Anaphora in Rap

Close reading of a brief filmed interview featuring Diddy and Biggie, circa 1993

Is it anaphora, repeating and revolving images or lines, or refrain, a sweet-nothing that keeps resurfacing until you have to sing it. Or is it the mask of hypermasculinity overcompensating for blatant homo-erotics and homo or bi-sexuality in the men who model the heterosexual alpha male with a soft hoodrich heart and a mean streak, in the music industry— rappers, reapers, producers, groupies and sidekicks whose role in the entourage is unclear except to give it more bulk and the illusion of something substantial. Do I sound like Freud yet, on his way to diagnosing perversion or melancholy as if the diagnosis will eliminate the condition?

My longer form piece on Diddy and the trial is forthcoming so I’m just going to transcribe this scene here, for my notes on some themes, a light forensics. Biggie wears a red and black shirt and a Kangol hat. He looks the usual downcast soporific way he did, lazy-eyed alertness, and he explains to a silent interviewer that Diddy, whose elbow is perched on Biggie’s shoulder, is like Jesus to him, cause he was selling drugs real hard and the record deal Diddy delivered, saved him. Diddy rebukes the comparison and when Biggie begins to repeat it with more emphasis, covers his mouth like he’s telling a dark secret, I’m not saying none of that, I’m not Jesus, he insists. Watch now for the thunder, (out this motherfucker), Diddy goes on to joke. It’s hard to tell who is more charismatic between Sean Combs and Christopher Wallace at this stage, but it’s clear who’s dominant. He saved me, Biggie repeats, looking into the camera wryly, refusing to have his praise misconstrued. I love you Biggie, is the response from the sudden black Jesus, into the microphone. Biggie nods, close to tears it seems, I love you too. Diddy signals, shhhh, a pointer finger wanding his lips. Their eye contact intensifies. A voiceover comes in, it’s Diddy from the future-perfect. People don’t realize how young we are, we’re actually like kids in this… multi-billion dollar industry. The video is still playing as Biggie leans on Diddy’s perched arm and lightly caresses his hand, your skin is so soft, then Biggie looks up and starts shaking his head and swiping his hat like he’s staving off flashbacks of arousal or reminiscence. Diddy laughs awkwardly into the mic, and they grow more boyish in unison, a play punch to the chin where the caress once was, more giggles, the arm using Biggie’s shoulder like a cane wraps around him now in half-embrace, and the deus ex machina enters, Diddy narrating again, you know, two young men that really had a chemistry, really got along, we were just enjoying… and he trails off, and Biggie is dead, but manages, in his signature pitch, in the final seconds of this crypt moment, to insert, it’s all good, as if forgiving what’s to come in advance.

›I’m no lawyer, but my case, had I needed to prove motive for any violence that came next, might have started here, where it usually does, at home among chosen family, with tenderness and comfort that goes so well, then so wrong, that everyone on the cast is forever haunted and haunts back, and tries to play it off and act overly casual upon recognition or reckoning, it’s all good. Cut to Bali or Epstein island or Biggie’s funeral or a yacht on the Amalfi coast or a courthouse in Manhattan, it’s all good. Not guilty. I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty. I think the title of a play by Amiri Baraka— The Great Goodness of Life, from a book Four Black Revolutionary Plays, which I read in his archive and features proto-rap’s hustler preachers selling an it’s all good gospel back and forth to one another not unlike now. A dedication in the book reads (All praises to the black man). It’s under the title awkwardly, displaced yet accounted for, constricted. Jesus dies on the cross, his sins are too many miracles, seditious acts of divine love.

Watch now for thunder/ He took me out of a dangerous game, you know what I’m saying?

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1. I had planned to share something here every day this week as a kind of mid-year state of the union in a formal way, but decided to just improvise on what comes, through Friday, into the chaos they surely spin this weekend.