There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable -
And therefore the fittest for renunciation
( T.S.Eliot, "The Dry Salvages)
I've always believed rap was Homeric, and not just by design: it seems as attuned to life's rhythms (I'd prefer to say 'arhythmics'), tensions and playful incongruities as anything you'll get in the Iliad. I've only looked at a few rap songs but the few I have, (& judging as well by the almost unanimous acceptance of hip hop music among the young), have led me to believe that rap means to be a true contemporary poetry. Yes, rap as the true heir to classical oral-based narrative: with Tupac Shakur perhaps its greatest poet-figure. He was the rhapsode of his age: the poet performer in a songmaking tradition that goes all the way back to antiquity. (The poet laureate of Edmonton, Alberta is hip hop artist Roland Pemberton, (a.k.a. Cadence Weapon. I'm surprised there aren't more.) I wish someone would look seriously at the idea of Homeric code in contemporary hip hop music. I think the ancient Greek ideal of thumos (meaning "passion", "spiritedness" or an "innate drive for recognition") would be serviceable here.
J.Cole's "Who Dat", despite the skillful choreography & theatre, song and setting, looks as if it stumbles through every imaginable inner-city nightmare, every stereotype of race and politics. This is its design. Though offering disparate (ludicrously incongruous) parts there is a whole story that emerges: integration out of the seemingly disintegrating structures.The rap he's inherited from Tupac and early hip hop upholds a recognizable pattern of tradition through variety: and the young artist is faithful to that lineage. The songer-performer is the unaccommodated rapster (a type of culture hero), who wanders listlessly into and out of his own narrative, following the same abandoned tracks; and the message, conveyed in the usual language, (Fayetteville) "southside" landscapes & violent backdrops of crowds & exploding cars, is really a weave of all the many incongruous (purposely misplaced) mini 'epics' along the way. It's his own unique take on the rap standard.
Lyrics, hands & gestures jab & strike at the heart of enforced 'codes' of middle-class life: urban, media and educational. Abandoned loading docks, strips of dirty forests and impressionable youth glued to multimeda foreground J.Cole's rap, and not the other way around.The video enforces the ludicrousness of the unenforceable—assimilation of inner-city youth in general, & gang youth in particular, to mainstream life— through a series of always very plausible images of "the breakage" in mainstream America: which is rap's true standard. He sets his rhythms, message and landscape against the norm (standard English, high school ethos and role-modelling) For lock-step conformity he gives meandering lyrics (parody of peripatetics), with cheer leaders, high school bands and growing mobs. Fires set here are not bonfires on the beach: mostly self-igniting, fueled by exploding cars & the gas spills under the rapper's feet. They're signs to remember a story & landscape by: pyrotechnics in the service of a mnemotechnics.
Interestingly enough, the online Urban Dictionary gives the expression "Who dat" as a derogatory reference to the once unpopularity of the New Orleans Saints football team: "Who dat said dey gonna beat dem saints. "Who dat" (ebonics for "Who is that?" ) is used here in J.Cole's video as perhaps a similar interrogation of fake tradition (even ebonics-based), or even a substitute inner-city history from which the rest of America's been excluded. Realities of gang culture, & the conditions that underlie them, cannot be separated from their representations in rap: to try to separate them (even in discussion) would be as absurd as the mainstream images of pom- poms, marching bands & role-modelling actually seen in J.Cole's video.
Did the young rap artist J.Cole purposefully foresee (and work into his video) the strange dialectics of the arhythmics of art & life: remixing the standard violence of visuals & signs, haunting sonorousness of music, to form his variation on the rapper "thug life" tradition? I doubt he consciously did though he's aware (I'm sure) of the essential drama of dance, youth and fires in any true contemporary poetry, one that clearly derives from Homeric epic and story-telling.
