In 2013, rapper Kendrick Lamar’s featured verse on fellow-artist Big Sean’s mid-August single “Control,” along with Lamar’s October group performance with his Top Dawg Entertainment compatriots in the BET Hip Hop Awards Show Cipher, witnessed the young emcee lyrically promise to metaphorically murder anyone standing in the way of him taking his seat on the ‘throne’ of hip-hop. Lamar was claiming himself the greatest emcee in hip-hop. His efforts garnered dozens of response tracks from some of the most prominent artists and most widely acclaimed lyricists in the industry, including Lupe Fiasco, Joell Ortiz, Papoose, and Eminem; yet few commentators have considered where and how rapper Eminem fits in Lamar’s kingdom. Eminem has long been regarded as one of the greatest lyricists, ever. On “Control,” Lamar had effectively called out Eminem when he rapped that anyone who has a “relapse” just needs to “relax and “pop in my disc,” a jab at the lackluster critical reception of Eminem’s 2009 album Relapse.
As if timed to respond to Lamar, on October 15, 2013, Eminem released “Rap God,” which received a Grammy-nomination,1 entry into the Guinness Book of World Record (for the most words in a hit recording), and as of spring of 2018 its YouTube video has been viewed nearly 680 million times. The release of “Rap God” saw Eminem claim his status as ‘Odin,’ a reference to one of the high gods of the Norse pantheon. Mythically speaking, Odin rules over Asgard, determining who of fallen humans and gods are able to enter into a paradise called Valhalla. He is widely remembered as representing sovereignty, and Thor, his son, is a god of war. Within this social context and historical shadow, it was that less than two years later, on May 29, 2015, after a nine month online voting tournament, self-described ‘Odin’ of the rap game Eminem was named hip-hop’s G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) by the website Ambrosia for Heads – the site’s name a reference to the food of the gods. In order for Eminem to be named the G.O.A.T. in online voting, he defeated Xzibit, Talib Kweli, DMX, Busta Rhymes, Big Daddy Kane, and, finally, Tupac. For his part, Tupac defeated Big Boi, Ice Cube, Scarface, Kendrick Lamar, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, and Rakim, only to be defeated by Eminem.2 Goats, on the other hand, have long been the favorite food – the “ambrosia” – for gods. The 2015 title of “G.O.A.T,” in the shadow of Eminem’s claim to be Odin, therefore, carries a paradoxical, dubious distinction; the titles cancel one another out, and this aporetic space offers a moment to consider how value is produced in hip-hop culture through a dialectal, flow-like process involving artists, fans, taste-makers, and other commentators with various social identities and differential access to resources.
On the same exact day that “Rap God” was released, BET hosted its annual hip-hop awards show. There, in a cipher supported by rich, layered verses from Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) artists Schoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad (and a present but silent Sza), Lamar rhetorically authorizes himself as heir to hip-hop’s throne, ‘King Kendrick.’ Somewhere between self-proclamation and external critical and popular praise, Lamar and Eminem have come to represent certain broader cultural forces. They also serve as windows for gazing out at the manner that hip-hop culture is both shaped by these forces, but also pushes against them. Some of these tendencies are seen through a comparative assessment of each artists’ claims to hip-hop divinity and claims made by others about Lamar and Eminem. A few years earlier, in the 2011 track “G.O.A.T.,” Eminem boasted “It’s easy just to consider me one of the greatest white rappers there is knowing goddamn well that I’m one of the best motherfucking rappers who ever lived period.”3 While most inside and out of hip-hop culture would agree with his claim, his racial qualification of context and politics telegraphs a critical query that this chapter raises: To what extent is the title of the ‘G.O.A.T.’ in hip-hop culture ever simply a matter of aesthetic skill over identity? And, if not only involving skill, what additional forces shape perceptions of and debates about an artist’s skill?
The competition between Lamar and Eminem is civil, modest, and, in some ways, family business (as both are connected to Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records, an imprint of Interscope Records). This tension offers an opportunity to consider the construction of value in hip-hop culture through the strategic rhetorical reliance on the idea of authority. Considering the manufacturing of Lamar’s value to hip-hop culture in the wake of Eminem’s contemporary meaning to/for hip-hop culture allows for a brief probing of the degree to which constructions of value in hip-hop culture are informed by broader cultural and historical racial interpretive contexts. Eminem (in this chapter) works as a kind of interpretive analytic foil to help clarify the meanings made by Lamar and made for others about Lamar by commentators and fans. Coinciding with Eminem’s mapping of white racial anxieties onto (in this case) himself, Kendrick Lamar is often celebrated as a bellwether or reminder of the future end of black anxieties and hardships the result of white racial animosity, i.e., whatever else black folks will be in the future, they will be ‘alright.’ In effort to traverse the space of this aporetic racialized tension, this chapter makes use of historian of religions Bruce Lincoln’s suggestion that authority is not so much an entity as it is an effect and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “regimes of value” that suggest cultural commodities exert variable value coherence from one cultural milieu to the next.4 This manufacturing of value may emerge as efforts to address the (seemingly) increasingly complicated world of proliferating social differences and threats to assumptions of white authority. By ‘white,’ I mean here a kind of kinetic energy without orientation, while ‘black’ is this same movement but oriented toward the concrete and, in particular, toward context.5 As scholars such as Nell Irvin Painter and David Roediger have argued, whiteness is an artificially constructed social classification. This is not to say that it does not remain incredibly powerful as this classification tool but that it has no concrete referent to rationalize claims to its authority.6
Attention to Eminem provides a context for comparison of the social and cultural impact of Lamar and, by extension, the impact of hip-hop on the manufacture of racial meanings and the boundaries they do or do not traverse in the broader U.S. society. Specifically, Eminem aids in outlining the interpretive boundary created by the cultural materials used to orient oneself or group, and he emphasizes the impact of broader social and cultural concerns on the production of ‘taste’ within hip-hop culture despite its emphasis on showing and proving. The insular (i.e., within hip-hop) cultural debate about who is better, Lamar or Eminem, and the broader discourse in recent years surrounding the G.O.A.T. status of Lamar, are suggestive that for many fans of hip-hop culture, rap or hip-hop culture can be imagined as Ragnarök, the mythical final battle of gods in Norse mythology. It is at Ragnarök where warring white gods are finally overcome – enabling a new world where power is distributed (if not evenly) differently than during the reign of the white gods. This chapter focuses attention to different meanings made from different social contexts, competing claims to authority waged as if in battle. Evidence for such perspectives and emphases come by way of digital media, journalistic write-ups, and online conversations and debates taking place via YouTube and rap lyrics sites. In what follows I explore the manufacturing of Lamar’s racial authority through the cultural idiom of hip-hop, beginning and ending the discussion within the shadow cast by Eminem (as proxy for white authority in ‘twilight’ – waxing and waning), and work to reveal glimpses of the racialized interpretive horizons that shape conceptions of who matters – who is valued – in the contemporary West. In short, I hope to demonstrate a bit of the process by which Lamar has come to mean so much to so many.
For my purposes here, value is procured through movement, and authority is the means to that movement. By ‘movement,’ I include attention to physical properties and persons (i.e., the law of conservation of energy) but emphasize the traversing of different ideological and interpretive postures, via the transmission of energy (as information). Such traversing is motivated by and makes possible the construction of authority in the social world. God-talk and G.O.A.T.-talk inside of hip-hop are efforts to produce an effect of authority, as are claims to racialized social identity. Historian of religions Bruce Lincoln describes authority as an effect meant to coerce or persuade, rather than an entity or object unto itself that might be found or stockpiled. Authority is manufactured through the transmitting of information.7 One popular rhetorical “process of authorization” relies on invocations of “the divine or transcendent at some crucial point of their operation.”8 These tend to be “typical of societies in which the foundational assumptions (one might also speak of the critical posture or regime of truth9) made normative by the European Enlightenment have not acquired hegemonic status.”10 Were we to assume or act as if such references were irrational or without complexity or efficacy, Lincoln says we’d be guilty of “presumptuousness and ethnocentrism.”11 It would be equally ethnocentric to assume the West so singularly associated with the European Enlightenment, or to suggest, as Lincoln does, that the Enlightenment was itself immune from the use of god-talk or claims to authenticity in the manufacturing of itself or in academic authorizing of it as secularly, rationally hegemonic. Lincoln is as helpful here as he is representative of the need for more white scholars of religion to recognize that individual and group distances to or from hegemonic regimes of truth are malleable and transgressible. Noting that the idea of a hegemonic Enlightenment is manufactured is easier than destabilizing that hegemony.
In effort to account for the economic, rational stakes fueling debates over authenticity and identity, and to give attention to the explicitly consumerist-oriented commodification of rappers as commodities, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s regimes of value approach to commodity helps to cultivate a more fluid assessment of claims to god or G.O.A.T. Commodities are “objects of economic value,” and following the insight of Georg Simmel, value ‘ “is never an inherent property of objects, but is a judgment made about them by subjects.” ’12 In this manner, Appadurai famously gives commodities a kind of “social life,” and helps in my recasting notions of “truth regimes” as regimes of value. For Lincoln, the social horse pulls the linguistic and aesthetic cart, meaning that Eminem’s authority is an effect of consumer assumptions about his proximity to white authority, and because “myth and group … are linked in a symbiotic relation of co-reproduction, each one being simultaneously producer and product of the other.”13 Whereas for Appadurai, products also require trade and transport. Value is not intrinsic to any object or commodity but is produced through a commodity’s effort to resist possession from those who desire it.14 Commodities are made valuable through their movement across different regimes, but this movement requires careful control so as not to dilute the market demand for the product. Think, for instance, of basic supply and demand economic principles: Movement creates demand, but too much movement risks decreasing demand when supply is too high. In short, distance from ownership determines value, while closer proximity to a commodity (or a social identity) produces an effect of authority. Exchange of ideas, people, and material objects amounts to a kind of movement that orients our awareness of our and others’ distances to or away from various regimes of value, themselves fitting in a matrix of overlapping and competing claims to both identity and the values ascribed to those identifications. Orientation (as authority) ostensibly enables the transmutation of movement into value, the ability to ‘work’ in the sense of physical properties. Disoriented movement ends up succumbing to a law of entropy, the divestment of energy’s ability to work within a system. Oriented movement, on the other hand, enables the use of energy, ensuring such movement creates value.
Talk of energy and movement is both a discursive model and also an attempt to account for concrete physical properties within social or humanistic analyses. To date, few have done more to articulate the empirical complexities inherent in the study of social identity within the academic study of religion than Monica R. Miller, in no small measure because the data for the ‘human sciences’ has the (analytically) irritating capacity to speak back to the scholar and tell scholars “No!” in both literal and figurative senses. This “no” proves authority as an effect, while Miller’s work in the study of hip-hop culture and black religion note the social and cultural techniques deployed by black folks, historically, as a means of producing an effect of authority within a broader social world that finds certain “white” social actors seeking to undermine such effects as they are enacted by black people. This process, as is also emphasized in Appadurai, involves movement. Unlike Appadurai’s emphasis on material, geospatial movement, Miller’s notion of movement – what she labels “aporetic flow” – signals the various domains through which movement occurs. Her work is attentive to physical movement, but also the impact of discursive constructions on physical movement. This flow transforms social “nonpassages … into creative expression.”15 And importantly, this creativity opens up concrete social possibilities for movement. God-talk, as well as broader aesthetic concerns over authenticity guiding much of this talk, has been a product of (as well as building block for) such flows.16 The rhetorical stylings analyzed in this chapter are not unique but fit within what Miller emphasizes is a long history of black signifying practices wherein claims to or about ‘god’ are meant to express black humanity.17 The history of cultural and social effects that ‘authorize’ black humanity predate and extend far beyond hip-hop culture, but hip-hop is no less informed by these practices such that
The emphasis on nonpassages and the transformation of those nonpassages into the means of travel help to outline the sociopolitical and hermeneutical boundary-zones that are able differentially to be traversed by different claims to social identity.19 It is one thing to recognize that social categories of identification are all manufactured; it is another to adjudicate which are worth keeping, how, and why. Stated differently, Miller’s theory of aporetic flow enables the maintenance of a scholar’s critical distance from their object of investigation – here, the manufacture of racial continuities and discontinuities of value among hip-hop artists – without erasure of the scholar’s movement within the overarching world in which the scholar and our data live. In 2013, that world (and the world of hip-hop within it) was rocked by a series of sonic booms, starting with Kendrick Lamar taking ‘control’ of the rap game.
Released on August 12, 2013, to Hot 97 radio station alongside a tweet from rapper Big Sean noting that the song was a little something extra that didn’t make his album Hall of Fame, “Control” was produced by NO I.D. and features extended verses from Big Sean, Kendrick Lamar, and Jay Electronica.20 The song was an instant hit, in no small part because it includes the memorable hook, “I don’t smoke crack, mutherfucker, I sell it,” but mostly because Lamar stole the show from Sean and Electronica, both highly respected lyricists in each’s own right. Across 64 (or so) bars that include pop cultural references, racialized claims to authenticity, and dozens of insider hip-hop references, Lamar name-drops emcee after emcee as his competition (even calling out Big Sean and Jay Electronica) and labels himself the “King of New York” and the “King of the Coast,” reference to his omnipresence in the “kingdom” of U.S. hip-hop. The song was embraced within hip-hop culture and embraced as a battle track to boot. For these reasons, along with technical execution and a rising cultural groundswell that posited Lamar as emblematic of a new generation of politically vocal, courageous young black Americans, the song marked Lamar’s movement from the peripheries of rap’s pantheon to its highest echelons.
Journalists and online commenters were quick to commemorate Lamar’s arrival as one of the G.O.A.T.s., and many waxed on the significance of the “Control” verse for Lamar’s career and for hip-hop culture in general. Examples of the responses to Lamar’s rhetorical roundhouse kicks demonstrate how value is procured through consumer ingestion and synthesis of Lamar’s effects of authority. Commentators started orienting themselves in the direction Lamar was moving: value coherence. On August 13, Edna Gundersen for USA Today offered the analogy of a bomb blast for the rap game. Gundersen included a quote from Sean “P. Ditty” Combs who said the verse was good for the culture because “if Larry Bird and Magic never challenged each other – the game wouldn’t have made the strides that it did.”21 Kia Makarechi, writing for The Huffington Post, said the verse was “putting everyone on notice” that Lamar is not only one of the best lyricists but also “a defender of the culture.”22 Such claims are akin to, but the valuative inverse of, the “exaggerated ways in which youth practices and hip hop culture are sometimes discursively constructed as ‘dirt,’ ‘risk,’ and societal ‘threat.’ ”23 Lamar is treated to equally exaggerated or hyperbolic claims, but he is not rendered as a pollutant or pathology, as was once the popular mode of journalistic interest in hip-hop. David Drake, for Complex.com, offered three reasons “Control” made such an immediate impact: First, Lamar crowned himself ‘king of New York,’ the home of hip-hop and, arguably, the home of skillful lyricism and wordplay in rap music. Second, Lamar ‘named names’ in a way relatively unique in the history of rap, mentioning the names of working artists he has already transcended (J. Cole, Big KRIT, Wale, Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake, Big Sean, Jay Electronica, Tyler the Creator, Mac Miller) and those who might still pose a bit of competition (Jigga, Nas, Eminem, Andre 3000). Lastly, the verse came at a time when hip-hop was relatively quiet.24 One week later, NPR ran a story that considered Lamar’s impact on interpretive possibilities, proffering that “there isn’t a rapper breathing who can defeat him when it comes to feats of rhyme; the most any of his peers can hope to do is rap him to a standstill.”25 For these journalists, Lamar (and hip-hop) seem to represent more than hip-hop. Lamar comes to represent the overcoming of adversity, the conquering of all competition, and hip-hop the vehicle through which to hone one’s battle skills even as it serves as the actual battleground, too.
Journalists have continued to show interest in Lamar’s verse in the years after the release of “Control,” particularly considering the social impact it had on the culture. In March of 2015, Al Shipley, Mosi Reeves, and Christina Lee, writing for RollingStone.com, said Lamar made Big Sean’s “Control” single “one of the most important hip-hop songs of the last decade” and listed nine ways Lamar’s verse “changed the world.”26 The story includes attention to how sample-clearance issues ensured that the song was never released officially. Some journalists and fans have speculated that there were not any substantial clearance issues but that the story of the trouble clearing the NO I.D. samples was a cover story for an overshadowed Big Sean who did not want to release the song. Another melodramatic point raised in the Rolling Stone article is that “Control” so whipped hip-hop heads into a lyrical bloodthirst that more subdued, polished offerings from Lamar, such as the Grammy-winning “i” from To Pimp a Butterfly, become less “listenable.” The story also describes a general sentiment that Lamar’s verse on “Control” made a cadre of the industry’s best working rappers defend their positions on wax, including B.O.B.’s “How 2 Rap,” Joell Ortiz’s “Outta Control,” Lupe Fiasco’s “SLR 2,” Joey Bada$$’s “Killuminati Pt. II,” Meek Mill’s “Ooh Kill ’Em” and more, many of whom were all the more offended at having been left off Lamar’s list. These are not merely underground lyricists, but some of the more commercially successful artists in rap music, making it nearly as significant that these artists would respond at all. For Rolling Stone, and emblematic of many, Lamar was quite literally “changing the game.” A combination of Lamar’s authority, and the consumerist celebration of that authority, was procuring/producing value.
An April 2017 story quotes Lamar explaining that hip-hop isn’t for the artists but for his “partners in the hood right now, they listen to rap every day, because it’s the only thing that can relate to their stories and their tribulations. They live and breathe it.”27 Out of a concern for homies in the hood, Lamar demands excellence of himself. And excellence, for him, requires confidence: “I want to keep doing it every time, period. And to do it every time, you have to challenge yourself and you have to confirm to yourself – not anybody else – confirm to yourself that you’re the best, period. No one can take that away from me, period.”28 Journalists and fans may not be alone in the manufacture of Lamar’s value through appreciation of and agreement with his claims to authority. Lamar is part of that process too. For him, the Dead Prez adage rings true: “It is bigger than hip hop.” Hip-hop signals something of black and brown life “in the hood.” We might consider this a process of manufactured identification between hip-hop and a social context interpreted as precarious, which it is. But I’m more interested to emphasize the chosen direction of orientation. Lamar is orienting himself toward hip-hop (and fans, etc.) claiming his origin in Compton, California, his literal family hometown and also a cultural archive of black meaning. Claiming Compton orients Lamar; ‘we’ orient ourselves via Lamar.
Journalists and artists are not the only ones interested in such identifications. Online YouTube comments posted to unofficial uploads of the “Control” track further elaborate the meanings fans ascribe to Lamar by way of his performance of authority. TheGameHub (2018) comments that “K-Dot called out Big Sean on his own [track] but realised the verse was so fire he had to keep it … Kung-Fu-Kenny the G.O.A.T.”29 References to G.O.A.T. status are a common feature of Lamar discussions online and are defended through various kinds of identifications including battle prowess, nostalgia, and more. Merve Cara (2017) comments,
Jtsasuke96 (2015) writes, “And that ladies and gentlemen, this how Kendrick became king of the new school [sic].”31 N G (2017) writes, “Kendrick is putting out great stuff right now, but this shit right here … for my money, no rapper has ever been as hot as Kendrick in 2013. Ever.”32 Bow To Me (2017) writes, “This man I don’t give a fuck Kendrick man … omg once he went in with the g5 lines and ended with the parachute was a laytex condom attached to a dread … omgggg this man is the goat[sic].”33 Joshua P (2017) writes,
These are but some of the sentiments presented through the digital archive of YouTube. A critical mass of fans ascribes much more than lyrical prowess to Lamar’s efforts but casts the effect of his lyrical authority as having to do with broader social forces. In this process, effects of authority add to Lamar’s value; they do not, necessarily, add to his authority in the broader social world.
Commenters and journalists continue to add to the “Control” archive. As late as October 2017, blogger Clayton Purdom at The A.V. Club.com writes that Lamar “assumed the crown of Best Rapper Alive … with a guest verse: his standard-setting shit-starter on Big Sean’s ‘Control,’ which instantly catapulted him to the public forefront of rap greatness.”35 Purdom continues that the verse “remains a remarkable act of defiance from Kendrick, at once sacrilegiously placing himself in the all-time pantheon and playing to the most deeply held notions of what ‘true’ hip-hop is,” becoming an “incomparable … event.”36 Ostensibly, Purdom treats “Control” as a kind of sacred event, a theophany occurring through Lamar’s audacity to name and claim his (own) status within the pantheon of hip-hop gods. Whether one agrees or not with Purdom, his analysis is representative of how many regard Lamar’s “Control” verse.
“Control” certainly was an event, only the notion that it was sacrilegious seemingly misses the point of the event: Lamar’s “Control” didn’t commemorate the intrinsic authority of a G.O.A.T. It created value through Lamar’s effects of authority and our embrace of those effects. Today, Lamar is a point of orientation for many inside (and out) of hip-hop culture, while others remain unconvinced of his authority to serve in such a capacity. Not everyone is convinced about Lamar’s value; astoundingly, however, the overwhelming majority of online comments and stories about the “Control” verse participate in the adjudication and litigation of whether Lamar is deserving of this title, and the quantity of positive comments (of the sort included here) suggest a contemporary interpretive consensus that Lamar sits atop hip-hop culture. The cultural conversation about Lamar’s greatness, according to these and additional comments, signifies the importance of authorities for/within hip-hop and perhaps the broader social and cultural public. Perhaps the public celebration of battles over authority mean so much to so many because through battle within hip-hop, we enable the transporting of value across assumed cultural and social boundaries? Battle produces an effect of flow, where adversity transmutes into opportunity. And following Miller, such flow is made manifest most explicitly in the hip-hop cipher.37
The cipher in hip-hop is a kind of sacred circle, where emcees socially interact with other emcees through lyrical wordplay. It also has a philosophical connotation with roots in the Supreme Mathematics of the Nation of Gods and Earths, specifically referenced as a “person, place, or thing, that is complete within its own nature.”38 Thanks to this influence from the Nation of Gods and Earths, the cipher came to be the name of emcees lyrically battling in a circle where one “shows and proves” their value through the transmission of knowledge. In the cipher, perceived social and cultural values associated with each participant is severed from that participant, but those assumed social and cultural values remain fair game for use by participants. For instance, inside the hip-hop cipher, the social world is respected to the extent the differential values generally ascribed to ‘black’ or ‘white’ are remembered and may even be used in battle to do ‘damage’ to another emcee. But the judgment of authority wielded within the cipher is not predicated on the assumed social value of each participant, but on their lyrical acumen and artistic creativity.
The cipher is as old as emceeing and is an embodied material expression of hip-hop prized by the culture that signifies completion. So in 2006, when BET created an awards show dedicated to hip-hop exclusively, producers ensured that the show would include attention to the cipher. BET ciphers are usually framed as outros to and intros from commercial breaks during the show’s telecast. Thanks to stellar performances over the years by a who’s who of rap’s finest lyricists, hip-hop fans are always eager to see these ‘battles.’ Participating artists do commercial promos for their ciphers that run in the weeks prior to the show, adding to the interest. These ciphers are now a perennial favorite for hip-hop fans. And if online commentary is any determinant, the 2013 TDE Cipher is one of the most memorable on record.
The 2013 BET Hip Hop Awards Show aired on October 15, 2013.39 Only two months after “Control,” and Lamar was dropping bombs again. The TDE Cipher was the fifth of the night and began with a product placement for Sprite before the camera caught up with Kendrick Lamar in a smoke-filled room commemorating the ‘Cipher.’ Viewers follow the camera and find the TDE ‘crew’ lined up and ready. SchoolBoy Q starts with timeless references to street-life and the tensions it poses to family and friends. Jay Rock follows with bars repping the 90059 zip code (LA County) and references to pulling himself up from ‘rock bottom.’ Next is Ab-Soul, who provides spaced-out lyrics that call back to hip-hop culture against existential themes related to mortality and substance abuse. Isaiah Rashad jumps in with immediate reference to mobility, having moved from Chattanooga to Southern California, evoking a sense of the great migration having never really ended. A brief pause (and cutaway to a Sprite bottle) and Lamar begins with reference after reference after reference to hip-hop culture, celebrating it as he calls it to the carpet. The verbal assault continues for over two full minutes to an instrumental of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.”
A bit of context is necessary for understanding the authorial effect of the cipher’s reliance on “Shook Ones.” Mobb Deep’s 1994 single “Shook Ones” (made more popular by Mobb Deep’s 1995 release of “Shook Ones, Part II”) is arguably one of the most popular hip-hop beats of all time. The beat, and Mobb Deep, mean a great deal to the culture, with constant references within and outside of hip-hop. The song’s popularity also increased after its use in Eminem’s commercially and critically successful film 8 Mile, the biopic that centers on Detroit’s underground rap scene in the 1990s. The Mobb Deep song provides the beat during the climatic rap battle at the end of the film. As a simple example of the popularity of “Shook Ones,” the official MobbDeepVEVO YouTube account video for “Shook Ones” has over 57 million views and over 30,000 comments, while an unauthorized video posted of “Shook Ones, Part II” has over 20 million views and 12,000 comments, with commenters suggesting, “Top 5 hardest hiphop beats ever created!!!. Its not even an argument! Factssssss!!!!!!! [sic]”40 and “one of the dopest beasts ever produced. R.I.P. Prodigy 11/2/1974–6/20/2017. I EDITED THIS COMMENT TODAY, June 20th 2017 TO SAY R.I.P. PRODIGY. IT WAS NOT PART OF MY ORIGINAL COMMENT.”41 The comment about Prodigy (one/half of Mobb Deep) refers to his 2017 death from complications of sickle cell anemia. As is clear from these and countless other comments, the chosen beat for the TDE Cipher means a great deal to the culture.
The cipher unfolded with each male emcee outdoing the last. Sza, the lone female artist, is present but strangely silent. Perhaps producers decided for her not to rap but nevertheless wanted her there to represent TDE’s supergroup, Black Hippy. Regardless of intent, it is a strange and troubling moment in an otherwise magisterial performance with Lamar providing an unforgettable climax and denouement. Lamar’s sonic homage to Mobb Deep (via DJ Choc) had as much to do with the authority conveyed during the cipher as did Lamar’s lyrics. The very well-known beat produced an overall sense of ‘buy-in’ from an international audience of hip-hop fans. But it was also a dog whistle of the sort already made explicit in Big Sean’s “Control.” This wasn’t a disoriented, generic hip-hop beat; it was a New York hip-hop beat. Lamar was doubling down on the braggadocio demonstrated in “Control.” Mobb Deep is well-known as an East Coast group. For Lamar to spit bars over the same beat with a similar level of execution as occurred on “Control” was another way of saying what he’d just told the world two months prior that he was the “King of New York.” In fact, with rhetorical and cultural adeptness, Lamar even references his “Control” verse as a threshold moment for the industry and hip-hop culture while simultaneously calling out the “sensitive rapper” who had been offended by the verse (widely presumed to be a reference to Drake). It is hard to count and to emphasize the layers upon layers upon layers of subtle, nostalgic references that make up Lamar’s verses. His bars work like photographs of hip-hop history. Moving toward the end of his flow, making his own snapshot for the hip-hop scrap book, he prophesies the current cultural climate within hip-hop and U.S. popular culture generally: other folks’ careers “ain’t shit” if they don’t include Lamar.
This event in hip-hop history soon had hip-hoppers scrambling to commemorate and analyze the occasion on social media platforms. On YouTube, these ciphers are often promoted unofficially, with BET.com both hosting and owning the rights for distribution of them. BET’s rights management did not stop scores of YouTube members from posting videos of the cipher, some even distill the occasion down to Lamar’s performance alone. One of these unauthorized videos posted on YouTube in 2013 is a screenshot with the audio of the cipher with 90,000 views, and the highest rated comment comes from Joe Anthony (2017) who writes, “I remember when this shit first aired. Hardest shit. Only 4 years but 2013 feels forever ago.”42 A more popular posting of the TDE Cipher was posted on December 13, 2013, and has 238,000 views as of this writing. The comments on this video tend to agree that Kendrick was the ostensible ‘winner’ within the cipher, but the overwhelming discourse emphasizes a healthy competition between the members of TDE and that the TDE collective represented something healthy for the culture, with one P25C referring to them as “the Justice League of Hip Hop.”43
Another of these unauthorized videos includes a series of comments exemplifying the scope of this chapter and aids in outlining the parameters of imagining rap as Ragnarök. The highest rated comment simply writes, “Whomever doesn’t know this beat I don’t respect you.”44 The first comment provoked 18 replies, most of whom note their knowledge of the beat supporting Top Dawg Entertainment’s 2013 BET Cipher, the Havoc-produced beat from Mobb Deep’s 1994 “Shook Ones” or, as discussed next, sarcastically provide the wrong answer.
The most popular comment sarcastically suggested that the beat came from the “Eminem final rap battle,” a reference to 8 Mile. The commenter appeals to a logic of authenticity that adjudicates shared knowledge through a taxonomizing of insider from outsider locations for the procuring of hip-hop knowledge. The comments conveyed a well-known borderland in hip-hop culture, the horizon posed between fans of hip-hop and fans of popular culture. Interestingly, the question posed as one of identification with the beat is answered as if the question had instead been “where is this beat from?” In other words, social identification as origin and orientation. Both answers are “correct,” that the beat used by TDE in 2013 comes from Mobb Deep, but for many people, their relationship to that beat is filtered through the popularity of Eminem, whose movie they may know very well but out of an affinity for Eminem rather than “love of the culture” of hip-hop. The bifurcation is overly general but nevertheless signals an interpretive tension born from the borderlands between ‘black’ meaning and ‘white’ meaning, here with white meant to signify on the transparent and generic, dislocated, and disoriented sense of meaning. Black meaning, on the other hand, understands the significance of orientation through origins and attribution of ‘proper’ origins, whether understood as manufactured or not.
The second-highest rated comment from the same video comes from one Jamil Jones (2016) who writes, “I think if Kendrick and Em went at it the war would never end because rapping is what they pride themselves on and have always wanted to run circles around other mcs.”45 Jones’s comment comes two years before the previous comments, meaning that Jones wasn’t working off the power of rhetorical or textual suggestion. He wasn’t thinking ‘battle’ because of the authenticity debate playing out in the comments. Rather, his comment speaks to another borderland between hip-hop culture and popular culture widely held but rarely interrogated. The question of black meaning inside of hip-hop is never far removed from an Eminem effect – what of authenticity and authority when the ‘greatest’ representative of ‘black’ art is not ‘black’? This effect is most assiduously epitomized in the 2015 ascription by an AmbrosiaforHeads.com tournament that found Eminem to be the greatest emcee of all time, the “G.O.A.T.,” but more must first be noted about the use of the digital space in organizing and authorizing racialized authority.
Video sharing sites are not the only venues for the manufacturing of value by hip-hop heads. Sites like the online music lyric database Genius.com reveals additional aspects of making, managing, and curating meaning in ways that lead to an authorizing industry of fans determining their authority to project value onto Lamar. For instance, amid advertisements for videos about the history of hip-hop on Jeopardy, Expedia travel deals, and new laptop computers, the Genius.com page for the BET Cipher 2013 from TDE has over half a million page views, with over 300 contributors. These contributors include those who correct the text, annotating it when the previously listed lyric is wrong or when the correct lyric is ambiguous. Contributors tag individual words, phrases, or sections, offering commentary for understanding or hyperlinks to pertinent background information. One comment tags the opening line of the opening verse from Schoolboy Q, writing, “This sounds highly similar to a line in the hook of ‘The Spiteful Chant,’ a collaboration between Schoolboy Q and Kendrick, which appeared on Kendrick’s album Section.80,” followed by a reference to the lyrics of the song that draws this comparison.46 In fact, each comment can also be upvoted or downvoted, crowdsourcing both expertise and authority. This particular comment received twenty upvotes and no downvotes. Later in the same verse, another comment tags the song’s use of the term “shake,” noting, “To shake is to leave the area and to shake is what you call whatever is left after the bud of weed is broken down,”47 continuing from the definition to wax philosophic on the ‘clever wordplay’ or what we might call ‘signifying.’ Another comment, this time tagging Lamar’s verse where he references the release of “Control,” is a prime example of the dialogical nature of this process of analysis. The first commenter writes,
The commenter includes hyperlinks to evidence supporting each of their points, and the comment had been upvoted eighty-four times with no downvotes. Closer inspection reveals that the single comment was started by one “Brian Kil,” but an additional five contributors edited this single comment, with the upvote/downvote mechanism determining whether an edit is appropriate or not. The Genius.com database further allows for a 4D tracking of the changes to the comments over time. This comment reveals the possible relationship between Lamar’s ascendancy and iconoclasm – i.e., why battle rap might be related to meaning-making in hip-hop – but it also reveals clues about how scholars and other interested parties might make sense of this material. Earlier, commentator Purdom provided an example of a common sentiment, that claiming one’s place in hip-hop’s pantheon necessitates a decentering or destabilizing of those already in the pantheon, signaling something of a zero-sum philosophy operative among fans (and perhaps, artists, too). Interestingly, however, the increasing numbers (however relative and subjective) of a hip-hop pantheon of gods would seemingly deconstruct this binary, dichotomous tension commentators use to handle cultural materials and culture producers. The competition produces more relative ‘space’ for movement, for effects of authority and, in the end, for value. Perhaps, this suggests something about the manufacture of meaning, in general. Where aporetic flow produces ruptures enabling new life possibilities, the “math” would suggest there is not a concrete zero-sum ontological situation in which Lamar and his fans find themselves; however, meaning-making is made possible at times through totalizing, zero-sum logics. The cipher is 360 degrees, signaling completion; meaning-making, on the other hand – signified in this chapter by way of god/g.o.a.t. status – has no boundaries; we debate as if there is only room for one G.O.A.T. when the debate itself proliferates space for renegotiations of value and new semblances of meaning.
These Genius.com contributors’ attention to detail and recitation and the manufacturing (through citation) of authority marks their task as a kind of technical biblical criticism, nothing less than an ongoing, organic mode of textual commentary. Similar in method to trained scholars who produce commentaries on biblical, pseudepigraphal, and other ancient documents, similarly are these commenters engaged in a process of refinement, textual analysis, and historical criticism. The text is scrutinized alongside existing commentary, producing an organic whole that viewers will find at any particular moment. This process of analysis occurs amid the neoliberal, nebulous space of the internet. If the meaning of Lamar or TDE is not ‘made’ here, then questions arising from said meaning are adjudicated here. In another important sense, the collective back and forth of commenters might also be considered an expression of something akin to Jewish midrash, giving more attention to the (explicit) importance of this material (and for getting its interpretation right), not for the sake of the veracity of the claims about the document but because the truth associated with the document (i.e., the lyrics of the cipher) are filtered through a specific concern for hip-hop culture. Genius.com represents one of many online spaces where such textual analyses manufacture and manage ‘orthodox’ interpretations and meanings.
These preceding examples work together to produce value in the form of assumed competition and battle over authority among hip-hop artists. The degree of coherence between narratives of battle or beef that may correspond to the actual artists’ lives is of less concern than the rhetorical and ritualistic-like behavior guiding discussions about the artists. In short, these strategies work to produce a veritable pantheon of hip-hop gods (and g.o.a.t.s).
In the history of religions, polytheism refers to the idea of many gods existing in the same universe or ontology. This diversity of gods is made possible because gods, traditionally at least, are represented by and with particular geographic areas, particular contexts. This notion of polytheism is helpful in considering the different meanings and values offered by/in hip-hop culture through attention to the rhetoric communicating both Lamar and Eminem’s G.O.A.T status. It could be that the notion of many G.O.A.T.s, like the idea of many gods, is possible because each represents a particular context. Though hip-hop culture provides a vehicle for the travel of meaning from one context to another, there are certain limits to hip-hop’s powers to effect change in the world’s organizational structure as essentially polytheistic, which, is to say, there are many different contexts where meaning is made and where value is ascribed.
In early November of 2013, Eminem was in public relations mode for his upcoming The Marshall Mathers LP 2, which contains the track “Rap God” and also includes a feature from Lamar. Asked about the “Control” verse, Eminem makes an analytical observation about Lamar’s rhetoric as only a brilliant rhetorician might, saying that by locating so many of his bars within a process of citation through recitation of other events and artists in the culture, Lamar emphasizes his love of hip-hop, “he sets it up so that you can’t really get mad at a lot of that shit he said because it was what every other emcee is already thinking.”49 Like many fans (some noted earlier), Eminem even contextualizes Lamar’s “Control” against his “Rap God,” saying that “Rap God” “pretty much from top to bottom is tongue in cheek.” Noting that sometimes he does want to feel like a rap god,
The Eminem effect is necessary to consider because although hip-hop may leave social identifications outside the cipher, the broader popular cultural consumer does not. Perhaps AmbrosiaForHeads crowning of G.O.A.T. may (at most) signify on being the best rapper in popular culture, while Lamar has been authorized as the G.O.A.T. of hip-hop culture likely connected to what he represents of and promises to black authority including, but extending beyond, hip-hop culture. White value is already assumed in the society in which hip-hop lives and breathes; black value remains a contested idea. Eminem is emblematic of this tragic reality, but he also seems motivated, at times, to contextualize and limit this exaggerated notion of white value.
Eminem limits his (own) claims to divine sovereignty to an arena, the rap venue. The claim is a generic and universal one that then moves in the direction of particularizing itself inside of a specific community of affinity, rappers or lyricists or hip-hop generally. He is limiting the number of areas where his rap authority can be called into question, and limiting authority made through whiteness by setting it inside of a context that does not respect social identifications as priority for authority, and that doesn’t respect white authority specifically. Conversely, the interpretive posture Lamar tends to demonstrate in “Control” and the TDE Cipher, and the interpretive postures audiences consume Lamar through, read his blackness as speaking on behalf of an already specific, particular community, moving then in the direction of the universal and the general. Lamar understands his role as cultural translator and cultural representative. Eminem, on the other hand, does not represent a ‘culture’ but a missing cultural identity looking for a home amid a population who overestimate the value of this ‘homelessness.’ In other words, when gods do not have a local home, ostensibly, they cannot be considered gods. Eminem’s qualification of ‘rap’ god is rhetorically clever, but also figuratively humbling and signals that he is, at some level, aware of these white limits – the biggest limit, perhaps, that of holding white and black in a dialectical union.
It may be that one community’s G.O.A.T. is another’s sacrificial offering. Eminem, with album sales numbers that dwarf all other lyricists revered in hip-hop today – including Kendrick Lamar – as G.O.A.T. helps bring a hip-hop sensibility to the masses. Lamar, on the other hand, through the medium of hip-hop, comes to be a champion of a set of cultural obligations and eventualities that exceed the reach of hip-hop culture, even if hip-hop is the final battleground. By this estimation, Lamar and Eminem are not judged against one another, meaning that fans and interested parties in hip-hop face very little cognitive dissonance when thinking of the authority each artist wields.
G.O.A.T.s are always a mark of highest respect, but also the objects traditionally sacrificed to the gods. There is, then, good reason for many in the United States during the early twenty-first century to authorize Lamar as a de facto G.O.A.T. Additionally, there may still be moments we can imagine the symbolic value of Eminem being dethroned as G.O.A.T. (by Lamar) at a time when critical masses within predominately white populations in Europe and the Americas are turning back toward nativism, if not outright white nationalism, in the face of real and imagined increased competition from black, brown, and yellow populations. This isn’t to suggest a direct parallel of white nationalists and Eminem, but that hip-hop is simply not immune to the broader cultural forces at work shaping the identities we value and authorize in the social world. To this extent, the mutual respect Lamar and Eminem extend to one another might suggest the model of the rap cipher as a mode of social and civic engagement in the world that is to come. Perhaps hip-hop provides the space for adjudicating cultural participation with an eye on the weight of history, the subsequent weight of geography and resources on interpretive possibilities, and a shared commitment to necessary attention to social context alongside a demand to “show and prove” one’s relevance to future social possibilities in a post-white world broadly conceived.