“Belly” Was More Than a Flop. It Exposed Rap’s Masculine Farce.
The recipe for a 1990s thug rapper was underbaked but revealing.
There’s a really simple recipe for making a 1990s thug rapper. The bones and broth of that recipe made lots of people lots of millions. It’s the same recipe for making a shitty American man today, just stripped down.
The making of a man is in lust. Lust for money. Lust for power over other men. Lust for territory, inside and outside the confines of a woman’s slit. Lust for numbness, the searing cherry tip of an endlessly lit blunt.
Tommy, played by DMX at his supernova brightest, may be the most confused, terrified protagonist in Black cinema. Forget the acting — and Nas would be lucky if we could all yeet that performance into the clouds — Earl Simmons strutted that screen like a pulsing knot of proto-masculine pain. His muscles ever tense, DMX could pop raw corn between clenched jaws.
The unmaking of a man is in indecision, the blind adherence to a macho whatever he wasn’t meant to continue, loyalty to a street code he never had jurisdiction over. The rules, if observed, will eventually kill you and your homeboys.
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Your Black Aunties Will Live Forever
We have house and home; we have music and dance. We had those uncles who are now gone for long enough to know they would’ve tapped a foot to this tune.
I’m in the armpit of summer so the cookouts smoke a-plenty — three weekends straight of graduations and anniversaries. Love and country and a Knicks championship.
I can celebrate more life by just living. I imagine my kin dearly, dollar-winin’ as our days get long and then short again. I see Brooklyn sunrises ruing the feeling that our overall day count also shortened a little.
A while ago, I was in Rahway, New Jersey with my girlfriend’s family. They’re a proud Dominican bunch with jet-fueled Spanish and thick-curled grandmothers. A mean margarita pitcher. Playful jabs with warmth wrapped around.
“I haven’t seen you in forever, mi amor. You got thick! Don’t tell me you hiding a baby under there!”
Then to me: “You know I’m the one who taught her to dress. Don’t let them tell you any different.”
A younger cousin was graduating high school. She calls them all ‘the baby.’ The baby just started sophomore year of college. That baby is driving down from D.C. to finish her med school program. The baby got married and they’re talking about having a baby!
I keep saying these ain’t babies you’re talking about and she resists.
“Everyone under 30 with no kids is a baby,” she says to me.
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The World Cup Keeps Reminding Me My Father’s Gone
If you are new to writing memoirs, there are terrific father-themed ones. Abusive, absentee, and delusional ones. I have the blessing of maybe covering all three in my book.
It’s hard for me not to get choked up when I hear the Daddy stories of this World Cup. If you are new to writing memoirs, there are terrific father-themed ones. Abusive daddies. Absentee daddies. Delusional daddies. I have the blessing of maybe covering all three in the book I’m working on about my own father.
Erling Haaland, I learned, is a player for Norway who’s built like a machine. But like me, he has a traceable human father. Unlike me, he has a father who raised him and passed along his sport. I so wish I had become a fan of The Beautiful Game when I was young, especially under the guidance of my dad, who truly loved footie. They called him “Skip” in Jamaica and I imagine his modest, lithe body, with shoulders swinging and legs crossing over, skipping to a dub beat as he struck the ball over and around opponents.
I can’t tell you much about soccer, but I know there are standout strikers like Haaland. His combination of power, stature, speed, and cunning betray his boyishness, his elation at tossing rivals down like rag dolls, at chewing up patches of grass in his cleats, at mauling the net with goal after goal. When I see him, I know there must’ve been Norse boatmen who had bones like steel and crashed the shores ready to take your land and your women. A bunch of beasts.
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The Knicks Title Opened The Floodgates
There are those who’ll tell you magic doesn’t exist. It’s the opposite. You have to reach the far edge of life, cliffhanging, roiling in apathy and sorrow to realize that faith is the only deliverance.
The Knickerbockers delivered an entire city, bred and masted at the maw of hell, to a single ecstatic reality: no hope is too silly. No dream will flourish unwritten. With 12 minute stretches of basketball, a game where the turns of a literal sphere dictate your pulse, the New York Knicks purged an entire city’s trauma.
Your world can exist in a bounce.
Then they won the championship. I was with my boys, from post-college, from the smoke-filled rooms, from the days where some left their dreams hanging just as thick as the weed in the air. We hugged and we cried and we FaceTimed. One of my best friends has two sons who now love basketball because they watch their dad break down the game and all the life to be learned from it. The thought alone tightens my rib cage around my swelling heart and produces the flood.
This year’s been really hard. My father died and — because of our difficult relationship— I refused to ID his body. The brutal mist of funeral home formaldehyde almost sucked my pupils out of their sockets as I signed his death certificate. Then I was laid off from my job for no reason. I had to accept my reality, but not lose my spirit in the agonies of a professional game.
I wrote. I wept. I exercised. In private.
But sometimes neither life nor fantasy is enough. My love for the Knicks occupies that indefinable space between improbable imaginary wins and heavy, cold stuck-ness.
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To LeBron And Black Boys Who Hate Where They From
Turning your back on home is the last step.
It’s 7th grade in the 90s, and I don’t care what nobody say, 7th grade in the 90s was lit even if you were a short and fat and ugly Black boy from Ocean Avenue. I have a tapered fade that’s too low on the sides. The exposed scalp has razor bumps raised in the back of a tragic bowl cut.
I live in a 1-bedroom apartment and it’s my birthday during my first year at prep school. The white kids get a car service home while I only hear the crackle of my concierge if the train gets stuck between Times Square and 72nd Street.
Not to say I’m broken, but I believe, deep down, I’m not worth much if I don’t go to this school and get these grades — which by this time are starting to slip.
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