Plain brown rappers

National Review, July 20, 1992 by James Bowman

Sister Souljah and Ice T may be telling the truth when they say their lyrics are lies.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant: An elephant's faithful One hundred per cent ! --From Horton Hatches the Egg

by Dr. Seuss

ALTHOUGH he is not exactly renowned for his faithfulness, Bill Clinton may be said to resemble the elephant in more than just its appetite as he eats his way through the grueling (more like porridging, actually) presidential campaign. At least his attack on the rap chanteuse, Sister Souljah, was a welcome attempt to penetrate the rhetorical fog in which Jesse Jackson lurks by calling his protegee to account for her words.

This is apparently not something one is supposed to do to a rapper. With the weary contempt of the sophisticate for the literal-minded, both Sister Souljah and another rap artiste, Mr. Ice T, have denied that their advocacy of killing white people meant what it said. "The song is fiction, not fact," says Ice T about "Cop Killer," which goes "Die, die, die, pig, die!/F--- the police!" and depicts the poet preparing to kill a policeman. "At no point do I go out and say, `Let's do it.' I'm singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain't never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it."

Likewise, Sister Souljah denies that she meant what she said in an interview with the Washington Post about the Los Angeles riots: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Like Ice T she claims that this was dramatic license, designed only to represent the "mindset" of a typical rioter. "I was in no way advocating that people go out and kill anybody, whether white or black."

It is easy to dismiss such excuses as disingenuous. On her rap tape, called 360 Degrees of Power and issued earlier this year by Sony Music Entertainment, Sister Souljah claims that black people are "in a state of war" with whites, that George Bush is a terrorist, and that "America's no damn good." No doubt she would say that it is only in the same spirit of dramatic empathy that she seems to advocate the killing of a black CIA agent and a policeman and imagines an official announcement by a white American President in 2995 that black slavery is to be reintroduced, but her persistent claims that "White people and the American government/Want to destroy Black African people wherever they are in the world" are pretty explicit to the naive listener.

When a Liar Tells the Truth

YET TO SAY THAT may be in a way as much beside the point as to insist that statements like "We are at war" or "Slavery's back in effect" are meant to be all in good fun. It is always hard to tell when a liar is telling the truth, but I am inclined to believe Ice T and Sister Souljah when they say they don't really mean it.

That is not to say that I accept the loathsome assurances of the spokesmen for Time Warner who are trying to fend off a spreading police boycott of "Cop Killer," which that corporation produced. In an attempt to claim the noblest of motives for selling thousands of copies of this hateful recording, Gerald Levin, the president of the company, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of his "willingness not just to tolerate creative freedom but to encourage it, even when the viewpoints expressed run counter to the norms of our mainstream culture." Murder is to him evidently just an alternative "viewpoint" or "norm" to that of the "mainstream." Thus he rejects calls to withdraw the album: "Given the natural instinct of corporations to avoid controversy, that's undoubtedly the easiest course. But to follow it would be to dishonor the truth."

Gag! Who invited truth and honor in here? Next to such hypocrisy the rappers themselves are models of almost elephantine integrity. Yet there does seem to be independent evidence that Levin and others with a pecuniary interest in believing so may be right to say that even such explicit words as those of "Cop Killer" are not intended "to advocate an assault by black street kids on the police"--that, in short, rap does not mean what it says to those for whom it is intended.

In a vox-pop piece in the Washington Post, for example, more than one of the black interviewees piped up, apparently unprompted, that "Souljah used exaggeration to make a point" and that she was not to be taken literally. When she says, "I'll shoot that motherf-----," does she really mean that she only intends to beat him up? Perhaps it is true after all that, in the words of Mr. Antwan Parker, 18, of Southeast Washington, "You got to be black to understand it."

That is itself an exaggeration, but the truth of it is that what we are dealing with here is a peculiarly black version of the rhetoric of oppression. It is not that Sister Souljah or Ice T or even the Los Angeles ghetto dwellers for whom both of them have at various times purported to speak are actually oppressed; rather, they have inheritted from their ancestors, who were, a form of speech and imagery characterized by a kind of fantastical moral chiaroscuro. So far from being a discussion of what Mr. Levin comically calls "the reality of the streets," it depends precisely upon its unreality--an unreality that takes the form of Mittyesque fantasies. Think of the ones you sometimes see in movies where a poor worm of a man imagines himself throttling some authority figure who is harassing him. It wouldn't be entertaining if there were any chance of his really doing it.