Big L and the ‘You’ in Rap Music

Lamont Coleman, a.k.a Big L

Here’s a rap lyric from the marvellous Big L on Put it On, the opening track on his debut album Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous, which came out in 1995 and remains a classic to this day:

You better flee hops, or get your head thrown three blocks

L keep rappers hearts pumping like Reeboks.

Even though this might seem like a rap lyric we’ve all heard many times before – both  thematically and stylistically – I want to show you that there is something strange going on here. It has to do with the first word of the bar, the ‘you’. By using this word, Big L is addressing someone directly without saying exactly who that person is. He is not naming names, so it’s impossible to identify a specific target of the message, but it’s clear that there is some person who the line is aimed at. On a purely logical level, this implies that it is us, the audience, who L is talking to. After all, we are listening to the song, and the song is saying ‘you better flee hops, or get your head thrown three blocks’. When someone on the street would say this to us, we would probably feel like we were indeed the ‘hops’ (NY slang for dude, bro, etc.) who should flee because otherwise we’d get our head thrown three blocks. Yet as all rap fans know, this is not what we experience. We are directly addressed, yet we do not feel addressed. When we listen to these lyrics or rap along with them (which, in the case of a white male like myself, is done solely in private for a variety of reasons), we also have someone else in mind with this ‘you’. So what is going on here? How must this ‘you’ in rap music be thought?

It seems to me like the ‘you’ in rap must be thought of as an empty form which is directed not at us, the listener, but at some external person, an unnamed and unspecified X. After all, if we did have the feeling that we were in fact the person who Big L is talking to, his rapping would lose its appeal, because the ‘you’ is almost always addressed in a negative, threatening, pejorative way. Here’s another lyric from the song All Black, which features on the same album and has a similar kind of vibe:

            So don’t try to test me, ‘cause I can’t stand testers

          Fuck around, I’ll introduce you to your ancestors

            Step to this and get left with a face full of tears, pal

            But man, you’ve been rapping for years now

            And ain’t made a hit yet, you flop in a split sec

            In the shower’s the only time you get your dick wet

Aside from the fact that these lines are amazing for their wit and multi-syllabic rhyme schemes, it’s clear that they are meant to offend, provoke, threaten and belittle someone or something. The ‘you’ addresses an unknown, unspecified other which we are invited to imagine together with Big L. By using the word ‘you’ in this way, Big L is distancing himself from this person, comparing himself to a loser who cannot get laid and who will lose a street fight in no time. This imaginative distance is made possible by virtue of our own misrecognition of the fact that it is us, the audience, which is directly spoken to. If we visualize this schema, it looks something like this:

Figure 1: Visual representation of Big L calling us idiots with us realizing it

By addressing us directly without us feeling addressed, we are given to opportunity to distance ourselves from the empty form X (who we all agree is a miserable human being) alongside Big L, which in turn allows us to feel a connection with Big L. When I listen to Big L, I like Big L, and I think this goes for all of us: we tend to like the artists we listen to, we sympathize with them, we glorify them, we buy their merchandise and attend their concerts. By rapping in a pejorative way about another ‘you’, Big L allows us to laugh with him at some unnamed loser and thereby identify with his success, his grandiosity, his awesomeness. That’s part of what makes Big L, and rap in general, appealing.

But now, a new mystery arises, because we have to ask ourselves another question: precisely who are we sympathizing with here? Big L grew up in some of the roughest neighbourhoods of New York City and openly glorifies violence, robberies and extortion, consistently objectifies women and thinks of himself as a real tough cookie because of these things. If we would watch a documentary about this type of person who is not a rapper, we’d be appalled. We despise the things he is bragging about, we dislike people who are arrogant and self-indulgent, especially when they are self-indulgent about violence and criminality. So why does this not count for our perception of Big L? Why is he one of my favourite rappers of all time despite the fact that I, upon closer reflection, strongly object to the contents of his speech?

This strange mechanism signifies a second level of imagination. Not only do we imagine an empty ‘other’ which we are making fun of together with Big L (an ‘other’ which, again, should really be ashamed of the fact that he exists), we also imagine Big L himself as someone ‘other’ than who he truly is, or at least, who he claims to be in his raps. This is the paradox of rap as portraying ‘real life’: part of its appeal lies in offering us a picture of life ‘as it really is’ in the streets of crime-ridden cities while simultaneously asking us to think of this picture as something that is not real, that is a fantasy of sorts, a mirage. We respect Big L because he authentically portrays his experiences and glorifies his lifestyle, but this kind of admiration only works when we are on some level aware that he is putting on a persona, that it’s not really him. Rap allows us to identify with people who we do not know and whose words would appal us in the real world because we identify with the imagination that the artist can always be someone different ‘in reality,’ that the person in the lyrics is merely a persona, a mask. If we were to again visualize this fantasy-construction, it would look something like this:

Figure 2: Visual representation of the mental gymnastics required to allow us to sympathize with people who openly glorify murder

As figure 2 shows, the version of Big L with which we are sympathizing is neither Big L himself nor a different version of him which we create in our heads. Rather, it’s a fantasy shared by him and us alike. Or, to be more precise, by sympathizing with Big L, we are sympathizing with that part of him that distances itself from the persona that he himself creates. It’s like we are watching someone put on a performance of himself while we both know that it is in fact a performance. This then allows us to sympathize with Big L, not with the part of him that glorifies violence, but with the part of him that does not, the part that knows that this glorification belongs to the performance itself. We are sympathizing with the man behind the mask who we are rarely shown but nonetheless imagine to be real, because if he were not real, if Big L would really take pleasure in murder and robbery, the fantasy of the persona would collapse and we’d stop listening to him. Or, at least, I probably would.

Amazingly, Big L himself acknowledges the distance which he, as a real person, has to his imagined persona on the track Street Struck. While most songs on the album glorify the violence of life in the streets, this song openly discusses the tragedy, horror and misery that such a life actually entails. In other words, now we are talking about ‘real’ life. Big L writes:

            I still chill with my peeps in the streets

But most of the time in the crib, writing rhymes to some dope beats

            Or either calling up some freaks to bone

            But word up, I try to leave the streets alone

            But it’s crazy hard kid, in other words it spooky

            The streets be calling me, like the crack be callin’ Pookie

       It ain’t a dumb joke, listening to this young folk

            Cause where I’m from, you can choke from the gun smoke

            Stay off the corners; that might be your best plan

            Before you catch a bullet that was meant for the next man

            Or end up with a deep cut

            Or relaxing on a hospital bed, from being street struck

(Chorus)

You better listen to L rhyme, ‘cause being street struck will get you nothing but a bullet or jail time

So pay attention to L rhyme, ‘cause being street struck will get you nothing but a bullet or jail time

In this song, Big L is giving the ‘young folk’ a piece of advice: life in the streets will either get you killed or imprisoned, it’s not worth it, so get out while you still can. He lived the life himself, but decided it was not worth it and thankfully found rap as a way to escape. Street Struck shows us that the fantasy we have of Big L, that he is aware of the distance between himself and the persona he puts up in other songs, is in fact real. In other words, we believe we are now seeing the ‘real’ Big L. We no longer believe he is not who he says he is, now we believe he is being sincere. Notice that in order to make this fantasy construction – or rather, the lack of it – work, the word ‘you’ changes its function. Now, it is us, the audience, which is directly addressed, and we must experience it so. We are no longer meant to disavow the message, we’re meant to take it to heart. Or, at least, the young kids who Big L has in mind with this song are meant to take his message to heart. There is no imagined other from which we are invited to imaginatively distance ourselves, we are meant to recognize ourselves as the person spoken to. So when Big L wants to be sincere and show himself as he truly is, the word ‘you’ takes up a different function. Now, it directly addresses his audience. The final schema then looks like this:

  Figure 3: Visual representation of Big L finally being a good person for once

Rap is such an interesting case study for this kind of imagined distancing because we tend to think of rappers as being ‘real’ and respect them for it. Rappers who we suspect talk about the gang life without having actually lived it are seen as ‘fake’ and not worthy of respect in the hiphop community, despite the fact that this would make them more sympathetic to us as real people. The paradox, then, is that our love for the ‘real’ part of rap lies precisely in our ability to believe that it is, on some level, not real. Whether Big L is in fact the wise, collected and kind spirit he portrays in Street Struck or the violent thug in Put It On and All Black remains unclear: maybe he’s both, maybe he’s neither. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters is that Big L was an incredibly talented artist whose mastery of wordplay, rhymes and flow still fascinate today, a young man who died way too soon in the streets that we can picture in our head thanks to his rhymes. And while he’s no longer alive today, the reality and beauty of his art lives on in our collective imagination. Big L, rest in peace.

Sources

Big L - Put It On

Big L - All Black

Big L - Street Struck

All songs feature on the 1995 album Lifestylez ov da Poor and Dangerous