Unlearning toxic hip

SIDNEY MADDEN, HOST:

A warning before we begin - this podcast is explicit in every way. And in this episode, the N-word can be heard multiple times.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERYDAY STRUGGLE")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) I'm living everyday like...

RODNEY CARMICHAEL, HOST:

Ori, do you know what this song is?

ORI: It is "Everyday Struggle."

CARMICHAEL: Oh, good. "Everyday Struggle" - that's right. You got it. You remembered.

Three years old might seem like a really young age to put your son onto Biggie Smalls. But the way I see it, nothing could be more fun.

You like that one?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: Maybe that's the egotistical part of parenthood, the part that makes you feel like a mad scientist. Like, I get to be the first person to introduce this dude to hip-hop. It's just crazy. Where do I begin? I got my answer when my wife bought him a Biggie T-shirt.

ORI: I want to listen to the other B.I.G. song.

CARMICHAEL: OK, the other B.I.G. song. You want to listen to this one?

ORI: No, that's not the B.I.G. song.

CARMICHAEL: That's not the one you want to hear. I really like this one. You don't want it?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MACHINE GUN FUNK")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) So you want to be...

CARMICHAEL: (Rapping) Hardcore. With your hat to the back, talking about the gats in your raps...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MACHINE GUN FUNK")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) But I can't feel that...

CARMICHAEL: You don't like that? No?

ORI: No.

CARMICHAEL: You're not feeling that? (Rapping) Christopher Williams.

My mom, his grammy - she'd already had him deep diving into Motown. "Stop! In The Name Of Love" was one of his most requested bath-time jams for a hot minute.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STOP! IN THE NAME OF LOVE")

THE SUPREMES: (Singing) Stop in the name of love before you break my heart.

CARMICHAEL: Even my wife's grandad got in on the mix, emailing YouTube links of Hindustani classical music all the way from India for us to play for his firstborn great-grandson.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing in non-English language).

CARMICHAEL: So now it was my turn. And it's weird 'cause I definitely thought about it before the Biggie shirt came into play. Like, man, I can't wait to play my son his first Tribe joint. I dropped some OutKast on him one day. But I hadn't done it or really thought specifically about when and where to start until that shirt just landed in his drawer. And I was like, oh, we here already? Every time my son hears a new song, he's got this habit of looking at me through the most earnest eyes and asking...

ORI: What's that song about?

CARMICHAEL: What's this song about? It's about respect. It's a song about respect. Here.

ORI: OK. Thank you.

CARMICHAEL: It's almost like the question he's really asking is, Daddy, explain the world to me.

What you want to hear?

ORI: Why - where is the music box?

CARMICHAEL: Right here.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG POPPA")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) I got the chronic by the tree, cuz. I love it when you call me big poppa.

ORI: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG POPPA")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) Throw your hands in the air if you's a true player.

ORI: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG POPPA")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) I love it when you call me big poppa. To the honeys getting money, playing n****s like dummies...

CARMICHAEL: Maybe by the time he's able to hold a conversation for longer than two minutes, I'll have found the words to explain why Biggie is complicated in more ways than just his eternal rhyme schemes. Right now the flow is just too cold, literally.

MADDEN: What's up, Rodney?

CARMICHAEL: What's up, Sid? How you doing?

MADDEN: I'm good. I'm fine. You sound down bad. Why you - are you sick?

CARMICHAEL: I'm very sick. Yeah.

MADDEN: Your kid gets a cold. It's your cold, too.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah, man. He brought home something called RSV. Like, you know all of the new wave cold and flu viruses when you have a...

MADDEN: Oh, gosh.

CARMICHAEL: ...Toddler cause they...

MADDEN: Oh, my God.

CARMICHAEL: ...Bring them home, like, every other week, man.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNBELIEVABLE")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) Biggie Smalls is the illest.

CARMICHAEL: Rappers been proclaiming themselves the illest since the beginning of rhyme - "Illmatic," Sick Wid It, flu season.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNBELIEVABLE")

NOTORIOUS B I G: (Rapping) Biggie, Biggie Smalls is the illest.

CARMICHAEL: Now, I don't know the etymology of the slang, but nursing my umpteenth cold since the pandemic, it got me to thinking of it as a survival metaphor. In order to stay alive in this sick world, you got to become the illest, and nothing's iller than being a hip-hop dad. You're tasked with raising the next generation without dooming them to repeat your destiny. We're supposed to be thinking about this kind of stuff all the time, and we do. But it doesn't mean that having kids doesn't give you even more cause to think about it - you know? - in a...

MADDEN: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: ...Deeper way.

MADDEN: It takes on a whole new meaning, a new lens.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah, man. You know, you start analyzing, like, how did I become the man that I came to be? And for me, man, I had to realize, like, a lot of it is due to the music that I grew up loving. You know what I mean?

MADDEN: If you see the flaw in that, how are you trying to avoid that?

CARMICHAEL: Man, I mean, I feel like that's a really big question to start on. That's kind of where I am with it. Yeah, 'cause truth is, I got a whole lifetime of rap and bull**** to infect him with. And ain't no vaccine for that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: I'm Rodney Carmichael.

MADDEN: I'm Sidney Madden.

CARMICHAEL: And from NPR Music, this is LOUDER THAN A RIOT. On every episode of this season, we tackle one unwritten rule of hip-hop that affects the most marginalized among us and holds the entire culture back.

MADDEN: And one that a new generation of rap refuses to stand for.

CARMICHAEL: All season long, we've been looking inward at how a culture created by the marginalized became such a marginalizing force to so many within it. At times, it's even caused me to question myself 'cause ain't no way to truly interrogate misogynoir in hip-hop without men taking some accountability for the past but especially for the future so we don't turn our sons into survivors and perpetrators of the same ill fate. So this episode is going to be a little different - part meditation, part conversation between me and my former selves and a few folks thinking seriously about beats, rhymes and life. On this episode, Rule No. 9 - like papa, like son.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: Do you think this is a happy song or a sad song?

ORI: Happy song and a sad song.

CARMICHAEL: You think it's happy and sad? You think Biggie's happy and sad on this song?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: Really? What makes you think that?

ORI: And I'm happy and sad, too.

CARMICHAEL: You're happy and sad, too? You have complex emotions.

Of all the hoods rap prepared me for, fatherhood ain't one of them.

ORI: Dad, do you know what cold water and hot water do?

CARMICHAEL: What do cold water and hot water do?

ORI: Cold water and hot water make warm water.

CARMICHAEL: Oh, that's kind of like happy and sad. If you're happy and sad, you're just kind of in the middle, huh?

I've loved hip-hop for most of my life. It's been my livelihood for nearly half as long. I make a living by paying critical attention to the culture. But something about becoming a dad in the last few years, it pulled some of the wax out my ears. I hear rap differently now. Multiply that times two 'cause about a year ago, we added a daughter to the mix. And hip-hop heads, you know we tend to obsess over our daughters, like Chris Rock joking about a dad's only job being to keep your daughter off the pole or T.I. confessing to going on his teenage daughter's gyno appointments just to make sure her hymen was still intact. When it comes to those baby girls, man, the patriarchy don't play. Meanwhile, we raise our sons to be as bad as dear old dad. So here I am, trying to grapple with all that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: But here's what I really want to know. How young is too young to begin talking to my son about rap?

What's Biggie talking about? Do you know what the song is about?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: What?

ORI: Music.

CARMICHAEL: (Laughter) The song is about music?

ORI: Yeah. The song is about music.

CARMICHAEL: What's he rapping about?

ORI: He's wrapping the presents.

CARMICHAEL: He's wrapping the presents (laughter)?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: OK, I like that (laughter). That's good.

It's kind of like deciding the right time to tell your kid the truth about Santa or sex. By the time my dad worked up the nerve to talk to me about the birds and the bees, I'd already memorized 2 Live Crew's "We Want Some P***y."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE WANT SOME P***Y")

2 LIVE CREW: (Singing) Somebody say hey, we want some p***y.

CARMICHAEL: And the way my dad talked about sex, using the clinical verb insert to describe the act, was not the way Luke and them talked about it. My dad and I didn't even live in the same house. Ice Cube, Too Short, Scarface - them n****s lived in my head rent-free. They were the rappers who raised me, especially when it came to how I thought about girls and, eventually, women.

KIESE LAYMON: 2 Live Crew, bro - like, I remember, like, '80-something, you know - (singing) hey, we want some (vocalizing).

CARMICHAEL: Exactly.

That's Kiese Laymon, a Black literary genius - and not just because the MacArthur Foundation says so. He's written a lot about growing up hip-hop in the South, so I had to holla at him.

LAYMON: I went to the concert. I knew that s*** was foul. I knew it was foul. I knew that s*** was foul.

CARMICHAEL: Hey, wait a minute. Hold on, hold on. You went to a 2 Live Crew...

LAYMON: I went to 2 Live Crew...

CARMICHAEL: ...Concert at what age?

LAYMON: ...In, like, '87, fam. You - it was 2 Live Crew.

CARMICHAEL: Wow.

LAYMON: It was Too Short.

CARMICHAEL: OK.

LAYMON: And I was going through puberty. Like, I knew that the shit they were saying about women was f***ed up. I knew it was mean, and I knew they couldn't rap. But I also knew at 12 or 13...

CARMICHAEL: (Laughter).

LAYMON: ...That the f****ed album cover made my body feel things. And when they performed at Jackson, they had them dancers on stage...

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LAYMON: ...Like, real-live grown women shaking they a**, like - and then these men are talking about how these grown women ain't s***. There's a dissonance there, but I think bodily what you feel is, yo, this is mean. And, like, why does my body, like, like it?

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LAYMON: You know what I'm saying? That's what I felt.

CARMICHAEL: 2 Live Crew normalized things for us that shouldn't have been normal at any age. Before I knew anything about the wild s*** that could go down at high school skip parties, 2 Live inducted a generation of Black boys into rape culture with the introduction of running trains.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE WANT SOME P***Y")

2 LIVE CREW: (Singing) See, me and my homies like to play this game. We call it Amtrak, but some call it the train. We all would line up in a single-file line and take our turns at waxing girls' behinds...

CARMICHAEL: While trying to work all this out in my head, Sid interviewed me a couple of times.

MADDEN: I want to go back to that feeling in the moment of discovering sex through media - like, the idea that there was a curiosity about it, but there was also, like, a shame to it and, like, a taboo to it.

CARMICHAEL: And for real, she asked me some hard questions - questions I really had to marinate on.

MADDEN: As you were learning through 2 Live Crew what the birds and the bees were way before you were learning it in school or by any of your elders or anything like that, there - you - were you picking up on the degrading nature of it, or were you just intrigued by the sensationalism? Like, when did you notice that it has this derogatory tone towards women?

CARMICHAEL: I don't know. I think something inside of you relays that even off top. I think, though, in terms of what really becomes more foundational for me is not even just the sexual aspect of what I'm hearing in the music, but the way masculinity is being defined, right? Like, you know, when I start to think about some of my favorite early rappers, whether it's, like, Ice Cube or - I was a NWA fan early on, too. The masculinity was hyper. It was extreme. Yeah. I learned a lot from my rap dads - how to mask, how to suppress, how to conceal and carry all the vulnerabilities that might be seen as signs of weakness.

LAYMON: I'm kind of, like, a softie. You know what I'm saying? Like, in the words of my boy Lathon, you know, like, I'll fight you, my n****, but, like, I'm a soft a** n****.

CARMICHAEL: See, I can relate to you on when you talk about growing up and feeling like, at least in comparison, that you are soft or were soft.

LAYMON: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: Like, I felt that in comparison to my dad, who in his own way and language was basically telling me that. And...

LAYMON: Right.

CARMICHAEL: Definitely in comparison to every - most of my favorite rappers. I remember Will Smith being an early favorite. And I don't know. I took a certain comfort in him because he seemed like he had the same level of softness, I guess, maybe. I didn't really had a language for it at that time.

LAYMON: Right.

CARMICHAEL: But, you know, by the time it's, like, you know, adolescence, it felt like wherever I was in the world, I needed to carry myself a certain way.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MADDEN: I want to dig into that - like, how rap shaped your perceptions of manhood, like, what it meant to be a Black man. So, I mean, take me back to that.

CARMICHAEL: This was the crack era. This was the mass incarceration era. This was the war on drugs era. And this was also the era when they were always like, you know, Black men are an endangered species. It just felt like you had to be ready for something - war, even if you lived in the suburbs. Like...

MADDEN: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: You had to be ready, yo. You stepped out the door. You had to have that pose.

MADDEN: It felt like a war zone.

CARMICHAEL: You had to have your - everything together, you know, so you didn't have to be tested because reality was going to test you in some kind of way. And so that's really what shaped and defined masculinity in that era. Every generation of Black men has to redefine masculinity all over again. The hand-me-downs from my daddy's and granddaddy's past - they never seemed to fit quite right.

My generation overdid it. We took that blaxploitation-era machismo, added guns and gangsta grills and a fascination with pimping, pushing and playing and packaged it for mass consumption, never once realizing we were the product the entire time. Hypermasculinity became a shield and sword Black men carried to ward off 400 years of fear, oppression, desperation. But when you weaponize yourself for protection 24/7, you end up causing the most harm to the ones closest to you, even yourself.

MADDEN: So if you had to have a metaphysical armor, you have to be ready for war, you had to always be ready for anything, how did that affect your relationships with women?

CARMICHAEL: For me, it seemed cooler to not be in a relationship but to still have physical relationships. It didn't seem cool to have emotional relationships. I can remember this one New Year's Eve. And I was going to get in the car. But I remember the girlfriend that I had at the time wanting to hang out, wanting to do New Year's Eve together and me being much more interested in hanging with the fellas, which, to my adult mind, is, like, so ludicrous.

MADDEN: I'm getting this image of teenage Rodney being a f*** n****...

CARMICHAEL: (Laughter).

MADDEN: ...Which is real funny to think about. I love that. I love having that image of mister stoic, green tea Rodney being just ain't s*** to his teenage girlfriend. But outside of that, I think it's so interesting the lessons you were learning and how you - the lessons you were learning from your friends, from music. But was there ever a point - did you ever have kind of, like, a eureka moment where you realized that some of these lessons are harmful or were harmful?

CARMICHAEL: Yeah, that came maybe a few years later. And it's funny. There's an album around that time, too. It ends up being the third De La Soul album, "Buhloone Mindstate."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EGO TRIPPIN', PART 2")

DE LA SOUL: (Rapping) Ego trip, ego trip, ego trip.

CARMICHAEL: It came out at a very pivotal time for me.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EGO TRIPPIN', PART 2")

DE LA SOUL: (Rapping) Ego trip, ego tripping down the f***ing stairs.

CARMICHAEL: You know, I was fresh out of high school and exploring the world and myself in ways for the first time. You know, you try on clothes that might not fit. You know what I'm saying? And it takes you a while to figure out how to be and to remind yourself who you are. And, yeah, I think that album was one of those that kind of helped me to deflate - I don't know. There was an ego - just to deflate that bloated sense of self, that - you know? I don't know.

MADDEN: Right - who you thought you were supposed to be.

CARMICHAEL: Exactly - who I thought I was supposed to be, the lifestyle that I was attempting to live out because it sounded so good in the music. I mean, I think every kid should have that experience. And some have it in their gap year. You know? I guess that was my gap year. It was a really hip-hop gap year. You know what I'm saying?

MADDEN: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: I went to the Navy and got kicked out. But, you know, that was kind of...

MADDEN: So wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So after high school, you went to the Navy, got kicked out.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah, I did. When you graduate high school without a plan, there's one of two places you might land - jail or the military. Joining the Navy was supposed to be my great escape, a way to run from responsibility and expectation and all the other Black, lower-middle-class hopes and post-civil rights dreams the generation prior had invested in me. They say the universe is so vast that we all have alternate versions of ourselves floating out there. I found mine drowning at the bottom of a 40-ounce bottle when I was 19.

He was everything I wasn't at the time, unleashed and unashamed. I dubbed him C-Mike, my hip-hop alter ego, the dude I became once I was finally out of my mama's house. I still wasn't old enough to drink or think straight, but I could legally buy a box of Newports, vote for a doobie-smoking president who claimed he never inhaled and sign my life away to Uncle Sam.

They stationed me on an aircraft carrier of 5,000 men. The Pacific Ocean was our hot tub, and every dock from San Diego up the coast to Bremerton, Wash., was our playground. We got paid to chock and chain fighter planes, but we clocked way more hours as hip-hop journeymen. Fishing out the hardest bars and deciphering rhymes was our closest thing to therapy. I came up on loot the day I discovered Kool G Rap's illest line. Snitches get stitches, b****es that act snotty inside the party. Even the hotties get turned to bodies.

My best friends were ex-dope boys, second-chance delinquents, teenage fathers, stuck in that liminal space between adolescence and accountability, the space Black boys ain't granted for long. Detroit n****s, St. Louis n****s, East Texas n****s, Birmingham, D.C., Tennessee, Mississippi and Atlanta n****s - all bonded over Snoop and Dre weed anthems, b****es ain't s*** ideology and thug life doctrine. We were politicians. We were philosophers. We were malt liquor guzzlers. We wasn't s***. I stumbled back to the boat more times than I can remember blacked out. Fragile egos took some of us out before our discharge date. A homie wound up in the brig when too much s*** talk over a spades game brought the knives out. And I fell asleep in my rack way too many cold nights, pumping Sade through my headphones and tucking my feelings under the covers so nobody could hear me humming "Love Is Stronger Than Pride."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS STRONGER THAN PRIDE")

SADE: (Singing) Love is stronger than pride.

MADDEN: So how did you get kicked out of the Navy?

CARMICHAEL: I got kicked out of the Navy for the most hip-hop s*** ever, probably...

MADDEN: (Laughter) Fitting.

CARMICHAEL: ...Especially in the era in which I got kicked out. It was for smoking weed.

MADDEN: Oh, my God, Rodney.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah. I popped a piss test.

MADDEN: Why have we never talked about this before for real?

CARMICHAEL: I don't know. It never came up. I don't...

MADDEN: I've seen turnt Rodney. I want to see, like, high, dozed Rodney.

CARMICHAEL: Nah. I stopped smoking weed not too long after I got kicked out of the Navy - not because of that, but I don't know, man. It just stole some of the joy out of it for me. I became one of those paranoid weed-smokers after that.

The stamp on my discharge papers read other than honorable. I got kicked out of the Navy 'cause I got real good at pretending I didn't give a f***. Something about that masquerade of not caring felt like the closest thing to freedom for a younger me. Remember that scene in "Juice" when Tupac surprises Omar Epps at his locker?

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "JUICE")

TUPAC SHAKUR: (As Bishop) I don't give a f***. I don't give a f*** about myself. Look, I ain't s***. I ain't never going to be s***. And you less of a man than me, so as soon as I decide that you ain't going to be s***...

CARMICHAEL: The thing is, unlike Tupac's character. I really thought I was special. White people had been telling me my whole childhood that I was different. I didn't know that was just code for nonthreatening. But now here I was, getting kicked out of the Navy like a n***** with the hard -er, a threat to the establishment, other than honorable. For me, there was some honor in that, never mind that I barely saved a dime or that I was going back to my mama's house empty-handed. At least Ice Cube wouldn't think I was a sellout now. After a year of living recklessly, my wake-up call came somewhere between Oakland and Atlanta on a four-day Greyhound bus ride back to reality.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Mister, your radio - I asked you to put your headphones on.

CARMICHAEL: De La Soul's "Buhloone Mindstate" album was the wake-up call in my headphones the whole way home.

MADDEN: Tell me more about that. What songs specifically?

CARMICHAEL: Oh man, probably "I Am I Be." Yeah. That's a really powerful song on that album. I am. (Rapping) I am Posdnous. I be the newest generation of slaves here to make tapes about record exec rakes.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I AM I BE")

DE LA SOUL: (Rapping) The pile of revenue I create, but I guess I don't get a cut 'cause my rent's a month late.

CARMICHAEL: I don't know. That's such a - man, and the sample on that song is very haunting. (Vocalizing).

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I AM I BE")

DE LA SOUL: (Rapping) Who departed life just a little too soon and didn't see me grab the Plug Tune fame as we go a little something like this. Look, Ma, no, protection...

CARMICHAEL: It was just, like, I had lived this fantasy version, this really carefree I-don't-give-a-f*** version. Maybe I needed to live that. But it was also a version of me that in a lot of ways embodied a lot of what I'd learned through the music in terms of how to be a young Black man, and that s*** didn't work in real life. I look back at that year, and I just see myself acting out in ways that mirrored a lot of the models of manhood and masculinity that I had loved growing up, in terms of how they acted toward women, in terms of how they acted toward other men sometimes and in terms of how they acted toward themselves, you know, that self-denial and that kind of thing. If my first dance with adulthood was awkward, it also laid the groundwork for a future where that experience and my love of hip-hop would come full circle.

ORI: I'm going to make chocolate chip cookies.

CARMICHAEL: Man, that's going to be so good.

(SOUNDBITE OF METAL SCRAPING PAN)

ORI: The chocolate chip cookies are done.

CARMICHAEL: I see.

ORI: Now let's put them in the oven.

CARMICHAEL: OK.

ORI: So now I can't breathe fire.

CARMICHAEL: Now you can't breathe fire?

ORI: No, because my nose are running.

CARMICHAEL: Oh. Maybe you can turn the runny nose into fire. You think dragons get runny noses?

My 3-year-old son is starting to exercise the power of his imagination. One second, he's a dinosaur, roaring and running through the kitchen with his arms outstretched. The next, he's making invisible cookies only he can see in a bathroom drawer he calls his oven before serving them up with a plastic spatula.

Wow, that is tasty. I love your skillet chocolate chip cookie recipe. Wow. How did you learn that, Ori?

ORI: I was baking.

CARMICHAEL: You were just messing around...

ORI: It's covered in (ph).

CARMICHAEL: ...And you created this?

ORI: What can we make next?

CARMICHAEL: What can we make next?

It's just child's play. And I try to encourage it 'cause I know that conjuring up a new sense of self or remixing your identity, it won't always be that easy, especially when the person you once imagined yourself to be is failing you. You can start over, but once you're grown, you never get to start from scratch. Instead, it's more like a process of constant revision. That idea is something Kiese leans on in his writing and in his life.

LAYMON: Before you can have a revision, you have to have a vision. You know what I'm saying? So you were talking about, like, you know, the things we don't want to be replicated, but a vision is equally interested in what we do want to be replicated. You know what I'm saying? And often that vision is very stringent. My initial vision of who I want to be, it's, like - it's not a human. It's not someone who can feel and think and breathe messily. But then I'll have to push back on that vision and be like, well, like, is that who I actually want to be? Well, actually, I want to be someone who is in the world, sensuous, sensory, but causing as little harm as possible. You know what I'm saying? People always talk about, like, the carbon footprint. Like, yeah, OK.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LAYMON: But I want to talk about the f***ing, like, harm footprint. And when I really started to really think about who I wanted to be, I had to contend with a lot of the f*** s*** that I have done to myself and definitely a lot of f*** s*** I've done to people who loved me in spite of the person that I am. Part of revision for me is just actually sitting in some of the harm I've done, but also, you can drown in that, too. So that's why I'm saying is really important to think about who you want to be as opposed to, like, who you don't want to be. Like, I don't want to be harmful. But the harder question for me, Rodney, is, like, who do I want to be out in the world?

CARMICHAEL: The act of reshaping my own hip-hop identity started in earnest maybe around the time I settled into my career as a working journalist. I became music editor of an Atlanta alt-weekly the same year that T.I. got busted on federal gun charges, the same month that DJ Drama's studio got raided by federal agents. The director Byron Hurt dropped his documentary "Beyond Beats And Rhymes" that year, too. It was my first comprehensive look at how misogyny, homophobia and transphobia became pillars of rap's toxic culture. It has this classic scene where Busta Rhymes promptly exits the studio when Byron starts asking him about homophobia in hip-hop.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES")

BUSTA RHYMES: That homo [expletive]? That what you're talking about?

BYRON HURT: Yeah.

BUSTA: I can't talk to you about that.

HURT: Why not?

BUSTA: 'Cause, I mean, with all due respect - you know what I mean? - I ain't trying to offend nobody. My cultural - what I represent culturally doesn't condone it whatsoever. So we slide. I'm being allowed.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right.

BUSTA: Word is bond.

HURT: Well, let me just ask you this, Busta. Let me just ask you this. Do you think that a gay rapper would ever be accepted...

BUSTA: Oh, wow.

HURT: ...In hip-hop culture?

BUSTA: (Singing) Pass the Henny and then some. Say the word and we're gone.

CARMICHAEL: We covered Byron's film, T.I.'s trial, Drama's arrest and Nelly's "Tip Drill" backlash that year. Matter of fact, we covered so much hip-hop that the editor-in-chief took me out to lunch one day to complain about all the rap and rappers taking over his music section.

MADDEN: You're covering it. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, like, how is the messages you're getting from the music shaping the work you create off of it?

CARMICHAEL: I guess I started to have a - sort of a defensive posture around the culture and the music and wanting to make sure that by any means necessary I could get some hip-hop in the book because to me, that in of itself in a white space was alternative - you know? - even if it was Black pop music. You know what I'm saying? So I think because of that, I probably had blinders on - like, really big blinders to some of the stuff that you're talking about, like, you know, the misogyny in the music.

This was the advent of the comment section. And so all of a sudden, now you had all of these white alt-weekly readers going in on the comments any time we published something hip-hop related. Oh, rap is this. And those Black people, they don't know. This is no talent, and they're just gangsters, and the violence. And so all of the critique and criticism when it's coming from outside of the culture, especially from white readers and detractors - like, it just makes you mad and - because they don't have the cultural wherewithal or the sociopolitical wherewithal or the historical wherewithal to be able to understand or contextualize this culture, even in terms of the negative aspects of it. Everything they spew just sounds like racism, you know what I'm saying? And so it becomes really hard to be self-critical of your culture and your music in this environment where you're having to be so defensive about it all the time.

The racial politics were thick, but the gender politics at play were becoming harder to defend, even in my own mind.

JAMILAH LEMIEUX: I got serious issues with Black men of your peer group, and I'm constantly trying to work through them.

CARMICHAEL: That's writer and cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux.

LEMIEUX: I think about this a lot. I'm 38, you know? So I'm not a young girl. But relative to a man, you know, who's in his late 40s, 50s - you know what I mean? - like, it's not my peer. And I'm consistently just kind of shocked at how stuck some of these men are.

CARMICHAEL: When Jamilah dropped "The Black Ass Lie," her 7,000-pound essay, in response to Dave Chappelle's comedy special "The Closer" - man, it was bigger than "Roxanne's Revenge." I remember tweeting it out at the time and calling it required reading for straight Black men or something like that. The first response I got was some bruh (ph) saying Black men had no avenue to express our pain. I had to hit dude back just to ask, have you never heard of hip-hop?

LEMIEUX: The story that we've always been sold about hip-hop was that hip-hop is Black men telling their truth, right? This is their side of the story. This is how they get to tell the world what they go through. And so for us to challenge that, we've been told we're challenging you all's ability to speak freely and talk about your experiences, you know? But what you all are saying is incredibly hurtful to us...

CARMICHAEL: Right.

LEMIEUX: ...And about us...

CARMICHAEL: Right.

LEMIEUX: ...You know? And so what does that mean? Am I to believe that we are so vile to them that we have somehow earned this loathing?

CARMICHAEL: Kind of like me, Jamilah's formative years was shaped by rap in a lot of ways too. Black Moon, Wu-Tang and De La were some of her early favorites. And just as I was learning through the music how to carry myself, Jamilah was picking up on how women were being perceived in it.

LEMIEUX: I think rap taught me a lot about what it means to live as a woman.

CARMICHAEL: In what ways?

LEMIEUX: What women are - how women are regarded - you know, that women are secondary to men in a very profound way - that what they need, what they feel, what they experience is just simply not as consequential...

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LEMIEUX: ...To the world as what men feel and desire. They talk about having endless access to women and choosing to mistreat them. And I just find that really curious because, like, if most women had endless access to men, our instinct wouldn't be, I want to abuse them.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LEMIEUX: But that's because we value men. We think of them as important people. I mean, Black women really, really, really value Black men in a very significant way.

CARMICHAEL: Said another way, Black men don't really, really, really value Black women - not in the same way, not until we're good and ready, until we have a reason - maybe even until we have a kid. And it's hard for me to say that out loud 'cause I don't want it to be true, even if there are plenty of examples throughout this whole season that keep proving it is true. And behind everything Jamilah's saying, I can almost hear her asking me, why are you just stepping up to the plate? And why are you talking to me about it? Toward the end of our convo, she made that question plain.

LEMIEUX: Have you thought about how hip-hop makes women feel? Have you given it any thought?

CARMICHAEL: Being a Black man and often working at white publications where hip-hop wasn't a priority, I've often found myself feeling the need to defend the culture, but I also would often have times when I was alone or in the car riding and listening to music where I would just be like - man. When I didn't have to explain anything to anybody else or excuse anything away, and it was just me sitting with it, I would be like, man, this s*** is, like, inexcusable.

It's always felt like it's so big that it's almost like - where can I begin other than with me? And I guess that's why, for me, being a dad now, I feel like my biggest project - you know, maybe my only project is to try to figure out how to raise a son who, despite being exposed to a lot of this stuff, will have another alternative way to think about and be a man so he doesn't have to be that kind of man and, you know, model that kind of behavior or living or pose as it - you know what I mean? I don't know. Maybe it's a cop-out, but - yeah, I guess that's where I am with it, you know?

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: As I was answering Jamilah's question, something about it sounded weak - even to me. Maybe the realization was hitting me in the moment that focusing on the next generation is really just another way to pass the buck to the young bucks in the hope that doing so might make me look less guilty. But I can't blame my rap dads any more than I can blame myself, especially at my big age. They say misogyny is rooted in hatred. I never thought of myself as a hater, least of all of Black women. I've loved them, been loved by them in one regard or another for my entire life. That love nurtured me even when I didn't fully love myself. But I've also loved hip-hop with my whole entire soul, and I never saw those two things in such stark conflict until recently.

It's forced me to consider my own complicity. I've thought about how I've contributed to misogynoir in ways I didn't realize as a writer and editor who sometimes wrote pieces under the guise of celebrating women in rap that only painted them further into a corner - a Hoteppin' before Hotepism - with profiles that objectified women sexually or moralized over them exercising their own brand of sexual agency, from poking problematic fun at Ciara's "Goodies" to think-piecing on Trina's pleasure principle by placing my own disapproving gaze front and center. Putting ideas like this into the world that influenced the way people read the art and actions of Black women caused a particular kind of harm that's worsened as women have come to dominate the genre. And it would be hypocritical of me to ask why that is without questioning myself first.

LEMIEUX: It's constantly a process, you know?

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LEMIEUX: It's constantly - it's a negotiation. And I think that in general, I mean, I think Black people have negotiated a lot to love hip-hop.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

LEMIEUX: There's this adherence to, you know, white male patriarchy that is deep in some of our men. I mean, hip-hop is hyper-capitalist. It's about, you know, who's got the biggest bank account, who's got the biggest watch, who's the most visible? That's where success and freedom are measured. And so instead of searching for a version of revolution that includes all Black people, they're thinking of how they get to live and be like white men.

CARMICHAEL: The fact that much of mainstream rap for so long lost or altogether lacked any kind of real intersectional come up feels like a major fail. Instead, we became a culture of exclusivity and exclusion, a billionaire boys club corporatized and commodified to death.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRUE DAT (INTERLUDE)")

BIG RUBE: (Rapping) Operating under the crooked American system too long. OutKast, pronounced outcast, adjective meaning...

CARMICHAEL: What Jamilah said reminded me of a line from an old OutKast album I still bump religiously. It comes near the end like a fresh sprinkling of Southernplayalistic (ph) critical race theory after nearly 60 minutes of Big and Dre's post-adolescent pimping and posturing.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRUE DAT (INTERLUDE)")

BIG RUBE: (Rapping) If you think it's all about pimping hoes and slamming Cadillac doors, you probably a cracker or a n**** that think he a cracker or maybe just don't understand.

CARMICHAEL: When Dungeon Family sage Big Rube said that on 'Kast's '94 debut, it literally took me years to understand. Rube was critiquing capitalism or the crooked American system, as he called it. But he was also calling out Black men and our undying allegiance to it. Being a big, old pimp became the modern-day remix on the slave master but in blackface. Even the countercultural stereotypes we claimed as uniquely our own were just spinoffs of our regularly scheduled programming. And like Audre Lorde said, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What we need are some tools to see racism and misogynoir as flip sides of the same oppression. It's hard to construct that future when the toolbox you're working from is a hand-me-down.

Z is for?

ORI: Zebra.

CARMICHAEL: All right. The end. Next - tomorrow we read a story, OK?

ORI: I want to read that story tonight.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

NIKI: What are you working on?

ORI: My computer because I need to work.

NIKI: Why do you need to work?

ORI: Because I need money.

NIKI: (Laughter) You need money?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have a lot of things I can offer my son. I won't die with an absurd amount of material wealth to bequeath him. I can't pass down any sort of athletic prowess that will help him excel in sports. Even when I was a straight-A student and one of the smartest kids in my class, math stayed kicking my ass.

There just ain't a lot of things I have to give other than my love of music. It's the only language I've ever been fluent in, the only tongue that's native to me. It's still the most revolutionary art form in my lifetime, even though my relationship to it might be way more complicated now. At this point, my legacy is old baggage. It's full of dusty records and dustier ideals I picked up through my dad, my rap dads and all my old homies about how to embody manhood.

Is that what it means? - 'cause, you know, best means favorite. There can only be one best friend.

ORI: There can be two best friends.

CARMICHAEL: There can be two best friends?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: Oh, OK. Well, I guess a lot of people have two best friends.

ORI: Hey, Daddy, do I

CARMICHAEL: Yeah. You're still 3. So does that mean you get three best friends?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: OK. Who are your three best friends? Tell me.

My relationship with rap nowadays, it's a lot like my relationship with Black men in general. I call few friends and call on those actual friends even less than that. As men get older, our connections to other men become less tangible. We get busy with life's responsibilities - building a career, raising a family, hiding from our emotions. We get hard or try to - to steel ourselves not just against the outside world but from our inner selves too.

When I was young, man, me and my n****s bonded over hip-hop, memorizing explicit lyrics, reciting raps in the mirror like we wrote them. That s*** was a release, but I stopped memorizing lyrics a long time ago. I don't dance in the mirror no more, and the only raps I occasionally recite are the ones that make me feel like I'm C-Mike again. I never heard music the same after that, but maybe because I never had friends who made me feel music quite like that again either. It's one of the last things Kiese and I talked about before we hung up.

And I had friendships with men in ways that I never have had since, you know, like, really deep friendships. And in a lot of ways, I didn't realize until a long time later that in some ways the end of that year and leaving that environment, there was a mourning associated with the end of these...

LAYMON: Wow.

CARMICHAEL: ...Relationships with men that I really love because I knew that probably would never happen again. And so I connect a lot of that with hip-hop as well because everything that was coming out at the time, that was, like, soundtracking the year for me. But, yeah, I found that trying to form those kind of relationships since then, or even admitting there was a craving to have that - those kind of relationships...

LAYMON: Yep.

CARMICHAEL: ...It was almost like I couldn't admit to myself for a long time that was something I needed or that I missed...

LAYMON: Right.

CARMICHAEL: ...About that period in my life. You know what I mean? Even when we were doing things that we shouldn't have been doing...

LAYMON: Absolutely, absolutely.

CARMICHAEL: ...Together, right? You know what I mean?

LAYMON: Oh, God, bro, like, that's so sad to say. I have boys, but all of those relationships are virtual. You know what I'm saying? Like, even pre-COVID, I still played a lot of basketball. Part of that was because, like, that was a community of mostly Black men. Like, I mean, basketball gave us an excuse to touch. Basketball gave us an excuse to commune and listen and be together. And then when my body broke, I didn't - I felt embarrassed to be around them 'cause I got bigger. I thought they would judge me, you know? And honestly, fam, what you just said, like, that - I haven't had real, textured, present, loving relationships with brothers, like, that I see every day or every week in decades.

CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Wow.

LAYMON: And it's terrible. And it's really terrible. And I miss it really bad, but I'm scared to, like - I don't even know. You know, there's not a Tinder for that. There's not a f***ing, like, Grindr for that.

CARMICHAEL: (Laughter).

LAYMON: Like, you know what I'm trying to say? Like, I don't know. Do I go on there and be like, I miss n****s. Like, any n****s want to come over here and - like, you know what I mean? - like, come to my crib, we can just like, you know, be n****s? Like - but that's what I want. But then, like - but I don't know how to do it, and I'm scared. But, like, a lot of men are feeling that, bro. Like, I - you know, in listening you can hear people talk - like, talk about, like, a kind of loneliness. And I think part of that is that we just don't - some of us don't make space to touch and commune with other brothers and our friends. For me, like, my friendships with my brothers, like, that was love. But what did we do in those groups? We talked about hip-hop. Like, you know what I mean?

CARMICHAEL: Yup.

LAYMON: Like, hip-hop are at the core - in addition to being all of the f***ed up things that the nation is, like, there's a textured love in there for me that I'd - have not found anywhere else yet.

CARMICHAEL: Hey, Ori. Who's your best friend today?

ORI: You are my best friend.

CARMICHAEL: I'm your best friend?

ORI: Yeah.

CARMICHAEL: For real?

ORI: You're my best friend.

CARMICHAEL: Why is Daddy your best friend?

ORI: Because.

CARMICHAEL: When my son calls me his best friend, I always think about how that was a parental no-no to the generation before me. Our parents were not our friends - didn't want to be, didn't pretend to be. And they had special ways of reminding us of that fact if we slipped up and forgot. But when he calls me his best friend now, part of me thinks about all the people I called friends growing up, all the rappers who schooled me coming up, all the people I looked to - even more than my parents - to give me the game.

I think to myself, you know, seeing me as a friend might not be the worst thing in the world. Teaching my son how to listen critically and empathically, how to hear the love and the lack in the music, how to distinguish the good shit from the bullshit, even when the bullshit is that shit, that feels like the work - necessary work, but it's also the fun. And in the right hands, maybe rap can be a tool for teaching my son something that has taken me this long to learn, as long as he never stops asking that question - what's this song about?

MADDEN: Looking forward, what questions do you have for your son, even if he can't answer them right now?

CARMICHAEL: Oh, man. What questions do I have for Ori? I'm really curious what questions he has for me, but, yeah, maybe we're not quite there yet - probably be a bunch of hard questions I'm going to struggle to answer just like these. I would love to hear him talk about music and why he likes who he likes, you know? But, yeah, I hope that I can be a decent model in terms of that kind of stuff, even as I'm learning it myself.

I see a softness in my son. I mean, the kid's 3 years old. He's supposed to be soft. But sometimes I see that softness, and I'm kind of embarrassed by it. Maybe 'cause it reminds me how soft I am and how I spent half my life trying to camouflage that shit. But I look at him, and I see the kid that cries too long when he's hurting inside. I see him, and I remember the look my dad used to give me when I did that. I've tried to give him that look, but, man, my son just keeps on wailing. The look doesn't work on him either, and I secretly take pride in that even as I fight back the urge to strip it away. I don't want to make him hard. I don't - not too hard - hard enough to survive but soft enough to live without being afraid or unforgiving or dead. And I hope music can be a lifeline somehow.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: I know this problem is bigger than my one son, but it feels like the most meaningful work I can do - something I can be about rather than just talking about, something I can hold myself accountable for. Truth is, I need work too. And I'm going to mess up while trying not to mess him up. I definitely have to unlearn some things about who I am and the person I imagine him to be. I'm also trying to leave myself open to whatever it is he has to teach me, even if it's how to be softer. The same way I gave my son blood and breath, he going to get these beats and rhymes 'cause we Black, and this rhythm is all we have that couldn't be stripped from us or stolen away. And he deserves every bit of that. It's his without asking, but he deserves to have it in a way that doesn't require him to lie, die or cause harm to himself or anyone else.

That's the thing I've always loved about rap. It's a self-regulating culture. We determine what's cool, what's corny, what's cap. We set the tone, take the temp and tell the time. That means there's space for the next 50 years of hip-hop to be a jamming-ass course correction, a counter-revolutionary remix, intersectional and liberatory as all hell - me and you, your mama and your cousin, too. I think that's that textured love that Kiese's talking about. And I want to give that to all our children.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: You have fun playing soccer with Elis today?

ORI: Yeah. Elis is going home to sleep...

CARMICHAEL: Yeah. You think that he...

ORI: ...And snuggle.

CARMICHAEL: He's - who is he going to snuggle with?

ORI: She's going to snuggle with her daddy.

CARMICHAEL: Who are you going to snuggle with?

ORI: I want to snuggle with Daddy.

CARMICHAEL: Oh, OK.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: All right, y'all. Next week is the last episode of the season, and we're confronting the rule at the root of it all.

MC LYTE: Two women can always find a common ground. I think it's the testosterone and the ego of the men to make women feel like you got to be the only one. You the only one on top.

KAMILLION: There can only be one queen bitch. That's why the girls be arguing all the time.

MADDEN: What happens when the same forces putting a squeeze on the girls, gays, and theys come for our show too? That's next time on LOUDER THAN A RIOT.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: LOUDER THAN A RIOT is hosted by me, Rodney Carmichael.

MADDEN: And me, Sidney Madden.

CARMICHAEL: This episode was written by me, and it was produced by Sam J. Leeds.

MADDEN: Our senior producer is Gabby Bulgarelli.

CARMICHAEL: And our producers are Sam J. Leeds and Mano Sundaresan. Our editor is Soraya Shockley, with additional editing by Sam J. Leeds. And our engineer is Gilly Moon. Our senior supervising producer is Cher Vincent. Our interns are Jose Sandoval, Teresa Xie and Pilar Galvan.

MADDEN: And the NPR execs are Keith Jenkins, Yolanda Sangweni and Anya Grundmann.

CARMICHAEL: Original theme by Kassa Overall, remix by Suzi Analogue, scoring by Suzi Analogue and Kassa Overall.

MADDEN: Our digital editors are Jacob Ganz, Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Sheldon Pearce. Our fact-checker is Greta Pittenger.

CARMICHAEL: Special thanks to my wife Niki for being my constant sounding board, and my son for letting me follow him around with a microphone for the last couple of months, and my mom for putting up with a teenage me - I think we made it.

MADDEN: If you liked this episode and you want to talk back, hit us up on Twitter. We're @LouderThanARiot. And if you want to email us, it's [email protected].

CARMICHAEL: From NPR Music, I'm Rodney Carmichael.

MADDEN: I'm Sidney Madden. This is LOUDER THAN A RIOT.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CARMICHAEL: I think I figured out what that crunchy sound was on my end.

MADDEN: What? What? What? Doritos.

CARMICHAEL: I think it was me rubbing my chin - like the hair on my chin. My bad.

MADDEN: OK, Billy Goat Gruff. All right.

CARMICHAEL: Who did you call me (laughter)?

MADDEN: Billy Goat Gruff. Can y'all not hear me? Can y'all hear me?

CARMICHAEL: Billy Goat Gruff. Yeah, yeah. No, we hear you.

MADDEN: All right.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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