In Praise of Assholes

After all, brothers like West and Cent can sell hype to support hype and thus generate as much personal wealth as many African nations can with all the diamonds, gold, and titanium in their sovereign ground. African-American entertainment is our DeBeers, our Nokia, our Lockheed — the only bloodsucking industry we (symbolically, at least) got and likely the only nation-state (figuratively, at least) we'll ever have as well. Meaning that in some perverse Black Nationalist way, you have to admire the loot Cent, Combs, Simmons, and Carter have hustled out of corporate America by wearing little more than their well-hyped shadows. Meanwhile, back in the real jungle, real Africans — Rwandans, no less — are slaughtering one another to corner the market on the colombite-tantalite-laced mud (known as coltan) that keeps your cell phone ringing. West and Cent may indeed be assholes, but they're symbolic assholes who remind us that American Darwinism has produced a species of Negro male who can now exploit his fetishized vernacular aura as profitably as multinational corporations can the minerals in your whole damned ancestral homeland. Cent will never win the NAACP Image Award he deserves for this achievement, mainly because that lot's more interested in "burying" the word nigga or "redeeming" Michael Vick's dog-strangling ass than applauding or even analyzing it.

Oh yes, BTW, FYI, Cent and West both have new albums out. Of course, West's previous effort, 2005's Late Registration, belongs in the pantheon of superlative hip-hop albums, despite his being a mere step or three above Combs in the "least enchanting rhymers of all time" category. To his credit, though, he's far wittier than Diddy, with reams of jokes and edgy one-liners ("I'm the Malcolm X of fly/Buy any jeans necessary") and something like a social conscience too — see his blood-diamond confessions on Registration's "Diamonds From Sierra Leone." What he lacks in ferocious flow he makes up for in plaintive verbal harassment — he's kinda like the guy who will beg his way into your panties if he has to, the one who will simply not shut up or back off until your ears give him the equivalent of sympathy punani. He's the Rodney Dangerfield of rap, in other words, and fortunately for us, what he lacks in MC finesse, he makes up for in musical panache. Registration had a jillion snappy ideas about what a hip-hop song could be — from showtunes to power ballads, from symphonic airs to Curtis Mayfield elegies — and mucho ear candy to burn. West proved he knew a ripe, juicy hook when he stole, borrowed, or chipmunked one, and he knew how to attach himself to it like a writhing, self-aggrandizing barnacle to boot. Graduation builds on this formula, even if this time around, his lyric conceits prove less galvanizing than his purely musical snatches.

Let's take "Drunk and Hot Girls," for starters. Ostensibly Graduation's "Gold Digger," its similarly breezy girl-bashing never achieves the deadpan hilarity of that Registration highlight because, like too many other moments this time, West presumes our sympathy for his rock-star pain — here, specifically, the downside of being entangled with intoxicated hotties. (The track does, however, prove he can mire himself in lounge music as seedy as any Tom Waits has trawled in.) The folly of his pathos, though, reaches its nadir on "Big Brother," a song about how much he loves and owes his big bruh Jay-Z and how little love and respect lil' bruh Kanye feels he gets in return. Not exactly Cain and Abel drama here.

Now, if there's anything both Kanye and 50 both want and will never, ever have, it's the genuine Vito Corleone-Muhammad Ali love and respect Shawn Carter has out here on these streets, a love I never truly appreciated until around December 4 of last year, when I was on Harlem's 145th Street A-train platform and overheard a young sister, about 17 or so, tell her homegirl she was on her way home to bake a birthday cake, like she always did for her "big brother" Jayhova. Both these guys could give away every dime they make from now until perdition to homeless orphans and not get that kind of unabashed 'hood love in return. Of all the things Carter has that other high-rolling hip-hop brothers might covet, the thing they covet the most can't be bought or sold: his "big man on campus" affability. In recognition of this lack, West and Cent take an opposite tack, seeing how far they can push straight-faced arrogance as an icebreaker, if not a virtue.