In Praise of Rap Groups

My various theories about J. Cole, De La Soul, capitalism, and other odds and ends

Hi friends,

I hope you’re well. I am here in my final days pre-fatherhood and thus I get to have some time to think and write and listen with the indulgence of independence and so I’d like to consider one of my great loves, the rap group.

While the most iconic practitioners of the rap form in my lifetime have largely been solo acts, I feel a deep devotion to the possibility of the collective. Of course the idea that it is an either/or decision is a falsehood but I think the virtues of the ensemble has been diminished some as it seems that rap groups have diminished in popularity or been shifted from the central form of the culture to a temporary business venture to launch multiple future solo acts.

Let me backtrack and explain how I got here.

This weekend our dear friend Eve came and hung out with us. During that time our other friend Erika texted me and told me she was listening to a very old song I recorded back when with my boys JusLove, Shaun Peace, and Vic Mensa. This made me think back to that moment of my life and my relationship to rap and to my friends and to what it meant for us to have love and name that love in the form of a song or in the form of a group. It is a tender and beautiful thing to come together in that way and offer it language.

Rap is often a practice of self mythology which can be one of the beautiful and empowering things about it and can be one of the harmful and narrowing things about it. I’m thinking about my verse in the song and the mythology it offers. In my first few lines I dip into the common practice of rappers to wash narrative in a sheen of nostalgia. Some of the lines go like this:

Time to rise, big Nate I been rhyming wise/

My flow it drive slow but the time it flies/

Last time that the DLP was on record/

I was in high school, Genesis had no record/

My hairline was full, JL had the fade/

Now I’m going bald, this dude got the braids/

excuse me the locks, we still be the clique/

and Shaun’s still the cat who hooks up the hits/

a hilarious bit of earnest and energetic rapping from me at a point when I was both… at the very beginning of an artistic life’s journey and yet at the end of one kind of journey. The things that marked time were both our physical changes and the incarceration of some of our former cohorts. And yet this moment does celebrate the endurance of our artistic connections through time. By that point me and Shaun had been making music together for nearly a decade and me and JusLove had been a rap group for over 5 years, released 2 albums independently, and then taken a nearly 2 year hiatus from making and releasing new music while we went to college and started our own stumbling, nascent journeys into adulthood. Vic, who I had met several years earlier when he was a high school freshman who had just started rhyming had matured into one of the most promising young MCs in Chicago, nearly to the end of his own high school journey and certainly looking beyond to a future in music.

This afternoon, while hanging out with Eve and Alison, we fell into my most beloved pastime with old friends, listening to rap and theorizing about its energies, origins, and possibilities. Somehow, we came to the subject of the rapper, J. Cole. J. Cole is one of those rappers who I think is easy to… disregard for fans of my age. It’s not that he is unskilled, but he is… sometimes didactic and earnest in a way that invites cynicism. I also feel a particular kinship with him. When you listen to Cole he is one of the rappers in whom you can hear his lineages and his fandoms and his loves, which I love. J. Cole is the sort of rapper who has a real sense that he exists in lineage, both as a fan and descendant of the rappers who came before him, and as an admirer and OG for those who have followed him. It’s a sense of placement that I feel resonant with in my own journeys as a writer across genres.

J. Cole is also one of those rappers some fans of my generation decry as boring.

I think that’s a bit unfair but I understand why people feel that way. The thing I think most about J. Cole is that he is a truly exceptional MC when he raps alongside other performers and when he is writing in a solo mode he is… uneven. It’s funny because the run that solidified J. Cole as a rapper of enduring reputation was a several album run with no features where he also produced the music. For me, it’s a delicious irony that the man famous for solitude is at his best immersed in the ensemble.

I have several theories about this and in general about the prevalence of solo rappers over rap groups. One, I just think that rap is a form that… is deeply collaborative and multivocal by design. Some of this is because the genesis of the form rests in the group routines of The Cold Crush Brothers, The Furious Five, and countless others. Some of this is because hip-hop’s musical history is so tied to the sample and the merging or stacking of one or several samples with new language sung and rapped. Rap is not, to my mind, the natural province of the lonely bard. But, rap is also a musical form that has been so deeply shaped and pushed by commercial forces and the market incentivizes solo acts over groups. Solo acts are more efficient and often more lucrative if only for the fact that money is more when not divided across mutiple members. Fewer people make for fewer variables that can fail or falter. And so we’ve seen a genre reduced to a host of soloist even when ensembles make for a bigger sound. I suppose this happened to jazz too. I suppose this is the way of any art under capitalism.

This is my rant for today, my little thought exercise.

Another thing came up in our conversation about rap today. I offered a hot take about rap (which is the only take worth offering). Here’s my take:

DE LA SOUL IS OBJECTIVELY THE GREATEST RAP GROUP OF ALL TIME. NOBODY ELSE HAS A DISCOGRAPHY THAT IS AS GOOD OVER A LONGER TIME PERIOD. THEY HAVE FEW PEERS AND NO BETTERS.

Maybe you agree with this (correct) opinion of mine. Maybe you’ve never heard of De La Soul. Maybe you are a deep lover of Wu Tang or OutKast or Tribe or UGK or some other worthy act and think my statement is a deep heresy. That’s fine.

Eve challenged me when I made my take. She said that she didn’t believe that I could be consistent with the metrics that I insist upon when I make my wild rap statements. So I’m gonna try. This is a fun exercise for me to think about artists that I love or used to love or maybe will come to love while I do this. I’ll write a Substack meditation on a specific group after revisiting their discography. I’ll also try to build a real set of categories through which to consider every group because why the hell not. Hopefully it’ll be a fun outlet for me and it’ll somewhat prevent this Substack from devolving entirely into a baby/fatherhood account. We’ll see what happens and how long I keep this up. I’ll probably still post other unrelated dispatches too but we’ll do this for as long as it’s an interesting prompt.

Aight y’all. I have to sit and think hard about rap in between doing a bunch of real adult tasks also.

Peace,

Nate