First Off, Fuck You!

You didn’t leave a comment on the last installment (Brent Newland excluded). If you liked it, why didn’t you say so? If you didn’t, why didn’t you say so? Is it because you’re too feeble-minded to get a sentence out or because you were too busy masturbating? You’re worthless.

You’re a wannabe writer and you should be revising your post-ironic depressed-twenty-something-protagonist-centered novel, or writing your epic poem that combines Homeric plotting with hipster slang in College Town, Ohio, or in Williamsburg—but you’re not, and you’re only reading this right now because you lack the discipline, and there aren’t any new Onion articles to suck your time away.

Are you angry yet? Well, in any case. Let’s begin. When it comes to pissing people off, as I see it, there are three modes one can operate in. The first is sheer belligerence, undirected, non-specific invective, as in the subtitle of this article. The second is specific but largely fallacious invective, directed but untrue, as in the first paragraph. The third is specific, directed invective that makes an intelligent point while it attacks you and, at the very least, rings true. Judge for yourself whether my second paragraph fits this third category.

Historically, hip-hop is very practiced in these first two categories. Plenty of mainstream hip-hop is fueled by sheer belligerence and boasting. During the mid-nineties, 2pac and Biggie spawned the West Coast-East Coast hip-hop feud, which was responsible for dozens of ‘dis tracks,’ the most famous being 2pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up.” These songs are the perfect model of this second mode of angering (specific, but fallacious), which, by the way, has proven to be a dramatic boon for record sales.

The third mode is harder to come by. Especially in hip-hop. Eminem approaches it at times when he’s criticizing outdated middle-class values (“And that’s the message that we deliver to little kids / and expect them not to know what a woman’s clitoris is”) or making a meta-statement about the commercial value of anger (as in “Get You Mad”).

In fact, this third and most difficult form of angering occurs more frequently in literature. Mary Karr made a splash in the poetry world before the success of her memoir, The Liars Club, with a Pushcart-award winning essay entitled “Against Decoration” (which you can find in her book, Viper Rum). She criticizes the overuse of ornamental language and how it often leads to a lack of clarity or lack of emotion in a poem. Throughout the course of the essay, she attacks many well-known and lauded poets such as James Merrill, Helen Vendler, Amy Clampitt and Rosanna Warren.

Point is: this essay earned her a reputation for being courageous and combative, specifically through this third mode of angering.

Learning to infuriate people in the right way can be very useful for writers, but the scope of this tool is limited. There’s a point, however, in literature and in hip-hop, when it’s not the act of angering or insulting, but the mere potential, the threat, that fuels the art.

Big pun explains this idea perfectly in his song “100%:” “Puerto Rock puro, not Menudo, no, I’m not the one / I study Judo, jou don’ know if I got a gun.” Whereas other rappers might say something like “I cock back, you bow down, bust a round, bloodying the ground, retaliation sounds like this,” Pun says more by saying less. Another example from “100 %:” “The Desert or the Shotty, whateva, you the body / that chose to be the dumb nigga at the party.” Or from “Capital Punishment:” “You made a grave mistake / Shouldn’t have come here, you changed your fate / Your brains’ll make the debut on the table when I raise the stakes.”

In all these examples, rather than describing the act of violence itself as Hittman does in “Bang Bang” (I cock back…etc), Pun derives power and establishes ascendancy through the suggestion of violence. Sometimes this is simple, as in the last example quoted above. One recalls the classic movie cut ( gun/blood splatter), the exploding head itself left to the imagination. But even in this line, Pun has yet to “raise the stakes;” the violence is completely conditional. It gets more complicated with the line before that. The implement is mentioned: the Desert Eagle, or the shotgun. There is a statement of indifference. And here’s the key part: a description of the person as a “body,” which prefigures the outcome of being the “dumb nigga at the party.” But my favorite example is the first. Pun isn’t shooting you right now. He doesn’t even brandish his gun. In fact, he might not even have a gun. His power (judo) is derived from your uncertainty as to whether he is armed or not (jou don’t know).

(There’s another of Pun’s lines which I had always thought went, “It don’t matter, I put the chrome to your batter.” In the course of writing this, I thought, brilliant, the brain is described as cake batter, thus the simile prefigures the act of shooting you in the head, thus turning the potential violence of the threat into an inevitability. However, I had the line wrong. Pun actually says “I put the chrome to your bladder,” which is still cool, but certainly less so. This misunderstanding brought to mind a line from Finnegans Wake: “…the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators.” What is true of Big Pun is often true of Hip-hop in general: with its lyrical density and sloppy pronunciation, these profitable intermisunderstandings occur frequently.)

But there’s more: Pun’s ascendant uncertainty, and all this angering, servers a larger purpose: to catch you off guard.

Next Time: Catullus; the Bluff, and Fade; the end of proscription.

By Christopher Robinson