2
Ain’t (Just) ’bout da Booty: Funky Reflections on Love
TOMMIE SHELBY
 
 
 
From blues to country and rock & roll to neo-soul, popular music is replete with love songs. And hip hop is no exception. Although it is generally associated with illegal drugs, vulgar language, gratuitous violence, and raunchy sex, those schooled in the culture know that the music also speaks to the mysteries of the heart. Whether we’re talking old school—Whodini’s “One Love” (Back in Black) and LL’s, “I Need Love” (Bigger and Deffer)—or new school—Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and OutKast’s The Love Below—there are reflections on love in hip hop. But are any of these funky ruminations on love philosophically profound?
Let’s go back, way the hell back, to Plato’s Symposium, one of the oldest inquiries into the meaning of love in the Western tradition.12 Plato is to philosophy what Public Enemy is to political rap; he didn’t create philosophy, but he perfected the craft, brought it to a wider audience, and deeply influenced future lovers of wisdom. Plato’s writings, Symposium included, take the form of dialogues between fictional characters, all based on well-known personalities in ancient Athens, and often featuring Socrates, the famous philosopher and Plato’s teacher.
The real-life Socrates only freestyled: he never wrote down or recorded his philosophy. Like Supernatural, he kept it all in his dome, letting it flow spontaneously against anyone who wanted to engage in a battle of ideas. He was so skilled in his combative, questioning style that the haters just wouldn’t let him live, making him pay the ultimate price for staying true to the game. Had he ever put pen to pad, the title of his greatest hits might have been Get Knowledge or Die Tryin’. Many, including Plato, have been known to sample—and sometimes bite—his best shit.
Symposium is named for its setting: an extravagant drinking party, where duns ain’t sippin’ on Seagram’s and OJ but on Rémy and Möet. Because Socrates and his clique had got so drunk the night before, they decide to chill and not to drink too much. To keep it interesting, though, they form a cipher and take turns rapping about the meaning and value of love, just to see who’s got the smoothest flow and illest rhymes. Let’s peep the most impressive performances.

Love Haters: Skepticism about Romantic Love

MC Pausanias keeps it conscious, positive, and, at times, kinda preachy. He claims there are two kinds of love, which we might call vulgar and spiritual. The vulgar lover seeks only the physical pleasure of another’s body—almost anyone’s body, as long as they fine—because, to be blunt, he just wanna get his freak on (Symposium 181b). Such love is not to be honored or praised, according to Pausanias, because it is unstable and thus unreliable. It is the kind of love associated with young folk. As Andre 3000 says: “I’m too young to be settlin’ down, quick to change my mind tomorrow / So now can I borrow your timid torso / More so than your soul, honest me gotta be how I roll.”13
In contrast, those inspired by spiritual love, while no doubt attracted to beautiful bodies, are primarily interested in another’s soul, and not just any soul but one that is righteous. They want to share everything and to spend their lives with their beloved because of the beauty and consistency of their beloved’s moral character. This more mature kind of love, Pausanias claims, is truly honorable, for the lover who seeks it aims to become a better person. True love, according to this conception, can’t be just about the booty.
Looking for traces of Pausanias in hip hop, we find plenty of talk about booty—not to mention booties shakin’ in music videos—and a strong tradition of skepticism toward spiritual love. Some deny its very existence. Others regard its pursuit as not worth all the damn trouble. Still others see it as a kind of trap, as a means for the opportunistic to get their hands on your cheddar. Jay-Z expresses this sentiment: “Me give my heart to a woman? / Not for nothin’, never happen / I’ll be forever mackin’ / Heart cold as assassins / I got no passion.”14
Now these critics of love do value mutually beneficial sexual relationships, either for the pleasures of sex alone or as part of a trade of sex for material goods, power, or money. Lil’ Kim suggests that she values these relationships for both reasons. Sometimes she emphasizes the intrinsic satisfaction of good sex, especially the oral variety: “Lick it right the first time or ya gotta do it over / Like it’s rehearsal for a Tootsie commercial.”15 At other times, the Queen B@#$h views it as simply a means to stick a nigga for his cream: “That’s how many times I wanna cum, twenty-one / And another one, and another one, and another one / 24 karats nigga / That’s when I’m fuckin’ wit’ the average nigga.”16 But these transactions in the sexual marketplace, whatever their value or attraction, should not be confused with love.
Perhaps we need to specify what kind of love we’re talking about. As important as they are, we ain’t talking about love for friends, family, or God. Snoop and the Dogg Pound got love for all their niggaz and bitches, Eminem got much love for his daughter Hailie, and Nas has love for one God and one love for his homies on lockdown.17 Our concern, however, is with erotic or romantic love, the kind of love intimately, if not inextricably, linked with sexual desire. So the type of love we’re talking about isn’t just about “that thing,” but sex has got to be a part of the equation.
Those dubious about romantic love could reply to Pausanias that, to the extent they care about cultivating virtue, they do it by loving, admiring, and learning from their crew, family, and God. And when it comes to sexual desire, well, they’re keepin’ it strictly vulgar. Following the lead of 3000, we can call persons who deny that they need somebody to love “love haters.” Can we find a convincing response to the love haters?

You’re All I Need: Love as Completeness and Eternal Unity

Next on the mic is the funky Aristophanes, whose steelo involves the clever use of myth and vivid allegory. He tells a tale about how, back in the day, each person possessed two heads, both male and female genitalia, and two sets of arms and legs. Consequently, these folks were strong and in no need of love, whether spiritual or vulgar. This made them arrogant and they tried to start beef with the gods. So Zeus quite naturally had to put them in their place. He dropped a thunderbolt on dem asses, cutting each person in two and leaving the halves physically deformed and feeling unfulfilled.
The moral of Aristophanes’s odd story is this. Until we find true love, we are incomplete and discontent (Symposium 189d–190d). While in this imperfect state, we long for our “other half,” desperate to feel whole and at peace. We are in search of that missing part of ourselves, our natural complement. Once a person meets the eyes of that special one “the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment” (Symposium 192b–c).
Aristophanes admits that, despite their undying attraction, most lovers can’t explain why they desire to be together forever. They regard their love as a mystery, and perhaps no less worthwhile because of it—think here of the “strange love” between Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. Yet they do know that sex plays a role in erotic love. Sexual intercourse and procreation affirm and symbolize their love. They represent that mutual but inexplicable desire for eternal unity. The couple in love wants to join their bodies in the most intimate way possible and through this to jointly produce a child that will embody their oneness in a single precious soul. With this, Aristophanes thinks he has uncovered the secret of the desire for spiritual love: It is simply the pursuit of wholeness and eternal unity.
This point of view is expressed in Method Man’s hit, “I’ll Be There For You / You’re All I Need To Get By,” which features the background vocals of Mary J. Blige.18 In an uncharacteristic display of sentimentality, our man Johnny Blaze, sometimes known as the Panty Raider, articulates a conception of love through dope rhymes about the utter fulfillment and devotion that comes only with love’s bond, a love that has its highest expression in the creation of a child. This vision of love is reinforced through other elements of the track. Blige expresses the idea of “love at first sight” when she invokes the hook from the classic song of the same title, performed originally by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell: “Like sweet morning dew / I took one look at you / And it was plain to see / you were my destiny.” And the theme of eternal unity comes in the form of a haunting sample that loops throughout from “Me & My Bitch” by the late Notorious B.I.G.: “Lie together, cry together / I swear to God, I hope we fuckin’ die together.”
But has Aristophanes really met the challenge of the love hater? Even with the help of Meth, Mary J, Biggie, Marvin and Tammi (and Ashford and Simpson who wrote the original tune), I don’t think he has. This conception of love is likely to be compelling only to those who feel incomplete or imperfect to begin with. For individuals who already feel self-sufficient or who value highly their independence, this account gives them no reason to seek spiritual love. As Jay-Z says, because life is already difficult enough, no need to add all the unnecessary drama that love typically brings: “If you havin’ girl problems, I feel bad for you, son / I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one.”19
But hold up, wait a minute. Perhaps we can preserve Aristophanes’s insight—that love is the pursuit of wholeness and eternal unity—by joining friendship with sex. The love hater admits that he needs the love of friends and also needs sex. We could then say that, despite his professed desire to never fall in love, he is actually in love when he loves a friend with whom he also makes love—kinda in the spirit of the low-crunk ballad “Lovers and Friends” by Lil Jon, Usher, and Ludacris.20 But is that really what we’re after? Nah, we all know the difference. Biggie, no champion of romantic love, does love his “bitch,” but he loves her like his “best friend”: “Moonlight strolls with the hoes / Oh no, that’s not my steelo / I wanna bitch that like to play Celo and Craps / Packin’ gats in a Coach bag, steamin’ dime bags / A real bitch is all I want, all I ever had.”21 Friendship and sex may be necessary for love, but they’re not sufficient.
We might wonder whether it would make a difference if the sex happened to be exclusive? Nah, the sex could just be damn good. As we know from Method Man, there’s no need to shop around when you got the good stuff at home. Or perhaps exclusive sex is just a way of showing that you are trustworthy and loyal, down for whatever, as in “you my nigga.” Maybe Socrates can help us devise a reply to the love hater.

A Beautiful Reflection: Love as Spiritual Transcendence

Socrates rocks the mic with heavy doses of logic, irony, and aggression. In his rap on love, he riffs on and samples from both Pausanias and Aristophanes. He gives them their props but doesn’t hesitate to let them know when their arguments are wack. Contrary to Aristophanes, Socrates insists that spiritual love is the desire for beauty, not wholeness. And he agrees with Pausanias that the lover doesn’t desire mere physical beauty but the kind of beauty that includes goodness and wisdom, as when we say a person is beautiful on the outside and inside, in body and soul, like that lovely brown skin lady that Mos Def and Talib Kweli thank God for.22 Yet, Socrates claims that the desire to love is neither good nor bad in itself (Symposium 202a). It is only praiseworthy when the one who is loved is also morally virtuous and therefore deserves to be loved. Sometimes what appears to be love at first sight turns out not to be love at all. Although your beloved may be superbly fine, you could discover that he or she simply lacks virtue. Or as L. Boogie asks rhetorically, “How you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?”23
Socrates continues by pointing out that possessing beauty is necessary for happiness, by which he means a life of flourishing (Symposium 202c). In other words, we might imagine that a life in which all of one’s desires are fulfilled would be complete, but without a good and wise companion it would be, despite appearances, a deeply impoverished life. He takes this idea and joins it with Aristophanes’s insight that love is something we want to possess forever. Socrates therefore concludes: “Love is wanting to possess the good forever” (Symposium 206a). So if the love hater wants to be truly happy in life, he or she must trade independence for spiritual love.
Socrates believes that “reproduction” is essential to love too, but not because of a desire to affirm the couple’s eternal unity, as Aristophanes and Tical suggest. The true lover desires the immortality of beauty, to give birth to and nurture something beautiful, which will itself bear beautiful fruit, and so on, forever (Symposium 206b). It is for the sake of eternal virtue that lovers make great sacrifices for their offspring, knowing that their children embody a beauty that is divine. This point is made in Lauryn Hill’s moving tribute to her son Zion: “A beautiful reflection of His grace / For I know that a gift so great / Is only one God could create / And I’m reminded every time I see your face.”13
But Socrates makes a distinction between two types of “offspring” and thus two types of love. There are those who seek love through giving birth to beautiful children, and then there are those who do so through giving birth to beautiful ideas, ideas that will help others to become lovers of wisdom and virtue—that is, philosophers. The second kind of lover is drawn to persons who are beautiful in both body and soul, and with their companionship the lover’s knowledge of virtue grows, step by step, culminating in the love of beauty itself, in all its forms. This then is the highest form of love, for the object of love is perfect in every way and never changes. It is love of that which all beautiful things have in common:
This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful. (Symposium 211c)
Within this conception of love, Socrates still finds a place for sex without making the badunkadunk the central focus. Sexual attraction to beautiful bodies is a steppingstone to true love, which is love, not of beautiful people, but of the idea of beauty in its purity, without the imperfections of the human form.
Yet, there is something deeply unsatisfying about Socrates’s theory of love. According to him, the beloved is merely a means to an end—cultivating moral virtue or knowledge of goodness. The lover values the beloved only insofar as he or she facilitates the quest for absolute beauty. Thus, by this logic, if a more adequate facilitator is found, the beloved should be replaced! Or, perhaps less horrifying, the lover will love other beautiful people just as much as, if not more than, his initial beloved. Either way, we lose two defining features of romantic love—irreplaca-bility and exclusivity. When the lover reflects on the meaning of being in love, he regards his beloved as unique; no one can take his or her place. Moreover, he loves only his beloved and wants his lover to love only him.
Socrates’s conception of love does not really answer the love hater’s skepticism. Both see very little in love to recommend. Although the marketplace of beautiful ideas may yield dividends ultimately of higher worth than the marketplace of bling, benjamins, and booty, the love hater could admit this without changing his or her mind about the value of erotic love.

That’s Where the Drama Begins: Love as Possession

After the battle is over and Socrates has been declared the victor, Alcibiades crashes the party with his crew. He arrives from da club, talkin’ loud, and drunk as hell. After learning that they’ve all just been rapping about the meaning of love, he demands an opportunity to display his skillz. Taking control of the mic, Alcibiades moves the crowd with revealing and frank first-person storytelling, full of colorful metaphors and double entendres.24 Despite his incredible high, his steez is intact and he manages to kick knowledge. In fact, he provides precisely what seems to be missing from the previous accounts, namely, the vicissitudes of erotic desire, the ceaseless struggle between lovers, the drama of love, the funk of love.25 Folks were tryin’ to take the shit out of love. But this is impossible, as Michael Franti reminds us on “Love Is Da Shit”: “You were worth every risk so I gave my heart room / And now I’m deep in the doo-doo that makes life bloom.”26
What Socrates fails to see is that love is a reciprocal relationship. It is not a one-way street between lover and beloved, as if the “love-object” had no will or consciousness of his or her own. We become painfully aware of this when our love is not returned. Alcibiades represents this point of view by offering a personal account of the drama of love between himself and Socrates.
Before reflecting on that drama, we should note that same-sex love relationships were a common and accepted practice in ancient Greek society. In our society, many are intolerant toward persons who express same-sex desire, and some hip-hop artists seem to take perverse pleasure in openly expressing malice toward “fags.” Why these artists regard this as adding to their art is another mystery worth exploring, though one I won’t take up here.27 Yet, whatever one thinks about the morality of homosexuality or the homophobia found in some rap lyrics, I’d challenge anyone who’s ever been in love to assert, in all honesty, that the feelings Alcibiades articulates are not universal and authentic sentiments of erotic love.
He first emphasizes the importance of possession. For Alcibiades possession is that familiar feeling of being under a spell when in love. Hit by the voo-doo that makes Salt-N-Pepa wanna shoop, the lover is drawn involuntarily to her beloved.28 Alcibiades claims that Socrates’s words have the power to possess in just this way. When that true playa Big Sockratease spits game it hypnotizes those who hear his words: “I swear to you, the moment [Socrates] starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face, ... and, let me tell you, I am not alone” (Symposium 215e).
But Alcibiades thinks of possession in a second sense, that of the powerful pronoun “my,” as in my nigga or my bitch. There’s a sense of implied ownership in love, a sense that my beloved “belongs” not just with me but to me. Let’s not be misled by economic metaphors, though. The object of one’s love should not be regarded as a commodity that can be exchanged for other commodities or for money—unless of course ya pimpin’ like Fiddy.29 Nor can one’s “rights” to him or her be transferred to another like a title to a tight ass Hummer. The sense of possession at issue is a desire for exclusivity, both sexual and emotional. The fragile bond of love is held together by trust and loyalty. The government cannot protect your “love rights” like it can your property rights. And even if 50 Cent’s lover gives the right answer to all twenty-one of his questions, there is no guarantee that she’ll follow through on her word. If the lover perceives that someone else is receiving the special affection characteristic of love, the lover becomes jealous, sometimes insanely so. The lover is especially sensitive to any sign that the ties of love might have been broken. As Black Thought from The Roots tells us: “I’ve seen people caught in love like whirlwinds / Listening to they squads and listening to girlfriends / That’s exactly the point where they whole world ends / Lies come in, that’s where the drama begins.”30
This brings us to another feature of love’s drama. Love can bring one to the brink of madness, making one obsessed and impulsive (Symposium 218a–b). As we all know, one does crazy things when in love. Remember when Left Eye burned down her man Andre Risen’s crib? Possession can also explain the thin line between love and hate: “Sometimes, believe me, I think I would be happier if [Socrates] were dead. And yet I know that if he dies I’ll be even more miserable. I can’t live with him, and I can’t live without him! What can I do about him” (Symposium 216c)?” This kind of aggression is often fueled by the implicit knowledge that the beloved can never really be fully possessed, and by the anxiety over being possessed oneself. Since she is an autonomous agent, the beloved is always slightly out of one’s grasp, remaining forever elusive. She can, if she so chooses, walk away or withhold affection. One ever fears that the magic could fade, that your beloved could awake from her dream-like state and see you for who you are, with all your flaws. Also, being possessed means accepting a sense of helplessness. It is, as Alcibiades claims, a kind of emotional slavery, which we are both attracted to and naturally repelled by. When the stakes are high and we must make that life-long commitment, we are often overcome with dread, even despite our undying love for our beloved. We are faced with, to reference Andre once more, “Dracula’s wedding.”
Alcibiades also complains that, in all their private moments together, Socrates never told him any secrets, never revealed anything private. In fact, Socrates, consistent with his philosophy, refused to say anything to Alcibiades that he wouldn’t say to any beautiful person who inquired. His relationship with Alcibiades is therefore not special or intimate. It’s so impersonal that maybe we shouldn’t consider it a “relationship” at all.31 Socrates doesn’t desire Alcibiades in his particularity. When Alcibiades offers himself and all that he has to Socrates and makes a desperate plea to the great man, he is flat rejected, straight dissed. This refusal of exclusivity by Socrates is also a failure of reciprocity. When the lover offers himself, an act filled with trepidation, he desires to have that offer reciprocated. Such offers are highly risky ventures, for they make the lover completely vulnerable. Loving takes courage. One is not simply putting one’s rep or paper on the line, but one’s heart. This is the painful lesson that Lauryn Hill learned when she loved real, real hard once: “That what you want might make you cry / And what you need might pass you by.”32
Yet despite this rejection, humiliation, and emotional suffering, in the eyes of Alcibiades, Socrates remains perfect in every way. He fully embodies the virtues of modesty, self-control, courage, and philosophical wisdom. Even his vices are regarded as virtues. This kind of idealization enables the lover to forgive the flaws of his or her beloved. But the point is not to view the beloved as a mere instance of a universal, such as BEAUTY itself. The point is to see the beloved as one-of-a-kind: “You could say many other marvelous things in praise of Socrates. Perhaps he shares some of his specific accomplishments with others. But, as a whole, he is unique; he is like no one else in the past and no one in the present—this is by far the most amazing thing about him” (Symposium 221c).

The Mysteries of Love Revealed?

There is at least one final thing we can learn from Alcibiades’s rap about love. Perhaps to love is not to possess beauty in itself, in its purity, as Socrates claims. Rather, to love is to regard one’s beloved as perfectly beautiful despite his or her flaws and to forgive these faults when they come from a person with an open and loving heart. But, again, this kind of love requires reciprocity. We only offer it with the expectation that it will be returned, and we should only accept it if we have the honest intention of giving it back. Such a relationship necessarily involves vulnerability—and the drama this brings. We must admit that sometimes relationships get ill. No doubt.
The love hater is not self-deceived about the risks of love. These risks are real, built into the very nature of love. In light of this fact, perhaps no philosophical argument or dope rhyme can convince the love hater to take a chance on love, especially if he or she fears vulnerability. Romantic love may not be for everyone. But it’s not merely for suckas either. And although we haven’t uncovered all of love’s mysteries, it should at least be clear it ain’t just ’bout da booty.33