For Us, By Us — Audience, Coded Language, and why rap doesn’t need a “message”
Tags: Drill Music, Music, Rap, Language

(Just a something I wrote while applying for something. If it sounds rushed it’s because it is — there was a 400 word limit, I went over as it is, and it might have been 4AM. There’s so much more that I wanna say on this that I might even come back to this idea later, but if I end up wanting to pitch it somewhere this post will immediately evaporate bc thieves be thieving.)

When South London rapper Loski sat down with the sensationalist Zeze Millz recently, something felt markedly different about the interview. When pressed (however reasonably) about their music’s effect on the community, we normally expect drill artists to give generic, media-trained answers denouncing street violence and insisting they are just “rapping their reality”. But Loski refused to play the game — he instead countered Millz’s moralising with a playful facetiousness, openly admitting that his listeners would rather buy into gun talk than preaching, and even responding to her point of there being no “positive” drill by controversially saying “if you don’t want to listen to violent music, go listen to jazz”. He was, albeit bluntly, touching on a much larger point — that the insistence from outsiders that rap must have a positive “message” or “meaning” is diluting the art form’s true purpose — catharsis and free expression.

As rap became the new pop and reached people it was perhaps not designed to reach, rappers now had to justify and intellectualise their rawest outbursts to a morally frightened (mainly white) audience that lacked context of their lived experience . From Jay-Z justifying his use of the N-word on Oprah Winfrey, to female artists like Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj being burdened with a pressure to either censor or politicise their sexuality (a pressure that doesn’t exist for their male counterparts), the white gaze pushed rappers to force their expression into broad boxes, and to come to conclusions pleasing to conservatives, so an outside audience can understand, and so as to not be seen as “glorifying” violence. But many white artists were allowed to be neutral — the Smiths could write deeply personal songs of post-industrial angst without being branded lazy or inauthentic for not being explicitly anti-Thatcher — Morrissey was scathing on Thatcher in his later solo career, but given his courting of the far right today, I wouldn’t rush to call his politics steadfast — and while controversial at the time, the Beatles aren’t currently seen as promoting drug use, even when much of their music and songwriting was influenced by psychedelics. Craving a general message dilutes the personal and therapeutic nature of rap — American rapper Earl Sweatshirt talks of how “rap music is [modern] slave music…slave communication had to be encrypted”. “If You Know, You Know” mentality is central to rap and its communities, and rappers should have the space to simply unload. Perhaps Cardi B doesn’t want to become a feminist icon, or a spokesperson for sex positivity — perhaps she simply wants to rap about having a WAP, to other women with WAPs, and that shouldn’t make her art any less valid.