Rap Genius – the website which annotates rap lyrics, although it’s now expanded to include rock lyrics, poetry and news stories – has been issued with an ultimatum. The National Music Publishers Association has told it to get licenses for publishing lyrics, or to take those lyrics down. It’s a shame, because as co-founder Ilan Zechory exclaimed, “Rap Genius is so much more than a lyrics site!. Anyone can make an account and start suggesting annotations for line meanings, ‘upvoting’ or ‘downvoting’ other people’s suggestions, discussing their favourite music on forums, or even adding raps and poems of their own. It’s a way for fans to find out what other fans think about the music they’re listening to, rather than just looking up lyrics.
I’m a sucker for what other fans think. This week I stumbled across a page by a fan called “Rap Critic”, who’d listed “The Top 5 Worst Lyrics I’ve Ever Heard”. Fair enough: we’ve all heard lyrics that make us cringe. What struck me – and not until I’d looked back through the list a few times – was that the first two lyrics he chose were ‘bad’ because they were unintentionally gay. “I take sacks to the face whenever I can” – that’s Luniz, and it sounds less like he’s talking about smoking weed than about, as “Rap Critic” puts it, “taking, you know, smooth jazz lessons?” The same sniggers go round when Canibus tells LL Cool J that he hasn’t got the skills “to eat a nigga’s ass like me”. What’s more embarrassing than accidentally rapping about gay sex?
What shocked me wasn’t that these lyrics were ridiculed – I’ve always known that rap’s a homophobic genre, but that I had no problem with that. A homosexual gaff is just bad rapping. However we might feel about homosexuality in other walks of life, when we listen to rap we expect certain things – and taking sacks to the face isn’t one of them. Which got me thinking: Why has rap music evolved like this? Is it a problem that’s part and parcel of the genre? Is there anything we can even do about it?
I’m not saying that there aren’t exceptions. According to Wikipedia there’s a whole sub-genre called “homo hop”, although it’s so marginalised that you might question whether it could even be considered part of rap music as a whole. There’s no overlap with mainstream rap music – homo hop isn’t so much a sub-genre of hip hop as entirely opposed to it, something that’s sprung up as a challenge to the genre’s inherent homophobia.
And it is inherent: ironically, rap emerged as the same sort of counter-cultural genre as homo hop, as a challenge to traditional (read: white) ideas of what music was ‘supposed’ to be. As soon as it became a popular genre it was always looking backwards, trying to stick to its roots, trying to keep it real. “Things done changed,” Dr Dre was already saying in ’92, as though change is always a bad thing. Much as it’s easy to expect that homo hop is inevitable, poised for a breakthrough in our supposedly-not-repressed age, the way the genre works and develops – endlessly reinforcing this image of the black man as strong, witty, and heterosexual – just doesn’t seem to allow for it.
You could argue that one of the things that’s allowed Eminem to be so successful as a white rapper is the way he’s taken these adjectives and exaggerated them, creating an image of himself as the “worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do black music so selfishly” – the murderous, gay-bashing king of rhyme. The very things which made Slim Shady seem so fresh and new when we first heard him are the ways in which he was conservative, sticking to what rap music’s always been about. Hardly surprising that as his respect as an innovator flounders, he’s offering us a sequel to the album that threatened to “stab you in the head, whether you’re a fag or lez/Or the homosex, hermaph, or a trans-a-vest”.
Rap works on nostalgia and exclusivity, always looking back to its official Golden Age of somewhere around ’87-’93, always extending its unofficial golden age into the ’90s and beyond, rarely dropping its traditional values of what it is to be a young black male. You can be openly gay as a pop singer, as a DJ, even – like Frank Ocean – as an R&B singer at the centre of the hip hop scene. You can’t be openly gay as a hardcore rapper. And you certainly can’t rap about it. When your genre’s always looking back to Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes – who walked out of an interview in 2006 after being asked what he thought about homophobia – calling someone a ‘faggot’ is still the easiest diss.
