Nothing Was The Same
Epistiles, part deux. More reflections from two veterans of the pen on the Great Rap Battle of '24.
This is a continuation of a series of letters in which we discuss the implications of the current moment in hiphop. To read from the beginning, take a look at the preceding post The Colepology.
Brother,
What are we even talking about at this point? Are we arguing that it’s wrong to bring out a digital 2Pac when there was already one at Coachella? Are we saying that Snoop’s voice is sacrosanct when it’s already been used for GPS navigation? Are we, as a hip-hop culture, supposed to deal with the complex web of morality of artificial intelligence when we’ve all been using AI for years? Were those things not a step too far simply because checks were cut?
Scratch that. Those are questions that need more discussion than we can get into; discussions that will take away from what we’re equipped to engage with here. So, let me start again:
What are we even talking about at this point? We thought that “Like That” was the earthquake shrugs of tectonic plates when it was just the small tremors that preceded the coming Richter activity. In hindsight, everything that Future was throwing on We Don’t Trust You seemed like a microseism, and the entirety of We Still Don’t Trust You was just animals running for high ground; Jermaine Lamarr Cole seems like a genius for flying away before the entire landscape was upheaved. And, while he is still seemingly taunting that the “Big One” has yet to occur, Aubrey Drake Graham’s dual responses—“Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle”—have shifted the terra beneath us.
The aftershocks of Drake’s replies have caused minor tsunamis that have washed up on the shores of William Leonard Roberts II, Kanye Omari West, Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., and others. Somewhere, Taylor Alison Swift is looking at it all from her private jet, thinking how she can turn the catastrophes below into a song about women wronged by men. Marion Hugh Knight Jr. has somehow involved himself from behind bars, which is not a big stretch considering the waves and winds have brought the ashes of Tupac Amaru Shakur into the cataclysm. But this is no mere act of God; just men who think themselves to be gods, battling in the heavens of wealth, power, and fame. Or, as Kendrick Lamar Duckworth put it: Money, power, respect—the last one is better.
You soff, duke…
I keep coming back to this. Partially because your ability to make ideas whole and holy has the spirit of Christopher George Latore Wallace accompanying me through this. I found it telling that you confessed to the voice haunting you because the Notorious B.I.G., the second King of New York and hip-hop’s first, using his second professional stage name (he’s still the real Biggie Smalls forever to many of us), was killed in the aftermath of rap clashes over two and half decades ago. The world remains unclear as to the true causes of the assassinations of Biggie and ‘Pac, just six months apart. We’ve heard tales from the gangsters in proximity, we’ve read about the investigations of the police and journalists, we’ve watched countless documentaries—but we still. Don’t. Know. The corporate media apparatus boxes things in the shorthand of a “rap beef.” While we know this to be extremely reductive, we recall the stories of heated confrontations, guns busting, lowkey kidnappings, and heightened security measures amongst a general atmosphere of darkness of that era. And we know that when Biggie said, “You soff, duke,” he wasn’t talking to no other rappers.
We want our wars to be in art, not between brothers. Not between Black men surviving and making their way under this capitalist hellscape where the quickest way to the top is tearing each other down.
You soff, duke…
I’m good with being soff—like the quote attributed to Lao Tzu saying, “Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.” I’m down to be water, like Bruce Lee said. This rap shit makes everyone think that they have to be hard and being sensitive is a slur. This makes no sense the opposite of being sensitive is being insensitive, and how you can't create any art worth being called art without being sensitive. Biggie was sensitive; Pac was sensitive. Their art lives on because of it. Still:
They won’t take me out my element….
Cole lost, but Cole won. He’s become an asterisk at this moment that’s now dealing with AI, cosmetic surgery, response times, and upturned expectations. Save for the most ardent OVO stans, no one expected Drake to be exerting as much dominance over this conflict as he’s currently doing. Bringing ‘Pac and Snoop into things is evil genius and a meta-commentary on the AI songs that emerged as people were (and still are) waiting for Kendrick to say… something.
Since “Like That,” his tone changed a little; he’s not as enthused, it feels like he’s kinda removed. How is he not in the booth? This question needs an answer. Because the possibility of a battle between the Big Three was that it promised to be about bars. Yes, Kendrick seems like a wild card, willing to die for this shit, take a fucking life for this shit. If we take him at his word and his biography of a good kid in Madd City born to comedically wild parents and surrounded by dead and incarcerated uncles, there’s always the possibility of him jumping out the window by pulling up, hopping out, airing out, and faking his death before running to Cuba, all while making it look sexy. K-Dot in real life is not the same K-Dot we see on TV. He’s alluded to possibly taking a life in his teens.
But he also had an album-length therapy session, and we intuitively know that he’s gonna keep it PG when it comes to battling former collaborators—especially one who’s not from the cloth of bandanas and flags and another who presumably has some of the best security available to the rich and famous. His silence here is disheartening—not because we want blood, but because we believed he was who he said he was when he said, “Just say his name and I’ll promise that you’ll see Candyman.” There’s a loophole in the fact that Drake never said Kendrick’s name in “Push Ups,” and an even smaller one for “Taylor Mode Freestyle,” as the first thing Tupac’s digital reanimation says, “Kendrick, we need ya.”
Kendrick, we need you.
But you know what else we need? Soffness. And you know what else is soff? Fertile, nourishing ground. We need the Earth that can be tilled, not what can be exploited for profit. Our genius is still the rarest and most abundant resource on the planet, but these rumblings have exhumed the spirit of rap beef to the point where we now have to listen to Quavo and Chris Brown trade dis records. And no one wants that.
In Love and Soffness,
exo.
Slime,
There are so many things that deserve our literary time and attention but let’s stay with that Life After Death moment for now. Who was Biggie talking to? A nameless duppy nigga who wanted to pump fear into Big’s heart, whispering death. Did he succeed? Can’t call it. Biggie’s voice gave no real indication one way or the other. Was “you soff duke, you soff” a spell cast on his would-be boogie man? Was dismissing the man as less than a man Biggie exorcising his own fears, fears of the specter he knew was on the way? Soff. It was performing a reversal on an attempt on his manhood. And that’s what we are talking about here, aren’t we? Biggie’s manhood, so fragile that he — and we of the riot baby generation — practiced a kabuki, a theater of fatherless manhood that would as often as not turn lethal if that energy was not poured into more sublimated, more creative violence. We developed immaculate penmanship to tag up a city that tried to obscure us. We cut cut up up dusty records to slice up time and make it bleed til the break of dawn. We turn our hands and legs into imaginary knives beheading the opps on cardboard as we uprocked and windmilled. We banged out beats on cafeteria tables while spitting intricate insults at our rivals. These endeavors required a warrior spirit and a code of conduct. It required we swallow our fears and get thick skin. At it’s core, Hiphop demands that you rise to the challenge of self realization, to be graceful under pressure, pressure that busts pipes. Big was Big because he embodied that grace on wax. Nothing disrupted his flow. Neither rhyme nor rhythm nor lack of resources nor any combination of circumstance could stop him from his appointed duty as a Master of Ceremony. Even after they murdered him, his immaculate flow remained etched into our souls like the Khemetic hieroglyphs. He became Brooklyn Incarnate, the king with the tilted crown.
Rakim laid the process out early: “I start to think/ and then I sink/Into the paper/Like I was ink/When I’m writing/I’m trapped in between the lines/I escape/ when I finish the line/ I got soul”. Soul is distinct from soft. In the insurgency years of hiphop it was required that your alterego be cut from hardened material that could withstand the pressure, that black coal transformed into diamonds so the god could drop jewels. Many of those outwardly hardened figures have disappeared for the most part, the way players like Charles Oakley and Anthony Mason who battled under the basket in the NBA of old have gone the way of the Dodo. The new breed are repelled by such unforgiving macho. (One recent meme on Basketball Tiktok reviews cherry picked bloopers from that era screaming “We done with the 90s!” followed by the sound of an empty soda can tossed across the room.) Those of us who got stuck in that analog approach have a particularly hard time with these new niggas. Time has moved on. When I see the grey shadow of these men on the new gentrified Fulton Mall, still rocking their Tims and oversized Pelle Pelle, with their doorags blowing in the cold wind its like coming across those looming heads on Easter Island. Remember he used to push the champagne Range?
So I am under no delusion that those kind of men can be those kind of men during these times. Our misogyny and myopia are well documented at this point. Prisons and the cemeteries grew fat on the flesh of that mode of manhood The irony of Puff’s lawsuits are that he was living in the 2020s like it was still 1995. Diddy changed his name but not his behavior. So again, what differentiates soul from soff? I see you and your subtle embrace of soft as hard because soft is survival. Soft is adaptive. But letting J. Cole off the hook is what we not going to do. As scribes and emcees and poets and men of letters we must never take our foot off his neck. None of this matters if Cole wasn’t so nice with it. If this was some mid also ran rapper we wouldn’t give a fuck. But he’s a monster one of our best and brightest. Obi Kenobi ass nikka. Soul don’t bend. Soul transcends.
I think you get at it when you mention Bruce Lee. One of the elohim of creative violence, his films inspired Black America because he was a master of percussive destruction. Another blazing example of grace under pressure, his book The Art of Expressing the Human Body is instructive in the process of developing a mind and body that is at once disciplined and flexible, supple and lethal. Yes, he spoke of being formless like water, but when you read his book it is chock full of resistance training. He spent hours pushing against immovable objects. The beauty and strength of his movement came from the what he came up against.
Which brings us to Dot and Drake. It’s been a dazzling display of strategy, poetry, the latest innovations in psychological technology and word war tactics. A sonic debate that covers race, commerce, morality, originality, tone, tech, truth, women and what makes a leader. This is Hiphop as it was always meant to be. Drake has displayed his gift for maximizing audience and efficiently belittling the opps. He dispenses with all his frenemies on silky and sinister production, pouring champagne thoughts on some bitchniggas he used to fuck with. “Push Ups” is full of insinuation and Big Dog bravado. It’s pretty and pimpish with laughter, rollicking with all of the lights. Kendrick is all business. “Euphoria” is a surgical dismantling of the Boy as a man, as a mask, as a mythology. While “Push Ups” addressed Dot’s Prince vs Michael analogy (“What’s a Prince to a King? He a son”) and implied threats directly (you too little, basically), “Euphoria” is a powerpoint response to Drake’s assertions of King status and his AI blasphemy on “Taylor Made”. He then followed it up with “6:16 in LA”, mocking and mirroring Drake’s timestamp series with a maelstrom of numerological meaning. Some real Gemini shit at play here. His use of soul samples Al Green and Teddy P are oh so gangster. So for only the second time in a decades long run, we are seeing Drake under real pressure from another rap mastermind. We are in a Jay Z and Nas moment: a battle for the soul of the culture. And we all, collectively must choose which path and how we continue. Are you hustler or preacher? Commerce or Culture? Without sound clash, we don’t evolve sonically, phonically or ebonically. I’m talking when Swizz defeated Just Blaze in a producer battle with a never heard before exclusive dub featuring Jay, Nas and DMX on the same track. I’m talkin’ Kiss on that Verzuz stage in Madison Square obliterating Dipset with his verse on I gotta hundred guns, a hidden clips”. We believe in this kind of redemptive violence, these afro-therapeutics, this threshing ground where we separate the wheat from the chaff. We remain impotent players in the realms of education, politics and the larger society so we must work shit out in the culture until further notice.
And that is why Ex, not gonna lie, yesterday as I watched a clip of a choir of young brown boys lined up on some bleachers, splendid in their school marching band uniforms, bopping rhythmically my eyes got…soff. Because they were chanting over and over again the question we must all ask ourselves: Is You Like That? Is You Like That? Is You Like That?
Your brethren,
RKM