“When These Rappers Spout Theatrics I Can’t Help but Wonder if They’re Just Afraid of Themselves”

August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Mike Beal

In the late ’00s and early ’10s there lurked the earth a strange and somewhat arrogant but also witty and verbose creature by the name of Pharoahe Monch (pronounced “Mahnch,” I do believe). Pharoahe Monch was [1] underground but hard, with lines like “They be swearin’ it’s cute / But I be up in the club / Box cutter in the booth”. He was a New Yorker with a steady ghetto diet but an element of discernment and a true understanding of what hip-hop should be. This artistic sense was manifest, among other means, in one of the skits on Desire, his 2008 album, with an interview with a kitschy “harshness diss record” figure: “Ni**az didn’t never have no weight in the street!” Juxtaposed with this satire, his style and worldview were more encompassed in his line from the standout “What it is”: “Young Eastwood / Just tryin’ to eat good / Breathe easy / Relax / Mack (sic) like Fleetwood”.

And I think about this sometimes, how nice it would be to be able to breathe easy, relax, and mack like Fleetwood, though I tend to mack more like Mr. Rogers. The point is, humanity seems to cleaved along two party lines of people who are scared of themselves and people who aren’t.

I’ve been on a steady 45-hours-a-week schedule at the hot, noisy kitchen where I work, and, I don’t expect you to believe me when I tell you this, but my 55-year-old sous chef listens to a constant, diarrheal stream of lowbrow booty music. I mean, I don’t really need a crystal ball to be able to tell that a particular song is going to pertain to some bit** the gentleman wants to do the nasty with, if ya know what I mean. I think of this nice, buxom bartender who sometimes I go see under the guise of drinking beer and watching boring Cubs games, because I’m really horny for her. And I think of these rap lyrics: my bit** did this, my bit** did that, I don’t respond to her texts, she’s boring, blah-blah-blah, and I’m just like no: you’re a closet homo or else you’re just some sort of droid, or puppet of corporate America, more likely.

And now I’m in danger of ending this post the exact same way I did the last one so I’ll bring in an anecdote that isn’t so much related in any way or even pertinent but sort of topically adjacent. That is that, frustratingly, I can’t find a speaker to work in my God da** stupid desktop PC (I plugged the same set of speakers into my Mac and it didn’t even give me a message… it just started pumping out music). When I plug it into the Dell it’s all like “You’ve just inserted a device.” It’s like yeah, Dell, I know. I remember what I did two seconds ago. Anyway, I was hoping to get back on Fruity Loops (the fu**ing piece of sh** won’t even let me plug in my headphones and do it either, despite the fact that there’s a headphone jack right on the front of the fu**ing tower) and lay down my song “Rude Byzantine”: “I need days to kick it / Days to chill / Days to take too many pills / Yo your aggression is over the line / If you step you’ve ignited the rude Byzantine”.

[1] I realize he might be still active today but I’m using past tense for storytelling effect.