Of Rappers, Thoughts, and Freedom Fries

By Chris Chrappa

"If you can't help but sleep, peel off your eyelids": So goes the wisdom of one of the rawest rappers in the known universe, an east coaster who goes by the name of Cage.

One of the things that has always kept my blood hot about hip-hop is the way its artists play around with words and their meanings, reminiscent of, if not exceeding in potency, the lunacy of a Lewis Carroll or (my favorite philosopher) Gilles Deleuze. What all of them recognized, at any rate, was that wars are not just fought with tanks and bombs, but often more covertly with words and language. Words are weapons, and it's often enough been said, however little understood, that to speak of "mere" words is like speaking of "mere" dynamite.

Robert Anton Wilson, to take another example, following the lead of the linguist Alfred Korzybski suggests that we strike the existential identifier "is" from our vocabulary. The mania for identification and classification often leads to ferocious dogmatism having effects out of all proportion to their seemingly innocuous causes. We can say what evil "is," who "is" evil, who "is" a criminal, or let's say, along with the Bell Curve, who "is" not intelligent enough to hack it in the Empire. The pragmatic value of identification seems clear enough, but the dangers/horrors of it are well-hidden beneath veils of ignorance.

Deleuze, like I mentioned above, wrote a subversive little treatise on Carroll and the Stoics called The Logic of Sense. Dry as it sounds, what Deleuze undertook in that book was downright harrowing: namely, learning us how to let ourselves think. Ponder that for just a moment: we do not know how to think-not because the Man keeps us from it, but because we won't allow ourselves to.

All to often we escape responsibility and evade difficult decisions without any clear moral imperative by invoking loaded words and slogans, as I mentioned in an earlier article. Walter Kaufmann called this "decidophobia," a fear of making hard, gray area decisions while honestly considering alternatives. Deleuze said "sense is neutral, impassive, pre-individual, and aconceptual;" and like a battle it is nowhere specifically on the field, but sort of hovers within it all like a mist. To reach sense is to go beyond "is," beyond your own slogans and loaded concepts ("intelligence" "patriotism" "love" et al.), beyond good and evil, and to hover intensely in the midst of a situation, looking at it with open eyes. And only then can you truly act.

Rappers mean much the same thing when they say "don't sleep"- which is something like: be so aware that you can't but affirm what you're aware of. Even the Notorious B.I.G. was intensely preoccupied with insomnia in his songs, so much so that he almost drove himself mad with paranoia. But would you dare say his paranoia was unjustified?

Even in our most tender moments-(and if you heard Bush's war speech then you obviously know we are a "peaceful people")-we seem like the monkey who put the fish up a tree, saying "kindly let me help you or you shall drown." And then we really act like monkeys when we do imbecilic and whiny shit like change "french fries" to "freedom fries," as if resentment were a sign of courage. Just because words are weapons doesn't mean that some aren't super-soakers, and that we shouldn't pick our battles carefully. The last time I checked, burning bridges were unimpressed by water guns. Heck, we might as well speed up the inferno and fill the soakers with gasoline. Maybe that's what we want, in which case we should grab our bananas and say it proud: ooh ooh, ah ah.

We may have misunderstood Cage: "Peel off your eyelids," he said.

Often, when people ask me what I'm studying and when they find out, I'm horrified at the onslaught of somnambulant, sanctimonious responses I get from them: "You shouldn't read philosophy in books," they tell me, "you should do what's in your heart." Threatened because I'm young and obviously a pugnacious intellectual, a great deal of people think they have to justify themselves and prove something because they didn't take my path, because they don't like reading, because they didn't make it out of high school, or whatever. All without me saying a word except "I study philosophy."

The point is not that I'm better or they're better; it is, alas, that it is so emblazoned on our souls to think in those terms.

Peel off your eyelids.

Society will dictate that you haven't succeeded for not being a pugnacious intellectual or some rocket scientist or matholator (Crispin's wonderful term). And because of this, or because status is such a persuasive symbol of it, it is assumed that I agree with society. So, since society (whatever it is) assumes that there is an asymmetry between us, it seems obvious that, when it becomes clear to me that you are no philosopher or matholator, I automatically think: "geez, this person must be one of those losers at the bottom of the bell curve." But who's thinking this after all?

So I get slogans and catch phrases: "Books are bullshit;" "you should be out in the world…hey I'm out in the world you know!;" "You can't learn anything in school, you need to learn how to live;" and again, my personal favorite, "Just do whatever God's got planned, live in the moment, do what's in your heart." I begin to wonder at the monochromy of pronouncements offered to me as if from on high. And I'm sorry to put it like this, but I tell you: I've had it up to here with what's in people's hearts. With so little in their heads, it's remarkable they're even aware of their vital organs.

And in case you ever wondered why philosophers and artists have been so taken by Nietzsche's proclamation of God's death, it's precisely because this God so often serves as an excuse to close our eyes to the harshness and recalcitrance of reality. It bites and kicks and slaps and stabs. It rubs you the wrong way (and occasionally the right way).

Here's something that seems to be tough to accept: I, geek that I am, am not reading and studying because I bought into some lie, or was forced to by the "system," or was bullied by my father, or even because I'm searching for the almighty seventh figure on my income: I actually enjoy it, really. But I enjoy it primarily because it keeps me in the mi(d)st of the battlefield, gives me fresh and challenging ways to look at things, new ways to view angles and nooks, new facets to investigate that I wasn't aware of. It's humbling, sometimes bringing me to tears and frustration beyond rational belief, but it slaps me out of dogmatic slumber, and that's a pain I'd wish on anyone.

So, if I were to suggest to one of my Christian interlocuters that, let's say, "going with God" didn't make them holy, but rather made them blind automated mindless followers, I would be and have been met with inane rebukes and excuses of every sort, even violence (believe me, Christians are no less prone to kickin' ass than us God-awful atheists). Another rapper, this time a west coaster named Ras Kass, put it like this: "God justifies every fuckin' thing they do." He was talking about genocide on our soil, oppression under our flag (which is still very much under God), and the tendency to treat it all like a ham sandwich. If you just go with it, dude, it becomes a whole lot easier to swallow; hell, even tasty, provided you get some freedom fries on the side.

But that's small matters. Cage, always fascinated by the gut of a situation, opened one of his verses thusly: "Had to pawn my belief in Christ to find out / what I look like with no skin." Kinda makes you wanna puke, doesn't it? But that's precisely the force of it, what's 'under the skin' of his lyric.

Most of us wouldn't have the intestines for something like that, content to recognize the soul and be done with it. Indeed, it's sublimely easy to think the familiar and to distrust visceral encounters, burying them under the eternal rubric of recognition, the Same, the General: this is a finger, this is a table, this is a thought, "Good morning Theaetetus."

What do we look like with no skin though? That is a question, a 'wooff' as logicians say, a 'well-formed formula.' What's it going to be, what's there to see? An aggregation of numbers and formulas? An immaterial soul? Atoms and leptons, muscles and bones? Would we know it if we saw it, or would we perhaps have to pawn some beliefs to find out, to not be sleepers within the moments we pay verbal tribute to while completely ignoring ("just be in the moment" "just live in the present" "just do whatever God has planned").

Here's a suggestion to go along with Wilson and Korzybski's: while we're striking "is" from the record let's take out periods as well. We can replace them with dashes or ellipses if we please, but I'm thinking more along the lines of metaphysical periods, thought-periods: this is an idiot, period; this is a pugnacious intellectual, period; this is a finger, this is a soul, this is evil, this is God, period; this is a moment, a now, a timeless present, a period.

The best thing Bertrand Russell ever said was that when you get down to it, the only difference between a thinker and a non-thinker is that the former trades inarticulate certainty for articulate hesitation. The thinker peels off his eyelids to see what he looks like without skin, to not doze through the experience, to not be counting sheep all the time and eating bananas and scratching his armpits, to not recognize himself everywhere he looks and forages. In short, he drops the periods.

Period-

P.S.: If you're interested in Wilson and Korzybski check out Drew's articles, that is, if you haven't already. If you have, check em out again.