What's good Notes on rap and language

Daniel Levin Becker

Book - 2022

"What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What's Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mi...xtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between"--

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Subjects
Genres
Music criticism and reviews
Published
San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Daniel Levin Becker (author)
Physical Description
299 pages ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780872868762
  • Preface
  • Introductions
  • Rhetorical questions
  • I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love
  • Rewinding
  • To be the man on the mic, to be the man on your mind
  • On cool
  • What's normal to us is an illusion to them
  • On me
  • I heard the beat and I ain't know what to write
  • Serious rap
  • What you hear is not a test
  • What's Good
  • Word machines
  • I make butter fly
  • Slang evolution
  • Speakin' my language if you talkin' 'bout tilapia
  • Slang and slipperiness
  • You'll never find a rhyme like this in any dictionary
  • On rhyme
  • Try me, try me
  • On register
  • Bitch I'm morose and lugubrious
  • Haunted roots
  • Hangin' on for dear life
  • Code and contraband
  • I got twenty-five lighters on the dresser
  • Intelligences
  • They don't call me Big for nuttin'
  • Power play
  • I'm on point like a elbow
  • Word as bond
  • Speech is my hammer bang the world into shape
  • Anti-simile
  • I'm the motherfucking king like Oedipus
  • =, ≠
  • I ain't Q-Tip but I'll make your breathin' stop
  • #
  • I got bars sentencing
  • Economy and time
  • Four Seasons, three words; do not disturb
  • Signifying chains
  • I take seven MCs, put 'em in a line
  • Recycling
  • Flow retarded, I'm on some Special Ed shit
  • Elective chronology
  • Ones upon a time in the projects
  • Ancestor worship
  • We're holdin' on to what's golden
  • Writing/biting
  • I got ninety-nine problems and a bitch ain't one
  • Aggravated quotation
  • Beat biter, dope style taker
  • Hyperlinks
  • Wikipedia that, if you didn't know
  • On cliché
  • Kickin' the fly clichés
  • Who wore it better?
  • Now I'm butt naked in a Lamborghini
  • Deniable plausibility
  • Might look light but we heavy though
  • On first person
  • I live it, I see it, and I write it because I know it
  • Truth and consequence
  • Calling her a crab is just a figure of speech
  • Criminal slang
  • I'm the biggest Dope Dealer and I serve all over town
  • Selling work
  • The dope I'm selling you don't smoke you feel
  • On values
  • I'm out here making sense 'cause I'm out here making dollars
  • On the B-word
  • Who you callin' a bitch?
  • On the N-word
  • She could be my broad and I could be her -
  • On white people
  • Please listen to my album
  • On second person
  • If that's your chick then why she textin' me?
  • Is rap poetry?
  • I take this more serious than just a poem
  • Writing/not writing
  • I wasn't born last night
  • What you hear is not a text
  • I can't help the poor if I'm one of them
  • On possession
  • Hi haters, I'm back off hiatus
  • On possession with intent to sell
  • Cash rules everything around me
  • Signifying ornaments
  • I spell it how the fucks I want
  • Outsider art
  • And all the people always know me for my comedy
  • On irony
  • This is fucking awesome
  • Dumb love
  • Microphone check 1-2 what is this
  • Criticism and categories
  • Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good
  • A larger English
  • Lampin' in the Hamptons like "What the fuck is a hammock?"
  • Witness
  • Party and bullshit
  • Sources
  • Rights and Permissions
  • Acknowledgments
  • About the Author
Review by Booklist Review

Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (2012), does a simultaneously historical, politically conscious, analytical, playful, and linguistic deep dive into the meanings and significance of famous rap lyrics. He considers colloquial language, quotations, and sampling as if he were making his own mixtape in tribute while also parsing the poetry and literary allusions in the genre to better comprehend its convergence of sound and technology and philosophical underpinnings. Levin Becker emphasizes rap music's complexity and multiple interpretations even when a song is nonsensical or ridiculous or pure word gymnastics like 50 Cent's "In Da Club." "If 50 Cent can be ingenious and metaphysical and clumsy and puerile in the space of twenty words, six seconds, just imagine what depths of inventiveness and complexity and contradiction abound within a lyrical tradition that will soon turn, well, fifty." Levin Becker makes a strong case for rap's prominent place in society and culture at large with its energetic and vibrating beats, how its puzzle pieces challenge listeners to pull lyrics apart and put them back together again, and how rap stimulates creativity.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"Rap music serves, consistently... as a delivery mechanism for the most exhilarating and crafty and inspiring use of language in contemporary American culture," according to this sonorous literary meditation from music critic Becker (Many Subtle Channels). In this spirit, he devotes each chapter to a loose-limbed analysis of the literary meaning and devices of a rap lyric; Queen Latifah's line "Who you callin' a bitch?" for example, prompts a disquisition on the nuances of the "b-word" and misogyny in hip-hop. Among the subjects Becker riffs on are the use of the "rewind" trope, the aesthetics of cool, militant lyrics as revolutionary praxis, the multifarious meanings of the n-word, and the uneasy consciences of white rap aficionados. Becker has an infectious, Whitmanesque enthusiasm for rap's demotic versifying--"an actual working model of the American democratic experiment"--but sometimes lapses into mannered critical theory ("I is a nest of quotation and posture and ventriloquism"). Still, his writing crackles when his shrewd insights collide with punchy evocations of hip-hop's vigor and style: "to ask Ice-T or Ice Cube to tell stories from the point of view of a father rather than an oversexed urban superpredator... is to ask them to choose reality over realness in a landscape where reality doesn't sell." Music aficionados and hip-hop lovers will savor every bit. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An intellectual examination of hip-hop lyrics. Though the genre is more easily experienced than explained, Levin Becker, a lifelong fan and contributing editor at the Believer and senior editor at McSweeney's Publishing, seems up for the challenge. His celebration of rappers' wordplay and creativity shows the links between Cardi B and Ernest Hemingway, and he also compares the influence of Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back" to a Shakespeare play. Levin Becker delivers stunningly deep readings of 50 Cent's "In Da Club" and takes odd swipes at Jay-Z's occasional nods to rhymes from other rappers, and he discusses the use of the N-word and hip-hop's preoccupation with drug dealing as a metaphor or plot point. Whether or not you agree with the author's feelings on those issues, or even the success of the book itself, will likely depend on your point of view and interest in the minutiae of lyrics and song construction--not to mention asides on nearly every page. Levin Becker is candid about how his life differs from those of many rappers: "I'm white, middle-class, educated, risk-averse, law-abiding with the usual exceptions that are fine for middle-class white people. I'm the son of a doctor and a composer and the youngest of five brothers and sisters, all brilliant and accomplished in their respective white-collar fields." That description explains a lot about his choices as well as his decision to overstuff his chapters with examples to back his points. He often offers five when one will do, slowing down the narrative and cluttering the argument. For example, here's how the author explains the evolution of rapper personas: "Before the gangster, though, rap's primary agent of flux and mutability was the clown. The slobbering caperer, the winking joke-butt, the wild card." Simply citing Flavor Flav would've worked, too. Levin Becker's knowledge and passion are unquestionable, but he tries too hard to argue why hip-hop should be taken seriously when it can easily speak for itself. Unnecessarily dense analysis whose appeal will be limited to die-hard hip-hop fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

PREFACE If you're reading this, no Drake, it's too late. Rap has moved on. This book cannot be held responsible for or looked to for comment on who is newly canonized or canceled or dearly departed, who's just been handed a jail sentence or an honorary Ivy League degree, how we're currently feeling about Kanye West. This book wishes those people the best in whatever awaits them, but it has no insight into the future, which is to say your present. At most it has modest hopes and expectations--that words like opp and twelve will sound as canonically worn-out to your ear as sucker and five-o do to mine, that you have come to lionize Dreezy and Kash Doll and think Desiigner is a typo and need someone to explain the Drake thing (read on)--but it doesn't know anything beyond its now, the end of 2020. We can't move through time that way, this book and I, and I bring it up because one of the magical and confounding things about rap music is that somehow it can.             This book is, was destined all along to be, the product of a moment: an interval of joyous immersion and contemplation and study that lasted the better part of a decade but whose subject spills past its temporal limits in both directions. My intent was less to write anything definitive or exhaustive than to propose a sort of interpretive mesh whose specific examples--novel vegetal euphemisms for marijuana, best practices for credit card scams--could be replaced intuitively, productively, by fresher material. "Write like something you don't mean to be erased but one day know will," as Kevin Young writes in The Grey Album: "then let them try." I wanted to highlight, in between the specifics I did manage to inventory, some things that seem to me to be timeless in rap, transcendent or unchanging or in permanent flux. I wanted to think out loud about why I can't get them out of my head, about how they work and what they mean about language, that amber in which timelessness is visible when you squint. I finished fussing over the mesh some time in 2018. The world continued to spin. I had written about the weird life some rap lyrics come to lead when commodified beyond context, and about Jay-Z's wanton borrowings from other people's raps, and then Jay sued an Australian company called The Little Homie over a book called A B to Jay-Z, which contained the line If you're having alphabet problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but my ABCs ain't one. (The Little Homie pointed out, craftily, that Jay-Z had appropriated those words from Ice-T. You probably know better than I how the case ended.) I had written about the worrisome trend of criminal courts in America admitting rap lyrics as evidence, and then I learned that rappers in England were getting court orders amounting to five-year censorship sentences. At some point Donald Trump pulled some strings to get A$AP Rocky out of jail in Sweden; later his reelection campaign scored endorsements from Ice Cube and Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, who praised his criminal reform efforts. At some point Kanye, who appears here in a song glorifying the Grammy Awards, tweeted a video of himself pissing on one. At some point opp was an answer in a Times crossword. I could go on listing these screw-turns of complexity, these slippages of reality from where I left it, but my point is that eventually the list will just be this book itself. So it goes. I've expanded or nuanced or corrected some things, but even now what follows feels like a time capsule from a time remembered only distantly. At the end of this book I wonder about the notion that we speak a common language in America, about whether we can really take it on faith that we do if "black lives matter" is a controversial sentence and Eric Garner can say I can't breathe plainly, repeatedly, and still be choked to death by police. And then this year George Floyd was murdered in the same way, in spite of saying the same words. A grim slippage, a terrible kind of rhyme. By then, and ever since, rap had begun to seem like a smaller and smaller subplot in a story about the world. Has it always been irresponsible to conflate rap with the black experience in America? Is it frivolous to think it can help us learn to understand each other? Maybe, maybe not. But rap is always present, its language, its attitude, its technologies of storytelling and misdirection and economy, the way it dramatizes pleasure and sadness and anger and pain. It finds its way into everything. It's history telling itself in real time, it's a telescope and a megaphone. It's a loop, at least for me, that makes the present that much richer, that much more intelligible. Floyd was a rapper too, for a time. He didn't make a career of it, but he made some moves in one of the most magnetic and strange rap scenes of the twentieth century, and if his talents were modest he still fit in perfectly there, sounded buoyant and airy and free even over the glacial grind of a DJ Screw beatscape. The thing is he still sounds that way now, however many years hence. His loss is senseless and tragic, and neither this book nor I need to see the future to know it will still be true at the moment you're reading this, no matter many new bad things have happened since. No matter how late it's gotten. But what a joyous, generous, weightless way for his voice to stay alive. What a place to spend forever. dlb, December 2020 *********   WORD MACHINES   Coke like a caterpillar, I make butter fly Cam'ron, in Clipse, "Popular Demand (Popeyes)" (2009) ** As promised, we'll start small. Poetry, said Mallarmé, is made of words, not ideas; so too is it too with rap. I know I said there was so much more to rap than words, but that was pages ago. We've all grown so much since then. Lots of the lyrics that commandeer my rewind button are what you'd call one-liners: they're self-contained thoughts, single servings of imagery and wit rather than subordinate parts of a larger rhetorical proposition. (Lots of great rap songs, in fact, are sprawling assemblages of essentially unrelated one-liners.) Coke like a caterpillar, I make butter fly is a good example; I'm coming after you like the letter V is another, one that in fact so fully assumes its one-linerness that I've forgotten the line it rhymes with. I know it comes toward the end of a seven-minute Midwest-rap posse cut, but I've retained little else, and in a way that's exactly what I'm talking about: one line from a rap song may be a single brick in an entire wall, but one brick can be the reason we take note of the wall in the first place, remember it when we don't even remember what rhymed with letter V. The funny thing about one-liners--funnier, at times, than the one-liners themselves--is that as a rule they take several lines of explanation to unpack with any precision or utility. They're mechanisms that require more energy to assemble than to release. I'm coming after you like the letter V is not a particularly complex construction, meaning-wise: the pronoun you sounds like the letter U, which the letter V comes after in the Roman alphabet, much as one might vengefully come after an enemy, that enemy being you, the pronoun, and voilà, sentence diagrammed, joke autopsied, spring-loaded snake stuffed back into novelty can of mixed nuts. There is all the same a deliberate functionality to it, a specific sequence in which the words, few as they are, have to hit. The ironic part is how many more words you have to throw at it afterwards just to reassemble it.             Same, then, with Cam'ron on coke and caterpillars. One line, eight words--you're supposed to hear seven, but this particular mechanism doesn't engage until you parse apart the last two. By my count, there are three simultaneous meanings in the second half alone, distinct but overlapping: I sell crack (butter) so quickly it appears to fly away; I make crack fashionable (fly); I turn the ugly act of selling crack into a thing of beauty (a butterfly). I'm already getting ahead of myself. How did we get to (a)? What makes butter crack? Why not give equal consideration to an interpretive scenario where Cam whiles away a slow day by making macramé butterflies or flinging pats of Land O' Lakes at passersby? In a word, context. I happen to know that Cam'ron is the capo of the Harlem crack-rap syndicate The Diplomats, and that this line concludes his guest verse on a record by the Virginia crack-rap duo Clipse. (Crack-rap is in no way a dig at either group, by the way, both of which rose to fame and greatness by rapping with tirelessly inventive gusto about selling crack, one convention of doing which is that you almost always call it something else, such as rock or krills or yams or butter.) If you have some inkling of these connections--and it's not like Cam keeps them a secret in the rest of his verse--you may also surmise that caterpillar pertains in some oblique way to the drug trade, that indeed any unexpected word in a crack-rap lyric will probably bend toward drugs, connotatively speaking, like a flower toward the sun. If you don't, not to worry: that's what the word coke is for.             So you rewind the thought, turning it over, looking for the seams. How do the two halves of the lyric fit together? Coke is like a caterpillar, and caterpillars become butterflies, so what does coke become? Why would Cam say I make butterfly rather than I make butterflies or I make a butterfly? This is the mechanism starting to work, defamiliarizing the thought in its constituent parts, raising questions you would never think to ask about the individual words by themselves. You know perfectly well what a garden-variety word like butterfly means until suddenly you don't--until you see it reacting strangely to the words around it, bending at odd angles, splitting itself apart, somehow making butter fly while the rest gives chase.             Some rappers enjoy unpacking their lyrics at the craft level, or at least oblige when asked to, but I've never heard Cam'ron break down any of the sharp gems he drops so routinely. The differential between talking and doing crops up a lot in hip-hop, and being able to create a perfect little word machine like this is different from being able to explain it, much less wanting to explain it. But that's the final beauty of a confection like Coke like a caterpillar, a riddle and its resolution contained in eight words: in spite of its clockwork construction, its elaborate internal contingencies, it asks nothing besides patience and experimentation to teach you to make sense of it. ********   SLANG EVOLUTION Speakin' my language if you talkin' 'bout tilapia Say you want this money, nigga, so what the hell is stoppin' ya Young Jeezy, in U.S.D.A., "Black Dreams" (2009) ** I once got about a third of the way into what I thought was a marijuana purchase before I realized I was buying cocaine. The misunderstanding had nothing to do with the word tilapia, but the situations feel similar. Patience and experimentation alone won't get me to the bottom of what Young Jeezy is telling me here; if someone in a dark alley this evening whispered tilapia at me, I'm sure I wouldn't know whether I was being offered food or offered drugs or insulted or incited to a sex act. The first thing any dictionary will tell you about tilapia is that it's a freshwater cichlid fish, which is also the last thing I'd expect to be discussing in an alley, or for that matter in a Young Jeezy song.             Because, once again, context. I'll go ahead and assume Jeezy is talking about drugs here, since, like Clipse and The Diplomats, he built his whole career on a remarkably steadfast foundation of talking about drugs. There have been times, though, when I've heard tilapia in a rap--it happens more often than you'd think--and context suggests it does refer to the freshwater fish, or to a meal made of same, or to a woman. (Maybe she has pursed lips or beady eyes? I don't know what her deal is.) Sometimes it could plausibly be any of the above: We get respected in the streets like the mafia / Young Future in the cut with tilapia. In principle, there's nothing weird about this. We use the same word to mean different things in different circumstances; if we didn't, the English lexicon would number in the millions of words rather than the hundreds of thousands. The operative meaning of ride depends on whether you're standing in an amusement park or a parking lot. Ditto park, for that matter. But it is a little weird to discover that I can't account for all the things tilapia means, even though if you'd asked me I would have said I knew how to define it. It's a funny feeling, to know a word perfectly well until suddenly you don't. Here I've been talking about tilapia for three paragraphs, and I still can't say with confidence that I'm speaking Jeezy's language. In principle again, it would be hard to imagine a better example of a word that exists to name a particular thing. A tilapia is a fish; that fish is a tilapia. But the world is a complex three-dimensional space, and language works overtime to keep up. There are actually multiple species of fish that share the name, some of which aren't even in the genus tilapia, some that spend their lives swimming around in the south of Africa and some, rather unluckier, that get caught and eaten in any number of preparations. We use the same word for all of these--individuals and groups alike, too, because at some point someone decided to make fish words in English both countable and uncountable--which means that in practice, within this one apparently specific word, there are multiple senses, multiple tilapia, between which new tilapias sometimes sprout like semantic moss. Something that has an anonymously fishy look or smell? Close enough. A drug? A beady-eyed woman? A nonce rhyme for mafia? Sure, if you can make it sound good. The word has its finite number of stable, attested meanings, but the intermediate values between them, like the fractions between zero and one are theoretically infinite.             This is just how languages grow. Words extrude new facets all the time, getting more particular or more general through invention or cooptation or corruption, and one of the truly enthralling things about language is that the old ones don't disappear--they just recede into these deep pockets of ancillary signification, distinct from one another but held in place by ghostly affinities. Why does rare mean bloody? Why is the quick part of a fingernail? Did you know picturesque had a Victorian sense? Ho used to be unisex; cock meant vagina in some places until the middle of the twentieth century. A dude was a dandy, a fop, a city slicker, an east coaster; now it can be as general as "male person" or as precise as "you're being very un-Dude" depending on how you inflect it. Swag has eighteen senses (plus two draft definitions) over four entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, spanning 1303 to 2002, from "a bulging bag" to "bold self-assurance in style and manner." Rock and roll doesn't mean fucking anymore, but you can see why it used to if you think about it for a minute. Sometimes two wholly unrelated ships come to dock in the same phonemic port--like bat or fluke or doge, which is both a sixteenth-century Venetian magistrate and a Shiba Inu surrounded by captions like very excite and such delishus--but most often the senses connect across time, through back channels forged by metaphor or memory or accident, a whole network of tunnels under the surface of contemporary spoken English. The most modern usages of viral and tweet and drone would be unintelligible to a person born in 1900, but once you showed them what those words mean now (along with an apologetic recap of late-capitalist techno-utopianism, I imagine) they could probably trace a path from past to present. And so my best guess for tilapia is that it's fallen under the gravitational pull of fish scale, which has become common rap slang for high-purity cocaine due to the shiny flakes it contains in uncut form. Someone pointed out the resemblance once, someone else riffed on it, then it happened a few more times, and before long the semantic bridge between fish and drugs was sturdy enough to support a whole piscine menagerie: tilapia, sea bass, snapper. Shorty sniffing haddock in the attic. Likewise, because the dime novelist Ned Buntline used cheese to mean money way back in 1850, we have no trouble now putting two and two together when Cardi B talks about that queso or Dr. Dre calls himself young black Rockefeller, hella swiss and mozzarella. Touch my cheddar, feel my Beretta, warns the Notorious B.I.G. Real mannish with my Spanish, says E-40: If it ain't about no gouda, partna, you can vanish. None of this is unique to hip-hop vernacular; all words in all registers are fair game for semantic repurposing by hooligans and druggies and marketers and soulless app developers. But rap is restless and easily bored. It abhors linguistic stasis. So the symbolic placeholder for "money" shapeshifts from cheeses to quiches to curds--I turn my concerns into words I could earn a couple curds and whey with--even as it wanders into other associative chains based on its color, on the form factor of its protuberance (You know it ain't nothing to drop a couple stacks on you; Can't wear skinny jeans 'cause my knots don't fit), on the number of commas required to write out the full amount, on the white guy depicted on the bill (It's all about the Benjamins; Pocket full of ivy and you know the faces blue).   Thinkin' of a master plan 'Cause ain't nothing but sweat inside my hand So I dig into my pocket, all my money's spent So I dig deeper, but still coming up with lint So I start my mission, leave my residence Thinking how could I get some dead presidents?   Guns get distilled to make (Uzi, Glock, Desert Eagle) or material (chrome, steel, stainless) or metaphorical function (Not toes or MC when I say hammer time; Keeping my toaster in a shoulder holster). Oral sex has been head since the forties, hence brain; hence face and neck and skull; hence dome, which was already slang for head in its nonsexual sense.   A hundred thousand dollars just in two days I don't fuck with niggas 'cause they two-faced I only fuck with bitches for that toupee (the top, nigga!) These Givenchys, I ain't worried 'bout no new Js   Once upon a time I'm leaving forked off into parallel chains: I'm out became I'm outie became I'm Audi, and I'm gone became I'm a ghost became I'm ghost, thereby opening the way to all things spectral including, thanks to Patrick's starring role in the movie Ghost, I'm Swayze. (The path from rappers' use of this construction almost exclusively to brag about peacing out right after sex to the contemporary sense of ghosting--abruptly severing communications with no explanation--is a great example of two distinct inflections that have a much greater affinity than they appear to at first glance.)   Women flash us, don't know? You better ask us A bastard with more contacts than Lens Crafters Tear down the rafters, venereals couldn't clap us You need practice; hit chicks then I'm Casper   We know butter means crack, but it also stands in for luxury, for smoothness, for anything yellow--sometimes more than one at once. Not long ago I heard Roc Marciano refer to the drug hustle as weighing grams of Land O' Lakes and then, a verse later, threaten to butter your slut up like a waffle. We also use the same words in the same language to mean different things at the same time. It's chaos and it's beautiful. This is, again, how languages grow: constantly, digging ever deeper into the pocket and finding new intermediate values and metaphors and substitutions, expanding degree by degree of separation. I like to string together these clusters of near-synonyms and consider the connoted concept at the center--heater, burner, toaster, biscuit; bail, bounce, dip, duck, jet--and listen to what they say about the difference between knowing words and understanding things. It feels a bit like growing constantly too. ***   SLANG AND SLIPPERINESS   Keep searching all you want and try your local library You'll never find a rhyme like this in any dictionary EMD, in UTFO, "Roxanne, Roxanne" (1984) ** "The slang we be sayin', G, it could mean whatever at that time," Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan told The Source in 2000. Take the word lobsterhead, which he uses in the song "Wildflower": "If a nigga fit that type of category, then he a lobsterhead. It's just that--slang. It's real, but it's what it means at that time." Ghostface, whose fifth solo album is called Fishscale, calls to mind Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking-Glass, when he explains "in rather a scornful tone" that when he uses a word "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." This sounds good but is mostly not actually true, slang tending to be both more and less than what the speaker intends, depending on the interpreter. More when we connect with it--I don't know any lobsterheads personally, but maybe you do and didn't know it until right now?--and less when we don't even register it as slang. Lobsterhead isn't particularly challenging as slang goes, but it's as handy a case study as any on how well Humpty's argument from mastery comes to life when exemplified by Ghostface and the rest of the Clan, who bend the English phrase to their will in a way that's almost always accessible without being altogether clear. Wu-Tang's resolute, practically reckless inventiveness with language earned them an entry all to themselves in Alonzo Westbrook's Hip Hoptionary, under "Wu-bonics": "the comingling of words that sound good but don't always make clear sense, i.e., using the name 'lobster head' to make a rhyme." Lobsterhead doesn't actually rhyme with anything in "Wildflower"--Ghost just calls a dude this lobsterhead-ass nigga--but how do you hear that and not want to know more? And once you want to know, where, besides through the looking glass, do you go to find out? ** "I heard they had a hip-hop slang book," says Method Man, also of the Wu-Tang Clan, beaming ecstatically in a scene from the 1997 rap documentary Rhyme & Reason. "And they had words in there like b-boy, b-girl, fresh, chill... we ain't used them shits since we was like nine years old out this motherfucker, man." He turns to dap a guy sitting on a couch behind him whose face is obscured by an off-white balaclava. "We don't even be saying cool anymore," Meth continues, back still to the camera. My best guess is that he's referring not to Hip Hoptionary, which didn't come out until 2002, but to Lois Stavsky's and Isaac Mozeson's 1995 A 2 Z: The Book of Rap & Hip-Hop Slang--but the identity of the book isn't really important. It should be obvious why rap's constantly expanding vernacular is a descriptivist lexicographer's dream, and also why the hope of ever doing the job authoritatively or comprehensively is insane. A 2 Z is out of print, as are most of the other glossaries that bubbled up around the end of the twentieth century. Ironically, a lot of the hip-hop slang books I know of are available only at my local library. Slang is insular and fleeting by nature and purpose, committed to and energized by its own novelty and indecipherability to all but a select in-group of outsiders. "Nonstandard words for nonstandard people," as Paul Beatty puts it. Rap has the wiry restlessness of any vernacular art form and the don't-call-it-a-corpus unruliness of any slang corpus, but that's not all. There's another wrinkle of richness and resistance in signifying, which anthropologist Claudia Mitchell-Kernan says "incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or messages." Plus, subcultures need antagonists, and the norms of "standard" English have always been white ones, which means we've got a pretty sound straw man in the dictionary. "The words given the special Black semantic slant tend to lose their linguistic currency in the black community," wrote Geneva Smitherman in 1977, "if or when they move into the white mainstream." Per John Russell and Russell John Rickford, the language is "forever morphing" by design, "constantly reinventing itself, bumping off words that were considered tony just the other day (but that have now been mainstreamed and co-opted by Madison Avenue to hawk everything from cereal to soda pop)." The idea of a dictionary of hip-hop slang, then, sounds as necessary to some as it is invasive to others. But the longstanding paradox of black escape is how reliably it attracts and enchants the white mainstream. "Already entrenched in the teen-age vocabulary are superlatives like 'def' (the best)," the New York Times reported in 1988. "Words like 'stupid' (terrific) and 'wack' (awful) are now established in both the urban and suburban teen-age lexicon irrespective of class or color." Rap keeps it moving. What else is there to do? It concerns itself only occasionally with policing usages or reclaiming wack and cool from overeager lobsterheads such as myself; mostly it just goes on steepening its semantic slant, slinging new slang faster than the dictionary can keep up. Some rappers sound a little scornful when they talk about this, like Method Man; some are triumphal. "Everything that hip-hop touches is transformed by the encounter," Jay-Z writes, "especially things like language and brands, which leave themselves open to constant redefinition. With language, rappers have raided the dictionary and written in new entries to every definition--words with one or two meanings now have twelve." Some rappers, maybe most, come across as merely unconcerned, the hare's obliviousness to the tortoise plodding along in its dust. ** The internet turbocharged the tortoise, of course, good news for those of us on the invading side. If it was far-fetched to think in 1984 that EMD's rhyme would eventually wind up printed in a book--which it was, for the first time to my knowledge in Lawrence Stanley's 1992 Rap: The Lyrics: The Words to Rap's Greatest Hits--today it's hard to imagine not being able to call up a song's lyrics, or at least a rudimentary approximation, and likely some discussion of what they mean. The internet was built for this shit, hypertext for a hyper literature. None of that manual cross-referencing, that print lag, that latency that made it so by the time you could look up a bit of slang in a print dictionary it would have ceased to be, ah, fresh. Between the moderated annotation platform Genius, which offers interpretive glosses and close readings that are usually enlightening and sometimes fantastically implausible, and Urban Dictionary, where you can visualize the historical baggage of the English language as reconstructed by a horde of clever- but endlessly anal-fixated twelve-year-olds, you can probably put together your own gloss of whatever song you want. I use both all the time; I happen to like the taste of the grain of salt with which it's necessary to take them. At best they double as everyone's local library, a lightweight amalgam of glossary and archive and oral history and rewind button, expanding in real time and curated, in Genius's case, by community editors and savant hip-hop heads and barely lucid lunatics and sometimes rappers themselves. On paper, as it were, all participants in this collective effort love rap and speak its English, or are at least making a good-faith effort to learn. Perhaps inevitably, though, not everyone is wild about so much frictionless assimilation and dissection. You see intimations of appropriation and establishmentarianism; you see plausible accusations of shady practices, like Genius lifting a few thousand early transcriptions from Matt Jost's Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive without attribution; you see reminders, more or less eloquently stated, that foiling this exact kind of intellectual materialism is what signifying is for in the first place. Rap Genius dot com is white devil sophistry, argued Kool A.D. of Das Racist in 2011; Urban Dictionary is for demons with college degrees. For my part, I like to imagine that a productive relationship is possible between slang's semantic slant and these technologies of documentation and decipherment. It pleases me, however naively, to picture more popular attention begetting more mischief and subversion, every list of known euphemisms for money or marijuana or fellatio driving the discovery and coinage of further uncharted ones. I was taught never to say the dictionary, lexicography being as alive and multiple and necessarily unfinished as language itself--but while we've got the definite-article version on hand, why not let it represent a formal challenge to keep coming up with figurations so novel, so unique, so unaccountably fly as to resist mainstream cooptation forever? ** An early contender for Rap Genius's slogan--it ultimately lost to Biggie's If you don't know, now you know--was Pay attention and listen real closely how I break this slang shit down. That's the introductory patter to Big L's 2001 hit "Ebonics (Criminal Slang)," a song brassily framed as a rhyming glossary and containing and defining about six dozen terms, many of which were new to me the first time I heard it:  Your bankroll is your poke, a chokehold is a yoke A kite is a note, a con is a okey-doke "Ebonics" is a terrific song, though you could argue, to take Geneva Smitherman at her word, that what makes its conceit so appealing to a novice listener is also what makes it kind of a seditious gesture. If slang is actively exhausted by being made accessible, unencrypted, to the white mainstream--"This song is like the OG Rap Genius," an early annotation of "Ebonics" says: "It explains rap music slang for anthropologists and Orientalists"--then aren't we just watching the song short-circuit the words in it by pinning them down, revoking their status and potency as slang, leaving them as toothless and commonplace as head or chill or fresh? Two decades later, isn't learning these new meanings just watching old news, navigating by the light of stars that burned out centuries ago? Sure, maybe, if you take the short view. Rap can always forge new nonstandards, after all, always will. But here's the more provocative question the song poses: what does it mean, when you're inventorying and glossing criminal slang, if some of the words are deep drug jargon but some of them are moderately jaunty Times crossword answers? Doesn't that come to say more about how you define criminality than anything else? Big L's greater genius here, so to speak, is to include under the banner of "criminal slang" not only rap lingo that scanned as relatively esoteric at the time, and arguably still does--I've never heard poke or vine or bull scare used anywhere else the way the song defines them--but also words and phrases that would be familiar to any anglophone alive during the twentieth century: Your apartment is your pad, your old man is your dad The studio is the lab and heated is mad That is, it's one thing to find out that krills means crack, and a very different thing to be told that cocaine is nose candy or movies is flicks. For both to happen in the same song, for the recherché to coexist with the corny in this way, casts into sudden relief just how much of the vernacular we accept today as mainstream, sometimes so much so that it's quaint, itself originated as slang. No doubt people who call their heart their ticker and their father their old man are by now the ones who most need something like Rap Genius to keep up, whether or not they choose to use it. But it's instructive to imagine, if only for the sake of imagining it, that at one point they were the scofflaws, the speakers of criminal slang, who most needed something like rap. Excerpted from What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language by Daniel Levin Becker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.