into cuisine. We took this word and we made it into poetry. It's horrible, but put some sauce on it and it's poetry. Nigger is the nitroglycerin of words. In the wrong hands, it can hurt. But if you give it to the right scientist, a Dave Chappelle, an Ice Cube, an Eddie Murphy. What they did—what N.W.A and Richard Pryor did with the word—is art. It's Mark Twain."
"GETTING DOWN TO WHAT'S REALLY REAL"
Authenticity in rap is its own conversation. It gets tricky, fast. The appeal of the cipher as a space is clear: Here someone can see himself transformed from nothing into something in the eyes of the world and, in so doing, redefine the way they see themselves. Given that the cipher as a space originates in places—Compton, Bed-Stuy, Chicago's South Side—where that imaginative space is one of the few dependable refuges from an inescapable reality, the idea that someone in the cipher would be speaking from the heart of the self takes on a different charge. Authenticity would be all one has—the most valuable currency, the purest paper, the artistic $1,000 bill. To counterfeit that purity would be the purest form of corruption.
And yet if we consider that of the more than one thousand unique songs Frank Sinatra recorded, he was a credited writer on only seven, and that some of Johnny Cash's most memorable performances are of other people's songs, we understand that, in some domains, authenticity comes from a different place. Only a fool would accuse Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday of being phonies because the words they sang about love and loss weren't autobiographical documents of their lived experience. In hip-hop, though, the stakes are different, because the art is different, is an art of authenticity: Speakers in hip-hop are, most often, voices that hadn't been heard from in American life. The great novel or film or ballet or opera by the talented young artist who was supporting his ongoing work by dealing crack had yet to appear.
To read Decoded—a book whose closest companion on the narrow shelf of great books by popular musicians about their practice is Bob Dylan's Chronicles—is to understand anew the nature of authenticity. As Jay Z writes:
This is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.
Not accidental, then, Jay Z's title. More literary criticism and musicology than memoir, Decoded slyly connects the codes that get rapped in ciphers to how rap, as an art form, demands to be heard with a mind aware of how variously language can be used, and that a word, put next to other words, doesn't necessarily mean what we think, or fear, it does.
TELEVISION AS LITERARY CRITICISM (II)
It's 1989, and Tipper Gore and Ice-T and a range of panelists are on Oprah engaging the question du jour: whether hip-hop MCs are failing to serve as role models for young children who hear their music. They are discussing Gore's initiative to put warning labels on records. She is succeeding in this fight.
In a paperboy cap and a ponytail, with a gold chain terminating in a solid-gold revolver-as-emblem, Ice-T is—as always—holding his own. He's a great debater, able to cycle through rhetorical modes, making the case, a reasonable one, that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, that the job of the artist isn't to self-censor but to report from the front lines of living. His reality is a harsh one, he concedes, an unwanted one, he admits, but he's in no position to police his experience. He's writing from that experience, and the people he's writing about talk that way, walk that way, sometimes call one another faggots, sometimes call women bitches. He's writing 