I heard a rapper’s verse some time in the past that stopped me in my tracks. The artist was Kemba and the tune, Daemons, featured on the posthumous album Unhealthy Vibes Endlessly (2019), by the conflicted and gifted artist XXXTentacion.
What struck me about Kemba’s verse was the best way it was carried out. There was an urgency in his voice, a wavering tone as if delivered in a state of panic or paranoia. It seemed like a person on the sting – compounded by Kemba’s harrowing recollection of how dependancy, loss, poverty and crime had negatively affected his younger thoughts.
As a practitioner of rap, I’ve lengthy been conscious the MCs I relate to most are those who articulate trauma and vulnerability of their work. And that is the place I consider they take advantage of distinction to their listeners’ lives.
When it’s achieved nicely and delivered with integrity, rap can provide a cathartic expertise for each speaker and listener. This phenomenon is a particular type of what rap researcher David Diallo defines as “name and response” – a way embedded in rap music since its origins.
Kemba’s Daemons verse had a profound influence on me, and acquired me fascinated with how different rappers articulate ache and trauma of their lyrical performances.
Rap music is an open-source tradition that borrows from a plethora of cultural influences. In addition to exterior types of excessive and low tradition, rappers usually borrow freely from one another’s phrases and concepts.
As Adam Bradley, an knowledgeable in rap lyrics, places it: “Imitation in a creative context” could be seen as an act of “charging one other’s phrases with your personal creativity and, within the course of, creating one thing that’s directly neither theirs nor yours, but someway each.”
This course of is clearly demonstrated in Kemba’s verse on Daemons, which shares stark similarities in efficiency type to the primary verse of Kendrick Lamar’s m.A.A.d metropolis (2012). When listening to the tracks again to again, the sense of panic in each artists’ voices stands out for comparability.
By borrowing this efficiency type, Kemba positions himself alongside Lamar as a “aware rap” lyricist. Kemba reveals he’s attuned to his personal emotional vulnerabilities and is utilizing his music as a therapeutic platform for private progress.
The clearest indication of how he engages with rap as a type of catharsis is how his verse concludes – by highlighting the problem of expressing trauma in such a public approach:
Simply give me one rattling minute, this shit is difficult for me
I misplaced my complete rattling mama, I misplaced part of me
She misplaced her complete rattling life from signs of poverty.
Then, two strains later, Kemba illustrates an understanding of the therapeutic properties of rap. His voice and cadence loosen up, the wavering, panicked tone not discernible, as his perspective shifts to one among decision and positivity for the long run:
It was nonstop for me, nobody is stoppin’ me
Both fulfil myself or be a self-fulfillin’ prophecy
This simply how I introduce myself correctly
Kemba.
By actually signing off after laying his playing cards on the desk, Kemba reveals how vital an act of self-exposure corresponding to this may be for a rap artist. He additionally reveals an consciousness of the way it can type emotional and mental bonds between listener and speaker.
‘It’s a feelin’
A number of the simplest artists practising rap as a type of therapeutic are Earl Sweatshirt and the rising skills MIKE and Navy Blue.
These rappers have been making music that prioritises feeling over technicality for years. As music editor Sheldon Pearce places it, they prioritise “temper over which means”.
Earl Sweatshirt nods to this concept in his hypnotic and clouded tune Shattered Goals (2018), saying “it’s a feelin’”. MIKE does the identical in his observe Extra Items (2020), during which he notes his reliance on emotional misery and painful reminiscence to assist him create rap: “To place the work in, I gotta get to hurtin’ a bit.”
It’s protected to say that Kemba, Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE contemplate “harm” a key ingredient to the creation of their artwork.
Take MIKE’s Like My Mama, that includes Navy Blue (2022). Within the observe, Navy Blue eschews sonic readability, transparency of which means or technical means and as an alternative presents a extremely intimate spoken portrait of current trauma, culminating in an audible expression of emotion as he repeats the concluding phrase: “Then got here the harm.”
Songs like this clearly weren’t created to showcase technical or sonic prowess, however as an alternative intention to alleviate ache and battle in optimistic, wholesome methods. As Earl Sweatshirt put it throughout an interview together with his mom for Billboard, this sort of rap “is just not explicitly shiny or on the market – the aim of it isn’t to promote … Rap helps me determine life, it’s the medium I take advantage of to type life out.”
The method of utilizing recollection of painful recollections as a catalyst for inventive expression has its roots in blues music. Because the writer and critic Ralph Ellison explains: “The blues is an impulse to maintain the painful particulars and episodes of a brutal expertise alive in a single’s aching consciousness – to finger its jagged grain and transcend it.”
Following this impulse, artists corresponding to Kemba, Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE and Navy Blue hold these “brutal experiences alive” of their music as a method of aiding the therapeutic course of for their very own psychological scars.
