It was a Tuesday or Wednesday a couple months ago when I opened Spotify at work. EBK Jaaybo, a rapper from Stockton, California probably best known for the song and certified heater “Boogieman”– any song where a guy brags about dropping a banger with no hook in it in what can only be called the hook is a guy I’m in favor of, especially because that song is like a speedball with preworkout thrown in– had released a song with HerbMadeThisBeat out of Oakland called “In My Projects”. The song was a Mannie Fresh homage, with a rowdy voice saying “In my projects” at the end of the loop, then going back to the sort of wiggly noises you’d hear on an early Lil Wayne song. EBKJaaybo’s lyrics are, well, about his projects and full of piquant details and names only his neighborhood is going to recognize. None of this is rewriting the rules, but EBK Jaaybo’s good at rapping: he stacks and overlays details out about his projects via barking syllables that teeter on offbeat. 

It might have been the same day, but it was blurred out on Spotify when I went back to listen to it. I sat down to write this, and I could only find it on YouTube after I went to the RapGenius page. One of the first searches I made for it on Youtube revealed it had been copyright struck by an organization called The Orchard Intl. 

One of the exciting things about hip-hop is that its subalternality is present in the form of the genre. Built off plundering old records your parents had, born in block parties and neighborhood feuds. With the decline of after school music programs, kids take their drive to make music to cracked pieces of software and microphones in closets. For all of country music’s outlaw imagery, mostly derived from an incidental charting decision that let western soundtracks sit next to hillbilly music, hip hop feels illegal. These street rappers, worshipped like cult heroes by their fans, upload things to Spotify because of the need to get work out as this is their job, coupled with the innate desire to share something you made. 

There is no subaltern without their surveillance. At this point, it is the fifth element of hip-hop, where the dominant cultural structure trawls for instances of copyright infringement, where “rap squads” form in police offices, where the political motivation of ambitious prosecutors lead to the lyrics of Young Thug, Drakeo the Ruler, and Lil Boosie to all be true. Just as cops don’t walk the beat in rich neighborhoods, nobody ever did Girl Talk the way they did Biz Markie. Great songs don’t come out because samples don’t get cleared and copyright. A monument like Paul’s Boutique wouldn’t be possible today unless it was free. This has the effect of sparking ingenuity in producers, coming up with all sorts of workarounds, but now the genre has instead acclimated to this surveillance. Law and its subjects are just another hegemonic ping pong match that artists at least should watch with rapt attention.

There’s no real secret to anybody reading this we’re seeing a rise in the desire for censorship. This is not about cancel culture, which is really just an attempt to label a dynamic that’s always existed because it happens on a computer, and to allow a bunch of shitty stand-up comedians to play victim. The legal chess matches between adult websites and state governors and not the sort of mass pile-ons you’re going to attract if you attempt to be controversial. Colleges are suppressing students for talking about Palestine. Hip hop has two relations to all this. The first is as a case study for what the repression of laws for any truly important art might look like, as that’s what hip hop is. The second is as evidence that truly important art can still exist despite all attempts otherwise. 

We should celebrate not only any art that wears its subalternality on its sleeve, but also the creative fans of those arts. And in that, I think special attention needs to be paid to the small scale bootleggers. Kids wearing tripp pants who put up rare Carti leaks on Youtube, or LVL22, who switched out the trash ass beat on “Euphoria” for Cardo’s superior work on “HoodbyAir” and “Ketamine” (apologies to Joe Buddens fans). And then, to continue on YouTube, which is probably the last revolution in consumer technology, the people who make the Type Beats. The NPR totebag crowd who think Kendrick Lamar and Doechii are the only two rappers who have ever existed may not realize that the beat on “DENIAL IS A RIVER” is a Type Beat for MF Doom (this is a recommendation to those people that they should begin grooming a performative MF Doom fandom as well to complete the trifecta, you’d like him, he’s the cartoon guy). Even though science fiction is threatening to destroy the planet in its own postmodern way, it also sprouted the New Wave, who attempted to steer that genre away from its own ass. It was through a fan culture that trained fans into critics and writers that science fiction and fantasy ended up creating some of its most valuable works. Today, fandom is an invitation for a vampire to come into your house or into a ponzi scheme of narrative orgasm. Witness Marvel Cinema in its refractory period if you want an idea of the destitution of fandom. 

One art that requires you ask the Department of Defense if you can borrow a fighter jet for the weekend and the other requires a laptop, a closet, a microphone, and a notebook. Even then: the run off from the army goes to police departments, who watch would-be rappers, paranoid, eyes shot, wishing for a tank they could street clean with like Master P. They are the true fans of the genre. 

 

This essay is dedicated to Abdallah Abatar, citizen journalist from Palestine.

There have been a lot of people attempting to leave Palestine and have been setting up GoFundMes to do so. They have asked for donations on Bluesky, often apropos of nothing. This has led to them being labeled as spam. 

In this case: Abatar had liked a rather mean post I made about the US military after a vet tried to facts and logic me about Biden’s role in Israel’s genocide. He messaged me afterwards to thank me, and after we talked he mentioned he was taking donations, but he didn’t send a link. I had no answer for the footage he made, it looked real, and Internet access isn’t a guarantee over there, as is anything. In order to throw him the $5, I had to google him. Everything checked out on my end, especially when I saw Jerusalem Post feveredly wondered if he was in Hamas (which they know he isn’t, but the more people who you claim are in in Hamas, the more you can label all Palestinians as Hamas).

There is no better picture of the future than the supposed “anti-Trump” social media site taking on its own, horrid lifeboat logic in the face of a genuine extinction crisis, allowing a roving crew of moderators to keep them safe so they can like posts like “RFK JR eats possums but you know he doesn’t eat pussy,” while the hands of the deprived reach out looking for any moment to alleviate suffering. If Bluesky users are reporting accounts en masse, then the idea of Bluesky as a global village square is bunk: it is a suburb with Citizen’s Concerned Committees stalking the streets with shotguns in their golf carts. All this surveillance, whether it’s on hip hop samples and lyrics and on how Palestinian people try to survive the impossible, tells on itself. It knows the meek will inherit the earth, and it responds: not if we can catch them first.