“Belly” Was More Than a Flop. It Exposed Rap’s Masculine Farce.

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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