WHAT THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT MUST LEARN FROM HIP-HOP, MUTHAFUCKA: Part I, Straddling the Line
The big publishing houses aren’t taking big risks on fiction these days, and independent presses and literary journals have become notorious for collapsing within months of their inception. The poem and the short story have been relegated to the category of ‘historical curiosities.’ And in the midst of this literary collapse, the Notorious B.I.G., now twelve years dead, continues to generate capital.
January 16th marked the opening of Notorious, the new biopic about the life and death (and certainly the Life After Death) of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, Frank White, Francis M.H., The King of New York. But where is the Hart Crane biopic? Where is the Flannery O’Connor biopic? Or for that matter, where is the Keith Gessen or Dave Eggers biopic? What quality does Biggie possess that these literary titans (and aspiring titans) lack? The release of Notorious provides us the perfect excuse to examine these admittedly ridiculous questions. By vivisecting the particular virtues of hip-hop notables such as B.I.G., Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, and Lil’ Wayne, we can, I think, arrive at a useful paradigm for how the current Literary Establishment can survive in the post-print, and one might say, post literary, world.
Part I: Straddling the line (destroying the dichotomy) between the sincere and the hyperbolic.
The hip-hop business model is best examined in relation to Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan (look forward to these coming installments), but for now, I’d like to focus on Biggie, whose genius was not in marketing (that’s Diddy), but in tonal complexity (his immense lyrical dexterity aside). B.I.G., more than any other emcee, was able to simultaneously inhabit the worlds of ‘real street life’ and hyperbolic bravado. He managed this in a way that many of today’s up and coming writers can’t, in a way that is reminiscent of Homer.
Listen to Ready to Die, Biggie’s first album. You’ll notice a conspicuous absence of hooks; that is, many of the songs lack a chorus, other than a simple repeated phrase or sample (“gimme the loot” or “back in the day”). This was by no means an exceptional quality in early hip-hop, but by 1993, it was already going out of vogue with the rise of west-coast gangsta rap. This is partly because Puffy had a less controlling influence in Big’s first album than in Life After Death, where his direction is responsible for a series of #1 pop hits, including “Hypnotize” and “Mo Money Mo Problems.”
Compare the beginning of “Gimme the Loot” to the Beginning of “Hypnotize.” The former begins with the line “My man inf left a tech and nine at my crib / Turned himself in; he had to do a bid. / A one-to-three, he be home the end of ’93.” The first lines of “Hypnotize”: Sicker than your average, / Poppa twist cabbage off instinct, / niggas don’t think shit stink. Pink gators, my Detroit players…” The difference between these two verses is very characteristic of the difference between the two albums in general. The first is populated with immersive stories of street life: hustling, robbery, death, and a lament for the good old days. Life After Death is less narrative and more eclectic. Hyperbole plays a bigger role, as does humor in general. The scope is also much larger, and the goals are loftier. It is a sprawling epic.
Compare this to Homer. The Illiad is a book of warfare, of rage, of brutal violence; the Odyssey is fantastical, exaggerated, and wickedly funny at times (think the olive branch covering Big O’s junk in front of Nausikaa). What’s the point of all this? Well, part of the genius of Homer is that he is able to regale us with incredible tales of battle and survival on the one hand, and astound us with the exactitude of his portrayals of true-to-life emotion on the other. This is most evident in the Odyssey, where there are nested layers of narrative and the scene alternates between the domestic setting of Ithaca and the mystical world of the wine-dark sea. Our hero faces real life problems (fools be macking my shorty) and incredible monsters. Homer has no compunctions about mixing these worlds and neither does B.I.G. This is Tupac’s problem: he takes himself too seriously; however real his ‘thuglife’ is, he’s unwilling to admit its hyperbole and he’s unwilling to deny the paradigm that separates cleverness from keepin’ it real.
In our modern literary society, as I see it, people tend to think in terms of this dichotomy between what’s clever and what’s sincere, as if the two were mutually exclusive. Not only does this attitude end up writing off the beautifully playful or ironic as ‘intellectual masturbation,’ but it encourages writers to write inexhaustibly dull works of ‘true sentiment.’ To the credit of people like Dave Eggers or Keith Gessen, they attempt to achieve both, but they fall short in that they can’t escape the dichotomous paradigm: Gessen writes a book (All the Sad Young Literary Men) about young, wannabe writers in the hopes that self-reflexivity will somehow mitigate the despairing abundance of cleverness and irony so endemic to our generation; and Eggers’ latest book, What is the What, as reviewer David Amsden says, contains “no footnotes, no apologia, no marginalia” and it lacks the “overzealous need to operate as a metacommentary on itself and twentysomething solipsism in general,” so characteristic of his earlier books—in this sense, Eggers’ latest offering, however successful it is, simply moves to the other side of the dichotomy. Noble attempts, say, but not quite at the pith (Vonnegut had it right in Slaughterhouse V—Nabokov in, well, pretty much everything).
It’s somewhat difficult to reduce the genius of B.I.G. to a short article. The most important thing I can say is: go listen to Life After Death, read the Odyssey again. Beware of this backlash from our over-ironic culture: cleverness is not a thing to be feared. When cleverness takes the form of posturing, it militates against sincerity. That doesn’t mean we have to eliminate cleverness or turn it back on itself in an act of highly solipsistic self-parody. It just means we need to admit that literature, hip-hop, life, all of the bullshit ain’t nothing but a thang. Homer’s easy to write off because he’s from a different world and who knows, he might not have ever existed as a single individual. The Notorious B.I.G., however, is much more immediate. We’d all do well to learn from him not to take everything so seriously, and that not taking things seriously doesn’t necessitate a lack of sincerity, or a lack of reality. Seriously.
The next installment: The hip-hop skit—How rappers undercut their own self-importance and why every writer should parody himself every 4th or 5th story, poem, novel, etc. Also, Alec Baldwin and R Kelly’s brilliant (or retarded) “Real Talk.”
