1.
A good diss track promises another good diss track. A good diss track turns social death into blue-balled ecstasy. A good diss track makes the wilderness bloom from red-lined concrete. A good diss track turns your Black mother’s cursed uterus into a phantasm for more sex. Could a good diss track give you more sex? A good diss track traps and un-traps itself. A good diss track is an industry––you need to reproduce it. A good diss track turns the Black Hercules into Hercules, himself. A good diss track turns the Venuses left in the slave ship into fiction. A good diss track gives the Black Adonis the pen of mass culture. A good diss track unfolds, refolds, and enfolds the Black body. A good diss track traffics. A good diss track is the track you listen to when your white friend needs rap education. A good diss track is every scene of Black submission.
2.
Did you see the dead people Kendrick saw––dancing on the dance floor? I heard Tupac scream his last breath in Drake’s AI simulacrum. Could all the rap niggas decide against themselves to live? At least for another diss track. The theodicy of Kendrick and Drake’s heavenly feud is “the art of [capitalist] competition.” To consume the hood’s detritus; to consume one’s limits; to consume The Other Vaginal Option; to consume young girls; to consume every motherfuckin’ quintuple entendre. Can literary language mend a policeman’s bullet wound? No: keep dancing. All our blackened skin is up for exchange.
3.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” –– W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of diss tracks. The diss track seeks to transform all human consciousness into itself. But it fails to concede its own two-ness: Kendrick and Drake; the American Negro and the white man; the Black woman and the whitest of women; the hope that brings all Black suffering asunder and the death that makes it possible. This is the matter of the diss track. The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of the diss track’s destruction. Its complete implosion into the world––for the world as a formal canvas for its masterful play.
4.
meet the grahams was the first black Trojan horse. If Drake’s helmet is his blackened progeny, then how could Adonis (no, Astyanax) turn away from it? Keep the family away, Kendrick (no, Achilles) says. The Black man is more than the pervert that lives. Pay for more sex and poppin’ percs to cope against all. Troy burnt down, but I smell the smoke of Kendrick’s visionary hood again & again. How many Troys have burnt down, again?
5.
“the some of negroes / over / board / the rest in lives / drowned / exist did not / in themselves / preservation / obliged frenzy / thirst for forty others / etc” –– m. nourbeSe phillip, Zong!
6.
Become a Black male chauvinist. Yes: you can desire. Empty the Black woman; tell more fairytale stories about the white woman. How many stories will it take ‘til you finally feel that you’re Black enough? Delete your dead father from memory. He was signed to a nigga that’s signed to a nigga that said he was signed to that nigga. And that rap nigga came to the East, not the West Coast, in 1619. Become Mr. Morale and teach your family Black Israelite truth. We don’t wanna hear you say “nigga” no more. You’re too much of a pussy to own it.
7.
“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.” –– Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Kendrick consumes the Black woman ethically. He slices his erotic sensation with sharpened steel knives; he marinates his erotic sensation with chicken bouillon cubes; he prepares his erotic sensation while slipping on Fabuloso cleaned titles; he broils his erotic sensation in the cauldron of white supremacy. Being Mr. Morale is turning the not-yet-almost-Black man’s whorehouse into a livable ethic. Now Kendrick turns the Black Adonis inward––the master of the household, no longer enucleated by the slave ship’s echoes. Were those the dead people Kendrick heard again & again & again?
8.
What is it? The braids? The Black Adonis is the blazing sword that cuts through all the beef. The Black Adonis is not a scam artist with the hopes of being accepted. The Black Adonis is a musician that calculates, moves, bends, turns, whoops, shoots, digs (diggin’ for dirt, should be diggin’ for proof), and makes your darkest secrets come to light. Let the Black Adonis see his babies. The Black Adonis is not a fuckin’ deadbeat that should never say, “more life.” See the whiplash on the Black Adonis––how his ego is stripped from the bottom. He lies for himself––see how the Black Adonis must fight his own battle. If the metaphors don’t reach him, how can the Black Adonis leave a house that was never a home?
9.
Kendrick and Drake hid me––a Black woman. Their awesome raps, blessed by Apollo, turned me from a woman to a beautiful child! O how the young girls flock! How many stolen children, lost generations, and beautiful babes dashed into the Atlantic, into Death Row, into the concrete wounds, into the gunfights, into the church bombs, into the perc, into the trap. Can’t you hear my son’s soul wop, wop, wop, wop?
10.
“While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she thought, ‘it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.’” –– Toni Morrison, Sula
11.
69 Gods don’t make good beat drops. You need a catchy tagline: the saccharine wiles of a Black siren; the giggles heard from the backseat of a beat-up Cadillac; the Greek epithets made from real street cred. The beat drop exists outside and within desire’s circulation. Let the Hennessey flow, and you’ll see how the settlers was usin’ town flow to make ‘em richer. All in the downbeat––you must beat it: hard.
12.
“’The body shows itself,’ complying with the demand, yet ‘it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it.’ Is it possible to give what has already been taken?” –– Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
13.
The bestselling album could get you free from the cops, so having gamblin’ problems, drinkin’ problems, pill-poppin’ and spendin’ problems is the least of your worries. You already got shot, so turn your rap digital. Sample your mama’s eulogy. Every coin you’ll make is a moment you’ll spend in the land of the living. Every coin you’ll make is a child you’ll make. Every coin you’ll make is a party you’ll throw for your crew members. Every coin you’ll make is a pill you’ll pop. Every coin you’ll make is a coin you’ll make back. Be transfixed on the coin and hear how it cries. Hear how the coin cries after the slave ship.
14.
Drake whispers, “Auto-generate my freestyles.” (They were once Henry Ford’s interchangeable parts.) Give me 50. Drop and give me 50. Drop and give me 50. Whip the Black Orpheus into trap/ped shapes to figure the hood to suburban light. For each butterfly he plucks from his heavenly harp, they will fly into our white mouths as sublime delicacy. Give me 50. Drop and give me 50. Drop and give me 50. Yet the Adonis’ dewdrops are the sweetest of them all.
15.
“How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?” –– Christina Sharpe, Venus in Two Acts
16.
Not Like Us was Cupid’s arrow––seized by Compton verse. They not like us, they not like us, they not like us, they not like us. Kendrick worshippers foam at the mouth, encircling the DJ booth. The final release: certified pedophile. They collapse on top of each other. The ceremony repeats. Will crying Compton verse save South Central? Will keeling over Kendrick save the Black Hercules? Will the usurped uterus save our young Black girls? They not like us, they not like us, they not like us.
17.
“Diss. /dɪs/ verb 1. to treat with disrespect and contempt 2. to find fault with.” ––Merriam-Webster Dictionary
