Hip-Hop, Sinners & Madmen
Our most reliable solace in life is reading and listening to artists who chronicled survival through the madness.
Photo Credit: A Syn
Last weekend I came across a James Baldwin passage from Just Above My Head that particularly moved me. The full passage is pretty long, so I’ll link it here, but here’s a specific portion:
“...The most dreadful people I have ever known are those who have been "saved," as they claim, by Christ--they could not possibly be more deluded--those for whom the heavenly telephone is endlessly ringing, always with disastrous messages for everybody else. Or those people who have been cured by their psychiatrists, a cure which has rendered them a little less exciting than oatmeal. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach--or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.”
The same is true of music. In my case, rap music. So much of my hip-hop experience, like most of ours, has been shaped by sinners and madmen. I don’t use those terms to demean them or relegate them, but to acknowledge that our rap favorites navigated so much madness that they wear the residue to this day. The lessons they teach were learned the hard way, but they have enough genius to convey them simply.
Last week, 50 Cent replied to a video of Irv Gotti admitting that he sought to blackball 50 in the early 2000s when he began dissing Ja Rule. In that pre-2003 era, Irv Gotti was a music industry golden boy at the time, involved in DMX, Jay-Z, and Ja’s success, and 50 Cent was “just” a fledgling rapper from Queens. The power dynamic meant that even after 50 survived the New York drug trade, developed his craft with Jam Master Jay, and came back from being shot nine times, he was still up against an obstacle out of his control. But Gotti’s efforts to destroy 50 ended up leading him to sign with an Interscope machine that made him a phenomenon.
Most of us know 50 for being relentlessly petty. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see him fire back at Gotti with a video full of demeaning jokes or other cruelty. But he simply stated, “now everybody knows why i act the way i act. These sucka ass ni66a’s be out here working against you, instead of working on their own shit. 👀now look at them, all fucked up.” This was a life lesson bore from madness.
The very existence of Get Rich Or Die Tryin and (insert your favorite album here) are a testament to madness. We’re all living in a system that’s fixed to appear flawed, with no easy answer for abolition. We’re left to fend for ourselves in communities policed by a system hoping we never learn the “right” way." If you read my last newsletter, you know how I feel about the amorality of survival mode. In the black experience, madness has become normalcy.
These are the circumstances that have people cling to religion and doctrine and psychiatry if only so they don’t lose their grip and descend into the quicksand of madness. But so many of our favorites knew nothing better to cling to but their own self-belief. They may have brushed up against religion, but they didn’t lose themselves within it, and it surely didn’t cloud them from committing the mad world’s sometimes necessary evils. Consider these lines from 50 Cent’s “Many Men:”
Every night I talk to god, but he don't say nothing back
I know he protecting me, but I still stay with my gat
In my nightmares, niggas keep pulling techs on me
Psych says some bitch dumb, put a hex on me
50 conveyed immense trauma. It’s improbable for him to have navigated his violent life experience and become as productive as he is today. But almost no one is capable of treading such trauma without emotional wounds that manifest in troubling ways. Who can overcome madness without a bit — or a lot — of “madman” left in them? There’s a lot to take away from 50 about how not to act, and what not to do. But his very existence, like that of so many of our favorite artists’, is a parable. His survival conveys the most important truth to cling to: it’s possible to overcome anything, and not just survive, but thrive.
The circumstance harkens to one of my other favorite Baldwin quotes:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
We cherish the bits of solidarity that we find with people in our “everyday life” because it gets so lonely on our own path. Some of us are lucky enough for a wealth of familiar connections. But a greater segment of us spend our lives feeling alone in crowded rooms and crowded when we’re alone. Peers, pastors, and psychs try their best, and they offer some solace, but it’s so often temporary.
We’re left to our own devices, navigating the madness the best way we know how, making our share of mistakes along the way. Our most reliable solace is reading or listening to someone who chronicled their own turmoil. It takes considerable bravery for artists to pour their deepest trials into art, and to be public figures whose stumbles are headlines. But without their bravery, and the lessons gained from them, who would we have as examples but pretenders full of dogma and hubris, who seem a little too comfortable with the madness because of the following it affords them?
When I think of change and evolution amid madness, I think of Gucci Mane’s personal evolution from self-medication to self-acceptance. I think of Tupac and Nipsey Hussle’s attempts to show gang members their truer power. I also think of the reality that through all the slippin’, DMX is still here and standing, enjoying his life. None of these men are flawless by far. But they’re all artists who had so much taken from them, yet still had the heart to give of themselves, some ultimately.
They found the strength to put pain to pad, and memory to melody. Most rappers aren’t about to get any Ted Talks on self-empowerment and aren’t close to “reformed” in the eyes of an establishment that seeks a certain amount of polished palatability. But what good are the establishment’s standards when they sustain the madness? These artist’s inspiration, if only in brief glimpses, bars, and IG captions, is appreciated.
It’s hard for me to trust lessons that weren’t learned the hard way. How do we know if they’re battle-tested? Like Baldwin conveyed in Just Above My Head, 2020 is too ugly and opportunistic for me to believe in anyone but survivors of madness, who give me consolation that our mistakes aren’t fatal unless they’re actually fatal. Until then, we push on.
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Venmo: Andre-Gee
This was a wonderful read. Thank u.
A couples questions, as per usual:
1 - how can you tell a madman from a rational actor?
2 - what sins are we willing to grapple with in art, and which sins are so damned even art can’t salvage them?
3 - what is the best Scarface song and why is it Someday?