Sure, many rappers grew up poor in urban centers and experienced violence and hard times, but as Chris Rock put it in "No Sex in the Champagne Room" (1999), "There's no way the ODB committed all those crimes."
Hip-hop is storytelling, and the best rappers are the ones with the most vivid imaginations. It's weird, then, that it's so vital for rappers to keep up the facade of being gangsters, or to borrow a line from Oscar Wilde's famous play, "the vital Importance of Being Earnest."
Earnestness isn't just highly sought after by late-19th century British bachelors, it's also necessary in contemporary rappers. I've mentioned this before in terms of Rick Ross, or as he's often called by his detractors, Officer Ricky: see, Rick Ross, arguably the most successful cocaine rapper (not the best, though: that would be Pusha T), never actually sold cocaine. Despite his own undying earnestness, Ross, born William Leonard Roberts II, worked as a corrections officer before he began rapping about his everyday activities, namely "hustling."
What irony there is in hip-hop is often hard to highlight because the actual life stories of rappers run the whole gamut from Jay-Z, who recently published a book dissecting a number of his songs, parsing truth from fiction, to Waka Flocka Flame, who appears to actually be a gangster if the number of times he's been shot, or shot at, in the past year means anything.
Rap fans rarely question their entertainers, but basically all songs — not just rap songs — are fiction. So it's really weird when a new act comes around with violent, disturbing or otherwise antisocial lyrics and everyone freaks out and tries to figure out if the act is being autobiographical or not.
This is exactly what happened in the '80s with the rise of gangsta rap, then in the late '90s when Eminem started rapping about killing his wife — and everyone else — and again in the past few months with Tyler, the Creator's (and the rest of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) skyrocket to fame on a missile of horrifying (albeit hilarious and amazing) lyrics and images, and The Weeknd's — a mysterious Canadian R&B artist — similar ascent.
The OF crew raps about truly detestable topics (rape, murder and deviant sexual taboos, to name a few) and culls their aesthetic from various cultural taboos, from Satanists to skater punks to skinheads. The Weeknd sings nonstop about bizarre sex and excessive drug use. Both artists have unique sounds, have risen to fame at breakneck speeds and are almost certainly not singing about their real lives.
In "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1895), Algernon Moncrieff has a practice that he calls Bunburying, where he gets out of appointments by saying that he has to visit Bunbury, his imaginary friend who is (constantly) sick. When Tyler, the Creator says that he's going to chop up a girl who rejected him (or when he says that he's going to stab Bruno Mars), he is effectively Bunburying. When the singer of The Weeknd announces that his object of desire should be on drugs for whatever it is he has in store for them, he, too, is Bunburying.
The Weeknd's "House of Balloons" (2011) is one of the most menacing albums I've ever heard, and Tyler, the Creator's debut, "Bastard" (2009), while one of the best debuts in recent memory, is similarly difficult. Both are dark and violent and antisocial and terrifying (in the best ways possible). But they're also palatable and enjoyable because they're fictional. (Both are also free self-releases from the artists, so you have no excuse to not check them out.)
So it's not like the world of hip-hop is without irony, it's just that most fans are the Cecilys and Gwendolens — the duped love interests of Wilde's play, read a book sometime — of the world: They want to be in love with an Earnest of their very own, and rappers are more than happy to oblige.
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Mitchell Geller is a senior majoring in psychology and English. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@tufts.edu.
