Leave Me Here, I'll Save Myself: Hellfyre Club and Rhyming in the Present Tense

(This article cites a bunch of lyrics- it is important that these are heard in their original context. I linked to the songs the lyrics are culled from and, where possible, the specific point in the song where the lyrics occur. The title comes from milo's song Karl Drogo Sighs)

 “'Maintain'- not a claim but an action word”- Open Mike Eagle from Self Medication Chant

I’ve been following LA-based rap collective Hellfyre Club with quasi-religious devotion for the past year or so- since my friend Rory Ferreira (rap moniker milo) joined it. The primary members besides milo are Nocando, Busdriver and Open Mike Eagle. I wrote a response to one of milo’s essays in September. Part of Hellfyre’s appeal is that despite having very different styles, the emcees possess a shared conviction regarding the value of their work and their collaboration. While bold rap crews have been around for a long time, there is something unmistakably new about Hellfyre. They don't all hail from one locale or have similar back-stories, but their cohesion and sense of purpose comes through nonetheless. In this post I will foolishly attempt to comment on the cultural significance of Hellfyre- Busdriver and Open Mike Eagle in particular.

Busdriver (Regan Farquhar)

Busdriver often voices bitterness and/or ambivalence about how his work is received. He complains that his place in society is to "entertain yuppies as they buy tight jeans and Thai cuisine". His music, like an ethnic food, is used as a symbol of discerning taste by a class of consumers who judge everything by how well it contributes to their own feeling of cultural distinction rather than how it relates to their own experience. Furthermore, Busdriver realizes how much he fails to fit into this role, saying "my raps don’t sell vitamin water". So, Busdriver doesn’t derive his conviction from without- from the hype-machine network that his music is circulated within. It also doesn’t seem to be derived from some place of inner peace- his delivery is so emblematic of agitation. Busdriver’s lyrics don’t beckon us to the vegan utopia predicted by brazenly politically-correct twitter poets like Steve Roggenbuck- he mocks the idea, saying "we can go to the hip hop show and join arms in unison at the soy farm". Trying to incorporate his music into any narrative of cultural or multicultural unity and the notions of progress implicit in those narratives violates it; his lyrics at times reflect the existential horror that comes along with the sense of being assimilated into a culture of compulsive mediocrity. The traditional sources of artistic conviction that I outlined above- positive reception by a trustworthy audience or the steadfast sense of articulating one’s authentic self- fail to account for Busdriver’s work.

In his book “The Location of Culture”, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha posits that the “self” in a modern context (i.e. a world defined by western ideology, where competing ideologies or even the notion of a ‘competing ideology’ are unimaginable) isn’t a sovereign entity with a fixed identity. He writes, "Being… postcolonial is a way of… surviving modernity, without the myth of individual or cultural sovereignty". For Bhabha, slippage of identity is the very condition of human agency in a post-colonial context, and art in this context reflects the vicissitudes of this condition. The adversity of modern life is something to survive, not overcome; and in Bhabha’s view, communities are not pre-ordained (the black community, the gay community etc.), community itself is articulated from a space in-between identities or estranged from identity: 



Homi Bhabha

"Political empowerment…comes from posing questions of solidarity and community from the interstitial perspective. Social differences are not simply given to experience through an already authenticated cultural tradition; they are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project - at once a vision and a construction - that takes you 'beyond' yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present."  

We are not historically located in an interregnum from where the past can be seen nostalgically and the future can be seen as a liberal utopia we are modestly doing our part in creating or, alternatively, a sci-fi dystopia we are careening towards with a tragically hip lack of agency. Because the struggle with identity is part and parcel with survival itself, art, rather than being a venue for emancipation or overcoming, invites the audience to bear witness to the artist’s mortal struggle between herself and what Foucault calls “the heterogenous systems that inhibit the formation of any identity”.

Open Mike Eagle’s lyrics attempt to construct a community in the present- "I thought I had a home/ but I was told that we were stolen/ now I have no land of my own and so I live right/ I live right next to you". This line exhibits how the disappearance of identity implicit in modernity coexists with the ability to envisage a community, and that this phenomenon allows the “political conditions of the present” to be brought into relief. The importance of new conceptions of collectivity is also impressed upon me by many of Busdriver’s songs, which express the fact that (for instance) love and happiness are antithetical to the self-help calculus of middle-class communities. Some acerbic examples: "this freedom it tastes funny/ I am a case study/ dealing with utilitarian uses of love" and "I’ve got a point system that determines my happiness/ its unit of measurement is your interest in my crappy shit".

Open Mike dedicates his song "Self Medication Chant" to "my friends that are slowly losing their minds". The artistic dedication that Hellfyre brings to the table is, I think, inextricable from a sense of slippage and empathy; their conviction about the aesthetic merit of their work is a far cry from traditional hip-hop posturing. In an interview, Busdriver says "I am a failed venture, and I’m only tenacious enough to keep it going… in no way should anyone think that there's a blow-up factor on the horizon or even present currently...it's rooted in something else that I'm not really at liberty to even touch on". Busdriver’s music creates the present, it illuminates reality, but this radical quality doesn’t offer a route to escapism or transcendence because it is itself an effect of the daylong sense of loss and failure that accompanies ‘modern life’. Hellfyre’s relentless work ethic (Busdriver, Nocando, milo and Open Mike Eagle all have full-lengths coming out this year) and expanding roster ensures that they will be a crucially important collective for years to come.

Hellfyre Club members (r-l Busdriver, Open Mike Eagle, Nocando, Rheteric Ramirez and milo)

In Memory of Chinua Achebe

After hearing that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, famous for writing “Things Fall Apart”, passed away in March I picked up “No Longer at Ease”, the sequel to that classic novel. “No Longer at Ease” tells the story of Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of the protagonist from “Things Fall Apart”. Obi is an excellent student, and receives a scholarship to study at Oxford. After earning a degree in English, he returns to Nigeria to work as a civil servant in Lagos, and has a difficult time navigating the deeply corrupt colonial government without becoming entrenched in it. Meanwhile, it is revealed to him that his girlfriend comes from a cursed lineage, and that if he were to marry her he would incur the wrath of his family. Eventually, both his romantic and careeristic endeavors collapse. Obi begins taking bribes- in the form of cash or sexual favors- and is eventually caught and jailed. At his sentencing, the judge says: “I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this.” Hearing this, “Treacherous tears came into Obi’s eyes. He brought out a white handkerchief and rubbed his face. But he did it as people do when they wipe sweat.” Achebe’s portrayal of Obi as a tragic figure is very subtle, but it sheds light on issues surrounding race, political idealism and other topics.

                The climax of the novel centers around two tragedies. Obi’s mother dies and his girlfriend, Clara, leaves him, disappearing from his life after a botched abortion. Obi experiences a definite shift in his mental state after these events. Prior to them, his life was permeated by dissatisfaction and frustration with both the outdated practices of his family and villagers and the arbitrary practices of the colonizing forces. His literary training, in a sense, backfired because once he left the ivory tower his only use for poetry was as a private respite from his disappointment, not as a tool for him to make sense of the colonial state he was frustrated by. After them, he experiences what Achebe calls “the peace that passeth all understanding”. He experiences his mother’s death not as an excruciating reminder of his estrangement from his family and culture, but as a severing of himself from his family and culture. His identity as a Nigerian fades away, his anguish collapses under the weight of its own inscrutability. He recognizes that time heals his wounds not mercifully, but indifferently. This leads Obi to begin living at the dreamlike pace of colonized Lagos (Nigeria’s capital city), taking bribes from parents worried about their children’s success, because he knows that the system is broken anyway. The formerly unthinkable act of taking bribes becomes sanitized, not reassuringly, but indifferently.

                The book deals with issues of race only in passing. After Obi’s conviction, his supervisor offers his opinion as to why Obi took bribes, “The African is corrupt through and through… over countless centuries the African has been the victim of the worst climate in the world and of every imaginable disease. Hardly his fault. But he has been sapped mentally and physically. We brought him western education but what use is it to him?” Rather than deal with Obi’s particular case, he blames inherent African inferiority and backs up his claim with pseudoscience.  His colleagues are uneasy about this explanation, but the matter soon passes. Colonized Africans are seen as a blank slate for the diffusion of western values, but because they are unreceptive to them, they merely serve as inferior “others” who can affirm western authority. This line of thought has been heavily pursued by literary theorists like Homi Bhabha, and it applies to “No Longer at Ease”. Obi stands between western ideals of “education” and “progress” and the aphorisms of his people. The value of his education is rendered moot when he returns to work in a corruption-riddled government, and the allegories of his people lose their explanatory power when age-old curses become antiquated and unreasonable rather than solemn.  When the ideals of two peoples clash, they don’t merge into a more perfect whole, they come crashing down to the earth and are lost in the cosmopolitan bustle.  He wants to marry Clara, but since she comes from a cursed lineage he can’t… their marriage would make his assimilation into a “civilized” western culture more expedient, but he finds the superficiality of that culture repugnant. The Marxist adage that abstraction is interpersonally actualized as estrangement and indifference is powerfully realized here. There is a disparity between the solemnity with which his mother threatens- if he goes through with his marriage- to commit suicide, and with which the judge deploys big words like “education” and “promise”, and the superficiality of her threat and the content of his words. This disparity is a result of the colonial presence. “The death of a mother is not like a palm tree bearing fruit at the end of its leaf, no matter how much we want to make it so. And that is not the only illusion we have…” Events that, when they occurred within a single culture, had attached to them an element of metaphorical beauty and a veneer of eternity, are reduced to blank facts of the events or experiences themselves. Why? The fundamental illusion—that of racial difference—absorbs other illusions, which may have been harmless, and ambivalently contextualizes them in a new, oppressive framework.  The aphorisms of his people may make Obi feel nostalgic, but now that the dreams of his people center around filling a role in the colonial government that is the instrument of their own oppression, having dreams or ideals at all becomes suspect.

                “No Longer at Ease” has many lessons to teach today’s activists. Near the novel’s end, Achebe writes: “The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist.” Political disappointment seeks a pedestal from which to voice its discontent—to make its discontent feel as true as the debunked ideals and aphorisms that gave birth to it felt. Achebe continues, “We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace. The most horrible sight in the world cannot put out the eye.” Obi attempts to go with the earth at its own pace by fading into the corrupt folly of his surroundings; in doing this, he finds comfort but loses himself (when he is arrested for taking bribes, he speaks to the police officer in a voice he “scarcely recognizes as his own”). At his sentencing, he cries tears not of moral shame but of inconsolable dejection. Of course, the white men surrounding him in the court room assume that he is crying out of moral shame, and they can, their values being affirmed, continue enjoying the game. Chinua Achebe never sought a place to stand but, with his deft portrayal of the anonymous despair of assimilated Africans, moved the earth nonetheless.

Dedicated to the memory of Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013