town
Selling work
The dope I’m selling you don’t smoke you feel
On values
I’m out here making sense ’cause I’m out here making dollars
On the b-word
Who you callin’ a bitch?
On the n-word
She could be my broad and I could be her —
On white people
Please listen to my album
On second person
If that’s your chick then why she textin’ me?
Is rap poetry?
I take this more serious than just a poem
Writing/not writing
I wasn’t born last night
What you hear is not a text
I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them
On possession
Hi haters, I’m back off hiatus
On possession with intent to sell
Cash rules everything around me
Signifying ornaments
I spell it how the fucks I want
Outsider art
And all the people always know me for my comedy
On irony
This is fucking awesome
Dumb love
Microphone check 1-2 what is this
Criticism and categories
Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good
A larger English
Lampin’ in the Hamptons like “What the fuck is a hammock?”
Witness
Party and bullshit
