6:16 in Lorain, Ohio: Truth, Facts , Toni Morrison, and The Rap Beef of The Century
You ever had an itch in your brain that you just can’t scratch? Well since the biggest rap battle of the century, I’ve had a small tickle in the back of my mind. While Kendrick undoubtedly won, I doubt the veracity of some of his most impactful claims. I don’t think Drake is a pedophile and I don’t think he has a hidden daughter. To be honest, I don’t think many people believe these things, but I haven’t seen many people talk about how this impacts their view of the beef. This lack of discussion in the biggest hip-hop discussion in the past decade (where every bar and frame of music video was picked apart for a deeper meaning) made me wonder if truth matters in hip-hop. The question in and of itself is interesting in a genre that puts a premium on authenticity and the truth in an artist’s words (especially in an American context where rapper’s art is used against them in court cases- Free Slime). Per usual, my north star in all things artistic had the reach to scratch this proverbial itch. Almost 4 decades ago Toni Morrison wrote an essay regarding the differences between fact and truth in her own writing. Walk with me, I promise there is a bridge between a 38 year old article on the fiction of Toni Morrison and Kendrick’s bar about Drakes favorite minor chord.
In The Site of Memory , Morrison writes on why her narrative fiction is not misplaced in the memoir canon. She begins her case with the origin of African American published works, the slave narrative. These stories were written with two purposes: (1) Black folks telling their stories, and (2) the abolition of slavery. This second purpose while undoubtedly noble, placed iron like constraints on these formerly enslaved artists. The white audiences had no appetite for the interior thoughts, emotions and ruminations of the contemporarily considered cattle of the American South. Contemporaries viewed any discussion beyond the facts of slavery to be merely rhetorical, rather than human. As such, many slave narratives are solely based on the facts of my ancestor’s lives. The writings do not consider their interior lives, their humanity, their truth. Morrison says that she writes her fiction to give our ancestors their truth back.[1] She viewed this as an essential work in detailing the history of our people, “because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.” This definitional difference between fact and truth is what helped scratch my itch. An ethos of digging deeper than mere fact, rather digging for what sits just underneath the surface. A depth not granted to my ancestors.
And how does this connect to a 2024 rap beef between the only Hip-Hop Pulitzer Prize winner and a Canadian billionaire? Walk with me now! I think, in his modern work, the literary award winner may have reversed the importance of fact and truth as compared to the slave narrative. Using purported facts as a way to explore the truth of Drakes interior life, in order to connect with the culturally illiterate masses. If you pay close attention Kendrick connects these tenuous purported “facts” to an interior truth about Drake as a human. While Kendrick does state these facts, he also states the subtext as well in the actual bars. The sex trafficking and pedophilia claims are linked to an inability to assert his own masculinity[2] and a metaphor for childish tendencies and mind state[3]. The Ozempic claims are aimed at a Drake’s discomfort in his own skin and actions based in being self-conscious.[4] The recurrence of a hidden child speaks to Drake’s inability to learn from the past and grow. [5] It is these interior truths which are far more biting than the “facts” of the claims (except for the pedophilia, there’s no way around the seriousness of those claims). But the question remains, if the purpose of the song is to speak to the interior truth’s then why even include these facts?
Now you may think I’m reaching with this connection to a greater meaning, but did you see the reaches that were endemic to this beef? Hip Hop media devoured each syllable trying to decode each rapper’s metaphors, allusions, and any other literary technique perceived. This has gone so far as a white commentator counting the amount of times Drake said the N-word in a song, which happened to match Drake’s age, to make a claim that Drake’s purpose in doing so is to claim that he’s been an N-word for each year of his life. It is this type of cultural illiteracy that makes me believe that Kendrick may have used the surface level “facts” as a way to grab the attention of the masses. This simplification and surface level lyrical approach is not an uncommon method for artists who are be gifted with words (see Lupe’s “Dumb It Down” or Jay-Z’s “Moment of Clarity”[6]). I do not mean to say that rapper’s lyrics are not meant to be unpacked, but they are often unpacked by person’s who are not culturally competent enough or sufficiently equipped with relevant understanding to then tell others the meanings of these artists art. As such, surface level facts may have been needed. This is further elucidated by the “factual” lyrics being ubiquitously commented on, but the sub-text lyrics indicated in the footnotes herein went not discussed or rapped word for word by fans.
Thus, the truth verses fact debate implicated by the beef of the century, is not a critique of hip-hop’s veracity, but rather the interest of the American masses. Like the slave narratives of our forefathers, it is the surface level facts which sell, not the truth of interior Black life. The consistency from slavery times to now should sit heavy in the stomach of the American masses. So to America I repeat Kendrick’s warning, “Don’t tell no lie about me and I won’t tell truths about you.”
[1]“I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.”
[2] “You can be a bitch even if you got bitches”
[3]“37 but you showing up as a 7 year old”
[4] “the skin that you living in is compromised in personas”
[5] “His father probably didn’t claim him neither, history repeats itself… its not your faut that he hiding another child”
[6] “Truthfully I wanted to rap like Common-Sense but I did 5 mil I ain’t been rhymin like Common since”