Feel Free: Essays

  But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands. Then something changed: “As I started getting life experiences, I realized my power was in conveying emotions that people felt.” He compared himself to a comedian whose jokes trigger this reaction: “Yo, that’s so true.” He started storytelling—people were mesmerized. “Friend or Foe” (1996), which concerns a confrontation between two hustlers, is rap in its masterful, full-blown, narrative form. Not just a monologue, but a story, complete with dialogue, scene setting, characterization. Within its comic flow and light touch—free from the relentless sincerity of Tupac—you can hear the seeds of 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Eminem, so many others. “That was the first one where it was so obvious,” Jay noted. He said the song represented an important turning point, the moment when he “realized I was doing it.”

  At times he restricts himself formally, like the Oulipo, that experimental French literary group of the sixties. In the song “22 Twos,” from 1996, we get twenty-two delicious plays on the words “too” and “two.”

  Ten years later, the sequel, “44 Fours,” has the same conceit, stepped up a gear. “Like, you know, close the walls in a bit smaller.” Can he explain why? “I think the reason I still make music is because of the challenge.” He doesn’t believe in relying solely on one’s natural gifts. And when it comes to talent, “You just never know—there is no gauge. You don’t see when it’s empty.”

  In the years since his masterpiece, “Reasonable Doubt,” the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In Decoded, he answers existentially: “How distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?” In the lyrics, practically: “Life stories told through rap/Niggas actin’ like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov’ did that/So hopefully you won’t have to go through that.” But can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? “Out hustlin,’ same clothes for days/I’ll never change, I’m too stuck in my ways.” Can’t he still rep his block? For Jay-Z, pride in the block has been essential and he recognized rap’s role in taking “that embarrassment off of you. The first time people were saying: I come from here—and it’s okay.” He quotes Mobb Deep: “No matter how much loot I get I’m staying in the projects!” But here, too, he sees change: “Before, if you didn’t have that authenticity, your career could be over. Vanilla Ice said he got stabbed or something, they found out he was lying, he was finished.” I suggested to him that many readers of this newspaper* would find it bizarre that the reputation of the rapper Rick Ross was damaged when it was revealed a few years ago that he was, at one time, a prison guard. “But again,” Jay says, “I think hip-hop has moved away from that place of everything has to be authentic. Kids are growing up very differently now.”

  Sure are. Odd Future. Waka Flocka Flame. Chief Keef. Returning to what appear to be the basic building blocks of rap: shock tactics, obscenity, perversely simplistic language. After the sophistication of Rakim, Q-Tip, Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West and Jay himself, are we back on the corner again? “Yeah, but Tupac was an angel compared to these artists!” He shakes his head, apparently amused at himself. And it’s true: listening to a Tupac record these days feels like listening to a pleasant slice of Sinatra. But Jay-Z does not suffer from nostalgia. He loves Odd Future and their punk-rock vibe. He sees their anger as a general “aversion to corporate America,” particularly as far as it has despoiled the planet. “People have a real aversion to what people in power did to the country. So they’re just lashing out, like: ‘This is the son that you made. Look at your son. Look at what you’ve done.’”

  But surely another thing they’re reacting against, in the Harold Bloom “anxiety of influence” sense, is the gleaming $460 million monument of Hova himself.

  Years ago, Martin Amis wrote a funny story, “Career Move,” in which the screenwriters live like poets, starving in garrets, while the poets chillax poolside, fax their verses to agents in Los Angeles and earn millions off a sonnet. Last year’s Watch the Throne, a collaboration with Kanye, concerns the coming to pass of that alternative reality. “Hundred stack/How you get it?” Jay-Z asks Kanye on “Gotta Have It.” The answer seems totally improbable, and yet it’s the truth: “Layin’ raps on tracks!” Fortunes made from rhyming verse. Which is what makes Watch the Throne interesting: it fully expresses black America’s present contradictions. “It’s a celebration of black excellence/Black tie, black Maybachs/Black excellence, opulence, decadence.” But it’s also a bitter accounting of the losses in a long and unfinished war. Kanye raps: “I feel the pain in my city wherever I go/314 soldiers died in Iraq/509 died in Chicago.” Written by a couple of millionaire businessmen on the fly (“Like ‘New Day,’ Kanye told me that—the actual rap—last year at the Met Ball, in my ear at dinner”), it really shouldn’t be as good as it is. But somehow their brotherly rivalry creates real energy despite the mammoth production. And in one vital way the process of making it was unusually intimate: “Most people nowadays—because of technology—send music back and forth.” But this was just two men “sitting in a room, and really talking about this.” At its most sublime—the ridiculously enjoyable “Niggas in Paris”—you feel a strong pull in both men toward sheer abandon, pure celebration. Didn’t we earn this? Can’t we sit back and enjoy it? It’s a song that doesn’t want to be responsible, or to be asked the old, painful questions. Who cares if they’re keeping it real? Or even making sense? Check that beat! Then there’s that word. “It’s a lot of pain and a lot of hurt and a lot of things going on beyond, beneath that.” He offers an analogy: “If your kid was acting up, you’d be like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ If they have a bellyache—‘Oh, you ate all the cotton candy.’ You’d make these comparisons, you’d see a link. You’d psychoanalyze the situation.”

  Rappers use language as a form of asymmetrical warfare. How else to explain George W. Bush’s extraordinary contention that a line spoken by a rapper—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”—was “one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency”? But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes. On “Who Gon Stop Me,” Jay-Z asks that we “please pardon all the curses” because “when you’re growing up worthless,” well, things come out that way. Black hurt, black self-esteem. It’s the contradictory pull of the “cipher,” rap terminology for the circle that forms around the kind of freestyling kid Jay-Z once was. What a word! Cipher (noun): 1. A secret or disguised way of writing; a code. 2. A key to such a code. 3. A person or thing of no importance. Watch the Throne celebrates two men’s escape from that circle of negation. It paints the world black: black bar mitzvahs, black cars, paintings of black girls in MoMA, all black everything, as if it might be possible in a single album to peel back thousands of years of negative connotation. Black no longer the shadow or the reverse or the opposite of something but now the thing itself. But living this fantasy proves problematic: “Only spot a few blacks the higher I go/What’s up to Will? Shout-out to O/That ain’t enough, we gon’ need a million more/Kick in the door, Biggie flow/I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go. You’re 1 percent of the 1 percent.” So what now? “Power to the people, when you see me, see you!” But that just won’t do. It’s Jay-Z who’s in Paris, after all, not the kids in the Marcy Houses, the housing project in Brooklyn where he grew up. Jay-Z knows this. He gets a little agitated when the subject of Zuccotti Park comes up: “What’s the thing on the wall, what are you fighting for?” He says he told Russell Simmons, the rap mogul, the same: “I’m not going to a park and picnic, I have no idea what to do, I don’t know what the fight is about. What do we wan
t, do you know?”

  Jay-Z likes clarity: “I think all those things need to really declare themselves a bit more clearly. Because when you just say that ‘the 1 percent is that,’ that’s not true. Yeah, the 1 percent that’s robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that’s criminal, that’s bad. Not being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on.”

  It’s so weird watching rappers becoming elder statesmen. “I’m out for presidents to represent me.” Well, now they do—and not only on dollar bills. Heavy responsibility lands on the shoulders of these unacknowledged legislators whose poetry is only, after all, four decades young. Jay-Z’s ready for it. He has his admirable Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation, putting disadvantaged kids through college. He’s spoken in support of gay rights. He’s curating music festivals and investing in environmental technologies. This October, his beloved Nets take up residence in their new home—the Barclays Center. And he has some canny, forward-looking political instincts: “I was speaking to my friend James, who’s from London, we were talking about something else, I just stopped and I was like, ‘What’s going to happen in London?’ This was maybe a month before the riots. He was like, ‘What?’ I said: ‘The culture of black people there, they’re not participating in changing the direction of the country. What’s gonna happen there?’ He actually called me when it blew up, he was like, ‘You know, I didn’t really understand your question, or the timing of it, until now.’”

  But still I think “conscious” rap fans hope for something more from him; to see, perhaps, a final severing of this link, in hip-hop, between material riches and true freedom. (Though why we should expect rappers to do this ahead of the rest of America isn’t clear.) It would take real forward thinking. Of his own ambitions for the future, he says: “I don’t want to do anything that isn’t true.” Maybe the next horizon will stretch beyond philanthropy and Maybach collections.

  Meanwhile, back in the rank and file, you still hear the old cry go up: Hip-hop is dead! Which really means that our version of it (the one we knew in our youth) has passed. But nothing could be duller than a nineties hip-hop bore. Lil Wayne? Give me Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Nicki Minaj? Please. Foxy Brown. Odd Future? WU-TANG CLAN 4EVAH. Listening to Jay-Z—still so flexible and enthusiastic, ears wide open—you realize you’re like one of these people who believes jazz died with Dizzy. The check comes. You will be unsurprised to hear the Jiggaman paid. At the last minute, I remembered to ask after his family, “Oh, my family’s amazing.” And the baby? “She’s four months.” “Marcy raised me, and whether right or wrong/Streets gave me all I write in the song.” But what will TriBeCa give Blue? “I actually thought about that more before she was born. Once she got here I’ve been in shock until maybe last week?” Her childhood won’t be like his, and this fact he takes in his stride. “We would fight each other. My brother would beat me up,” he says, but it was all in preparation for the outside. “I was going to have to fight, I was going to have to go through some things, and they were preparing me.” He smiles: “She doesn’t have to be tough. She has to love herself, she has to know who she is, she has to be respectful, and be a moral person.” It’s a new day.

  BROTHER FROM ANOTHER MOTHER

  The wigs on Key & Peele are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labeled—“Short Black/Brown, Human,” “Long Black, Human”—they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters and young Arab gym posers; rival Albanian/Macedonian restaurateurs; a couple of trash-talking, church-going, African-American ladies; and the President of the United States, to name a few. Between them, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play all these people, and more, on their hit Comedy Central sketch show, now in its fourth season. (They are also the show’s main writers and executive producers.) They eschew the haphazard whatever’s-in-the-costume-box approach—enshrined by Monty Python and still operating on Saturday Night Live (SNL)—in favor of a sleek, cinematic style. There are no fudged lines, crimes against drag, wobbling sets, or corpsing. False mustaches do not hang limply: a strain of yak hair lends them body and shape. Editing is a three-month process, if not longer. Subjects are satirized by way of precise imitation—you laugh harder because it looks like the real thing. On one occasion, a black actress, a guest star on the show, followed Key into his trailer, convinced that his wig was his actual hair. (Key—to steal a phrase from Nabokov—is “ideally bald.”) “And she wouldn’t leave until she saw me take my hair off, because she thought that I and all the other guest stars were fucking with her,” he recalled. “She’s, like, ‘Man, that is your hair. That’s your hair. You got it done in the back like your mama would do.’ I said, ‘I promise you this is glued to my head.’ And she was squealing with delight. She was going, ‘Oh! This is crazy! This is crazy!’ She just couldn’t believe it.” Call it method comedy.

  The two men are physically incongruous. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheekboned and LA fit; Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a teddy bear. Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie and hipster specs. Key is fond of sharply cut jackets and shiny shirts—like an ad exec on casual Friday—and looks forty-three the way Will Smith looked forty-three, which is not much. Before he even gets near hair and makeup, Key can play black, Latino, South Asian, Native American, Arab, even Italian. He is biracial, the son of a white mother and a black father, as is Peele. But though Peele’s phenotype is less obviously malleable—you might not guess that he’s biracial at all—he is so convincing in voice and gesture that he makes you see what isn’t really there. His Obama impersonation is uncanny, and it’s the voice and hands, rather than the makeup lightening his skin, that allow you to forget that he looks nothing like the president. One of his most successful creations—a nightmarish, overly entitled young woman called Meegan—is an especially startling transformation: played in his own dark-brown skin, she somehow still reads as a white girl from the Jersey Shore.

  Between chameleonic turns, the two men appear as themselves, casually introducing their sketches or riffing on them with a cozy intimacy, as if recommending a video on YouTube, where they are wildly popular. A sketch show may seem a somewhat antique format, but it turns out that its traditional pleasures—three-minute scenes, meme-like catchphrases—dovetail neatly with online tastes. Averaging 2 million on-air viewers, Key and Peele have a huge second life online, where their visually polished, byte-size, self-contained skits—easily extracted from each twenty-two-minute episode—rack up views in the many millions. Given these numbers, it’s striking how little online animus they inspire, despite their aim to make fun of everyone—men and women, all sexualities, any subculture, race or nation—in repeated acts of equal-opportunity offending. They don’t attract anything approaching the kind of critique a sitcom like Girls seems to generate just by existing. What they get, Peele conceded, as if it were a little embarrassing, is “a lot of love.” Partly, this is the license we tend to lend to (male) clowns, but it may also be a consequence of the antic freedom inherent in sketch, which, unlike sitcom, can present many different worlds simultaneously.

  This creative liberty took on a physical aspect one warm LA morning in mid-November, as Key and Peele requisitioned half a suburban street in order to film two sketches in neighboring ranch houses: a domestic scene between Meegan and her lunkhead boyfriend, Andre (played by Key), and a genre spoof of the old Sidney Poitier classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “One of our bits makes you laugh? We have you, and you will back us up,” Peele suggested, during a break in filming. “And, if something offends you, you will excuse it.” Sitting at a trestle table in the overgrown back garden of “Meegan’s Home,” he was in drag, scarfing down lunch with the cast and crew, and yet—for a man wearing a full face of makeup and false eyelashes—he seemed almost anonymou
s among them, speaking in a whisper and gesturing not at all. On set, Peele is notably introverted, as mild and reasonable in person as he tends toward extremity when in character. Looking down at his cleavage, he murmured, “You often hear comments, as a black man, that there’s something emasculating about putting on a dress. It may be technically true, but I’ve found it so fun. It’s not a downgrade in any way.”

  When Key sat down beside Peele, he, too, seemed an unlikely shock merchant, although for the opposite reason. Outgoing, exhaustingly personable, he engages frenetically with everyone: discussing fantasy football with a cameraman, rhapsodizing about the play An Octoroon with his PR person and ardently agreeing with his comedy partner about the curious demise of the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks (“ahead of its time”), the present sociohistorical triumph of nerd culture, and a core comic principle underpinning many of their sketches. (“It’s what we call ‘peas in a pod’: two characters who feel just as passionate about the same thing.”)

  Peele loves “a comedy scene that makes you cry”—like the last episode of Britain’s The Office—and cites Ricky Gervais’s creation Regional Manager David Brent as a personal touchstone. Key loves Gervais, too, though his “favorite performer of all time ever” is another Brit, Peter Sellers. “Because it’s all pathos, pathos, pathos.” When considering these matters, the two men laugh at each other’s jokes and finish each other’s sentences, apparently free of the double-act psychodrama made infamous by such toxic pairings as Martin and Lewis, Crosby and Hope, and Abbott and Costello. Like their Comedy Central stablemates Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, from the sitcom Broad City, they pull off the unusual trick of wringing laughs out of amity. One of the network’s original concepts for the show was “Key versus Peele,” which was soon abandoned when the two stars couldn’t find enough topics on which to disagree, even comically.