The Philippine Online Chronicles

In the span of two decades rap/ hip-hop music has gone from a seeming fad spear-headed by the safe and commercially consumable pop rap of the late 80s and early 90s of the likes of Young MC, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and Tone Loc, to become a dominant commercial musical form. (Rap started much earlier of course, and was pioneered by a number of brilliant acts, but here we mention rap’s state on the pop charts.) Even if it isn’t straight rap, a lot of today’s pop music takes its influences from hip-hop, whether it be Jay-Z, Gorillaz, or Justin Bieber.

This music takes off from gansta rap (both East and West Coast) with strong doses of G-Funk, developed by Dr. Dre and a pretty clear influence in the work of the likes of Timbaland, Pharrell, and Kanye West. One of the things that has made hip-hop/rap so successful has been its ability to appropriate various musical styles, allowing for a kind of pastiche art that mixes and takes what it wants not only from other styles but specific bits from other songs.

We’ve heard what happens when rap and rock mix, with The Beastie Boys, Run DMC, the soundtrack of Judgment Night, and probably its best form Rage Against the Machine. We’ve also heard rap take specific parts from songs to create something new and fresh and amazing, whether it was Dr. Dre’s great samples from The Chronic, Kanye West’s use of songs from Daft Punk and Steely Dan, or Danger Mouse’s mix of The Beatle’s self-titled album (better known as the White album) and Jay-Z’s Black Album to make The Gray Album.

What I’m pointing at here is the potency of the sound of rap/hip-hop, how the beats, rooted in African rhythms, seem to appeal to all kinds of listeners and help to shape culture and music in general today. But one of the things that is being forgotten is that hip-hop didn’t start out, and should not just be about the sound, the attitude, the culture, and the posturing. It should say something.

The word rap may have a number of possible etymologies, but I like the idea that it operates as an acronym for Rhythmically Accented Poetry. One may argue that poetry must have a sound element, hence that acronym being redundant. But when we think of rap we cannot help but think of how the words are delivered with such a rhythmic accent and how this kind of delivery matters so much to a song’s success. One need look no further than Soulja Boy to hear how catchy words that are rhythmically accented can be; the content and the very clear fact that those songs are very far from and never aspire to poetry are another matter though.

But the success of Soulja Boy, among many other rappers whose main concerns when rapping are only about talking about bitches and hos, cars, money, and gold, is indicative of how little lyricism matters in today’s rap landscape. To be fair, rap’s progenitors did a good amount of posturing too, but they were doing this as part of an attempt at subverting the dominant social systems. Today’s rappers posture for the sake of it.

This shows how rap has been co-opted by the music mass media marketing machine and defanged. In its earlier incarnations, in the hands of the likes of Public Enemy and NWA rap was a potent form of social commentary. Whether it was Chuck D and Flava Flav stomping down New York’s streets enjoining listeners to “Fight the Power” or Ice Cube and Eazy E depicting gangland violence and police brutality in South Central LA, rap was not only a means of self-expression but a means of spreading awareness of these social conditions and giving voice to a marginalized segment of American society.

It is here then that we enter our analysis of Mos Def’s “Mathematics.” While most people know Mos Def these days for his work as an actor in movies like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Be Kind Rewind, he is also an accomplished rapper, having made solo albums as well as collaborating on a number of projects like Blackstar, as well as appearing on others’ albums, most notably with The Roots. “”Mathematics” comes from his first, and at least as far as I’m concerned, still his best album Black on Both Sides.

In “Mathematics” Mos Def runs us through a series of numbers and figures, connecting all these together to deliver a powerful piece of music that operates just as much as social commentary and protest poetry as it does ill hip-hop track.

The track begins as many rap songs do, with shout outs, but through these shout outs Mos Def establishes a framing device that he will utilize at the start of each verse:

One for Charlie Hustle

two for steady rock

three for the fourth comin’ live, future shock

it’s five dimensions

six senses

seven firmaments of heaven and hell

8 million stories to tell

nine planets faithfully keep in orbit

with the probable tenth the universe expands length

He starts the second verse thus:

It’s one universal law

But two sides to every story

Three strikes and you be in for life mandatory

Four MCs murdered in the last four years

I ain’t tryin’ to be the fifth one the millennium is here

It’s 6 million ways to die

From the seven deadly thrills

Eight-year-olds being found with 9mills

It’s 10PM where your seeds at?

Rather than a central metaphor to drive it as a poem, “Mathematics” implements a centripetal system. When using a poem with a central metaphor, one allows the central metaphor to dictate the kinds of images that will be used in the poem. But here we have disparate images and ideas all being brought together for their value as “mathematics” or really statistics or just anything to do with numbers.

It seems to play with this underlying idea that we insist on logic in the contemporary world, so instead of relating a story or a narrative, as most poems, stories, and songs do, Mos Def piles on all these various instances of numbers and their various meanings to get us to think about the things that he is referring to and trying to make a commentary about.

When Mos Def proceeds with the first verse, he again begins with a rap convention. He refers to the rap that he is about to give (it’s common for rappers to announce the year, as well as maybe throw in a dis against others i.e. My raps are so 2008, your raps are so 2000-late) and then he talks about how great a rapper he is.

But beyond those conventions given, he also adds a great sense of awareness, as well as a decidedly poetic execution to his lines, “The body of my text possess extra strength/Power-lift the powerless up, out of this towering inferno/My ink so hot it burn through the journal.”

We see here Mos Def seeing text as an elevation, he’s not merely rapping or spitting beats, but he is making a text that will lift up the powerless. We see there a play of words, power-lift the powerless. Also there’s a novel image there, ink so hot it burns through the journal. He’s not merely talking about how great his rhymes are, not content to just say he’s better than other MCs, but he provides us with that distinct image of journal burning up with his words, which works both as a great image and as a statement on the power of ideas. There’s also some great rhyming here, “text possess extra strength” creates an internal rhyme through the use of assonance, while the words inferno and journal bring together both images of burning and a surprising end-rhyme.

After this he promises to “Hip-hop past all your tall social hurdles.” We see this working on the literal and figurative levels, hip-hop as an image that works with the idea of hurdles, but also hip-hop as a form of music that allows the speaker to overcome social hurdles. It’s another smart play of words, compact and delivered in the mere space of a line. And this is just the first verse! So many of these lines appear in the song; it packs in more ideas than entire rap albums, or possibly entire oeuvres of other rappers.

Poetry is a violence to language, according to some poets, because it defies the norms and conventions of normal everyday language. This is of course true as we don’t speak in iambs, though contemporary poetry has moved toward both an enhancement of the language and a more conversational tone.

Observing rap we see, like poetry, the imposition of and the importance of sound. Rappers refer to it as flow, or flowing, when they begin to spit beats or reach a state where the words come automatically. It’s interesting that flow is also the term used by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi to refer to the process through which we are fully immersed and energized in an act, usually of creativity, where we are no longer thinking about the act we are doing, but rather allowing past knowledge, skill, talent, and expertise to fuse together so that our consciousness just “flows” through it.

The rapper’s flow owes just as much to vocabulary as it does to sound, as it’s not only about rhyming but stringing ideas together, and the free-flow/free association way in which rappers combine metaphor, simile, imagery, allusion, and utterance, weaving these seamlessly into rhymes is often a mesmerizing act of poetry.

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Mathematics (considrememilesdavis)

Mos Def not only imposes his will on the language, doing a violence to it so that it serves his purposes, but he uses violent imagery to surprise, provoke, and evoke feeling from the listener, This isn’t the gangster posturing of pulling out gats and popping caps in people’s asses, but rather a violent visual imagery not in the service of the rapper’s ego but in service of the larger message that the rapper attempts to channel, a violence in service of social justice. It’s a call to revolution, set against phat beats.

Notice how Mos Def discusses the social conditions that lead to crime and the ineffective way that government responds to it. When I just summed it up in that last sentence it sounded like a droll paper or newspaper article, but here’s Mos Def’s flow:

Bubblin’ crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty

And end up in the global jail economy

Stiffer stipulations added to each sentence

Budget cutbacks but increased police presence

And even if you get out of prison still livin

Join the other five million under state supervision

This is business , not faces just lines and statistics…

The system break man, women and child into figures

We have there a compelling portrayal of the social conditions, to do with race and class, brilliantly conveyed there, and throughout the song, in packed lines that combine image and idea to convey message.

He maintains all this rapping about numbers and figures and discussing social conditions, showing how people are reduced to figures and statistics. Through his flow he paints an image of great social injustice and the way that we are able to overlook this because we dehumanize all of the victims of such a global world order by turning them into numbers. But then by the end he empowers these “numbers” again and provides a call to revolution:

You push too hard even numbers got limits

Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:

The million straws underneath it- it’s all mathematics

Again we see there Mos Def operating on the level of the literal, with the idea that numbers have limits, but also referring to these numbers as people, who will one day revolt once things have gone too far. He makes use of the familiar saying, but works it into his framework of numbers and mathematics.

“Mathematics” sounds cool, has a great beat and a groovy bassline with some LSS inducing-scratching, but at its heart it is a song of social commentary, an attempt to show us the world, or at least how Mos Def sees the world, by appealing to these statistics, framing these statistics in an aesthetically beautiful package, like a Trojan Horse filled with worldview-shattering ideas. It seems a subversion as we don’t think of numbers when we think of art, and we don’t think of statistics when we think of rap. But Mos Def surprises and enlightens by his fusion of these different elements here, imbuing his social commentary with aesthetic power.

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