“Rap as Meme: How We Think About Rap in 2016”

Let’s call this a confession. Not a confession of a guilty pleasure or an unpopular opinion. It’s something much worse: I have a favorite meme. Everyone on the Internet has one, but not everyone on the Internet wants to admit it. I’m here to admit that I have a favorite meme and tell you why it’s my favorite meme and analyze my favorite meme.

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If you don’t have a favorite meme, I’ve got one for you. If you don’t think you can have a favorite meme, give me a chance to sell you.

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The meme I want to talk about is a rap meme, something so prevalent on certain parts of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook that it’s become hard to avoid, one of those clever little images that pops up every hour on the timeline poking fun at an artist or a new album or, at its most acerbic, white rap fan like me. But my favorite meme is more inclusive and honest and, in its own way, telling.

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Pardon me for overthinking something on social media. Someone has to do it.

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My favorite meme is of the brick wall variety. It comes from a template that plays on a popular stock image that shows a young man, eyes wide in a mix of shock and frustration, hands thrown in the air in annoyance and surrender, mouth agape, befuddled. He stands in front of a brick wall, addressing it with those hands and that mouth and those stunned eyes, ready to abandon the argument he seems to be having with the dark red barrier of bricks in front of him. It’s a meme that started out as something generic, ripe for jokes about conversations with intractable parents, intolerable significant others, and supporters of an inimical political position. Recently, however, its usage has been sharpened as it has moved from Meme Twitter to Rap Twitter and Black Twitter, two overlapping regions that are simultaneously each their own online sovereignties.

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If you’re on Rap Twitter or Black Twitter, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not, you’re going to have to trust that they are very, very real places worth paying attention to, even if you don’t think you fit the demographics.

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Without Rap Twitter and Black Twitter, the brick wall meme genre would be stuck, static and unevolved, in its former state. Passed through the trials of Rap Twitter, it is now a valuable tool for visually expressing how stubborn and simple your counterpart in an online rap argument is. If that doesn’t sound like a strong case for a valuable tool, just hold on. The bets version of this meme is successfully plain and clean. It bears that stock image, man dumbfounded in front of wall, on its lower half, with white space above for black text that reads something like this: “Trying to convince the Internet you can like Uzi, Kodak, Drake, and Cole at the same time.”

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If you find it hard to believe that someone could feel strongly about this combination of photo and sentence on the Internet, hold on for one more paragraph.

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This meme is really a call for inclusion in rap, and end to the rapidly expanding trend of animosity between fans of lyricists and fans of Southern trappers, between sing-song pop rap and grittier West Coast music, between the rock and punk and trap-influence new generation and the artists deriving their sound from the old guard. For many, to be a fan of rap in 2016 would be to choose between “Uzi, Kodak, Drake and Cole.” A purist can only buy new releases from one of those artists; to support more than one would be the first step on the dark and terrifying road of selling out. “Uzi” is Lil Uzi Vert, a green-dreadlocked Philadelphia native and hyperactive performer who synthesizes rapid flows and a punk-pop sound into what has been called a “catchy melodic soup.” “Kodak” is Kodak black, a currently incarcerated nineteen year old from outside Miami whose unrefined style and classic rag-to-riches rap tale has made him a rallying cry for fans who favor youth and raw delivery and personality and narrative over perfect musicality or complexity. Drake is the mononym megastar, the worldwide sensation who built his career on technical and lyrical skill but also his slowed down pop ballads that blurred the line between rapping and singing. “Cole” is J Cole, the rap snob’s choice, an introverted and intellectual North Carolina native whose last album went double platinum without a single feature or particularly noisy single.

To like all four of these artists is rap social suicide. The argument goes that no fan with any taste or sophistication could love J Cole’s poetic calls for self-love in “Love Yourz” and his deeply autobiographical tales of lost virginity in “Wet Dreamz” and still possess the mental capacity to blast Kodak Black’s “Skrt” or “Vibin in This Bih” when they come on the radio. It would take an especially uncultured listener to respect Drake’s crooning vocals in “Controlla,” “Marvin’s Room” and “Too Good” and still want to celebrate as Uzi jumps around stage, genuinely screaming the choppy “All My Chains” or the irresistible “Baby Are You Home.”

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I’m not trying to tell you that the meme has solved rap arguments for us, and I’m not going to tell you you can’t make an argument against each of these rappers that my precious meme happens to mention. I could spend an hour on why J Cole is vastly overrated and should stop making his fans spend $10 on an album so he can complain for an hour and a half. I could tell you why I would trade all of those artists for Future and why if you have me five songs to play on a desert island for eternity, they would all be from Dirty Sprite 2. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that rap fans are in a fragmented world, where artists are dug into boxes and their fans are pitted against each other just to yell at each other in all caps on Twitter. A world of where on bad Hot New Hip Hop rating can condemn a song and a world where literal “One Listen Reviews” and a stream of “Classic or Trash” tweets determine and album’s sales and its legacy. A world so absurd that someone could have a favorite rap meme. I’m just asking you to put yourself in the meme. Ask yourself if it’s better to be the man or the wall. To ask yourself if it’s worth dismissing “LUV is Rage,” one of the happiest mixtapes of the decade or “Lil Big Pac,” one of the brashest and most raw records of the year just because they don’t fit into a certain category. Don’t be the brick wall.