When Art Reflects Reality: The Uneasy Listening Experience
Rap music elicits so many good feelings, but certain subgenres, which reflect real-life societal ills, can spur a pang of guilt and discomfort that don’t quite vibe with the bassline.
In February, Jadakiss and Pusha T pushed back the release of their “Huntin Season” single after the murder of Pop Smoke. Pusha clarified on IG that “the whole concept of 'Hunting Season' and the hypothetical ideas of 'killing rappers' isn't sitting [well] with me while mourning [the] death of Pop Smoke,” who was fatally shot by robbers in an LA home he was renting.
Pusha T’s comments illuminated one of rap’s most taboo topics: how real-life trauma can result in an uneasy listening experience. Rap music elicits so many good feelings, but certain subgenres, which reflect real-life societal ills, can also spur a pang of guilt and discomfort that don’t quite vibe with the bassline.
Months after Pusha and Jadakiss pushed their single back, artists like Smokepurrp, 6ix9ine, and others delayed their music in the midst of June’s George Floyd-spurred uprisings. It’s possible that they were simply making shrewd business moves, but they publicly framed the decisions as observance of a higher cause.
These artists, who explore violent and nihilistic lyrics that reflect their lives, acknowledged that there’s a time and place for everything. And as Black people fight for a time and place without white supremacy, how do we simultaneously engage with lyrics that reflect its negative ramifications?
America is a bloodthirsty, self-medicating nation, and those themes are reflected in our art. Some of the first movies were westerns about gunslinging Old West cowboys. Movies chronicling Italian crime families and domestic terrorism are some of the most beloved, highest-grossing films of all time. Many a literary icon and rock star used drugs and/or wrote about them. Guns were in our consciousness from a young age via Looney Tunes gun-toters like Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. Americana is rife with depictions of gun violence and drug use before a rapper ever stepped into a booth. To quote The Wire, violent, self-indulgent rap music is “our thing” which “is just a part of the big thing.”
But it feels like rap music, a Black artform, sees its progenitors suffer for their art at a disproportionate rate. Nowadays, it’s hard to listen to the latest rap phenom without pondering whether the lifestyle they chronicle will claim them. Scarcity factor and fatalism have become a factor of standom.
Two of July’s biggest rap albums were posthumous projects from Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD, who were 20 and 21 (for six days) respectively at the time of their deaths. Juice WRLD died at Chicago’s Midway Airport in December after a fatal seizure from an accidental overdose of oxycodone and codeine. DJBooth’s Donna-Claire Chesman noted that his weary, drug-addled brand of emo rap sounded like “an unending cry for help.” “Legends,” one of his most notable songs, was a tribute to the deceased Lil Peep and XXXTentacion — but it also eerily foretold his death:
This time, it was so unexpected
Last time, it was the drugs he was lacing
All legends fall in the making, yeah, sorry truth, uh
Dying young, uh, demon youth
He also rapped, “What's the 27 Club? We ain't making it past 21 / I been going through paranoia, so I always gotta keep a gun.” The line reflects the dual scourges of gun violence and substance abuse, which are two traumatic, often overlapping effects of systemic oppression. His Chicago peers like Polo G often rap about how self-medicating is so often a byproduct of coping with the trauma of gun violence. The late Juice WRLD was open about his drug use. He told Vulture that it was Future who first inspired him to sip lean, and the Atlanta icon “kind of apologized” when he heard that.
Future was ambivalent about whether he felt guilty about his WRLD on Drugs co-star’s death. He told XXL that drug use has long been a part of popular music, and also said, “me having an influence on that, I just feel like…that is not my intentions. My intention was just to be me. I’m just being me and what you get from it is what you get from it.” He also noted it was a “touchy situation.”
Indeed, Future deserves his creative license, but he also has to acknowledge the troubling aspects of his influence. Who knows how much responsibility popular art bears in sustaining America’s drug epidemic among impressionable people. It’s not a predominant role like critics reductively suggest, but Juice WRLD and others prove that it’s not nonexistent. That “touchiness” permeates the Future listening experience, as it does even moreso for late artists like Juice WRLD and Lil Peep, who died of an accidental overdose in November of 2017. Some listeners can simply marvel at the brilliant ways in which artists convey their pain. But others ponder how genuine their content is, and how it affects their well-being and longterm vitality. These questions can pervade the listening experience to the point where some people simply don’t want to listen.
The same can be true for depictions of violence in music. The final single Pop Smoke released on his own was “Christopher Walking,” a surging track bogged by a hook that sounds too similar to the tragedy of his own death:
Niggas sayin' they outside
Send the addy, we gon' slide
Air it out when we arrive
As bop-worthy as drill and trap beats are, it’s hard to ignore that they’ve become two of rap’s most true-to-life subgenres. The best artists of these scenes are charismatic, energetic, witty, melodically-inclined, and so many other coalescing qualities that allow us to gloss over the reality of their lyrics and enjoy the music — until the next damning instance of death or incarceration that makes us reckon with the reality that it’s not just music.
And again, these artists deserve their creative license, but some listeners will never be able to shake the musical-moral dissonance. What does that mean? Some things aren’t good or bad, they just are. That dissonance is what makes “Hot Nigga” one of the most feel-good songs of the 2010s — and a top-to-bottom confessional of a life targeted by the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s what makes one play Lil Baby’s “Freestyle,” then think of Marlo’s recent death and hope longingly for Lil Baby. It’s what makes YMW Melly”s “Murder On My Mind” a hypnotizing-yet-haunting listen. It’s what allowed us to co-opt “demon time” and “savage” into romantic mindsets even though their recent cultural coinage refers to being willing to kill.
The jokes about turning up to Future’s existential lamentations are funny but also ingrained in truth. Traumatic themes are hip-hop norms because they’re societal norms. Has despair become such an accepted part of the Black American experience that references to dead homies, the trendy gun of the moment and “molly, percocet” are iconography, eliciting no alarm from listeners? Has our awe of the cowboy turned into an unhealthy, voyeuristic fascination with artists hiding their pain behind bravado? In many ways, chalking up internal dysfunction as standard rap fare helps normalize the plight.
Our social and political agency has to be devoted to changing the conditions we turn up to. Ultimately, none of these travails exist without capitalism and white supremacy — this piece’s only targets of ire. The first part of solving a problem is acknowledging it, which can irreparably color our listening experience.
Too many rappers, young ones especially, are susceptible to the violence and chemical dependencies they rap about. For some, it’s easy to compartmentalize the tracks as artistic expression and point the finger at society for shaping the canvas.
But consider the plight of Pop Smoke, Lil Peep, XXXTentacion. Or the carceral consequences of Bobby Shmurda, Tay-K, YMW Melly, and too many more, which can leave intent listeners distressed, hoping that the lyrics they’re taking in won’t eventually be art reflecting reality. There is power in the tongue. And the power is with the people to change the uneasy listening experience.
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Venmo: Andre-Gee
Thank u.
A couple questions; as always:
1 - is the record industry interested or in any way more interested in dealing with the mental and emotional pain that comes with being in these environments, or is it mostly lip service and turning a blind eye?
2 - why do women rappers, many of whom are also shaped by these poisoned environments, have less incidents with the law than men rappers?