The Preface

 

Jay-Z, Nas, and Biggie had New York, circa the mid '80s, early 90's "war on drugs." Tupac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg had Compton, L.A., one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. Eminem had 8-Mile Detroit, Outkast had the dirty South, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As for myself, a small, dominantly upper middle class town in New England, circa 2012 was when I first saw the allure of rap. It was my final autumn as a high schooler, although at a little under 17 years old, my age did not reflect that fact. I hadn't skipped a grade or anything, but my birthday was right on the cut-off date, and my parents had fought to get me admitted to Elementary School as a first grader, rather than a kindergartener. Because of that, I'd always tried to compensate for my age - mingling with the upperclassmen as a freshman, taking risks to prove myself, that sort of thing. Your typical first world problems. But it was for that reason that I found myself at a house party, watching a handful of super-seniors and recently graduated students kicking freestyles over an old Rakim cypher. One of them (who actually went on to record a mixtape), laid down the enigmatic line that for the rest of my life I'll surely have trouble forgetting:

 

"The profit is the problem, the problem is I don't got it"

 

At that point in my life, I barely even registered hip hop as a genre of music, let alone an art form that I could ever see myself undertaking. Instead of joining the cypher myself, I just sat back, socialized, and quietly chuckled at these pinnacles of the kid-back-home-who's-still-trying-to-rap archetype. But nevertheless, something about that bar stuck with me, and I had always been an avid writer to boot. So when I got home, I found myself with a pen and paper writing down the lyrics:

 

"I've got the profit, the problem's the profit like that's my problem

Turning profits like Warren Buffet, you've gotta snuff it

That's enough yeah, that ain't my problem

All these rappers getting pissed off when I rob them, that's my profit ain't my problem"

 

Reads like something a 17 year old wrote, no? Well, even then I think I knew that. So I put down the paper, chuckled at my brief stint as a rapper, and moved on to other things. That was it.

 

...well, that is, until about three years down the road. Now it's the fall of 2015, my junior year at college in Michigan, and I've just released my first single, appropriately titled "The Profit". So what in the hell exactly happened?

 

Somewhere along the road, I fell very, very quickly into a vast appreciation of hip hop as a genre. I was a late bloomer as far as my knowledge of music went - I didn't start gaining an individual preference towards music as a whole until about 5th or 6th grade, when I discovered the Beatles. After that, it was a good, long time before I let any other music touch my ears, but I eventually moved on to classic rock, then heavy metal, then that dark, dark phase where I considered Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, and Insane Clown Posse to be the best music had to offer (I'd express my remorse except I know we've all been through some variant of that one time or another). From there, it was a natural but much-needed transition into Eminem (Recovery-era, though; it was an unfortunately long while before The Marshall Mathers or Slim Shady LP blipped on my radar). That led to an appreciation of popular music in general--which up until then I had unqualifiably hated--but particularly radio rap, and I was lucky enough that this transition happened when radio rap meant Blueprint 3-era Jay Z, not Pitbull. From there, I just slipped further and further down the rabbit hole to where I am now - Kanye West, Pusha T, Kendrick Lamar, Action Bronson, Drake, Earl Sweatshirt, and El-P of all people topping my list of 25 Most Played on iTunes, with another 3,000 song library of almost entirely rap that I've been building from the ground up for the past couple of years. 

 

It was this explosion of interest in hip hop culture that prompted me to write an overly-serious analysis of Juicy J's "Bandz a Make Her Dance" music video for my freshman year Writing 115 class, which went on not only to get a grade, but also to win a prize for excellence in first-year writing and to be published in a school journal. You read that right: an essay that explicitly includes the sentence "'You say no to ratchet pussy, Juicy J cain't'" won an award and was published by a University-sanctioned institution. I officially won college.

 

But to be honest, I thought that would be the high point of college level writing, and I basically checked out academia-wise until junior year, when my Writing Minor threw the "Repurposing Project" at me. See, Writing 220 is not your typical college writing course. You work with exactly one project over the course of the semester, which is to revisit a previous work of writing, repurpose it into a new project for a different audience, and finally, remediate that new project. Given its significance in my first two years of writing, I was drawn to revisit the Juicy J paper, bringing me to where I am now.

 

 

The Process

 

The original work, which you can find below under "Original", connected Juicy J's wealth and fame with the uniformity that so often plagues popular rap. I decided almost immediately that, based on its rap-related subject matter, I could repurpose the analytical essay (written primarily for an academic audience) into something more palatable to rap fans - a lyrical interpretation; that is, a rap song, with the lyrics and analysis thereof uploaded onto Rap Genius.

 

The process of this transformation was a difficult one, as I struggled for a while to find a way to adapt the theme of the original source - the drawbacks of fame and wealth in the music industry - into a cohesive product. My first draft was a horribly sporadic, offensively pretentious attempt at a few "conscious" rap lines that sounded more Immortal Technique than Mick Jenkins. I also briefly flirted with attempting an imitation Future/Young Thug sound a la that dumb Hopsin video, but I eventually decided that neither self-seriousness nor self-parody was the way to go, and that I needed to emphasize the "self", not whatever came after it. So I began brainstorming ways that I could mold the original source's thesis to fit my own experiences.

 

As it turns out, I'm neither famous nor a rapper, so I couldn't relate to those aspects of Juicy J's experience. But I did understand the wealth - as I mentioned before, as an upper middle class white boy from New England, I'm about as privileged as the average American comes. Because of that, I definitely cannot relate to the started-from-the-bottom narrative utilized in so many rap songs, but it did get me thinking about other pitfalls of wealth related to rap. Taking the perspective of someone who wanted to break into the music industry - which became closer to the truth as the project went on - I started pondering the irony of how a privileged white male who has an unfair leg-up in endless opportunities could still feel trapped if rapping was his passion. Sure, he could with ease become a politician, lawyer, or doctor, but in an industry dominated by come-up stories, would he bring anything new to the table?

 

This incredibly complex question - which must first be prefaced by an acknowledgment of white male privilege, lest the asker be accused of presenting some variant on the bullshit "maybe this means white men are LESS privileged then others" argument - oddly enough got me thinking about those first few rap lines that I'd written. I started to wonder what exactly that kid had meant by "the profit is the problem", so I tracked down his music. As it turned out, that line had made it into one of his songs, accompanied by a full four bars on that one theme that had stuck with me so long ago:

 

"Profit's the problem, the problem is I don't got it

Profit's the problem, the problem is I don't want it

Profit's the problem, the problem is I'm a prophet

Speak to God but right now we're not talking"

 

Hearing them again, the bars struck even deeper, so I decided to incorporate them into the track. This decision was not only one driven by my , but also one that runs deeply in the veins of hip hop genre conventions. Take for example the Wu Tang Clan's classic C.R.E.A.M. hook:

 

"Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M. get the money

Dolla dolla bills y'all"

 

This hook has been used liberally across the genre, from Drake's "Pound Cake" all the way to Fat Joe's "Ballin". It is but one of many examples of this in hip hop - songs are used to pay homage to their inspirations. And given the extent to which my song was inspired by that bar, I incorporated it, as well as the original four bars I wrote in response to it, into the intro, and ultimately the hook of my new track, changing only one thing. The new line now read:

 

"The profit's the problem, the problem is THAT I got it"

 

From there I expanded the song into a fully fledged track, complete with two verses, a hook, an intro, and an outro: "The Profit". I chose to direct my first verse at the "problems" with the "profit" - that in my position, money was a setback in the world of hip hop. To insure that the first verse would not be taken as an ignorant or selfish worldview, I posit myself as a "villain" throughout, as an acknowledgement that, more often than not in this world, privileged white men fill an antagonistic and oppressive role to the rest of society. The second verse focuses on examining that role. The different drafts of the song, as well as an annotated bibliography of the lyrics, can be found below under "Repurposed".

 

Finally, the project took me to the remediation phase - taking the repurposed project and expanding it to a new form of digital media. If this sounds wildly out of the bounds of a usual writing class to you, you're not the only one. It was a crazy experience, and you can read my posts on the writing blog here. But running with that crazy prompt, I took my project to the logical next level: turning a few lyrics published on Rap Genius into a fully-fledged song (and to a lesser extent, a video).

 

I have a working knowledge of Ableton, Final Cut, and recording software, but for the remediation phase I had to rely heavily on an enormously generous friend in helping me take rough cuts of everything and edit them into professional-sounding, CDQ music, so shouts out to my boy Nestor who helped me master the beat I composed as well as the song I recorded, and who also operated the camera during the video shoot. I'm certain it all would not be listenable or viewable without you.

 

I had big plans for the video to deeply reflect the themes of the track, but unfortunately those plans more or less fell by the wayside once I realized the immense amounts of time and effort it takes to create a song from the ground up. Having put the vast majority of my work into the music itself, and then having had to work through shot scheduling, storyboarding, and figuring out when to get the talent and crew together in one place at one time, I was left with about an evening's worth of shooting footage. We did the best we could, but keep in mind that 6 hours, in film time, is not a lot, and I was left with a bit of raw footage that needed to be edited into 4 minutes of coherency. At the latter, I may have failed, but at the very least the video became a visual component to augment the true remediation of the song itself. And to the eagle-eyed viewer, there are a few moments of strong subtext, particularly during the second verse... but it's on you to figure those out for yourself. The song itself is found below under "Remediated", and the video component plays automatically on the Home page.

 

It was a long, admittedly stressful creative process for me as I shifted gear from an academic to an artist over the course of a relatively short four month time period. But in the end, I've created a product that I never thought would see the light of day. For that I am thankful, and I hope that even if this project fails from an artistic standpoint, you, the reader, can see it for what it is and appreciate the genesis of one of the most unlikely rap careers ever. Without further ado, I present to you:

 

 

The PrOFIT