Heavy D (and Wolverine) and the Boyz

The opener for Nate Patrin's Pitchfork review of "Murs For President" makes an assertion that I’ve been mulling over, myself, as of late:

Mainstream hip-hop has little time for ordinary dudes. It works inversely to the right wing's O'Reilly-spearheaded, Palin-nominating faux-populism: Heads don't want candidates just like them, anti-elite, down-to-earth, and on your level. They want linguistically supernatural battlers, colossal egos with something to prove and plenty to back it up with, long-striding titans who own a dozen of something you'll never even be let into the dealership to look at.

I've been reading Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem, and have been really interested in how his protagonists -- boys maturing into adolescence in Brooklyn -- thrive on a synergy of proto-hip-hop and comic book culture. A hefty portion of the narrative is about issues of dominance and empowerment, and I think Lethem pretty much nails it by isolating both rap music and comic books as primary points of identification that young people, most typically young males, use to bolster themselves in the face of the awkwardness and the general humiliations of the pre-teen and teenage years.

Which is to say this: comic books are so appealing because they are about completely awesome badasses who are so powerful that they are impervious to the general sufferings that regular people go through. While we’re on the subject, rappers are so appealing because they are presented as completely awesome badasses who are so powerful that they are impervious to the general sufferings that regular people go through.

Of course, as both media have progressed, such sweeping generalizations don’t always apply. Many comic books in the past decades have dealt with exploding the invulnerabilities of superheroes and exploring how quotidian experience affects their human sides. Similarly, many rappers have carved entire careers out of introspective, observational rhymes that come from a desire to identify directly with the experience of the audience, instead of climbing onto a pedestal of unfuckwithability from which to view, but not participate in, the more trivial aspects of existence in which the listener must still wallow.

However, those approaches, I would argue, are niche markets. Mass audiences still seem to prefer larger than life personas and abilities in their heroes. A human side can be revealed, of course, but it must then be followed by some sort of bang, either figurative or literal.

Fundamentally, I think this climate exists because, as a group, youth has the need more than any other stratum of the population to simply feel awesome. In terms of issues of empowerment, so many things happen over the course of our lives as young people that we have no control over. We consistently find ourselves at the mercy of our parents, our teachers, and our peers, all three demographics demonstrating an inclination to routinely make us feel insignificant or worse.

And why, specifically, would a writ-large narrative of archetypes be the trick for making a young person feel empowered? Why not something subtler, whose points resonate more realistically with the workings of one’s daily life? Why so escapist? Why so fantastic?

If anyone were to actually read this, they might get onto me for conflating escapism and fantasy but, since not even my mom checks in regularly, I’m going to do it. Escapism/fantasy (maybe we can call it “escaptasy…”) is at its most tantalizing when the reality of one’s surroundings are bleakest. The quotidian elements of one’s life are precisely the things one wants to escape. This is especially true for young people, particularly adolescents. They don’t need to see a car ride through the Swedish countryside turned into a metaphor. They’re continually turning car rides into metaphors of either struggle (when with their parents, say) or liberation (when with their friends). Everything is a signifier. I can’t think of another time in one’s life when such a huge amount of intellectual energy is spent upon reading deeper meaning into each and every stimulus in one’s immediate environment.

So escapism and fantasy become necessary coping mechanisms, and the simpler and stronger the imagery the better. Day to day, youth is lost in a sea of ambiguity. A clear-cut narrative with as little grey area as possible, that shows a definitive protagonist kicking the shit out of a definitive antagonist is essential. To drive the pint home: it makes you feel awesome.

Again, this is why I love, love, love Fortress of Solitude. With equal deftness, Lethem reminds me of all of the indignities of childhood and, at the same time, completely immerses me in the glory of the tools used to make life bearable. The word “hope” has become filled with an ever-increasing rhetorical import this year, but political appropriation aside, one thing that I will always be grateful to rap and comic books for is that both media were a continual source of hope for me as a kid and as a teenager. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for artists who aim to create something larger-than-life.