Granted, I’m young, I always end up catching shit second-hand.
I learned soul music through Just Blaze and RZA sample chops. I picked up R&B from the local Quiet Storm radio station (rebranded as the ‘oldies but goldies’ channel by the time I tuned in). I really figured out how to write after reading Greg Tate’s posthumous work as shared by younger, contemporary writers whose work reflects his style.
I grew up in and around hip-hop; like Vince Staples, I can’t point out a singular moment where I fell in love — it’s just always been around. (First crush: Drake, “Better Find Your Love.” Political awakening: Paris, “The Days of Old.” Heartbreak: The Pharcyde, “Otha Fish.”) What I can describe is the process of falling deeper, magnetized by raps that call on their predecessors, that point a listener — me, and maybe you, too — toward a wider net of linguistic lineage. A set of clues that offer stepping stones into a vast music history and future.
From the itinerant intellectuals to wide-eyed neophytes, so many of the hip-hop artists we love love to talk to themselves (in the first and third person). Their references — clever, bombastic, militant, cringe, brilliant, multilingual — form a key to the map of Afro-American cultural expression across the decades. Alongside the sample’s power to flip past legacies into Afro-futuristic beats and breaks: a dense language of allusions (to other rappers and rap records, to various ways of knowing, to place) in the lyrics themselves.
Much has been made of the “macho” or “sambo” in rap, the overperformer, the hypermasculine or hyperfemme subject spitting self-aggrandizing, self-referencing raps as a response to systemic emasculation and defeminization. Aside from this caricature (a typification which falls in line with white expectations of, and projections onto, Black people as oversexed and under-agentic), a constructive and community-building effort towards speaking not just about ourselves, but amongst ourselves, emerges in the music.
Rap has developed an internal, intricate web ripe for unweaving, one of my favorite pastimes as I grow up with the genre. Constantly paying homage, biting, and cross-referencing; making in-jokes and if-you-know-you-know bids for attention; speaking to one another across time and distance to pick up past conversations; leaving cliffhangers for future artists to complete. At the heart of it all is rap’s collective allusion to, and continuation of, its own history.
Lupe Fiasco once mused that jazz became an intellectual practice in part because of its rigor and adherence to standards: go-to classics practiced and recorded by generation after generation of artists. A literal ‘standard’ of performance quality. At the time, Lu (now a professor of rap’s theory and practice, and an advocate for rap’s capacities/capabilities) withheld the term from his own genre, saying rap had yet to reach that point. I’d argue these sorts of standards exist in rap, too, within and between the lines, embedded in the lyrics, holding up high standards for commentary and verbal excellence while bearing rappers’ intergenerational repetition.
The beloved group Black Star constantly referenced the heads who preceded them, in effect emphasizing what they believed rap should be. Hear the hook of “Definition” / ”Re:Definition”’s and its music bed, which references Boogie Down Productions’ “Stop the Violence”:
- Black Star: “One, two, three, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, we came to rock it on to the tip top…it’s kind of dangerous to be an emcee…too much violence in hip-hop”
- Boogie Down Productions:“One, two, three, the crew is called BDP, and if you want to go to the tip top, stop the violence in hip-hop”
On “Definition,” the duo doubled down on the connection by evoking BDP’s “The Bridge is Over” (“Manhattan keeps on making it, Brooklyn keeps on taking it”) and flipping the same sample as BDP’s “P is Free Remix.” They’re not alone: Ja Rule’s famed “100 guns, 100 clips” line on “New York” borrows from KRS One’s “100 Guns,” and luminaries from Dr. Dre to Common to Das EFX have all sampled KRS’ voice and lyrics in their song’s instrumentals. Certified standard.
Mos Def, ½ of Black Star, offers a window to others. His solo record “Children’s Story” pays blatant homage to Slick Rick’s song of the same name, just one entry in a series of rips, bites, and throwbacks to Rick’s material. Busta Rhymes follows suit as a featured guest on Rampage’s “Wild for the Night,” lifting The Ruler’s lines from the first 10 seconds of “The Ruler’s Back.” Pharrell and Kelis take heavy inspiration from Slick Rick as well on “Ghetto Children,” damn near a straight jack of “Hey Young World.” Kanye sampled Rick’s voice on “Cop Shot the Kid,” and Snoop borrowed “La Di Da Di” wholesale. (That same Slick Rick song also provided the blueprint for the hook structure, cadence, and melody of Biggie’s immortal release “Hypnotize.”) With each new reference, a canon cements itself around the source material.
The nods of recognition don’t stop there. Too $hort’s lyric, “I go on and on, can’t understand how I last so long,” found its way into DJ Khaled and Dr*ke’s “For Free”; the hook for Special Ed’s “I Got It Made” ended up in a verse on Common’s “Resurrection”; Mos Def’s “Ms. Fat Booty” calls out Edo G’s “I Got To Have It”; Big Pooh makes it clear that he agrees with Lil Kim — “Money, Power, Respect” is what we need in life — on “Wish Me Well,” from Little Brother’s latest LP; Elzhi, Detroit’s greatest lyricist, has a whole mixtape (Elmatic) covering Nas’ Illmatic. (Editor’s Note: Discussion of Detroit’s greatest lyricist feels incomplete without mentioning Veeze.) Lest we forget, the queen Ms. Lauryn Hill set her own template with Miseducation that has lent itself to her vocals being sampled or borrowed across tracks from Fabolous, Rapsody, Jadakiss, Flatbush Zombies, Cardi B, and a Torontonian (alongside many others)
More than reference material, rap also has replicable and recognizable song formats and types that set standards, too. Phonte Coleman, Little Brother’s other hall-of-famer, offers his own rendition of a classic schema in hip-hop (the ‘name all your girls’ record) on “See Now,” calling out the same names that LL Cool J lists off as his potential honeys in “Around the Way Girl.” This showmanship can be heard across Jay Z’s “Girls, girls, girls (Pt. 1)” (and the sequel), Jadakiss’ “On My Way,” and JID and TI’s “Ladies, Ladies, Ladies” (on which JID expresses excitement at his chance to make one of these kinds of tracks). These efforts are mirrored (and bested) by women who twist the format (see: “Dreams” by Lil Kim, an upgrade of BIG’s “Just Playing (Dreams),” and Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie Dreamz”). They flip the accessorization of female partners on its head and take full control over their own desire within the same canon.
All of this rapping about rapping and rapping about rappers to instill tradition and expand canons leads us to the best part: building cross-country, even borderless, analog and digital communities (consumable and capitalizable communities, sure, but communities all the same).
Rap geographies provide insightful point locations for identification, understanding, and bonding, which together create localized standards; artists vividly describe claimed homes, down to street names and intersections. Vince Staples grew up on Poppy Street in Norf Norf; Nipsey Hussle was from the Crenshaw district of Slauson Avenue in South Central Los Angeles before his tragic murder, and called himself a Slauson Boy proudly; Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek are from Marcy Projects, in Bed-Stuy (before both moved to 560 State Street); Roxanne Shante is from Queensbridge Projects, in Long Island City, Queens, as are Nas and his erstwhile friend Prodigy; The Wu is from Shaolin, with members from Stapleton Houses; Young B was on 119th and Lexington walking her dog (black sidekick on the Nexington); Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and a slew of further affiliates and former friends/neighbors once called the Parkway Garden Homes home (best known as Chicago’s O-Block). But you knew that already. In no other genre can we name with this level of granularity, down to a block or even an address, the home-bases repped.
There are two wrinkles that may serve to sketch out the manifold here: the first, a politics of residence (at times attended by violence) that speaks to our economic and spatial precarity. Put more simply, the associations folks sort themselves into by blocks and streets to sell unprotected goods (and/or to protect themselves from state-ordered harassment and outsider encroachment) are inherently land-based. Those associations make their way into the music in one way or another. Songs like “From The Town,” an ode to Oakland penned and performed by Lulbearrubberband, lay out Black urban cultures as practiced locally and call out neighborhoods, boundaries, and colloquialisms specific to folks’ haunts and stomping grounds. Maps of compatriots, adversaries, and relationships come into focus through repeated locational references (e.g. Bankhead as a lightning rod many Atlantans claim; or, the ever-present East vs. West Side of most cities as an oft-cited dividing line). Said to a non-New Orleanian, or an auditorily ignorant passerby, “Magnolia Projects” doesn’t mean anything — but to Juvenile, Birdman, Lil Wayne, and Magnolia’s affiliated soldiers, a shout-out to the housing development is affirming (and to outsiders, such a claim represents both an allegiance and a statement of solidarity).
Moreover, we receive descriptions of place in records that elucidate vignette-level detail: Common describes an entire South Side Chicago scene and era on “Reminding Me (Of Sef)” typifying his childhood, and the adolescence of his friends and family — from restaurants like Giordano’s, famous for its deep dish, to hotel spots like the Bismarck, frequented for functions. Com’ offers a remembrance of the city (punctuated by death) that no longer exists in his life, much like Chance The Rapper’s “Summer Friends,” released 20 year later about the same area.
This leads us to our second wrinkle: as home changes for generations of Black folks whose neighborhoods face constant displacing pressures from outside, and constant economic violence that begets physical violence from within, these time capsules help us remember, and re-instantiate, Black homes and neighborhoods where they may no longer exist.
This re-instantiation can also be seen more abstractly in some New York rappers’ transmogrification of New York’s boroughs and neighborhoods into Islamic contexts, as Five Percenters call on Islamic heritage shared by their African and Arab brothers and sisters to install a spiritually rooted semiotics of place in New York City’s disjoint neighborhood geography, albeit not without controversy: to Big Daddy Kane and Talib Kweli, their birth neighborhood of Brooklyn was no longer named after a Dutch town, but was newly christened Medina, after the city in Saudi Arabia. Harlem became Mecca; Queensbridge nicknamed Kuwait by Queens rappers Capone-n-Noreaga, Lefrak City transformed in Iraq by those same spitters. Home can mean and look like many things—the righteous, speaking amongst themselves, traced out new relationships with their lands to step away from colonial naming practices and towards more distinctly and ancestrally familiar place names.
This collection of conversations represents more than just those “if you know you know” moments. They’re a way of conveying context, information, and shared cultural heritage without saying as much, and a way to communicate in codes and cyphers (that build heritage) which are only meant to be discernible from the inside — decipherable to Black folks (despite the vultures who pick apart this distinct culture to disseminate it to voyeurs).
To return to “standards” briefly: jazz musicians and producers, via instrumental communication, laid out similar timeways and polyphonies/polyrhythms to reach even further back towards our continent of origin and even further forward toward futures in the stars. While rap standards may have abbreviated timescales (largely in response to new media formats which allow for much greater volumes of content, and a much quicker pace of consumption, uptake, and discard), this quickened pace (from ~15 years in the ‘golden era’, to five or less via streaming modes) serves for quicker and broader dissemination of in-jokes, touchstones, memories, and collective consciousness. Hip-hop has been, can be, and still is a means of documentation and strategy for cultural resilience in the midst of constant threats; whether on physical records or in 320kbp/s lossy mp3s, the genre is an avenue towards commemoration of Black community history, language, and geography, replete with templates for continuing to build on what was to imagine what can be.
Given the master’s mother tongue and a weakened connection back to Africa, many of us have had to reinvent mythologies and develop insular ways of referring to ourselves and our cultures to protect our lifeways from appropriation and expropriation; it only makes sense that a tongue or two would slip once or twice and get caught on record speaking sideways to the many of us who might know just what they mean.
