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real nigga rhetoric
by aishamanneThe underground has always been the lifeblood of hip-hop.
From the Native Tongues to the [Midwest] to the [south] to the [place], underground movements of young black people rapping together have been pushing the culture of hip-hop forward like an organized railroad system. The conducting force behind this railroad has always the spontaneity that makes the experience of black youth what it is—an exhilaratingly haunting joy with the potential to bring the sun closer. To master the impossible. To get out the hood, to witness gunshots and run for the ice cream truck directly after.
Black children are born in the sun, so they remember it through the sounds and colors that guided them through the uneasy streets they made homes in. The booming bass from the speakers of black Escalades, the shiny rims, the basketball courts and barking dogs. The music videos with gangs of friends wearing similar clothes and throwing up similar shapes with their fingers, forming bonds of love in the face of constant war tests.
What makes these bonds unbreakable is not only shared circumstance, but the authentic spontaneous conditions of how they’re formed. I don’t bond with you because you’re struggling; the circumstance of your struggle brought you to the same space in time—same corner store, same high school stairway, same park bench—as me. That shared presence throughout history has often been the birthpoint of hip-hop’s legend material.
The things that live forever—live the loudest and feel the strongest—are the things born in the deepest corners of the railroad system. The places with the most light: bedroom studios, verses sparked from conversations shared at the Chinese food spot after school, cyphers at the park on hot summer days. The people who make these spaces what they are don’t live ‘under’ anything. They are, in fact, categorically outside.
So where exactly is ‘the underground’?
It’s coursing through the veins of the whole thing, of course. Hidden, but felt. Routinely sacrificed for something deemed greater to emerge, until the glitter suddenly feels less gold and something about the cinematography starts looking too cold. Then the underground is summoned—referenced through the invisible seance that is the dangling of bait (making it Big). Trading the streets for gold.
Who’s to blame when the trade is made?
Who wouldn’t leave dirt for fame? Any of us breathing would do anything for a chance at life. The life that feels easiest, that feels closest to relief. The difference between us all is the need for relief, and the awareness of its possibility. But no one is more needy, more aware, than ‘hood niggas.’/Young niggas./Society’s favorite menaces.
No one more tactful, more relentless. As the makers of the underground, they were born into textbooks that called them nothing before they could read. They come-of-age outside, on the streets of environments that pressure them to survive. Environments that force them to prove their ingenuity.
So they do. They gather in the spaces they can and take over the spaces they can’t. They laugh out loud and love in between. They don’t do it because of the pressure of survival; the pressure becomes a light that they shine on themselves.
Then they’re made to watch it reflect onto everything around them. Their own light shines too bright for their own names to be seen. They stare up at it on billboards and down at it on screens, searching for themselves in between.
It is within this darkness that the underground is formed.
And in any dark space, much activity goes unseen. The things we’d do to escape, the bonds we’d be willing to break, the pieces of ourselves we’d consider giving away. The internal ambition is always to spin back. It’s to make it out the hood, but ultimately to come back and right the wrongs that paved the road to an uneasy success. But that road is long enough to make the railroads look unfamiliar. The faces that guided you through the dark aren’t as easy to see standing in the ‘new’ light—the one shining on the billboards and cheesing through brand deal after brand deal.
You want to be on TV, but you also want someone to see you on TV doing something nice for the kids at the elementary school you went to. You’re not sure who, but someone. That’s really what the fight had been for all along—not to make it out the hood, but to make it far enough that someone in the hood could see you stunting.
If no one in the hood could see it, it wouldn’t even be worth it. You don’t think about that part much, but it’s the true trophy. The Grammy is nothing without the audience watching on a plastic-covered sofa somewhere you’re glad to no longer be.
Or not.
Sometimes you believe in the trophy. Sometimes you believe salvation is on the other side of flashing lights. That’s what the flash is for.
But in the dark, you have no choice but to listen. Just walking down the street is a musical experience. And the struggle has always inspired the story; [new lyric] Jay-Z being a billionaire only really matters because he’s a billionaire who made it out of the Marcy Projects.
Then he built a trophy in the hood and called it a masterpiece of his fortune. These masterpieces are made to not only be worthy of celebration, but to demand aspiration. Don’t just get money: get money like me. Grind through life until you make it to the top.
And if you hustle through your journey well enough, you’ll break through the ceiling.
Not just make it out the hood, but make it farther than the suburbs. You could even climb to the very top of the Empire State Building. If you do, the trophy they build for you will be across the bridge. You’ll bring flashing lights and cameras back to the streets for a showing off of game.
And you’ll want someone to see.
Whoever your someone is, a lot of others do—the kids playing double dutch in pissy hallways and shooting basketballs into makeshift hoops. The kids grabbing crumbs and making feasts appear from thin air. Some of the most exciting things that ever happen in their lives are when the flashing lights spin through the hood, shining visions of their highest hopes and possibilities. Birthing new dreams.
It’s exciting because it’s a vision they can understand. One that looks exactly like home, just shiny and new and a lot more easy. The one that comes back to the hood usually comes back wearing sneakers and chains and jeans that make white people uncomfortable. It’s more of a flex that way. It’s not just ‘so-and-so’ did ‘such-and-such’ for the kids—it’s ‘did you see him do it?’ The quiet part, which is sometimes out loud too, is that while he was doing it the fit was clean. A good deed dressed in good cloth.
Sometimes they do come back in plain clothes, which is usually part of a general spiel about humility-something-something-financial-literacy-et cetera. That storyline tends to be a flex in a different sense. But either way, the point is to be seen. The viewer is loved enough to be desired—that’s who the grind is really for.
And that’s what kids in the underground rap about.
Until they don’t anymore. Until they figure out how to either rap about different things or rap to different ears in order to get to higher places. The railroad systems usually require moving in groups, so they rap together in groups too. Then they spend days together moving through the cities rapping out loud, letting the streets know who really owns them.
Loud enough that hopefully somebody across the bridge can hear.
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Along the way, in between the verses they rap out loud, they speak different things in a different language. No one teaches them how to speak nor how to listen, but they do.
The rules carry them as far as they usually need to go—wherever and back. Their parents’ rules may be to come back by the time the streetlights come on, the cops’ rules depend on the mood of the day, and every other sign in the city is screaming a rule in their faces and daring them to break it. But the rules they write for themselves often begin with hip-hop: either in the songs themselves or in the booths where they’re written (wherever the chosen booth may be).
The below is a list of Real Nigga Commandments as gathered from songs, conversations, films, stories, and shared memories within the world of hip-hop.
the ten commandments of being a real nigga:
- know the commandments.
- word is bond.
- my name is my name.
- check your environment.
- don’t steal swag.
- avoid being a bitch ass nigga.
- be very wary of bitch ass niggas.
- know your lines.
- avoid bum behavior.
- real recognize real.