Thug Life Aesthetics

Right, so don't take this as a replacement for the long-promised, possibly-never-happening post in which I deliver my two cents on hip-hop, specifically the Tupac-Biggie schism (I'm starting to realize that I don't really know that much about hip-hop, and until I can educate myself suitably, I'm not about to spout off in an informed way on the internet). But I'm still gonna touch on Pac for a quick second here: I was just sitting at my desk, listening to "Me Against the World" and thinking about why I enjoy Tupac as a rapper. For me, it's the fact that his rhymes form a solid narrative with relative effortlessness that really does it(yeah yeah yeah, over-intellectualizing popular art, but this gets interesting). Sure, he can be clever when he wants, but I rather appreciate the restraint he uses. It makes his track almost subtle, if not in theme. Contrast this with some MF Doom, which I've been listening to at length after the discovery of Madvillain; there's a thing on the internet linking famous rappers with famous authors, and the Doom analogue was Pynchon, which is about right. Absurd rhymes, notable for their lyric quality and bizarre humor/imagery, reveling in the construction of couplets. That ain't Tupac, he's got a story to tell. And (another reason why I love him) Tupac's story is that of humanity. He does rap about gang life and the dangers of being a young black man in the late 80's/early 90's, something that I personally don't happen to know intimately about, but in his rhymes Tupac opens and universalizes the experience via the emotive powers of music. I couldn't remember the entire rhyme off the top of my head, but in "Me Against the World," when he's talking about how thugs get lonely too, that really clicks viscerally within me. Yeah, college students don't feel like they're embattled with the universal powers in the same way thugs on the streets of LA do, but Tupac doesn't alienate. He opens these feeling up to empathy, and by doing so creates deep emotional resonance in his listeners. And then I realized, this is exactly why "hard" songs are worth listening too-- Tom Waits, for example. Tom Waits may not fall right next to Tupac on the realism spectrum, but they both tackle really deep emotions. Just look at all those train songs. Tom is singing about people who have really hit rock bottom there, and instead of trying to gloss over or solve these problems, he's saying hey, let's give grief its proper time. By listening to one of his down-and-out ballads, we're taking some time to sit down and really feel for all the folks out there waiting for that train to bring them home, the people who've really messed up and are just starting to try and bring it back up. And, in spending two to five minutes in peaceful auditory meditation on this theme, we're really getting in touch with humanity in the collective sense. It's way too easy to wall off individual experiences-- oh, Biggie's angry because he's had a rough life and is dealing with heavy mental/emotional issues-- in the way we consume art. What guys like Tom Waits and Tupac do is put us, for a brief moment, in the mental shoes of that lonely thug in South Central, or that semi-mythical traveling salesman cum boozehound. Life is a hard thing to bear, and we tend to make it through with a whole lot of help from our social herd. Tom and Pac just make that herd a bit bigger from time to time. Now, how's that for universalizing gloomy themes in gangsta rap?