OR: CHASING THE MASCULINITY OF THE GREATEST CUBAN——AMERICAN CROSSOVER POP-RAPPER IN ALL OF HISTORY

‘Smell me,’ I said. I’m with a new girl and we’re in that sort of weird hazy space between ‘hanging out’ and ‘actual boyfriend/girlfriend’, i.e. we’ve seen each other as naked as it is possible to see another person and eaten pizza in each other’s beds but not actually sat down and Had The Chat about Where We Are As A Couple yet, and I am saying ‘smell me’. ‘Smell me,’ I say, and I offer her my wrist. And she says: that’s nice, yeah. And I say: ‘It’s Pitbull. By Pitbull.’ And she says, ‘Pitbull? As in: Pitbull?’ And I say, yes. And she laughs, and laughs, and laughs and laughs and laughs. ‘Respect Pitbull,’ I say. ‘Show your respect to Pitbull.’

* * *

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I think the pop-rap artist Pitbull is one of the most singular and unparalleled examples of masculinity in our culture today. He’s also sort of weird, and laughable, and the way he straddles that line – at once a joke and an icon – is something I find deeply inspiring. Pitbull transcends many things – taste, fashion, trends, race – but most of all he skips like a stone over a glassy lake the very concept of irony, at once wrapped tightly in its knot and kicking lightly six feet clear above it. Pitbull contains multitudes, is what I’m saying, and I want to be like him.

I am not a macho man. Machismo is a hard concept to pin down, because it’s less a strict list of principles and things to be good at – a macho man can lift heavy iron, and kick a ball perfect spiral, and eat just a mess of boiled eggs at once, and drive a stick-shift car, and tolerate incredibly spicy hot foods, but he can also walk into a room and own it, look good in a suit, send flowers to a love to say ‘thank you’. My machismo is something different, softer: I have a very complex skincare routine, for instance, and a whole cupboard of herbal and non-herbal teas, and my tender body does not really react well to fabrics washed in biological laundry powder. My machismo is more soft knits and high necks, and I am Really Into Cats, and music-wise I cannot really tolerate any songs that have lyrics in them, let alone jangling chords, so like the absolute polar inverse of cock-rock. For a formative period of my adolescence my half-broken voice sounded exactly like my mother’s so when I answered the phone her friends would talk to me as if I were her (and I mean what is it about middle-aged women that just makes them on a constant rolling start re: any conversation about their vagina or anus? The amount of times I’ve heard, ‘Oh hello Hazel listen: it’s me nuggets again—’ I mean) and I think that had a very impactful impression on my nascent feelings of masculinity. I am very unstrong and deeply unathletic and despite a lifetime spent searching for the one sport I assume everyone has in their locker that they are particularly good at, I am yet to find it (I am okay at ping-pong and suspect – but have not ever really tested – that I would be a competent adult badminton player). I eat meat but not in a very macho I’ll-have-my-steak-raw-and-my-whisky-rawer way because I actually have a very overriding sweet tooth making me far more likely to order tiramisu and get a little bit squishy on it. I cannot grow a beard but I also don’t quite have the raw charisma to go clean-shaven without looking like I’m still taking GCSEs so both sides of the world of shaving are closed off to me entirely. I have never, ever fired a gun. I have never, ever put up a shelf. I have never, ever given someone a black eye. I find most wild animals terrifying and have opinions about soft furnishings. If I had to describe my lovemaking style as a popular coffee drink it would be ‘vanilla latte’. How do you think Pitbull fucks? I think Pitbull fucks like a snake spliced with a wolf. Pitbull fucks like a Ferrari driving up a skyscraper. Pitbull fucks like a double espresso poured into a fire. Pitbull fucks like a Gatling gun hanging out of a police helicopter. Pitbull has never ever had to Google ‘what toner is best for oily skin?’

Pitbull fascinates me, then, for two reasons: one, he is my exact masculine inverse, the same way a bullet is the opposite of a gun, and second because his status as a near-galactically famous pop star makes little to no actual sense. I mean: look at him. In an age of flawless hyper-celebrity, Pitbull’s vibe is still ‘small-town bouncer who put out a nude charity calendar’. His net worth is estimated at $65 million (2016), but I still sort of feel that, if I bumped into him in the street, he could still palm me a couple of grimy grams of MDMA for £20. Pitbull hasn’t worn anything that is non-designer and non-fitted – and, crucially, not-a-suit – for the best part of eight years now, but he still sort of looks like one of those anonymous blokes at a Russian millionaire’s wedding who may or may not have a warrant out for his war crimes. (Pitbull wears excessive richness in a way that seems both pre-destined to him from birth, and ever-so-slightly uncomfortably: a size M t-shirt stretched over a size L frame.) He Will Not Get Over White Trousers. And even his stage name, Pitbull, is deeply uncool: the kind of nickname you give to the senseless kid who used to ride BMX around your cul-de-sac and dated your sister during that summer she was trying to piss your dad off, and ended up getting an infected neck tattoo and, later, six years in prison for a particularly petty charge of theft. Pitbull exudes the kind of energy a glamorous uncle at a large family barbeque might, but he’s escalated and gathered it up like a snowball, accelerating constantly in speed and power, until it has shot down a ramp and up at the lip into the white-pale sky: flying, there, momentum keeping it in place, off into the horizon, gone. Pitbull turned a sort of everyman-alpha everytown-mediocrity into superstardom, without really changing the formula up at all. His mere existence at the top of the tree twists my head.

Pitbull was born Armando Christian Pérez, but I don’t give a crap about that. Every autobiography of every pop star with a stage name starts like this: they were born a mortal, and ascended to god. I am not interested in the path of Armando Christian Pérez, because that guy was clearly mediocre: it was only when he took on the name of Pitbull, the mantle and the mask, that he became Pitbull. Pitbull’s path to the top is fascinating to me because at some point along the line there was an invisible twist there, where Pitbull pivoted from ‘a kind of rap in-joke exclusive to Miami’ to ‘big enough pop star to open the World Cup ceremony in Brazil’, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that happened. I am fascinated by the idea of most pop stars as awkward-shaped high school teens, but no more is that so than with Pitbull: can you imagine him at school? There is absolutely no way he didn’t deal Ritalin and draw logos for himself in the back of all his workbooks. I feel like there are still bathrooms at South Miami Senior High that have the word ‘PITBULL’ etched into them – shakily, at first, but then confidently as he began to live his truth – into the very brick of them with a compass.

Pitbull’s first few years in music, 2004 to 2010, were solid if unspectacular (his first album was pushed by and featured the at the time much bigger artist Lil’ Jon, who met the rapper and liked him; in 2001, Pit was taken under the wing of Famous Artist Music & Management’s Robert Fernandez, who ‘saw the eagerness and hunger he had’ and decided to start working with him, and what I’m getting from all of this is Pitbull’s early career was marked by the fact that he was ‘quite likeable’ and ‘very keen’, and I think we can all learn a little something from that). Early Pitbull is proper dry-hump-in-a-sweaty-club rock-ya-ass music, and seeing old footage of him then, before the suit, is like seeing the Queen in a t-shirt: Pitbull lip-syncs to a crowd while wearing a sleeveless basketball vest (when have you ever seen Pitbull’s upper arms? They exist. But when have you seen them?), or walks slo-mo into a set mansion in two oversized shirts unbuttoned over a tee, baggy suit jacket w/ jeans. Then Pitbull’s breakout 2010 hit I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) happened, and he turns up in the video to that in a black suit, black shirt, black oversized shades, like the final boss in a videogame where you exclusively combo-kill Vegas seminar pick-up artists, and that was it: he rapped the line label flop but Pit don’t stop / got her in the cockpit playing with Pit’s cock, and lo, a legend was born.

From then on, Pitbull has made every single song that anyone on earth has stripped to, and it’s made him enormously successful as a result. His formula is actually pretty simple: Pitbull has a keen ear for fleeting music trends, so he lifts from them for a backing track, raps about how good a night it’s going to be on top of it, ideally inserts a female vocalist feature, and then boom: song of the summer, every single time. 2013’s Timber is perhaps the most perfect example of this: Pit jumped on to a nascent country revival with a harmonica-led backing arrangement (how can you mash up country music and EDM and make a worldwide #1 hit? Ask Pitbull, a Midas-fingered maniac); got Ke$ha to sing the hook; very visibly did not turn up to the video shoot so every shot of him dancing in a pink suit jacket on a slightly gloomy beach is interspersed in with Ke$ha, a thousand miles and a number of weeks away, writhing on a farm; and sang the line this biggity boy’s a diggity dog in it; and somehow this was the only song that played on my office radio for an entire calendar year from October 2013 onwards. What Pitbull does doesn’t make sense in the cold glowing light of day, but put a single bottle of beer in your hand and cram yourself into a low-ceilinged room with a thousand other dancing people and suddenly it does: Pitbull, very crucially, makes music for you to listen to when you’re waiting at the bar trying to buy a girl a drink. Pitbull is the soundtrack for every night when a boy who still takes his laundry home for his mum to do makes out with a girl who has 10,000 Instagram followers minimum.

Working theory: I’m writing this from the year 2018, which I have to tell you, is not a great year. We’ll look back on this and laugh, I really think, but right now it feels chaotic: Trump is in the midst of his presidency, and we have all finally realised that his term in the White House is real, it is happening, there is no escaping this fact. Tectonic plates of stress push over everything: climate change looms, a generation of young people seem inexorably pinned under the vestiges of the 2008 market crash, home ownership is a distant dream for so many, debt is up, wages are down, weaponised crime is up (weaponised crime!), the police are seemingly at war with people of colour, Britain is creaking away from Europe for no discernible reason, trans people have to scream and shout for their right to be recognised as people, the alt-right rises, trolling has become a legitimate political force, Russia is infiltrating Britain, Russia is infiltrating the US, Syria is at war with itself and we are all trying to get involved with it, Facebook hovers above us, ominous and large, listening in. Like: the earth is tearing itself into a desert planet and we’re too busy firing bullets into each other and posting memes about it to really notice. So it’s stressful. It’s a stressful time. We will look back on this and laugh! But it’s a stressful time. To be alive.

Pitbull is not stressed, and actually his sort of malaise-wrestling braggadocio is an antithesis of stress itself, and I think somewhere in that nub is the pulsing core of his appeal. Look at a still photo of Pitbull and hear the word: aha. Wake up and rub your eyes and know Pitbull is somewhere, pouring a perfect, dripless tequila shot. Pitbull tells us that there is a core energy in this world, Partying, and that everything else we do should be driven into that pursuit: having a good time, flexing in a club, smelling good, grinding nice, dancing on that girl, getting tipsy but not out-of-control drunk, camera flashes, perfect teeth, dale. Pitbull is a monument to having a good time. He is a cathedral to the idea of doing three lines of coke in a bathroom and losing your fucking mind to an EDM drop.

And in that sense I think Pitbull does something bigger than make music for people who are in the Uber home waiting to screw: I actually think he actively adds balance to the universe. Pitbull is Pitbull, sure, but he also isn’t: he’s essentially a suit, an occasional soul patch, some oversized glasses and a gruff roar, the same song in different formations, ten interchangeable dancers behind him. If you dressed Pitbull in jeans and a t-shirt he could be, very literally, anyone. You wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up if he’d punched you once in the street. Pitbull, like James Bond, only becomes himself when he puts on the suit: and, again, like James Bond, he could be easily played by another actor, and another actor the generation after that, then George Lazenby for a bit, then another, better actor. We need Pitbull because we need someone to remind us to have fun; we need Pitbull because we need something fresh to dance to in nightclubs. Pitbull is essentially ‘work hard, party harder’ made flesh, he’s an inspirational mantra about getting it, his life is what would happen if you could make an erection sentient. Pitbull, crucially, is an energy, a universal yang to balance out the collective yin, and we need to always have him there – quietly, somewhere, out there, trying to put an EDM drop in the middle of some Balearic folk music – to keep ourselves together. Respect Pitbull, is what I’m saying. Every time I smell like him I am reminded that something out there is good.