Hip-Hop and Philosophy

Rap is the black CNN. Widely attributed to Public Enemy’s Chuck D, this view implies that rap informs the culture at large about ideas current in the black community. It follows that hip-hop lyrics mean the way messages do. They are meant to be true as they conform to regular patterns of meaning.¹³² So there should be a straight line from a fact to an idea about it in the lyricist’s mind to the lyric’s meaning. This communicative-message model of hip-hop lyrical meaning holds that a successful hip-hop lyric must be a genuine testimony about the lyricist’s real self, telling the truth from the standpoint of a real person. Ice-T really had scrapes with the law, Lauryn Hill really had scrapes with the wrong kind of man, and Eminem really learned his craft in scrappy Detroit. And the messages their lyrics convey are rooted in these real experiences.

The communicative-message model answers numerous questions arising in hip hop. For instance, rap is so black-identified that the perennial question arises about whether non-blacks (such as Eminem or the Beastie Boys) can create rap music. The dispute isn’t about the mere ability to rhyme over beats. It’s over whether non-blacks can report truths thought to derive from being black. If rap is communicative in the way that messages are, then how can one report on things one hasn’t seen or experienced? As a defense, the non-black rap artist can appeal to the “blackness” of their background to show that they have access to the truths their lyrics convey. (Eminem’s 8 Mile attempts this.) Alternatively (as in the Beastie Boys example), they can underscore the way their acts draw from different musical genres, such as punk rock.¹³³ As such, their role as “reporters” of black life is greatly attenuated, and they can be interpreted as left-field “commentators” drawing from other kinds of experiences.

Rapper Young Buck recently observed: “Rap is weird, man. A muthafucka can say what he wants in they music. But it’s just putting words together, so you gotta be your own judge of how real it is.”¹³⁴ Buck’s point is that rap artists entertain and enlighten by creatively expressing their ideas. If they have a burden to testify truthfully, neither that burden nor its satisfaction seems easily settled in the meanings of lyrics. It follows that hip-hop lyrics mean the way narratives and stories do. They are meant to be as-if true by conforming to the lyricist’s adopted persona in their adopted biography.¹³⁵ There should be a straight line from an as-if fact to an idea about it in the lyricist’s mind to the written lyric’s meaning. This narrative-story model of hip-hop lyrical meaning holds that a successful hip-hop lyric be enlightening, entertaining, and even poignant in telling the as-if truth from the lyricist’s adopted persona. Marshall Mathers tells stories about the “thoughts” and “actions” of a character named “Eminem,” Sean Combs tells stories about a character named “Puff Daddy” (aka “P Diddy,” aka “Puffy”), Kimberly Jones about a character named “Lil’ Kim,” and Calvin Broadus about a character named “Snoop Dogg.” And the narratives their lyrics convey are rooted in the as-if experiences of these adopted personae.

The narrative-story model addresses numerous concerns that arise in hip hop. For instance, hip-hop artists often reject claims that they are role models for disaffected youth. After all (goes the reasoning) they are artists who are responding to what their art demands of them. And part of what it demands is to sometimes venture into territory society is reluctant to occupy—well-suited to artistic and creative narrative but ill-suited to being a role model for young people.

There are good reasons for trying to synthesize these competing models. How is a listener supposed to “judge” the “realness” of a given lyric, especially since—unlike most other lyrical art forms—rap music attempts to communicate ideas and not merely represent the artistic fantasies of its creators?¹³⁶ What beliefs and attitudes can we fairly ascribe to lyricists on the basis of their lyrics?¹³⁷ This is closely related to more general aesthetic questions about the integrity and meaning of artworks themselves. After all, rap is an art form presented to listeners in a way that allows for that long kind of listen, the kind where different interpretations emerge and conflict, and lyrics bump into each other, refusing to be easily decoded and figured out. What Jay-Z means by “H to the izz-O” is one level of query; how his use of izz-O is related to his (and Snoop’s) oft-mimicked fo’ shizzle is another.¹³⁸ The aesthetic interest in rap must include a theory of rap as an artwork that conveys meaning.

Another motivation for a synthesis derives from all-too-familiar moral and political questions about rap music. Some people wonder about the rapper’s moral responsibility for the views expressed in their lyrics. Gangsta’ rap, big-pimpin’ braggadocio, thong songs, gin-and-juice posturing, thug life, and bitches-and-ho’s clichés provide the familiar litany of examples, linked by the paired worries about violence in black urban life and negative attitudes toward women. This responsibility gets more complicated in that many of the messages in the lyrics (as well as visuals in the videos) seem to celebrate what many consider pathologies of urban black life. Others are concerned about the political component of hip-hop lyrics and how criticisms of power, authority, and the social order are to be understood.¹³⁹ N.W.A.’s “F*** Tha Police” (Straight Outta Compton) is an obvious (though dated) example, as is KRS-One’s Keep Right. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) is an especially striking example, since one cannot listen to Chuck D on that record without calling to mind Spike Lee’s 1989 (famously political) Do the Right Thing. Nas’s Street’s Disciple and The Game’s The Documentary provide more recent social commentaries of sorts.

Other people are interested in the cultural fabric hip-hop artists are crafting—the so-called hip-hop nation—complete with cultural values and markers of all sorts. Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Q-Tip, and others aren’t just artists performing in a certain style, but are seen by many of their fans as part of a larger movement of authenticity. Tupac was very explicit about his notion of “thug life” being both a lyrical trope on his records and a way of authentic living for young people in desperate circumstances, suggesting a broad culture-making role for rap music. He envisioned his lyrics inspiring listeners only seeing hopelessness and violence in their own thug lives.¹⁴⁰ Surely Pac’s lyrical meanings include his intention to depict that life with poignancy and subtlety. (Older music fans surely remember punk rock as a style of music, a style of dress, and a social movement all at once.)

Here, then, is an obvious synthesis of the communicative-message and narrative-story models: hip-hop lyrics are truth telling and authentic messages of the real selves of their authors (borrowing from Chuck D), though they are so conveyed in stories and narratives of the personae adopted by those lyricists (borrowing from Young Buck). I will argue against this tempting synthesis by challenging the claim that an idea in a lyric derives from an idea in the mind of a lyricist.¹⁴¹

This synthesis runs afoul of hip hop’s most notorious problems, the bitch-and-ho problem and the problem of beefs. These problems trade on a fundamental confusion about whether hip-hop lyrics mean communicatively or narratively, whether they aim at genuine truth or merely as-if truth. For instance, are sexually explicit lyrics about women—“bitches and ho’s” in the vernacular—meant to be truth-telling and factual or are they meant depictively, indicating the sort of thing a certain character might say? When traditional roles are reversed, and women utter lyrics that are sexually explicit or demeaning (Lil’ Kim comes to mind), are they meant as truth-correcting to prevailing sexual stereotypes or as counter-narrative to those stereotypes? These confusions are not restricted to outsiders in the listening culture at large, but often persist even among such privileged audiences as industry insiders. The miscommunications and counter-narrative posturing (which is it?) that typify beefs are cases in point. Some of these problems surface for every lyrical art, but they are especially troubling for hip-hop verbal performances.

The philosopher Jerrold Levinson proposes that, in general, “a work of art says what, on the basis of the work contextually construed, it would be reasonable to impute to its artist as a view that he or she both significantly held and was concerned to convey.”¹⁴² Following this proposal, we might say that what Kelis’s lyric expresses is that which she can be said to significantly hold, provided that she is concerned to convey that view in the lyric. (I’m assuming that she wrote the lyric in question.) So for the meaning of “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,” we should say that the lyric says what Kelis significantly holds—that her body attracts men—and that she is concerned to convey that in the lyric, the art being the metaphoric suggestion that her body attracts like a milkshake. I say significantly held, as opposed to just held, since presumably Kelis (like the rest of us) holds many things that are not part of her intending to say something by the lyric. But the concerned-to-convey relation is trickier, since for her to be concerned to convey some view she holds, it seems she must do so with respect to some listener. So, once we introduce the idea of a conveying relation, we must say something about Kelis’s audience.

That audience is neither uniform nor simple. Some listeners will be savvy enough to unpack the lyric’s sexual meaning, perhaps even being such “insiders” in the intended audience that they understand something about the children’s playground banter she mimics, as well as the way popular black music often straddles that fine line between sexual confrontation and playful teasing. Others will be “outsiders,” getting some message from the lyric, certainly, even as they invariably misperceive it to some degree.¹⁴³ These two sorts of listeners will have to be accommodated in a general analysis of a lyricist’s being concerned to convey something.

This is especially important since lyrical meaning can hinge on this. For instance (as Levinson points out) an insider audience might take lyrics to be “purveying stories or confessionals that simply ‘tell it like it is’, without moralizing,” while to an outsider audience those same lyrics are personified irony, presenting “morality plays that admonish against certain forms of behavior tempting to those in hard circumstances.”¹⁴⁴ A certain sort of listener, for example, might take Lil’ Kim’s sexually frank lyrics in songs like “Suck My D**k” (The Notorious KIM) to be self-demeaning, along the lines of classic feminist criticisms about objectifying women. But another sort of listener could take her to be asserting that sexuality on her own terms, defiantly, in ways generally not deemed acceptable for women.

Hence the most exacting view about lyrical meaning may come to this: a lyric means what a lyricist intends to say, by which we mean that a lyricist significantly holds some view, and is concerned to convey that view in their lyric to an audience of insider and outsider listeners. Levinson argues similarly but he takes the relevant intended message to be higher-order, since in some cases there may be conflicting first-order views being conveyed. As he puts it, a higher-order message “enfolds the ones that are equally suggested by the work but at odds with one another, and which is more plausibly ascribed to the author than either of the first-order messages taken by themselves.”¹⁴⁵

Suppose you knew Lil’ Kim personally, and knew for a fact that she believed that women should flaunt their sexuality with men in a way that classical feminists (say) would take to be self-demeaning, thereby debunking the self-affirming, Lil’-Kim’s-a-feminist-icon meaning that some might suggest. On this scenario, the classical feminist is the outsider audience, given Lil’ Kim’s intention, and the insiders are (presumably) those that recognize (and perhaps accept) the currency of the sexual-flaunting message. This will be a challenge to any theory that regards lyrics as messages, particularly because of the dual-audience feature just introduced; dual audiences imply dual meanings. So which view is she really concerned to convey? Perhaps Lil’ Kim’s intention is to convey conflicting (first-order) views to her audiences. Nevertheless, it would still be plausible to attribute to her some higher-order message—even if only the (higher-order) intention to intend different messages for different audiences. Isn’t that after all what we recognize as subtlety: an outsider gets one message, an insider another, and we take the lyricist to have intended that?

The main idea is that, whatever message we take the lyric in question to be communicating, it is traceable back to the lyricist as a super-view that enfolds multiple, potentially conflicting (plain old) messages that can be sorted by their targeted audiences. After all, there is surely a true story about what Lil’ Kim intends to convey, mixed messages and all. And the problem doesn’t dissipate even if her super-view is that there is no message meant to be conveyed. Lil’ Kim might be trying to confound philosophical analysts seeking to discern her intended meaning by deliberately writing lyrics that don’t reflect any intended meaning. But then that would be her super-view, and we’d just have to expose her intentions to discern her real message. Meaning nothing in a lyric is a way of meaning something in a lyric, and the philosopher’s task is to explain that.

Our task multiplies, since it is trivially true that a target listener is presented with a hip-hop lyric in some context. That context includes the conventions and traditions associated with the art form, “knowledge of which would be presumed in a savvy listener.” ¹⁴⁶ Familiarity with the ritualized insults of vernacular black speech, for instance, diminishes the relevance to lyrical meaning of the customary meanings of expressions; an astute listener recognizes braggadocio when they hear it, and an astute lyricist will figure that into their intended meaning.

Eminem works such savvy into his song “Stan” (The Marshall Mathers LP) as he relates letters from a disturbed fan, and then his own response. Stan writes to Eminem (aka Slim Shady): “Dear Slim, you still ain’t called or wrote, I hope you have a chance / I ain’t mad—I just think it’s fucked up you don’t answer fans.” Eminem brackets the lyric with standard letter-writing conventions to establish the kind of talk that this is, and uses a number of references and devices to tell the listener—who might themselves be the sort of fan who writes this sort of letter—what kind of communication this is. After subsequent letters (and ultimately a cassette recording of that fan’s suicide) document Stan’s downward emotional spiral, Eminem includes his own belated reply letter to that fan. Its rather pedestrian opening suggests his lack of any alarm, followed by his growing sense that the writer is troubled. He works the context of lyrical-meaning evaluation to get his target listeners to understand the views he is concerned to convey. And the gravity of the lyrical meaning is such that it can convey one thing to a critic who may decry what they regard as rap music’s violence and nihilism, another thing to a deranged fan who may be on the same path as “Stan,” and still another thing to a listener who is skeptical about Eminem’s credibility as a serious rap artist, someone who can tell “the truth” the way such artists are supposed to. That this story is meant as true is not left to chance, as the closing lyric of Eminem’s reply to Stan suggests: “I seen this one shit on the news a couple weeks ago that made me sick / Some dude was drunk and drove his car over a bridge . . . / And in the car they found a tape, but they didn’t say who it was to / Come to think about, his name was . . . it was you.” It all works because the listeners understand the exchange, and the intended meaning comes across.

Of course, the contribution to lyrical meaning by targeted contexts of meaning evaluation is always going to be somewhat slippery. After all, a listener might hear a lyric on a dance floor, from a passing SUV, or through their iPod while running around the Central Park reservoir. The context variables are numerous and ever-shifting. Whether a boast about “bitches and ho’s” is meant as a derogation of women, or as an implicit criticism of someone who thinks of women that way, might be alternately grasped by a listener (in part) depending on whether they are being thoughtful and reflective, annoyed and anxious, or driven by adrenaline and sexual energy. Since there is no privileged context of evaluation (the way museums are for paintings, say), a lyricist will always have some trouble targeting a particular audience with an intended meaning.

So now we see one chief problem for the synthesis under consideration. The line from lyricist to lyric cannot be straight because the relevant intentions to mean this or that cannot be transparent. Lil’ Kim can always mean one thing to one audience or another, and we’ll never know. Eminem can always construct a narrative built around as-if truth, and we’ll just have to take his word for it. Hence, if hip-hop lyrics pass Young Buck’s test, they will fail Chuck D’s test, and vice-versa. That the synthesis acknowledges this doesn’t provide a solution for it. Because it isn’t fully transparent, the concerned-to-convey relation will always plague Chuck D’s communicative-message model. If we can identify conventions of truthfulness for hip-hop lyrics, then we could close the problem down. But the synthesis prevents this option, because on Young Buck’s narrative-story model, the conventions may be regular, but they aren’t regular in the same way. As long as a lyricist’s intentions are audience-sensitive, we can always ask which audience such-and-such meaning is intended for, a question it seems we cannot reliably answer. To further illuminate this analysis let’s consider another problem for hip-hop lyrical meaning: the beef problem.

Ja Rule explains that his feud with 50 Cent developed after 50 Cent “felt the need to call my name and disrespect what I am doing, which is crazy.... So when I come back now and say I don’t like him for this, this and this reason, everyone goes, ‘Well now, it’s getting out of hand.’”¹⁴⁷ Part of the interpretation problem for Ja Rule is that he feels he cannot evaluate 50 Cent’s motivation for disrespecting him, and so is confused about the nature of the insults. He is further confused by their reception and so feels hemmed in. It’s as if Ja Rule doesn’t know which kind of listener he is—since he is surely adept at sorting the multi-level views that lyrics convey—nor does he know whether 50 Cent is speaking “in character,” that is, in his customary persona. And because he suspects it to be genuine, and not persona-mediated, he insists (the way any listener would) on a rational accounting for the view expressed. Since he cannot complete that accounting, he takes 50 Cent to be “crazy.”

Ja Rule is in a predictable bind given the failure of the synthetic claim under consideration. (Tupac was in a similar bind as he tried to figure out what Biggie and Puff Daddy were saying about him after the first time he got shot; interviews with Biggie before he died suggest that he was confused too.) To get out of this bind, Ja Rule needs either to complete the rational accounting (perhaps there is a genuine reason—maybe an unnoticed slight—for 50 Cent to have negative feelings about him), or reinstate the mediating persona (so that 50 Cent can be understood as speaking a part, and the interpretations will be of views enfolded by a super-view).

Someone may take this dilemma about beefs to make the case that rap music lyrics are not ultimately communicative, but I think this would be mistaken. The reasoning might run like this: if interpreting lyrics is a matter of discerning the super-view in question, so as to ascribe it to the lyricist, then what is at issue in how hip-hop lyrics mean is which persona is being adopted. If the persona is the key to (lyrical) meaning intentions, then our interpretive task is to specify what that persona is like (to make sense of what views it is conveying). Presumably this would involve seeing how that “character” shows up on different records, in videos, maybe even in other venues altogether. (Snoop and Puffy, for instance, exemplify acts that are bigger than their records.) But to study the character of a persona is to recognize that it is fictional. That is why beefs are settled the ways they are settled: either by being recognized as persona-driven—and so un-genuine and fictional—or else their persona is seen through to an actual insult made by the real person, sometimes with tragic, Biggie-and-Tupac results. But this implies that rap lyrics, to be genuinely interpreted, must be taken apart from the context of a persona. The communicative meaning problem that my analysis is supposed to help solve thus evaporates, leaving only an aesthetic meaning problem, no more difficult than wondering what James Gandolfini’s “Tony Soprano” means by such-and-such a line. (Answer: nothing, since he’s a fictional persona, not a real person.)

But this objection misunderstands something fundamental about how hip-hop is created. The solutions to beefs may indeed suggest the desirability of separating lyric from persona. But that doesn’t imply that personae are not communicative, or else that they are only quasi-communicative in some fictional bracketed way. Why do beefs get started in the first place? Not because of misunderstanding, but because personae are genuine extensions of the lived lives of rap artists. And so lyrics are at once the words and (thus) the thoughts of actual lyricists and the characters they adopt. That is why Young Buck has the dilemma about judging rap music. It’s not because anyone can string together any words they like and mean anything they like by them. It’s because there is an implied burden of authenticity. To be a rapper is to speak what is real, and it’s the realness that is difficult to authenticate. So the task of discerning the super-views behind the meaning of hip-hop lyrics remains thoroughly communicative, perhaps more so than for lyrics in other styles of music.

Mario Winans seems caught in a dilemma about meaning with his song “Pretty Girl Bullshit,” with its wholly inappropriate title given his deep church background. He realizes it and tries to wriggle himself free in a recent interview: “I never say the word in the song. I don’t even think it’s spelled out on the record. So that could be bull shoes really.”¹⁴⁸ Doubtful. He supposes (insincerely, I’m sure) that his famous gospel-singing mother (for instance) is a listener who will uptake the view expressed by the phrase bull shoes or some other innocuous term just because she lacks the actual utterance of the full expletive. His intention to convey the inappropriate expletive, though, is out in the open, given the way any contemporary listener would likely hear the lyric. His lyrical-meaning-intention betrays his explanation. Indeed, he manages to convey the meaning bullshit without saying it, his meaning intention see-sawing ever so precariously. The meaning of his lyric remains loose and unsettled so as to protect his gospel-singing persona.

Two

Freestyling rap seems to present any robust synthetic view of hip-hop lyrical meaning with a difficult challenge. Lil’ Flip’s free-association style, for instance, is tricky to treat either communicatively or narratively: “Buy the house, I buy the block / Buy the boat, I buy the dock / Sitting sideways at IHOP / Watch the trunk to see it go pop.”¹⁴⁹ Some of his critics go so far as to deny that his rhymes should even count as lyrics. “It’s because he’s country,” argues DJ Enuff. “He’ll say some slick shit here and there, but he ain’t Nas or Black Thought. His style and the way he carries himself make him hot. No one would ever say he’s a lyricist.”¹⁵⁰ It will have to be enough, I think, to consider freestyling as a borderline case of both communicative and narrative lyrical-meaning-intention in hip hop. Lil’ Flip as free-styler is a persona without a narrative or a message, much like jazz scat-singers of another era.

Three

Lauryn Hill calls her debut solo record The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as a way to both present and critique popular notions of how a woman ought to deal with love and life. After we hear a classroom discussion among young people about love, we hear her sing on “Ex Factor”: “It ain’t working / And when I try to walk away / You’d hurt yourself to make me stay / This is crazy.” It’s as if we hear the “miseducation” in grade school, and then fast forward to its irrational aftermath, cataloguing one of its distorting effects. We move from song to song on that album as Lauryn Hill moves from persona to persona: from miseducated fallen woman; to enlightened re-educated woman on “That Thing”; to biblical West Indian prophet—complete with accent and syntax shifts—on “To Zion,” “Lost Ones,” and others. Somehow we understand her, finally, as a meta-persona who takes her fate into her own hands in the album’s title song: “I made up my mind to define my destiny.” The narratives have their impact because these are her true lived experiences, while the lived experiences are presented as if they happened in just this story arc, so that the listener can grasp their significance. It makes little sense to force the issue of settling the lyrical meaning, since the persona-shuttling is precisely the point.¹⁵¹

Thesis: The Lyricist Message

Anti-Thesis: The Lyricist Narrative

Synthesis: Mixin’ Messages and Narratives

Messages from Kelis’s Yard and Lil’ Kim’s Beehive

Messages in Context: Slim Shady and Stan the Fan

Ja Rule v. 50 Cent: Beefs, Personae, and Meaning

Hip-Hop Lyrics: No Black CNN and No Art of Storytelling

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