Hi. I’m Noah Berlatsky. I’m the critic who you mocked (without mentioning my name) in your interview with Albert Ching at Comic Book Resources last week.
That interview, as you know, focused on criticism of Marvel’s hip hop variant covers. Many writers have argued that Marvel has a poor history of employing creators of color, and that, therefore, its variant cover project seems to celebrate the work of black art at a company that has largely ignored black people. I made that argument myself at the Guardian. In doing so, I failed to acknowledge that Marvel had hired many people of color to do the cover variants. I apologized for that on twitter. And, as I said, you took that as an opportunity to throw some elbows my way.
I have no objection to the elbows. I screwed up. I erased people of color when I was trying to highlight the ways in which they are erased, and for that I deserve ridicule. As one injured party, whose good efforts I should have acknowledged, you’re well within your rights to pile on.
However, I was distressed to see that you used my error as a way to dismiss, not just me, but everyone who had expressed concern about this marketing initiative. You wrote,
A small but very loud contingent are high-fiving each other while making huge assumptions about our intentions, spreading misinformation about the diversity of the artists involved in this project and across our entire line, and handing out snap judgments like they just learned the term “cultural appropriation” and are dying to put it in an essay.
That may well be an apt description of me. But you have to be aware that many other writers, who did not make the same errors I did, have raised objections, both to Marvel’s failure to employ black creators and to its generally dismissive tone when confronted. Why, in short, are you responding to one white writer who screwed up, rather than engaging with the many black writers and POC writers who have discussed this issue? I’m sure all of these folks have already been drawn to your attention, but in case you missed them, people who have tried to talk to you about this problem include David Brothers,J.A. Micheline, Shawn Pryor, and Osvaldo Oyola.
Many more people have weighed in on social media. Perhaps this is just a “small” contingent compared to Marvel’s whole audience. But it is part of the “dialogue” with hip hop you claim to want Marvel to engage in. People want to know why Marvel claims to love hip hop, but won’t hire black creators to write and draw its ongoing comics. And your response is to, very deliberately, engage with a white critic who made a mistake, while ignoring all the black people and people of color who have voiced serious concerns. That doesn’t seem like you want a dialogue with hip hop, or with anyone. It seems, instead, like you want the credibility of hip hop without engaging with the community and without doing the work.
Along the same lines, it’s great that artists like de la Soul and Nas like their covers; you gave them props, and they responded enthusiastically. However, I wish you would take a moment to go back to them and explain that you are using their endorsement as a way to avoid discussing the lack of black artists on Marvel’s regular comics line. Perhaps they would be fine with that. But it seems like you should give them the opportunity to say so, rather than making assumptions.
I suspect you will never see this letter. I had hoped CBR would give me the chance to post this on their site, especially since, in my view, their interview was sycophantic and broadly unworthy of them. Unfortunately, for me, and I feel for their integrity, they decided not to give space to a reply.
But since you made your response to criticism all about me, I felt like I should try to tell you, even if only in a small voice, that it isn’t about me. Because, as I hope you’re aware, hip hop is way bigger than me. It’s bigger than you, too. And yes, it’s even bigger than Marvel. The folks criticizing you are asking you to live up to this music and art and movement that you’re claiming that you love. As it is, the only bit of hip hop you are demonstrating real affection for is industry rule #4080. If you’d like to change that, you need to maybe stop talking and start listening — though not, in the first place, to me.
In Paul Fussell’s brutally perceptive BAD: The Dumbing of America, the late author cites the tastefully small print on a wedding invitation he had received:
We are aware of the plight of the less fortunate and homeless. Please bring a spare article of winter clothing.
The second part of this, Fussell allowed, was perfectly acceptable, even admirable. The first, with its self-congratulatory, attention-seeking, and naggingly proper tone, was bad. Fussell didn’t live long enough to see comics reach a high enough degree of corporate respectability that they have adopted the same mealy-mouthed back-patting that he found to be the common denominator in every big company’s marketing strategy, but he would have found the events of the last few weeks dismayingly familiar.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with Marvel’s hip-hop variant cover experiment. As blatant attempts at money-soaking go, it’s perfectly pleasant, and the material itself ranges from decent to wonderful. There’s not even anything intrinsically wrong with their attempt to capitalize on a cultural phenomenon with which their own engagement has been, to put it as mildly as possible, standoffish. And its admirable that they made an effort to include work by many artists of color in this project, even if they’ve failed to do so in their regular series. Where it all goes wrong is in how, like the well-meaning couple that just wants to translate their friends’ largesse into an attempt to keep a homeless person warm, Marvel can’t help but inserting themselves into the picture and turning what could have otherwise been a harmless exercise in mash-up culture into a gross display of self-adulation. Like so many corporate executives who can’t manage to do a bit of good without turning it into something bad, Marvel executives just couldn’t shut up.
“Marvel Comics and hip-hop culture have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue,” gassed editor-in-chief Axel Alonso when announcing the project. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, you know? All he had to do was pull the covers off the easel and show off what his people had done, and we might have been impressed enough to actually enjoy it. But with this fat-headed, entirely self-serving comment, he forced our hand. By making the patently absurd claim that Marvel Comics – a company that almost single-handedly invented the trope of giving black characters a name starting with ‘Black’, just in case we didn’t get the picture; a company whose record of hiring black creators is nothing short of dismal; a company whose biggest contribution to hip-hop, as far as I can tell, was creating a mutant character named Bling!, the daughter of two rappers named “Daddy Libido” and “Sexy Mutha” – has been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with hip-hop culture, the company forced us to examine that claim at face value, and it’s as worth as much as a pair of knockoff Air Jordans.
It’s not as if there’s no connection whatsoever between comics and hip-hop. Street culture has always been attracted to four-color crimefighters; I made that point the subject of my first presentation at the EMP Pop Conference almost a decade ago. It’s been reinforced articulately by this site’s founder here. The problem is one that David Brothers, a man who’s far more qualified than Noah or I to perceive, is that what’s happening between Marvel and hip-hop isn’t a dialogue; it’s a monologue. Worse still, it’s a monologue that began with a series of insults – what else are we make of a company that created black characters like the Hypno-Hustler, Charcoal, Night Thrasher, and Dreadlox? What are we to think of a company who reached out to black youth, in conjunction with Kyle Baker, so long ago that the comic came with a cassette tape? What are we to assume from the fact that Marvel’s biggest gesture towards the rap game this century was teaming up with a white rapper eight years past his prime? – and ended with a demand to be thanked?
Brothers’ response only showed how compounded Marvel’s folly had become. Alonso, at least, seems to have a genuine appreciation of hip-hop, but executive editor Tom Breevort, who is widely known as a short-tempered crank, fielded a question about the disparity between a company that employs almost no African-American writers, artists, or editors and a company that expects everyone to give them an atta-boy for cashing in on a cultural phenomenon that they previously ignored. Breevort’s response was so clueless, so tone-deaf and consequence blind, so borderline contemptuous, that it made it seem like no one behind the scenes at Marvel bothered to think the whole thing through before releasing the variant covers into the world accompanied by a press release making it clear that they expected to be praised for it.
Marvel’s management doesn’t quite have the perception gap that DC’s does, if for no other reason that they haven’t employed someone as horrible as Dan DiDio since they got rid of Bill Jemas. (Jemas did his own outreach to the hip-hop community, which went about as well as you might expect.) But they can’t coast on the goodwill generated by their successful film empire forever, and sooner or later, they’re going to have to answer – with a response a lot more thoughtful than “what does one have to do with the other?” – questions about their lack of diversity, their co-option of cultural trends, their treatment of their creators, and their ham-handed barreling through whatever social development they perceive as the trend of the moment. (Someday, our gay-married overlords will hold us all accountable for this.) When that day comes, they better have something to show other than a bunch more variant covers that are worth less than the lies they were printed on. Until then, they need to shut up and stop congratulating themselves. So far, the monologue has consisted of rappers talking to Marvel; if they don’t learn to respect their audience the way that audience has respected them, it’ll soon consist of Marvel talking to itself.
There are two popular ways of coming at Lil B’s music.
The first is outright dismissal. A significant portion of the listening public is turned off by the seeming childishness and rough-hewn nature of his material. They find it infantile or moronic.
The second is ironic approval. Because of his prolificacy and oddball sensibilities, Lil B has become the exemplar of internet-wave hip-hop. From this perspective his work seems like art brut, a (presumably) unknowing reflection of the state of music in the twenty-first century.
There have been a few more complicated treatments of Lil B’s music as winking provocateur or network visionary. For my purposes I would like to focus on the spiritual dimension of his music.
I want to articulate the mystical theme that runs through Lil B’s work. It draws on a mix of his own home-brewed creative ontology, Judeo-Christian mysticism (writ large), and a sort of liberal pan-spirituality. We will see that this unique stance comes from the nature of his ambitious goal and his idiosyncratic context; as so many of us are, he is attempting to work from where he is rather than from any codified religious position. His eclectic, haphazard approach to religious and ethical life suffers horrible (arguably humiliating) failures at times from its internal tensions. At times he lapses into uninspired and dull posturing. But the same tensions that lead him to lapse into inanity lend his songs particular ingenious moments. Who could expect anything else from this sort of religious exploration?
A discussion of the relationship between Lil B and religion could easily become a monograph. Thus, I’ve limited the scope to my favorite of his songs, “I’m God”, and its accompanying music video. I will attempt to keep the analysis of “I’m God” within its internal structure, lending related works and theoretical references primarily in the end-notes. Finally, I will deal with the beat, the imagery, and the final verse rather than going through the entire text line-by-line (my first attempt to do a thorough reading was terrifyingly long).
The video opens in what appears to be a religious goods store in Los Angeles. Lil B is wandering around, handling the merchandise as his cameraman shakily shadows him. This imagery is gorgeous, if a little familiar; even in a commodified world where religious artifacts seem anachronistic, there is a beauty and a subtlety to each of the objects in their individuality, as the video’s numerous closeups attempt to convey. Further, the structure of the store mirrors the structure of Lil B’s lyrical struggle within the song; from within a modern, heavily commercial environment, here the notoriously superficial environs of LA, he strives to use the tools at his disposal to relate to something simultaneously ahistorical, personal, and spiritual. His relationship with God and his related attempt to be a deity are quickly expressed in the opening lines of the song. Over the hushed whispers of an Imogen Heap sample, he tells us that we know he always wanted to be the best. What rapper doesn’t?
The experience of struggle and overcoming is central to hip-hop, as is the notion that material wealth is connected with one’s spiritual wealth. This often involves a set of simple answers to the question: “How do I know that I’ve been successful, that I’ve approached perfection even as I suffer from this struggle?” One of the primary conflicts in hip-hop is wanting to know you’ve made it, and this helps us understand the emphasis on benjamins, booze, and bitches that many rappers refer to as proof of their symbolic security. Material wealth often fails to capture exactly what rappers are attempting; thus Jay-Z’s late career shift of concern from dope and hoes to his legacy[i]. At a certain point, the material goods are not enough; they, like the bodies who possess them, are too finite, and elicit a craving for more that often becomes displaced onto conservative concerns with one’s presence in history. Lil B, despite not having the capital or success of a more marketable rapper, reaches out to this same sense of historical success and, importantly, even further beyond it to spiritual concerns. Thus, he opens the track with his desire, not simply to be the best, but to be God. Soon after he affirms his ambition to be divine, he affirms again his finite, named identity: “This is real talk. It’s Lil B.” His name is public, contextualized, but his spiritual pursuit is not; he is a historical figure confined to his context and his history but striving for something more, a commodity striving for significance like the religious products that surround him. This struggle is the core of the song.
The Imogen Heap song sampled by producer Clams Casino is “Just for Now”, another song about the passions involved in struggle. In that song, the conflict is interpersonal; Heap meditates on the struggle to remain happy, calm, and avoid judgment even as your desires and doubts pull you apart from one another. There is not space here for a detailed analysis of “Just for Now”, but the song is about the balance of desiring pause and escape even as the immanent pressures of a relationship push you into uncomfortable contact with the Other. This has a direct analog in Lil B’s complex relationship with his spirituality, with Jesus Christ (iconography of whom appears prominently in the video), and with his own desire to be properly recognized by others while remaining true to his own ambition.
In the hands of Casino, the Imogen Heap sample becomes an angelic chorus surrounding Lil B’s all-too grounded and personal voice. The sample becomes ghostly and secondary; abstracted in order to express its affective nature over its lyrical content (though that also remains relevant). Longing and passion charge Lil B’s delivery with a context and a hungriness that his decontextualized lyrics do not have. This funhouse reflection is one aspect of the implicitly structured ecology of “I’m God”. Lil B, frustrated by his inability to consistently and clearly express his desire and ambition, surrounds himself with images and sounds that also obliquely refer to an unnamed object. This symbolic collage is constructed in hopes that holistically the entire configuration (assemblage) will be able to express what he, in his historically determined selfhood, cannot[ii].
Let’s turn to the final verse. I will begin with Lil B’s plea: “Throw your hands up, it’s Lil B for Lil Boss/I need all the based energy I can” at about 3:26 in the music video. For those who are unfamiliar with Lil B’s terminology, being “based” has an ambiguous relationship with drugs, but is primarily characterized by a positive affect and feeling of flow[iii]. A “based freestyle” is a freestyle that flows through someone who is based. The based individual has a positive, quasi-mystical experience that is connected to another plane of being. Based here takes on the double sense of being (de)based as a centered subject and being based, as in rooted, in an originary point. Lil B consistently claims that he is the “Based God”, which is simultaneously a statement about one’s intimate relationship to God and one’s shamanic prowess at becoming (and remaining) based. It’s in this spirit that Lil B asks for our help. Being based is not an atomistic process; it’s about a relationship to a responsive audience. If Lil B’s mystical experience is successful, both he and his audience experience being based. Being based is thus related to the festival experience common to many cultures; experiencing a sense of flow is something that happens to us as a collective, not something that strikes us as individuals. Lil B as Based God takes on the position of a spiritual conduit.
After this preface, we are transitioned into the first section of the final verse. This set of lines begins a meditation on the conflict that I have described above. Lil B raps: “Is this what you really want, you’ve got me in the flesh now/No, I’m not stressed out, I’m God, I’m the best out.” Lil B here asks if you really want him as a finite, historically determined man or if we really desire him as a spiritual entity, a vector for based energy. His answer is immediate: he’s not upset about our addressing him as a human being because he knows that he is also God. This brings us to the core of the verse:
Rap transparent, my see-through glasses
Incoherent, and no I’m not starin’
I just see through you
And from your heartbeat you is soft in the middle
I’m real on the outside, solid in the inside
Bitch, it’s the Westside
Lil B takes our reminder of his humanity as a challenge. His raps are transparent and weightless; by virtue of their musical ecology they are based and therefore transcend the status of determinate words of a given speaker. They are in touch with a spiritual reality, while we (and presumably fake rappers) remain contextually determined and thus “soft in the middle”. While he works toward transcendence, we find ourselves still measuring our world by material and social goods. This lends a particularly interesting bent to his reversal of our attempt to assert his materiality; while as a mortal human he is “real on the outside”, his solidity as a rapper comes from his spiritual struggle on the inside. It’s in this spirit that he evokes the “Westside”; both a real place and a culture, the Westside captures a recognition of the tension that is missing from our mundane account of reality.
The tension and dehumanization of being based is both exhilarating and disorienting. It is in this spirit that he raps: “I’m so sick/I’m feeling so nauseous”. This leads into by far the most interesting part of the song. Lil B raps:
This is a culmination of the various moments of the song. Lil B asks us to evangelize his basedness and his transcendence while simultaneously echoing his earlier request for our participation. He is “Based for life” not simply because he has dedicated his life to being based, but also because being based is a recognition and a celebration of the ephemeral and oblique spiritual core of life. In the final images of prayer and an illuminated plastic angel, he asks us to celebrate alongside him.
[i] Though the shift in Jay-Z’s music warrants an extensive discussion, for a simple (and admittedly selective) comparison, consider the early, street-centric “Dead Presidents II” and the late, reputation-flaunting “Kingdom Come”.
[ii] Interesting touchstones for this sort of artistic move can be seen in the symbolist tradition. For a more robust theoretical reference, consider Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.
[iii] Another possible avenue of investigation that will not be pursued in this essay is the relationship of Lil B and freestyling to the Fluxus movement.
[iv] Interesting precedents for this device include Emerson, Whitman, and Nietzsche. Each make claims that they channel the voices of history. This addresses their respective notions of self-hood; each makes a claim to a self that is a fractured element of a larger multiplicity. See Leaves of Grass, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Emerson’s Essays.
