In 2011 I released my solo debut album, Lost Summer.
Like a lot of things I did in 2011, there are lyrics I cringe at, when reminded of them in 2021.
And so, I would like to take this moment to personally apologize to all my friends for my 20s, and to thank those who stuck with me.
For those who were not my friend, I will now share with you a small bit of what that experience was like (lucky you!) via the worst lyrics from my debut album.
Not, “this metaphor is kind of weak” worst, but “you’re an idiot conflating the cool detachment you admired in rap, with misogyny”. “Cool detachment often overlapping with misogyny” being one of Hip Hop’s most problematic exports.
Now, to be clear, there are bad lyrics on every track of my first album, but there are the worst of the worst.
Trigger warning: I will use the original language of my lyrics when quoting the lyric, and when referencing it for the first time, so as to not erase or diminish my words. After that I will use asterisks to cover that word, as it gets excessive to use triggering words over and over, even when just for reference purposes.
#1
“Stupid White bitch want me to rhyme at the mall”.
Song, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”
First of all, I have to apologize. I am truly sorry for referring to women, to any one woman, as a “bitch”. Unequivocally, I apologize. To the world, to anyone who listened, to anyone who was hurt by hearing it, I am sorry.
Some advice to rappers and something that applies to almost every lyric to follow: if you find yourself writing about something you don’t do, stop.
Be like Drake – imply that someone around “might fuck around and catch a body like that” (“Headlines“) or that “to be real, man, I never did one crime” (“Lemon Pepper Freestyle“).
And I don’t mean you can’t rap about street shit, if that’s the life you’re familiar with. I don’t even mean you can’t embellish. If you are still conveying who you truly are, the details are there for effect.
But if you are not conveying who you really are, a lie can be as small as a single word.
One thing I have never done is refer to women as “bitches” or call a woman a “bitch”. But I chose to use that language on something that was BEING RECORDED.
I remember debating whether to write “girl” instead of the b perjorative here, but in this case, I scapegoated my music, and Hip Hop as a whole, for my own shortcomings.
My “mid-20s, White guy who is angry at relationships” self-imposed identity would have none of taking the “easy way out” by not saying something terrible.
What was actually an intense self-anger, bordering on self-hatred, was directed at women and relationships. More specifically, I resented the value we as a society place on being in a relationship. (Or maybe more accurately, I resented the amount I equated my own self-worth with being in a relationship).
If you were wondering what rhyming “at the mall” has to do with anything – this line was in reference to another self-imposed situation.
In my early 20s, if I was in a social situation with new people, a friend would mention I rap, and then, often, some person – almost always a young White woman – would ask me to rap.
First of all, don’t do this.
It’s like asking a comedian to tell you a joke. If that doesn’t sound weird to you, it’s like asking a nurse to check this weird bruise you have.
If that doesn’t sound rude to you, well then, now you know: do not ask people to perform for you. They do that thing for a living and you are not only putting them on the spot, but you are demanding they do their day job, in their off time, FOR FREE.
But more importantly than unpaid labor concerns, my unwillingness to rap should’ve been a sign that maybe, just maybe, rapping wasn’t for me.
Oh? You’re upset because a young woman – the gender you’re attracted to – is asking you to display your talents to them?
If you’re too shy to rap on-demand you might not have the charisma and outgoing nature required of a rapper. If you’re too shy to rap to a YOUNG WOMAN ASKING YOU TO RAP FOR THEM then you absolutely do not have what it takes.
An Aside…for the Word B****
For anyone who might think artists should never apologize for their work, or for anyone who thinks the language I used is nothing to apologize for, I want to make clear that I am not anti-cursing, in any sense.
The problem with a man using the word b**** is much more complex than most other swear words.
When a man calls a woman a b****, or even refers to women offhandedly as such, there is no equivalent response. There is no word a woman could use to defend herself that is on par with a man calling a woman a b****.
A woman can respond with hurtful things, absolutely. Very hurtful things.
But the most hurtful things a woman can say to a man is to compare him to a woman.
P****, B****, F****** – are arguably some of the worst things you can call a man.
One of them is literally another word for “vagina”, one is the word in question – historically used to degrade and oppress women – and the third is a derogatory slur meant to insult a man who acts too feminine.
Our insults and our compliments are built on our social values, and our patriarchy devalues women so intensely they don’t even have words to insult men that don’t also insult women.
#2
“Bone these Silverstone bitches and leave em Clueless”
Song, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”
Jesus christ.
First of all, no, I didn’t.
Second, see the above response to lyric #1.
Third, when trying to find rhymes within rhymes, it’s easy to get carried away.
I used “bone” because it rhymed with Silverstone, but never actually used that term in my day-to-day language.
“Hey guys, going over to my girlfriend’s house to bone. See you guys later”. No. I never said that, for more reasons than one.
The lyric is clever, as in, “something in the vain of wit”, not as in, “something that is actually, successfully clever”. The small payoff of internal rhyme and weak braggadocio is not worth throwing an entire gender – half the earth – under the bus.
Since writing these lyrics, I’ve found that if you stick to your own values and refuse to take the easy way out when creating, you will come up with better, at least more original, material. It will take longer and probably be more difficult, but you will probably come up with something better than “bone these Silverstone b***** and leave em Clueless”.
If I haven’t mentioned, the theme of this album should be “sensitive guy tries too hard to pretend he doesn’t care”.
In re-listening to this album I can hear my unabashed ripoff of Cudi’s cool dettachment (to be clear, please do not blame Kid Cudi for any of my mess) a la lines like, “soaring past the moon, a super-duper lonely guy”.
Cudi makes loneliness cool, I made it super cringey.
Like this next lyric.
#3
“Most these dudes in relationships, get lame quick”.
Song, “Bar Close”
Damn, this essay is hard to write. But it should be.
I really like the chorus on this track, so it’s pretty disappointing to hear the too-harsh verses now.
In both vocal tone and lyric content, the verses should’ve been smoother, more minimalist. The verses should’ve matched the feeling of the chorus: going out and having a good time, maybe throw in some bars, keep it light but with some wordplay.
Listening to Cudi now, it’s easier to see where I went wrong.
When Cudi says,
Girls that I dated, it’s okay, I am not mad, yo
“The Prayer”
Unless you stabbed me in the heart, no love ho
He’s first saying he’s above it – “I am not mad” – which is cool. Someone still has feelings for you and you don’t have feelings for them, is cool, or cold, emotionally.
When Cudi follows that up with his contradictory next line, “no love ho”, I probably used this to rationalize my own verbiage, something along the lines of, “if the emotional Cudi can say ‘ho’, why can’t I write ‘b****’?”
If the Cudster can say “you stabbed me in the heart” why can’t I say, “dudes in relationship get lame quick”?
When I look back at it, I am reminded that I often was not the best at ribbing. I was sensitive, and sensitive about the fact that I was sensitive. Especially back then, I was the guy who takes it too seriously or says something too intense that ruins the whole mood of jovial shit-talking that groups of young men often use as a form of bonding (which we don’t have time to unpack here).
What I should’ve noticed is that the power of these lines is in their contradiction: a young man say’s he’s not mad a woman, then shows exactly how much he really is.
I should’ve also noticed that these lyrics are not really that powerful of lyrics to begin with – much less to model my own writing after.
#4
“When I hurt you girl, it won’t be on purpose”
Song, “Emma”
The entire tone of this song is exhausting. A Cudi – with his low, laid back delivery – could get away with a line along the lines of, “I’m self-destructive in relationships”.
I can see what I was going for here.
Again, in the vain of being clever instead of honest, in an effort to position myself as cool instead of what I was (filled with social anxiety), I was trying to say something along the lines of what Michael Scott was trying to say, when Michael Scott was trying to play Santa Claus.
“Fuck what yall feel” says the rapper very concerned with everything anyone might feel in reaction to him or his music.
“I know it’s at the point you’re probably catching feelings” is like, ok for a line here or there, but the theme of an entire song?
If someone is into you, it’s really cool to hold that against them.
Looking back I was trying, in a transparently desperate manner, to invert the internal narrative of my relationships in which I was – and you’ll never believe this – more often than not, the one getting broken up with.
Or, perhaps, the “getting dumped” narrative was one I told myself because – and you’ll never believe this – we don’t remember as intensely the times when we reject the romantic advances of others, as we do the times we’ve been rejected.
The flow on this song was supposed to be referential of an old school, 80s flow, if anyone listened and was wondering, but where the flow tried too hard, the lyrics also, doth protested too much.
#5
“We’ll just keep fucking with each other’s head”
Song: “Best I Never Had”
An unrequieted love song in Hip Hop is a good idea. But with music and art you either go all the way or you don’t really go anywhere.
Telling your story when you want, and filling in the rest with genre generalities whenever you feel yourself coming uncomfortably close to the truth results, as the case with “Best I Never Had”, results in the worst of both: a nothing soup.
For once, maybe the only time on this album, I was trying to summarize my actual experience of failed relationships, but filtered it through this whole “My Boo” or “Dilemma” filter which didn’t work. (If you don’t remember, “My Boo” is not about a couple in love, but like most Usher songs, about people cheating. Same with “Dilemma” which at least owes up to its premise in its title.)
The line before the one quoted above is “maybe one day we’ll end up in each other’s bed” which, if I’m trying to tell a love story, minimizes the love part, and “we’ll just keep fucking with each other’s head” stands in for all the wannabe-toxic tropes I relied on in “Best I Never Had” – toxic tropes being a tone that the music, by the way, in no way calls for.
The result of a lack of confidence in telling the totality of ones story is a filling in of the gaps with empty platitudes, patching the holes in your self-worth with pieces of pre-tested identity, themselves a performative show that sub-cultures put on for themselves.
Do I think all of the cast of the Jersey Shore, is that dude? No.
I think some of the Jersey Shore are true Jersey bros, but I think some of the cast of Jersey Shore would dress differently if they had grown up in Orange County. In that way, the spiky, gelled hair, or the oversized muscles, the tanning-bed-tan are all pieces of sub-culture that many would-be Jersey Shore-ites put on to patch in the parts of themselves they are unsure, or unaware of.
In that way I picked up the pieces of Hip Hop that I admired, that I wanted to be true about myself, and used them as a shield.
That’s one way to survive.
But shielding yourself, or worse, filling in the unexamined parts of yourselves with a culture you reduce to its affectations, is no way to create art.
What Would I Change?
I in no way mean to equivocate any of my language by writing this, but to investigate my motives and the results of those motives, with the clarity that time has given me: on my own psyche, on the self-narrative I tell myself now, and on the self-narrative I remember investing in back then.
None of this is to takeaway from the music, the instrumentals of the album. None of this is to take away from all the work people put into make this music sound as good as it did. None of this is to take away the accomplishment of creating something so ambitious as a 10-track solo Hip Hop album. I have tremendous pride in the high points of my lyrics, and in many of my musical choices. None of this is to take away anything from anyone who’s enjoyed this music, as I know I did when I made it.
By looking back on my worst lyrics – the times when my words reduced others, as well as myself – I hope I can make amends for any damage I may have done. Damage done directly or, if no one ever listened to a single lyric, just the indirect damage of adding more toxic, unexamined bullshit into a universe already full of it.
If I had to go back now and tell myself anything it would be:
You learned to rap, you spent a lot of time on that. You did what you thought was the scariest part: rapping as a White boy. Now you have to do the actual scariest part, the part that I know you are, deep down, truly afraid of, the part you are so afraid of you won’t even acknowledge: you have to tell your truth. The truth is you are not ok with a lot of the things you think you are, these lyrics are just one example. Real pain is caused by words, and if that isn’t enough, anger is fueled and dehumanization is rationalized with language. Anger and dehumanization lead to real violence, and that violence is most often the strong hurting those less powerful.
A letter to my younger self
I think I made my final album as an attempt to right some of my lyrical wrongs. To create Hip Hop that came as close as I could to giving back to Hip Hop something worthy of what it had given me. Not that I could give to Hip Hop as much as it gave to me, I would think that’s reserved for only the most successful artists, but with The Jordy Skywalker Project I think I put the most accurate reflection of my true self in the form of a Hip Hop album, as I possibly could.
Earlier in my career, I didn’t have the confidence to create to my fullest potential and so I took shortcuts that looked appealing.
This was done, in many cases, at the expense of women. An easy, selfish out.