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Walk It Like I Talk It: Race, Language, and Performance in Battle Rap

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Walk It Like I Talk It: Race, Language, and Performance in Battle Rap WALK IT LIKE I TALK IT: RACE, LANGUAGE, AND PERFORMANCE IN BATTLE RAP Jordan M. Davis A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Glenn Hinson Karla Slocum Charles Price © 2020 Jordan M. Davis ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Jordan M. Davis: WALK IT LIKE I TALK IT: RACE, LANGUAGE, AND PERFORMANCE IN BATTLE RAP (Under the direction of Glenn Hinson) Contemporary battle rap is subgenre of rap that has risen to prominence over the last decade. This thesis will explore the ways in which battle rap participants—fans, rappers, and battle league administrators—collectively contribute to a black space in which complex, multifaceted ideas of blackness can simultaneously exist. Chapter 1 opens with an autobiographical example and places battle rap in conversation with older traditions of black oral performance. Chapter 2 narratively and theoretically explores moments in the line outside of a battle rap event, where fans and battlers congregate and take space in anticipation of the event to come. Chapter 3 continues the narrative, moving into the building and beginning to look at ways in which battle rappers construct multifarious notions of blackness through their lyrics onstage. Finally, Chapter 4 moves away from narrative and looks thematically at how battlers lyrically construct ideas about blackness more broadly. iii To my late grandparents Edward and Judy Custenborder. Without your dedication, love, and commitment, I would not be where I am today. iv AKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the process of writing this thesis, I have received an incredible amount of guidance and support from many individuals. I want to thank Dr. Glenn Hinson, my thesis committee chair, advisor, and mentor, for providing dedicated professional and personal advisement throughout my graduate coursework and the construction of this thesis. I also want to show gratitude to my two other committee members, my former advisor Dr. Charles Price, and Dr. Karla Slocum. Their insights have been instrumental in my continued development of this project. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of UNC’s Departments of Anthropology, Communication, and Music, whose commitments to interdisciplinary teaching allowed me to start thinking through this project long before any of the words contained in this document were typed. This thesis would certainly not have been possible without the artistic work of the battlers cited herein. Thank you to 40 B.A.R.R.S., Ms. Hustle, Ms. Fit, QB, Deisel, Cee the Boss, Phara Funeral, Ms. Murk, Casey Jay, Zan, Jai Smoove, E Hart, and Classy for continuing to entertain and push the discourse on blackness and the black experience. Finally, and certainly not least of all, I want to thank my mother, Paula Arnold, for her continued love and support throughout my life, and specifically my graduate journey. I’d also like to thank all of my wonderful friends from Topeka, Kansas City, and here in Chapel Hill, whose check-ins, dinners, movie nights, and random trips have filled my life with joy as I strove to carry out this project. v PREFACE I’ve loved battle rap since my early years of high school. For this project, I wanted to encapsulate a number of important facets of the battle rap experience—not least of which is the experience of being black in a black space,1 the notion that battle rappers are engaged in knowledge production and the often complicated, sticky realities of doing so in a highly competitive space. The format of this paper was inspired by a class in my graduate coursework taught by Dr. Renee Alexander Craft that focused on performance studies and performance ethnography as a way of researching, writing, and presenting information. Additionally, my own advisor Glenn Hinson’s book, Fire in my Bones, further informed the idea’s enactment. My idea was that the best way to encapsulate the battle rap experience in writing was to take my reader on a narrative journey of attending a battle rap event, making stops along the way to situate my narrative theoretically and to provide lyrical examples of my overall argument about blackness, black space, and knowledge production. To distill the immense wealth of lyrical information contained in the hundreds of battles on YouTube, I chose to focus primarily on one battle from the event that I attended. I draw from other battles as well, but the narrative, as well as the discourse analysis, focuses on this battle. 1I recognize that the term “black space” is abstract and hence open to competing interpretations; however, I use black space to mean a space in which blackness is the central social category—quantitatively and qualitatively. By framing it as such, I hope to underline the complexities of blackness and its construction in these spaces, working against a simple categorization and instead conceptualizing black space as a site of what John L. Jackson (2001) calls “antiessentialist possibilities” for understanding race—one that includes the infinitely complex ways in which individuals live racial identities. vi I also found it apt to begin with an autobiographical example. My description of the Connecticut-based emcee QB vs Bronx-based Ms. Fit battle highlights how I experienced battle rap for seven-odd years from 2012-2019. That is to say, for seven years, I (along with many other fans) experienced battle rap entirely online. It wasn’t until I attended my first event in- person in May 2019—Queen of the Ring’s “Panic Room 4” card—that I realized the importance of embodied experience as distinct from online experience in watching battle rap, particularly as a black person myself. With this thesis I hope to open new conversations about race in the academy— particularly as it relates to battle rap—as well as to open space for these two powerful forums for knowledge production to enter into conversation with one another. Battle rap today is an understudied-yet-critically-important piece of contemporary Hip Hop Culture that warrants rigorous and respectful academic inquiry. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 Toasts to Street Battles: Early Black American Oral Performance .................................. 10 Contemporary Battle Rap: An Introduction to Form and Function .................................. 22 CHAPTER 2: THE LINE ............................................................................................................. 30 Formation .......................................................................................................................... 34 Recapitulation – where online and the line meet .............................................................. 40 Preparation ........................................................................................................................ 47 CHAPTER 3: IN THE BUILDING .............................................................................................. 52 Onstage ............................................................................................................................. 53 CHAPTER 4: LYRICAL CONSTRUCTIONS ............................................................................ 73 Explicit Articulation.......................................................................................................... 77 Language Markers ............................................................................................................ 78 Historical Markers ............................................................................................................ 80 Geographical Markers ....................................................................................................... 85 Street Life.......................................................................................................................... 89 Iconic Figures.................................................................................................................... 92 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 99 BIBLIOGRARPHY .....................................................................................................................102 viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION I grew up a biracial kid in Topeka, Kansas. For the first nine years of my schooling I attended Catholic school. My class was always small—21 or 22 people was the largest it ever became—and for the most part the constituency remained the same throughout my attendance. A core group of kids growing up together, with a small number entering and exiting the class over the years. These were kids I laughed with, learned with, played with, and became with, from kindergarten through our eighth-grade commencement. It’s clear looking back that we were our own community; but as I became myself alongside the rest of these kids, I came to realize that my becoming included an additional layer of complexity. For the vast majority of my childhood, I was the only black child in my peer group. Early on this fact eluded me, but as I progressed through elementary and middle school and continued to be socialized inside and outside of school, the differences became pronounced in ever-higher relief. It was difficult for me to come to terms with what growing up
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