Lil Wayne makes Emmett Till lynching a component of his sexual boast: Jarvis DeBerry
What to make of those folks who can't talk about sex without talking about violence? When they describe a particularly athletic sexual escapade they claim to have "beat the (vulgarity for a woman's genitalia) up." To understand the controversy surrounding a recent lyric by New Orleans-born rapper Lil Wayne first you have to understand the violent imagery invoked even by those who aren't in hip hop. For example, David Hollister's 2000 R&B hit "One Woman Man" is about a man running into a former lover. He sings, "Seeing you reminds me of / all the nights I used to beat it up / I would do it again, but I can't. / 'Cause everything is different now / and I finally have settled down / and became a one-woman man."
Describing consensual and pleasurable intercourse as a violent act is bad enough. Describing it as beating it up like Emmett Till? That's orders of magnitude worse. Yet, that's the boast Lil Wayne makes when he contributes to the song "Karate Chop." If you don't know, Till was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he was accused of whistling at a white woman. Segregationists kidnapped him, beat him, shot him and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.
Till's family was understandably upset by the invocation of their family member's name to make a sexual boast, and their outrage reached the right ears. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Till's family reached out to the Rev. Jesse Jackson who passed on their concerns to Antonio "L.A." Reid, president of Epic Records.
Jackson said afterward that the Internet version with the Till reference was improperly leaked and that the authorized version "has! removed those lyrics from that song." Reid said, "This is not the official version," Reid said. "We understand the sensitivity of this." We should all be skeptical that the company would have taken the line out without pressure. But at least the pressure paid off.
The line is indefensible and disrespectful, but I wondered if I'd think differently of it if had been spoken by an artist I like. In 2000, hip-hop duo OutKast released "So Fresh, So Clean" as part of their critically acclaimed CD "Stankonia." It's there that that Andre 3000 rhymes, "I love who you are / I love who you ain't. / You're so Anne Frank. / Let's hit the attic to hide out for 'bout two weeks. / Rick Jamesin', no chains and whips / I do suck lips till hips jerk in double time / The boy next door's a freak. Ha! Ha!"
Frank, a Jew in Amsterdam, kept a diary as before and her family were discovered in an attic by Hitler's Nazis and taken to concentration camps. Rick James was the R&B and funk bad boy who sang "Super Freak" and was later proved to be one. He was convicted for tying up a woman, holding her hostage and forcing her into sex. No chains, Andre says. Even so, I asked Twitter Wednesday, is his allusion to the most famous victim of the Holocaust different from Lil Wayne's reference to most famous victim of American lynching?
One friend responded that the line about Frank "refers to her resistance. Not her death. Had that line referred to Bergen Belsen," she said of the concentration camp where Frank died of typhus, "I'd feel differently." Still, some folks feel differently already. I didn't recoil at Andre's line, but is it because it's acceptable or is it because I don't have the same emotional connection to the Holocaust that Jewish listeners are likely to have?
Airickca Gordon-Taylor, a spokeswoman for Emmett Till's family, told interviewer Boyce Watkins, "I just couldn't understand how (Lil Wayne) could compare the gateway to life to the brutality and punishment of death." Unlikely comparisons give! hip hop ! an element of surprise, which doesn't let Lil Wayne off the, but it might help answer Gordon-Taylor's question.
On "Breath of Life," a website New Orleans writer Kalamu ya Salaam started to discuss black music, there's a 2007 discussion with his son Mtume ya Salaam about similes, metaphors and MC'ing. The son uses the two members of OutKast to make a point about word play in hip hop:
A good rapper's similes aren't really similes in the traditional sense.... I'm thinking about Big Boi saying, "They got me bent like elbows," or his partner (Andre) 3000 saying, "Some issues need to be addressed, like envelopes, I mean." Neither one of those (is) a simile in the poetic, traditional manner of "her eyes are like diamonds." Big Boi isn't comparing himself to an elbow and Andre's line is memorable precisely because "like envelopes" isn't what he means. They're both playing with the fact that English words often have double meanings. They're saying one thing and meaning something else. They're calling attention to what they really mean by claiming to mean something else. That's not a simile or a metaphor. That's MCing.
As violent as it sounds, Lil Wayne is not promising to commit a crime against a woman. He's perverting the language and history to promise that she'll have a good time. But how he got there really is irrelevant. Some things ought to be held sacred, but maintaining a proper reverence is a hard thing for many hip hop artists - including some I like.
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