In the comics memoir, Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm, Percy Carey tells of his experiences growing up in New York, finding success as an emcee in the early 90s, and getting caught up in the drug trade and gang shootings that would eventually leave him paralyzed from the waist down. Artist Ron Wimberly sketches Carey on the graphic novel’s cover in a wheelchair as he is now, rather than surrounded by fans or performing on the stage he once shared with names like Snoop Dogg and Tupac. The choice is fitting, given Carey’s interest in conveying the social and economic realities of his life behind these scenes and after spending time in prison.
But in the epilogue subtitled “Standing Ovation,” Carey grasps the wheelchair’s arms and pushes himself up. A microphone dangles in the air above him. With his arms stretched out, chin raised, he steps forward and says: “Damn! Feels good to do that! Fuck it, I figure if I can’t do it in real life…yet…might as well do it in my book!”
When we are asked to consider what makes comics unique, I think that our conversation should include scenes like this one. We know that the distinguishing features of comics can extend beyond formal elements to include stylistic practices that develop and advance whenever a sequence of words and pictures tell a story. In this case, Sentences provides an opportunity to talk about what happens when genre conventions refuse to stay put in graphic narratives that are based on actual events.
I’m curious about what Carey’s story accomplishes here by stepping away from what he can’t do “in real life.” Reviews of the comic are unequivocal when it comes to praising his honesty, his unwillingness to glamorize hip hop culture or the drug trade. What, if anything, changes when Carey (in collaboration with Wimberly) frees himself from the wheelchair and in the process, releases his story from the constrictions of nonfiction? By bracketing off the moment in an epilogue, the comic arguably reaches the only kind of happy ending possible without threatening the story’s credibility. At the same time, the utter joy and pleasure that he takes in the visual representation of his body makes the fact that we are dealing with a comic particularly important. Is it enough to say that Carey wishes for the ability to stand or that he imagines what it might be like to walk again when on the concluding pages of his book, he actually does?
Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby provides a second example. The semi-autobiographical narrative is anchored to the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s, but the comic also breaks away from the “real” in its closing pages. The protagonist, Toland Polk, opens a patio door in the snowy, urban setting of his present and with the sounds of a jazz record curling around the panel, he ushers the viewer into a summer day from his bittersweet Alabama past. As with Percy Carey’s comic book persona, Toland steps out of the story to prepare the reader for this moment. (“There’s something I wanna show you!” he says prior to this page.) The image fills our entire field of vision, maintaining the style and aesthetic features of the rest of the comic in a way that doesn’t merely depict what Toland imagines, but communicates deeper sensations that the viewer experiences within the primary narrative frame.
In both examples, dialogue is deployed strategically and in a metafictional way to shape our encounter with realistically-pictured conjecture. But what happens when there are no words to guide us? In my last example from The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell, a Civil Rights demonstration ends the graphic novel which focuses on the story of a black and white family involved in the events surrounding a police shooting at Texas Southern University in 1968. The comic is based on the experiences of Long and his father who worked as a television reporter in Houston during this time.
Powell closes the story with a procession of silent marching figures to accompany the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that serves as the book’s title. The shoes shuffle slowly from panel to panel until they lift without warning and begin to float up. Their flight could be said to signify the protestors’ courage or suggest a longing for social and spiritual transcendence in honor of King’s assassination that year. It could even allude to elements of African myth. Whatever it accomplishes, it does so with no clear verbal signposts, shifting seamlessly into the speculative realm through illustration.
Where do these strange endings leave us? How does this resistance to more realistic representation alter the way we encounter the real in nonfiction comics? Could it indicate an unwillingness to truly face hard, unresolved suffering and social conflict? Or are we so accustomed to comic book flights of fancy that using the tropes more commonly associated with superheroes just feels damn good, to paraphrase Percy Carey, in any type of comic?
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.
“I’m a bad bitch,” Nicki Minaj declares on “I’m the Best”, the opening track of her debut album Pink Friday. It’s a claim she’s made before – and the only difference here is that she doesn’t seem to mean it. Just a year and a half ago on “Itty Bitty Piggy” from her mix tape Beam Me Up Scotty she came across as a potty-mouthed cackling machine-gun, declaring her badness and her bitchiness in a deranged rhythmic repetitive sing-song that made you believe in both and really not want to meet her in a dark alley. In comparison, “I’m the Best” sounds like — well, like a rapper looking to go pop by eschewing weirdness for rote R&B backing and rotely inspirational lyrics. “I’m fighting for the girls who never thought they could win.” That’s a long, sad trip away from the profane nuttiness of: “If you see a itty bitty piggy in the market/give that bitch a quarter and a car/tell her park it /I don’t fuck with pigs like a salaam alaikum/, I put em in a field, I’ll let Oscar Myer bake em.”
I wish “I’m the Best” was an aberration. But alas Pink Fridayis filled nigh to bursting with blandness. You know those swelling, earnest, I-have-overcome bullshit tracks that even decent rappers often put at the end of their CDs where you can conveniently skip over them? Imagine you had a whole album full of that, and you’ve got a general idea of what Minaj has perpetrated. The Rihanna collaboration “Fly” sounds like a song called “Fly”; the Natasha Bedingfield collaboration “Last Chance” sounds like a Natasha Bedingfield collaboration. Just so you won’t blame the R&B songstresses, though, Minaj proves that she can suck all on her loneseome with dross like “Here I Am,” where she actually says, in all earnestness, “I’m a woman, hear me roar.” So what’s next — is she going to declare that Lil’ Wayne is the wind beneath her wings?
Quoting Helen Reddy with a straight face on a hip-hop album seems like a good indication that you have lost your way in a fairly spectacular manner. If you were so inclined, you could see this as a desperate and misguided effort to reach a mainstream audience. And it clearly is that.
But at the same time, the albums’ rudderlessness seems like part and parcel of Minaj’s persona. Switching from Barbie cuteness to rasta declamation to faux British accents to sped up tourettes, Minaj’s flow has always been about spastic incoherence. It’s no accident that perhaps her most acclaimed performance is deliberately and gloriously bipolar. In her verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” she switches back and forth between a flirtatious little girl coo and a fierce, ranting growl, using the alternation to create an escalating momentum so massive it makes the other rappers on the track, from Jay-Z to Rick Ross, sound positively precious.
As “Monster” makes clear, Minaj has flirted throughout her career with the standard hip hop roles for women: sex kitten and ball breaker. That flirtation, though, always tends to be oddly, and in some ways refreshingly, half-hearted. Minaj may don preposterous ass-accentuating outfits in her “Massive Attack” video, or giant castrating claws in Ludacris’ “My Chick Is Bad,” but for the most part it’s remarkable how little she seems to care either about teasing cocks or cutting them off. Instead, her focus is almost always on, as she invariably says, “bitches.” One of the decent tracks on Pink Friday, “Did It On’em,” is fairly typical, as she threatens her peers with explicit machismo. “All these bitches is my sons…If I had a dick I would pull it out and piss on ‘em.”
The other side of wishing you had a dick to piss on ‘em is, of course, wishing you had a dick to do something else to them. Minaj is famously semi-closeted. Her most explicit statements of lust on record have almost invariably involved, not men, but other women. The exception that proves the rule is perhaps Christina Aguilera’s “Woohoo,” where two not-all-that-straight women serenade each other about the pleasures of cunnilingus (“Lick, lick, like a lolly.”) Or, on the other tongue, there’s Usher’s “Little Freak”, and Gucci Mane’s “Girls Kissing Girls,” in both of which Minaj hornily anticipates a (ahem) ménage, offering to hook her brothers up.
Pink Friday doesn’t have anything that hot and heavy — and no wonder. Minaj may enjoy lasciviously contemplating your “kitty cat” and asking if she can “touch her,” but she’s careful to rhyme the whole thing with “Usher.” Lesbianism is only OK packaged for male consumption. Minaj wants girls . . . but it ain’t no fun if the homeys can’t have none.
In short, Minaj can’t be a sex bomb and a bad ass; she can’t be a castrator and one of the boys; she can’t be dyke and have a career. She’s got no place to go — which isn’t always a bad thing. Her see-sawing between identities is surely a large part of her appeal and her genius. What other female rapper has claimed to be Monica Lewinsky, Barbie, and Freddie from Nightmare on Elm Street? Minaj ‘s refusal to stay in the hip hop box labeled “women” has allowed her to be silly, unpredictable, and fierce in a way that few rappers of any gender have managed.
But sometimes freedom can be a trap too. A debut is where you show the world who you are, and for Minaj that’s death. You can see the problem most clearly, perhaps, on the album’s best track — “Roman’s Revenge” with Eminem. Swizz Beatz drops the two rappers into a factory full of hammering synths, and Eminem proceeds to tear that shit apart, bouncing from S&M to pissed off Happy Meals to bondage water sports, his brain spewing tangled knots of filthy punchlines so fast that lesser mortals don’t even have time to be knocked on their ass. “So I tied her arms and legs to the bed, set up the camera and pissed twice on her. Look! Two peas in a tripod.”
Like most rappers, Minaj doesn’t have Eminem’s skills, but she doesn’t get blown away either. From her first stuttering transgender declaration, “I am not Jasmine, I am Aladdin!” she spits insults and threats, references Eli Manning, and generally sounding lean, mean, and nuts.
The only thing is…well, Eminem is up in there getting a blow job and pissing on women, you know? And in response Minaj…starts sneering at bitches again. There’s a general consensus that she’s calling out Lil’ Kim in particular, and fair enough. But can you imagine Minaj cutting off a guy’s bits and Slim Shady saying, “ayup”, and then going after some random third party? Indeed, you have to wonder if he’s glancing sideways at Minaj when he snaps (ostensibly again to Kim), “look who’s back again, bitch/keep acting as if you have the same passion I have/yeah right, still hungry, my ass.”
The point isn’t that Minaj has to fight for the rights of women everywhere. But it Is to suggest that, even at her most feral there are places she won’t, or can’t, go. “I feel like people always wanna define me and I don’t wanna be defined,” Minaj said in a Vibe Magazine interview. (in a Vibe Magazine interview). Unfortunately, on Pink Friday, that fear of being defined seems to have made her unwilling to say anything of interest at all. At some point, if you’re not going to stand for something, you might as well sit down.
