Little Boys Dressed Like Rappers (Op-Ed)

 

Little Boys Dressed Like Rappers

I never wrote a poem about a Black boy on a plane, but while traveling between my birth home, my academic home, and my writing home, I found myself sitting by a 6-year-old Black boy on the plane. Instead of thinking about poetry, which I have yet to write, reading from my ever-growing book list, or resting my eyes for the ride, I find peace lending my Nintendo switch to a lucky kid sitting by me. I thought this time was no different, but the little boy quickly handed my switch back to me, uninterested in his initial thought of playing with the switch. “I guess my games suck” was my initial thought, but when he pulled out his tablet and opened up Roblox, his young mind opened up why he was so interested in his tablet instead.

“XXXTentacion was my hero,” the kid sighed as he started editing his Roblox character to resemble the deceased rapper. “I looked up to him and I was really sad when he died.” Hearing those words come from this Black boy and feeling the grief and disappointment shook me to my core. My initial pause occurred when l stopped myself from speaking on the controversies of such a young artist like XXX and suggesting the Black boy look up to somebody else. I couldn’t interject. All I could do was create space for this Black boy to explore the imaginary because deep down, the boy saw himself in the deceased rapper. The boy was experiencing grief through play, but also experiencing a world of imagination where his hero never died and his future self never died. A world where they both live forever.

We have to accept rappers’ complicated relationships with popular culture and the influence they have on the public and private spheres. For example, XXXTentacion was a controversial figure, but to call his death anything but untimely and undeserved would further dehumanize him and the slew of young rappers that passed before and after him. XXX touched the life of this young boy in ways we can’t imagine, so how do we reconcile the life and the narrative of a 20-year-old who died before fully discovering himself? How do we reconcile these figures of hip-hop with the narrative that the media often portrays these artists and their art?

To reconcile the complicated relationship that Hip-hop has with popular culture, I don’t need to get into the commercial success that hip-hop artists have received over the past forty years. I don’t need to note that 40 plus hip-hop songs are currently dominating the Billboard top 100 with 5 of the top 10 songs being hip-hop inspired. I don’t need to talk about the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-inspired Hamilton which took the nation by storm in 2015 and is still selling out live performances despite being available on Disney+ and part of the original cast discontinuing their roles for the show. I don’t need to expand on the diasporic reaches of hip-hop by listing the sub-genres starting with UK Grime and ending with Korean Drill. I don’t need to do that right? 

So when a young black boy calls a young rapper his hero… why do I pause? Why does it take me time to process such an experience? Could it be because when I was his age, I listened to the consciousness of Lupe Fiasco, Pre-crisis Kanye, and The Jesus Musik making Lecrae? The politics of their work sided with the respectability, religion, and critiques of Black culture itself. The politics of their work is a direct reflection of my upbringing and influences my thoughts in the conservative south. I know the impact listening to their music had on me as I processed the world at a young age, so I paused to think about how listening to these artists would affect him. Overall, my initial pause was even deeper than I thought.

To explore these complications, we have to start with the conditions which bred hip-hop music. Hip-hop was the birthchild of a post-soul era. Cultural theorist and academic Mark Anthony Neal describes post-soul as “the political, social, and cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements.” From this post-soul era, came the political upbringing of Black boys experiencing the effects of Reaganomics, The War on Drugs, The War on Crime, Deindustrialization, and Mass Incarceration. For these Boys, the personal was political because of how these moments affected their lives on a daily, creating poets that rapped over soul samples to drown out the noise. The likes of KRS-1 to the rap collective of N.W.A were rooted in political opposition to the conditions of their upbringing. The post-soul, leaning towards Black nihilism and a feeling of no hope in these rap communities, created a way for rap to work in multiple spheres. 

Hip-hop's complicated relationship with popular culture stems from the reflection and introspection of the darkest parts of Black American life and culture. Hip-hop is a reflection of the under nation that is far removed from a romanticized version of the United States as a cultural and global power that rejects the realities of Black life on a daily basis while also benefitting from access to that same culture. Sociologist and Cultural Theorist Stuart Hall describes this moment as “a movement from high culture to American mainstream popular culture and its mass-cultural, image-mediated, technological forms.” Subsequently, Hip-hop is accepted by the masses of popular culture but is constantly placed into a status of low art in regards to the media’s reflection of Hip-hop’s influence. So what now?

We are in a new era where the post-soul has manifested its way into the realities of our cultural inheritance to the point that hip-hop is its own escape from the limitations of Black popular culture. Philosopher Paul C. Taylor categorizes this as Post-Blackness. Taylor describes Post-Blackness by explaining that “Blackness ceases to be a foundation and becomes a question, an object of scrutiny, … and for some, a burden.” The burden of such Blackness is unintentionally being played out by younger hip-hop artists through their groundbreaking cross-genre music. This is a part of the reason why Hip-hop is selling across the world. It is also the reason why I didn’t truly believe this Black boy should be admiring an artist that was pushing a Post-Blackness aesthetic. I hoped that the little Black boy would be able to see more hope, but right now he needs this space, his loss, and his imagination while racing cars as an XXXTentacion avatar. He’s not the first to do so and will not be the last. As I finish this reflection, I am reminded of Isaiah Rashad’s lyrics “little boys dressed like rappers, can that road make them daddies?” The answer is not a yes or no but I will say that we teach Black boys consequences before we teach them possibilities in which the imaginary is altered into a realistic view of the world. I cannot answer whether the kid will be a good father or not, but I also can’t answer the question of whether XXXTentacion is a good father or not for different reasons. All I know is that this little Black boy is alive and he is imagining a future for himself in which he lives. Currently, that is all he needs.