Light, Water, Gas, Electricity, Rent

Reflecting on the figure of “Ma” in hip-hop

“And even as a crack fiend, Mama/ You always was a black queen, Mama.”

— Tupac Shakur, “Dear Mama”

“Since you brought me in this world, let me take you out/ To a restaurant, upper echelon.”

— Kanye West, “Hey Mama”

“You smell like light, gas, water, electricity, rent/ you sound like why the gospel choir got so tired”

— Chance the Rapper, “Sunday Candy”

I.

“Remember that story you wrote about Ma?”

Us three brothers sit in our cheap, plastic pool-side lawn chairs lounging, smoking watermelon-flavored hookah and looking out over our balcony, sighting rows of trailer parks, a luminescent 7-Eleven signboard, a noisy couple tugging a CVS grocery cart heavy with washed out shirts, blankets, liquor bottles, trash bags. Four black and white rabbits, thick with fat, graze on our heat-stricken lawn. They’ve invaded the cul-de-sac. Parrots too. Green and orange blots chattering high up in the oak leaves.

“It’s funny you mention that,” I say, taking a hit. I let the smoke curl down my lips slowly, like spider silk. “I’m working on this essay in a class right now, ’bout rappers and their moms.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the uh, argument?”

“Basically, we’re taught to hate women.”

Joe rises from his chair, gently blows on the hot coals. “Shit ain’t hitting.”

“Most women anyway. Any woman but Ma.”

II.

No woman or “type” of woman in hip-hop is written about with more emotional complexity than ma. From Tupac’s “Dear Mama,” to Eminem’s “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” to Kanye West’s “Mama,” to Chance’s “Sunday Candy,” the mothers (and mothers of mothers) of hip-hop are represented as loving, flawed, hateful, heroic, ordinary, faithful, forgiving, spiteful, hurt. Against the countless disembodied women summoned up to be fucked, humiliated, objectified, and discarded in hip-hop (and elsewhere), there is a counter tradition of women portrayed in varying complexity as “mother,” mama: Afeni Shakur, Debbie Mathers, Dr. Donda West, Chance’s grandma.

III.

Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” a loving lyric penned to his mother, Afeni Shakur, begins with: “you are appreciated.” The “you” here is both personal and inclusive. In invoking the figure of “mama,” a stylization that announces already a black female presence — “mama,” not mom, mum, mommy, ma — Shakur opens his lyric up to the possibility of addressing black mothers more generally. Following each repetition, the lyric’s refrain “you are appreciated,” begins to take on communal dimensions: Dear (black) Mama(s), you are appreciated.

Afeni Shakur has said of the lyric, “It is a song that spoke not just to me, but every mother that has been in that situation, and there have been millions of us.” The “situation” Tupac represents in “Dear Mama” is one characterized by fatherlessness (“all along/ I was looking for a father”), drug addiction (“even though you was a crack fiend, mama”), gang life (“I hung around with the thugs”), the relentless incarceration of young black men (“And who’d think in elementary? / Heeey! I see the penitentiary, one day”), and black, female resilience in the face of perpetual marginalization (“A poor single mother on welfare, tell me how you did it?”).

With “Dear Mama,” Tupac gifts his mother an emotional integrity un-characteristic of most representations of women in hip-hop:

And runnin from the police, that’s right

Mama catch me, put a whoopin on my backside

And even as a crack fiend, mama

You always was a black queen, mama

I finally understand

For a woman it ain’t easy trying to raise a man

In a few lines, Tupac represents the complexity in Afeni Shakur’s restaging of motherhood. Rather than reduce her to a “good” or “bad” mother, he makes space for a spectrum of representations: we see Afeni Shakur discipline her son, watch her fix him and his lil’ sister a “hot plate”, watch her “hug him through a jail cell.” We imagine her smoking crack in their small bathroom, and trying on the “diamond necklace” that Tupac gave her. Tupac’s “Dear Mama” announces: yes, motherhood can look like all this.

When asked in an interview about the song, Tupac said, “I wrote it for my mama because I love her and I felt I owed her something deep.” But how do you capture in song ma, mamma, mother, woman, bitch? How does a lyricist fold onto the blank page or air decades of feeling, of loving, of hating ma?

IV.

In “Only One,” Kanye takes up the figure of his late mother, Dr. Donda West. Positioning himself somewhere between electronic seer and ballad singer, Kanye’s autotune-varnished voice becomes the site for a benevolent possession: “As I lay me down to sleep/ I hear her speak to me/ Hello Mari’, how ya doin?” Dr. Donda West takes hold of the song. Gently urged on by Paul McCartney’s soft grand piano playing, she communes with her son, encourages him, and reminds him to be thankful, to be less insecure. She tells him she’s sorry to have gone, that she is proud of him, that she won’t go, no need for goodbyes. Her closing refrain — “Tell Nori [Kanye’s daughter] about me” — repeats eleven times: “Tell Nori about me, tell Nori about me/ Tell Nori about me, tell Nori about me…” The lyric’s repetition is arresting; one feels in the refrain the continued presence of the dead.

The lyric’s relentless refrain demonstrates the felt inadequacy of language to communicate deep emotional feeling—what the Romantic poet William Wordsworth called a “craving in the mind”. Repetition is an attempt to sidestep that felt inadequacy; the unsayable is at the very least gestured towards in the reiteration of what can be said. Using the figure of his mother, Kanye expresses through her plea “tell Nori about me” — that is, tell my granddaughter about me, let me live on in her — his own desire to have his mother in his daughter’s life, in his own life.

Kanye writes a song that, through the use of a rhetorical persona (his mother speaking from heaven), gestures towards the complex feelings he harbors towards his mother’s death, towards a present and future without her. That’s what writing can and can’t do.

That said, there is an important irony here; namely, that rappers invest in representations of their mothers an emotional and rhetorical complexity often denied other women. Kanye West, for instance, can pen a lyric dedicated to his loving, diligent mother (“Hey Mama”), and yet, on the very next track, badger “Erica” for giving him head, as he did in the mixtape Freshmen Adjustment (2005). Serious question: why is the only woman a rapper feels safe loving, representing lovingly in lyric, his mother? Don’t all women (and men) smell like light, gas, water, electricity, rent?

V.

Joe takes a long hit. “Cool. But I like your story about Ma better, to be honest.”

VI.

Black Jack Table #9

By Jason Bircea

I find her sitting at a Blackjack table in a corner of the second floor of the Hawaiian Gardens Casino.

I can’t breathe, I’m so angry.

“Pick up your fucking chips, we’re leaving.”

She hasn’t been home since Thursday. The skin on her face looks stretched, translucent.

I can almost see her skull.

I called out at work and spent Sunday moving through the San Manuel, Pechanga, and Hawaiian Garden Casinos looking for her. After this morning’s classes at the college, I came back looking. I was beginning to think she was dead.

I pull a chair from an empty table nearby, sit down. I fish out my L&M cigarettes, offer her one, order a glass of Coca-Cola, try to get comfortable.

“I love you,” she tells me. “And look,” she says, her hands passing over a stack of bright red chips. “I’m winning.”

“I love you too, Ma,” I say, and mean it deep.