"H-E Double Hockey Sticks"

By Brian Salkowski

The lifespan of a given slang word or even a explicit cuss word is fleeting, as new ways of saying the same thing evolve and gain popularity. Thus certain words and phrases can become markers of particular historical moments. When Malice of The Clipse rhymes on “Zen” that “I’m from the old school when the gat was a jammy,” he is calling attention not only to the shifting street terminology for firearms, but also to the power of words to define time and place. (This example is especially ironic since “gat” as used in hip-hop is itself a slang term more than a century old derived from the Gatling gun.) Using the term def, for instance, to say that something is great means that you are most likely somewhere in New York in the 1980s. Def waned in popularity as other terms (phat, dope, fly, official) took over, only to fade out as well; back in 1993, Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons, even held a mock funeral for “def”—complete with casket. Just like “gat,” it will probably be resurrected. Slang is so prevalent in rap that it supports a cottage industry of online and even print lexicons, the most prominent of which is the Web-based “Urban Dictionary.” The Web site Rap Genius offers line-by-line analysis of rap lyrics, interpreting slang and uncovering nuances of expression. We encourage readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the words in the lyrics to use such resources to explicate these poems of the present, just as one might use the Oxford English Dictionary to discern shades of meaning in poems of the past.

Most of rap’s language, though, is quite plain and often explicit. Rap, after all, was the first musical genre to make cursing a customary practice. Because it emerged out of an underground scene, at first relatively heedless of commercial considerations, rap was free to stick more closely to the ways people actually speak. Ironically, this renegade attitude contributed to rap’s commercial success. NWA went platinum in the early 1990s despite the fact that almost none of their songs were suitable for airplay. Music video viewers have often found themselves subjected to the farce of rap songs made incomprehensible by bleeped and edited lyrics. The Recording Industry Association of America essentially invented the parental advisory sticker in response to rap artists like 2 Live Crew and Ice-T. But rap’s explicit language and content is about more than simply causing a stir. Rap was born as a form of necessary speech. It provided young people, many of whom were from difficult and impoverished backgrounds, with a voice and a means of vivid expression. This new art form would be passionate, plainspoken, and at times profane. The young artists would take as their themes both the hardscrabble realities of everyday life as well as the aspirational imaginings of wealth, comfort, and success. In his memoir, From Pieces to Weight (2005), 50 Cent describes what rapping meant to him when he was just beginning: “I wrote about the things I had seen in my life and what was going on in the ’hood. I was able to express myself in rhyme better than I ever had in a regular conversation.” 7 The fact that rap’s rhymed expression is often blunt and confrontational, aggressive and offensive, makes profanity a necessary, even defining, element of its art.

Rap’s early years offer surprisingly little in the way of curse words; indeed, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that explicit language and content became commonplace in the music. Set to a beat, such words endow rap with transgressive power rarely matched in popular music. But rap’s most incendiary element may be its subject matter. Rap lyrics contain violence, misogyny, sexism, and homophobia. One must come to terms with these qualities when studying the formal elements of rap’s poetry.

Rap is a reflection of a broader culture that too often sanctions the same sexism, homophobia, and violence found in the music. By including lyrics with such content, we present occasions to challenge pernicious influences by confronting them directly rather than simply pretending they aren’t there. At the same time, studying lyrics of targeted offense offers occasions to underscore the often-overlooked fact that hip-hop has formulated its own critiques of sexism, misogyny, and violence. Most successful female MCs recognize that for them the only place where they can negotiate race, class, gender, and sexuality with relative freedom is the hiphop world. In addition, we should explore how women artists have expanded rap to embody their own voices. Are artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, who flaunt their sexuality in a manner similar to their male counterparts, doing subversive and revolutionary work or are they simply succumbing to commercial pressures or adhering to the template established by many young men who’ve made rap their own?

Similarly, hip-hop culture is often hostile to the very idea of homosexuality. Though there are openly gay MCs in hip-hop’s underground like Medusa, Deep Dickollective and of course now in the mainstream you have Lil Nas X. The first openly gay rapper.

So finally like language was born from our species early ingenuity and evolution, rap music was born from a oppressed culture desperate for an outlet to express their experience that the rest of America had little to no clue about. It just so happened that it needed its own disclaimer first.

Art has no feelings. Art has never had rules. The free flow of expression without outside interference is the gold standard.