WHAT THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT MUST LEARN FROM HIP-HOP, MUTHAFUCKA: Part IX

In conclusion

XVI

I’ll fuck you up your ass and down your throat,
you cock-sucker Aurelius and fudge-packer Furius!
Just because my verses are tender doesn’t mean
that I’ve gone all soft. Sure, a poet should focus
on writing poetry and not on sex; but does that
mean he can’t write about sex? If a poem is
in good taste, well-written and sexy,
it can tingle and stiffen even hairy old men,
not just horny teenagers. You think I’m a sissy
because I write about thousands of kisses?
I’ll fuck you up your ass and down your throat!

–Catullus, circa 50 BC

“I’ll fuck you up your ass and down your throat,” reader! The first line break achieves what I refer to as the bluff: any sort of subtle misdirection or attempt at catching the reader off-guard. Through our uncertainty of the addressee, the reader is placed in a position of vulnerability: Catullus asserts his power over us, even when we realize he is attacking Furius and Aurelius.

In football, a fade route is when the receiver, after a jab-step or juke (the bluff), drifts (fades) toward the sideline while continuing to run at full speed. Thus, after the bluff has been accomplished, he is just out of reach of the defense and the touchdown is inevitable—unless the fade goes too wide and the receiver runs out of bounds.

When approaching a work of art, we have a line of defense and the artist has to find a way to breach into our territory. We ask ourselves: is the poem going to penetrate me in any hole, in any way? (If we leave our hearts undefended, then there is no value to a well-executed incursion.) Thus, the initial bluff, then the fade. Our line broken, we try our best to defend against the poem’s desire to pluck our heartstrings, but our best defense now is useless. We can only wait in the uncertainty of whether or not the speaker will continue with perfect execution to the end zone without veering out of bounds.

If you are playing chess against a superior opponent, he may have you at the first gambit: the rest of the game is merely the playing out of an inevitability, and yet surprising to you every step along the way. We can think about literature in this way: as a game between the author and the reader, but the author has so many advantages (time, revision, experience, isolation, focus) that we can’t possibly win. And indeed, winning is not the point. Losing is the point. But we want to lose despite our best efforts to remain guarded, rather than simply forfeiting. When we actually win, we are unmoved, and the author fails.

There are many examples of the bluff. The Stranger opens with “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” The extreme indifference of the speaker immediately catches us off guard. Or in the first section of Lolita: we are seduced by a luxuriant prose style and then told that “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” By then it’s too late, the bluff has worked: we don’t know whether to love the speaker or fear him, and in that confusion, the fade begins and plays out all the way to the end of the novel.

So what does all this have to do with angering people? Both of these tactics are different forms of the bluff. Hip-hop is certainly best at achieving the bluff and fade through these modes. Many hip-hop songs seem to me to be aimed at overwhelming the listener. The effect desired by the end of the song is not a complex emotional state, it is simply a feeling of “what just hit me?” Because hip-hop is often much more lyrically dense than other forms of music, and because it runs at a fixed tempo (i.e. the listener cannot pause the way a reader of a poem can), it is well adapted to achieving this basic state of being overwhelmed.

If I were to be proscriptive, as I have been in all previous installments of this series, I would say something like: every story must bluff the reader in some way, even if that is done through a sheer surplus of sincerity, and sometimes without the reader’s knowledge that he or she has been bluffed, and that this will allow the piece to achieve, if it doesn’t misstep, any of innumerable and complex variations of this basic emotional state.

However, I’m tired of being proscriptive, and besides, if a proscription is going to survive, it must eventually collapse into a meditation:

AOL became popular in the early nineties, The New York Times developed a significant web presence in ’95, blogging originated in 1999, Myspace was founded in 2003. Someone born in 1960 would be forty by the time the word ‘blog’ was in use. I’m speaking to those who will inherit the literary establishment (whatever that is), those of my own generation. We’ve grown up with the internet and we’re maturing as its maturing. Consequently, we’re uniquely suited to deal with the problems its cultural impact presents to the state of the publishing industry. However we tackle this, one thing seems certain to me: new modes of thinking, or at the very least, new metaphors will be needed. Or one might say, adapting to the plurality and pace of the internet means that we’ll need constantly shifting and overlapping metaphors. What can be extracted from hip-hop may be just as arbitrary as what can be extracted from fly-fishing; the important thing is that we continue to view the state of our Arts and Letters through varying lenses, that we change lenses often, and be willing, with sincerity, to look at our reflection in a fun-house mirror. Boyeeeeee.

Read the whole series!

By Christopher Robinson