THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Diss-topia: Beef as interdiscursive cultural

policing in American Hiphop

By

Christian Free

July 2016

A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts degree in the

Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences

Faculty Advisor: Michael Silverstein

Preceptor: William Feeney

Contents

ONE MORE TIME – WHAT’S BEEF? ..................................................................................................... 1

DISSES AND BEEFS AS SPEECH ACTS AND SPEECH GENRES ..................................................... 6

THE SIGNIFYIN(G) DISS – THE DISS AS SPEECH ACT AND SPEECH GENRE ............................................................ 6 (RITUAL) VERBAL DUELING, DISPUTE GENRES AND BEEF AS A HIPHOP MUSICAL GENRE SUI GENERIS ............ 12

DISS TRACKS AND RAP BEEF AS CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN (MEDIATIZED) HIPHOP 16

BREAKING DOWN THE TOP DISSES ................................................................................................. 20

SIGNIFYIN(G) ON NAMES ........................................................................................................................................ 22 SIGNIFYIN(G) ON IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY .................................................................................................. 23

THE CENTRALITY OF INTERDISCURSIVITY IN THE BEEF TRADITION ............................... 26

THE BRIDGE WARS - EXPOSING THE CORE VALUES OF A COALESCING CULTURE IN LOCAL RAP PRACTICES .... 26 THE EAST COAST – WEST COAST (ECWC) RIVALRY – BEEF IN THE GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT ................................ 33

Seeking Citational Fuel – imagined rivalries amplified by the mass media. .................................................... 34 LEGACY OF THE BRIDGE WARS AND THE ECWC RIVALRIES .............................................................................. 36

THE ART OF THE DISS: DISCOURSE-LEVEL SIGNIFYIN(G) IN A “CHILDREN’S STORY” . 37

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 47

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 48

APPENDIX A .............................................................................................................................................. 51

APPENDIX B .............................................................................................................................................. 52

1

One More Time – What’s Beef? You walk around showing off your body ‘cause it sells

Plus to avoid the fact that you ain't got skills

Mad at me ‘cause I kick that shit real niggas feel

While 99% of your fans wear high heels

From Ice-T to Kool Moe Dee to Jay-Z

Now you want to fuck with me? You must be crazy

(Canibus, “Second Round K.O.”, 1998) [Complex List #7]

The tension of competitive rivalries is often a key ingredient in the creation of art and the

production of discourses. This is certainly the case in Hiphop, a cultural system based

fundamentally in artistic practices and poetic expression, which has emerged over the last four

decades as a powerful mediator of youth social identity in the United States. Pennycook (2007)

argues in fact that the emergence of global Hiphop communities has driven the global spread of

authenticity as a transnational / transcultural value. Authenticity and other values are at the

center of how many rivalries emerge and play out among Hiphop artists, and form the basis of a

pervasive category of semiotic acts commonly referred to as disses. A diss is a form of insult and

rejection commonly employed by Hiphop artists, especially rappers (MCs), to highlight some

issue one claims to have with another person or institution, typically another artist. The example

above from novice MC Canibus chastises veteran rapper LL Cool J for his projected celebrity

image, declining lyrical skills and unwarranted dissing of fellow MCs.

Artists who diss seek to engage in dialogue with their targets to answer for their alleged

transgression(s), thus opening up a discourse space about/around the conflict at hand. This space

is known as a beef. Beefs are characterized by sustained dissing and other forms of subversion1

between feuding interactants in a fluid, scalable participatory frame. The most iconic form of

beef is a back-and-forth exchange of diss tracks, or full rap songs purposed as a cotextual

1 The relationship between dissing and other speech phenomena variously described as “talking shit”, “throwing shade”,

“reading”, “jive talking”, “starting up”, etc. remains unclear as far as I can tell, though they are commonly held as more-or-less

sense-synonymous.

2

assemblage of various types of disses. Beefs can and do emerge at every level of representation

and scale of interaction, from young rival MCs in the same neighborhood fighting in their street

mixtapes, to institutionalized collectives of superstar MCs residing on opposite geographic coasts

fighting at the highest level of mass mediatized productions in the rap music industry.

A popular and highly productive2 rhetorical question which has taken up mantra-like

status for many artists and fans is “What’s Beef?”, upon which countless MCs in particular have

poetically reflected over the decades. The opening commentary of the author of Complex

Magazine’s “The 50 Best Hip-Hop Diss Songs”, a corpus under analysis in this paper, begins

with an affirmation of the ubiquity of beef throughout the entire history of the culture:

What's beef? Is it when your mom ain't safe up in the street? Or is it actually the fifth element of hip-hop? Dating all of

the way back to when Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang borrowed Grandmaster Caz's rhyme book and used his

lyrics without credit on "Rapper's Delight," MCs have been feuding on and off wax for years.

This paper will argue that rap beefs are complex discursive-interactional spaces that emerge

when MCs seek to announce, manage and resolve their conflicts in a manner consistent with /

normalized by Hiphop values. As such they constitute a distinct, highly dialogic genre of

communication within Hiphop culture, and as with all communicative genres in Hiphop they are

constituted in large part by forms and practices inherited from the African American literary and

discursive tradition, such as signifyin(g) and ritual verbal dueling. It will synthesize and deploy

modern arguments of genre as being constructed in-and-through the production of discourse, and

understood relationally through and stabilized by intertextuality (more generally,

interdiscursivity), which enables a full hermeneutic understanding of the rap lyrics3 themselves.

These interdiscursivities also expose the cultural values and normativities which underpin their

production (Bauman, 1999; Briggs & Bauman, 1992; Miller, 1984; Sparling, 2008 and others).

2 In the sense of thematically motivating many raps and popular discourses 3 That is, the intertextualities contribute to the “total semiotic fact” of the rap track

3

The lyrical and musical text strategies for the poetic (de)construction of self/others articulate the

values of Hiphop culture, very often as they relate to community-derived notions of originality,

authenticity and reverence for cultural elders.

Additionally, it is a strong imperative of anyone who would claim to be Hiphop to call

out transgressive behavior wherever and whenever it is observed – riffing on Allen Kay’s now

legendary advertising slogan in the 90s for the New York MTA “If You See Something, Say

Something”. In Hiphop the sentiment is embodied in the iconic mantra “Keep It Real”, which

has always been both a reflexive personal mandate and a social behavioral directive. Very often

personal transgressions are cast as cultural transgressions as a beef “cooks” (i.e. unfolds over

socio-space-time), knowing that community members bestow special praise and credit upon

those who take it upon themselves to police against violators of community and cultural

standards. This has strong implications for how beefs can be taken up, even sparked or fabricated

entirely, by individuals and institutions who would seek to capitalize economically or

symbolically on the way MCs can (otherwise) peacefully adjudicate their conflicts. This paper

can only briefly touch on these significant epiphenomena, and instead will focus on the first

order utility of beef as Hiphop’s canonical genre of expressing disapprobation and resolving

personal conflicts, and leave much of what might be called the “business of beef” to future

scholarship.

However, because Hiphop is fundamentally grounded in competitive artistic expression,

this ethical-regulative function of disses/beef is inextricably connected to the success of

performative acts within the context of the feud. The communicative structures of beef are

minimally and inherently duplex – critiques and disapprobations are enabled and given power

only by-and-through demonstrations of poetic virtuosity. Combatants must demonstrate their

4

ethical superiority through superior aesthetic prowess in language, musicality, and demonstration

of worldly knowledge. In particular, the abilities to diss indirectly (commonly referred to in

Hiphop as subliminal dissing) and effectively chain-in congruent (viz. appropriate-to and

effective-in context) sociohistorical discourses in innovative ways, all while rhyming as

impressively as possible. Such discourses can be both internal to Hiphop, such as those of earlier

diss tracks / beefs4, as well as external, such as those about broader popular culture and the

African American literary tradition. The point is that in constructing elaborate interdiscursivities,

which trope both on denotational text and the pragmatics of language usage, artists invoke a

dialectic socio-semiotic process within the dialogic context of a rivalry – aesthetic evaluation and

moral evaluation merge into opposite sides of the same coin. The result is that the superior poet

will most often, though not always, be viewed as the moral superior and victor in the ongoing

feud.

I will begin by grounding disses and beefs in speech act-theoretic and speech genre-

theoretic terms, addressing what I see as a significant lacuna in the scholarship on Hiphop

language practices. I will describe their sociocultural antecedents and counterparts in literary

scholarship – particularly the practice of and those constituted by signifyin(g)5 in the African

American discursive tradition. Dissing will be argued to be a primary genre of utterance in

Hiphop, and beefing a secondary (complex) genre that emerges from sustained dialogic dissing. I

will also consider how MCs take up and tool these discursive practices in-and-through their

artistic practice and interaction rituals, such as the freestyle battle cipher, and how entering into a

4 Anecdotally, many in the Hiphop Nation feel that particular artists and texts have achieved a sort of apotheosis in Hiphop

cosmology, and their invocation in rap speaks to a sacred/profane distinction, as evidenced in everyday metapragmatic discourse

and reflections. This paper will only tangentially touch on this idea but I believe this to be a very ripe area for future scholarship. 5 In this paper I will adhere to the convention of writing signifyin(g) as such, given its popularity among many writers on the

subject, and the fact that this spelling itself is an act of signifyin(g).

5

beef discursively shifts how feuding MCs (can/should/must) discursively interact with each other

to resolve their conflicts. I will also discuss the consequences of projecting these practices onto

mass mediatized communication chains6 -- such practices have become progressively more

fractal and socio-spatiotemporally discontinuous in their particular uptake formations as new

media formats and technologies, such as Twitter, have emerged and largely rendered older

forms, such as cassette tapes, obsolete. (Agha, 2011)

As supporting evidence for the thesis that disses and beefs are Hiphop’s generic modes of

cultural disapprobation, I will explore areal semiotic tendencies across a corpus of American rap

texts, produced across many different geographies and historical contexts. The contents of the

“Top 50 Diss Tracks of All Time” list published by Complex Magazine in 20157 provide

evidence of these two genres’ stability/well-formedness via the articulation of cultural values and

transgressions against them. I will also closely examine the historical evolution of two particular

beefs, the Bridge Wars of the mid 1980’s and the East Coast – West Coast beef of the mid

1990’s, and their constituent diss tracks which illustrate the centrality of reflexive

interdiscursivity in constituting the genre of beef, and the creative ways MCs will poetically

chain other texts and encounters into their ongoing feuds. Along with the original rap texts I will

take up some of the metadiscursive commentary relating to these cultural textual achievements

culled from artist/participant interviews and fellow Hiphop scholars. Lastly I will closely analyze

a single track, tracing how it achieves a very complex transformation of experience from a

classic Hiphop cautionary fable into a subliminal diss aimed at the most powerful mogul in the

rap business at the time. This track and the dozens of others like it exemplify the creative lengths

6 E.g. an extremely common chain in the pre-CD era was the radio-mixtape chain, where MCs would record their tracks (in or out

of a studio), deliver these originals/masters to radio DJs who (might) broadcast them to their audiences, some members of whom

(might) record the radio onto a cassette tape and circulate this new “mixtape”. 7 http://www.complex.com/music/2015/05/the-50-best-hip-hop-diss-songs/

6

MCs are able and willing to go to in order to highlight their concerns for protecting and policing

Hiphop culture.

Disses and Beefs as Speech Acts and Speech Genres

The Signifyin(g) Diss – The Diss as Speech Act and Speech Genre

When considered as a type of speech act, a prototypical diss is a targeted illocutionary act

of insult and disapprobation whose perlocutionary strength (intensity) is directly tied to its

aesthetic reception by the target and the bystanding audience of all other hearers. Consider the

following diss against MC Eiht by DJ Quik, troping on his target’s name and how it reflects on

his gang (set) affiliation:

Tell me why you act so scary

Givin your set a bad name wit your misspelled name

E-I-H-T, now should I continue

Yeah you left out the G cause the G ain't in you

(DJ Quik, “Dollaz + Sense”, 1995) [Complex List #15]

There appear to be two felicity conditions for a diss to be taken up and interpreted as a diss,

rather than just a more generic act of insult8. First, the target must be (or become) self-aware, that

is, they must come to think they are a target; and second, there must be at least one additional

party to the interaction, a ratified participant in Goffmanian terms (1981 and elsewhere), that can

act as a verifier, or witness, for a diss to be counted as such. The first condition is crucial to note

because, while many disses directly identify their intended target, as will be discussed shortly

many do not, and may only indirectly allude to or hint at a possible target to various degrees.

This possibility for indirection makes the acts of (non)reference itself a type of speech act (cf.

Searle (1969). Naming names, as it were, has different illocutionary and perlocutionary

intentions than does withholding them or baiting for possible interpretations. The result is that

many beefs are/have been instantiated by artists who inferred subliminal disses in the lyrics of

8Irvine (1992) was perhaps the first to assert the (theoretical) extreme generality of insult behaviors, which are entirely

determined in context, never purely propositional statements, but always “communicative effects constructed in interaction” (11)

7

another artist and choose to react as if a direct diss had been made on them, sensing a subversive

conversational or conventional implicature wrapped inside a outwardly ambiguous or neutral

proposition (Grice, 1975).

The second condition is just as essential because disses are always bilateral face-

threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987), which in the most basic case (viz. direct disses) are

performed baldly, without redress, and as such pose a threat not only to the diss target, but also

the diss source. The source of the diss must necessarily put their own face in potential jeopardy,

and do so on the record (literally and figurative)9, when committing themselves to dissing

another. Without an interactional verifier, there is no possibility for punishing one who is judged

(by the target) to have made unfair or unfounded critiques or “read” invalid implicatures in the

utterances of another. The etymological semantics of the deverbal noun diss itself, i.e. [an act of]

disrespect, also becomes somewhat incoherent without some sort of witness – can there be

disrespect in a discursive universe with only two members? There can certainly be insults

exchanged in private interactions, but I would argue one can only dis(respect) when a fellow

community member is physically or virtually present (or later recruited to a verification role) and

can verify that the diss content, if held to be true, would violate shared community standards

governing respectable behavior. Thus one must be prepared to gamble with one’s ceremonial self

as it were (Goffman, 1982, p. 91) when dissing another community member, and some audience

must accept and validate the bet placed.

Given these requirements of target self-identification and verifiability, disses should be

distinguished from pure insults and condemnations. They are in fact a subset, or perhaps

9 This pun would be much stronger if vinyl records still were as widely circulated as they used to be.

8

derivative, of the category of insults10, and as such are interactional achievements which are

themselves predicated on other achievements as well as the participatory frame of the

communicative event. When empirically analyzing the nature of Hiphop disses, the requirement

of target self-identification tends to be of significantly more interest and consequence than the

requirement for an interactional verifier11, due to the pervasive and myriad practices of

indirection and their evolution over the course of Hiphop’s history (Morgan, 2001, 2010).

Directionality is an extremely significant parameter in the African American literary-discursive

genealogy, from which rap music inherits its communicative genre norms.

Not all disses are made directly, baldly, without redress. In fact, in most African

American discursive practices insults and disses are often valorized for how indirectly they can

be formulated (implied), while still achieving their desired interactional (perlocutionary)

entailments. That is to say, increasing positive value is ascribed to wider and wider gaps between

baseline denotational textuality and the conceivable range of connotative meanings variously

signified by the text, which are appropriate-to and effective-within that context (Silverstein,

2003). As just mentioned, structural forms and pragmatics of the language of Hiphop culture12

are long understood to be rooted strongly in African American discursive traditions and

vernaculars (Alim, 2006; Morgan, 2001, 2002; Richardson, 2007; Smitherman, 1997 and many

others). As such, the Hiphop Nation has inherited practices, meanings and rules of usage

10 Pagliai (2009) argues that insults are themselves a subset of a larger category of obscenities, distinguished by their targeted

nature. 11 As a rule the evaluative audience who “overhears” the poet MC (a la John Stuart Mill and Northrop Frye) is symbolically

recruited by default to this role in the consumption of rap music. This is not intended to trivialize this requirement though, as

questions over whether a verifier was in fact ratified, i.e. able to act as verifier, or reliable in their verification have certainly been

raised in particular past beefs, particularly when the verifier alerts a potential target to their status as a target (e.g. “Yo I heard X

was talking shit about you”). 12 One can rightfully and productively critique the scholarly value of constructing a conceptual object like the “language” of a

“culture” (itself a contestable conceptual object). In this case, I mean to refer to something like a discursive regime (cf. Foucault

(1972, 1981 [1970]), or a prevailing ethno-metapragmatics of structure and usage among interactants with Hiphop culture. Elaine

Richardson (2007, pp. 201–205) sheds useful light on this problem in the context of African American vernacular discourses.

9

observed by its users, including the affinity for indirection which is frequently achieved via acts

of so-called “Signifyin(g)”. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., signifyin(g) in literary terms is:

“a trope, in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony

(the master tropes), and also hyperbole, litotes, and metalepsis. […] we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and

catachresis, all of which are used in in the ritual of Signifyin(g).” (Gates, 2014, p. 57).

In plain terms, an act of signifyin(g) is an act of playful (though not always benevolent),

improvised semiotic distortion, achievable via an endless myriad of poetic manipulations. He

compares interpreting an act of signifyin(g) to stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors (p. 44).

Gates theorizes that signifyin(g) always entails two components – formal revision, and an

intertextual relation – rooted in the double-voiced artistic representation of the Yoruba orisha

Esu, and figured most prominently in the Signifyin(g) Monkey tale which Gates and others have

so productively deconstructed. Thus to the semiotician, an act of signifyin(g) points to an

unbounded paradigmatic class of options for a given signifier, each intertextually

(interdiscursively) associated with some non-conventional interpretation absent from the text

(Saussure, 1983, p. 122). Non-conventional, that is, from the standpoint of standard(ized)

linguistic registers or prevailing/dominant linguistic ideologies. One can Signify at all levels of

formal language structure – from individual morphemes and words to full clauses and entire

idiomatic expressions. It is so pervasive a practice in all areas of African American social life

that enumerating examples actually seems violently reductive – but the most canonical and well-

studied examples are probably found in the ritual insult game of playing the dozens - cf.

(Abrahams, 1962; Chimezie, 1976; Kochman, 2012; Labov, 1972a; and most recently Wald,

2014). The numerous examples illustrated later in this paper will surely make its essence clear to

the non-initiate.

As well, a now tremendous number of literary scholars and social scientists alike have

discussed the nature and function of signifyin(g) in African American discursive and rhetorical

10

practice. Mitchell-Kernan (1971, 1972) was among the first to recognize the tendency of many

sociolinguists of the American inner city to regard games of verbal dueling like the dozens, the

primary empirical site of acts of signifyin(g), as always done in jest and for their own sake,

which is reductive, inaccurate and misses a much greater point. She argues that in fact these

games and the speech acts constituting them are pervasive token instantiations of a type of

discursive mode, one that drills on linguistic skills highly valued in the Black community – not

unlike the way Classical Greek and/or Latin rhetoric has traditionally been valorized in European

and American communities. This is intended not just to promote verbal inventiveness or

virtuosity, but also what we might call “verbal discipline” – the ability to follow rules of rhyme

and meter (Frith, 1996, p. 175). Smitherman identifies signifyin(g) as one of the core semantic

strategies / discursive modes for the Hiphop Nation, and distinguishes it from direct insults (cf.

the dozens) by its subtle, indirect and circumlocutory nature (Smitherman, 1986, 1997, p. 14, and

elsewhere). Most Hiphop Heads consider subliminal disses, i.e. signifyin(g) in rap lyrics, more

creative – and more often than not more effective – than direct disses all else being equal, as it

requires an extra amount of knowledge/wisdom to see the full significance of the track.

The greatest achievement of this scholarship has been a recognition of signifyin(g)

practices as purposive in numerous arenas of social life, despite the myriad forms it may take or

specific cultural contexts in which it can be found. I take this to illustrate the generic13 nature of

dissing as speech, and enough to warrant further elaboration along such analytic lines. The

writings of Mikhail Bakhtin have proven especially productive for linguists and other social

scientists exploring the heterogeneity of utterance types in everyday speech and writing. Among

13 Taken in this paper to mean “of/as a genre”, not the second-order meaning of “basic” or “unbranded”

11

other things, Bakhtin develops the idea of the inherent ‘addressivity’ of all utterances, and the

dialogicality of language:

When constructing my utterance, I try to actively determine response. […] When speaking I always take into account

the apperceptive background of the addressee’s perception of my speech […] because all this will determine his active

responsive understanding of my utterance. (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 95–96)

Bakhtin describes the mechanism behind a speaker’s design of an utterance (including choice of

language variety) as a dialogue with a listener and their projected responses to the utterance.

Dissing is a primary speech genre within African American discursive practice – each uttered

diss is crafted for a specific interactional effect, and anticipates (viz. culturally licenses) a

reciprocal response within the genre. It is easiest to think of this in terms of verbal speech

exchanges, but this analysis can be extended into other semiotic modalities – gestural signs,

photography, even fashion choices can be construed as shots being taken at a target.

We can extend the Bakhtinian analysis one step further by arguing beef itself to be an

emergent, secondary (complex) speech genre born of sustained dissing, mixed with other

discursive practices, that achieve a highly developed and organized artistic cultural

communication system. Bakhtin writes of these secondary genres “During the process of their

formation, they absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in

unmediated speech communion. These primary genres are altered and assume a special character

when they enter into complex ones (1986, p. 62).” Because disses are primarily fashioned to

highlight transgressions, this gives beef the discursive flavor of airing grievances, while opening

up a generic space for responses, refutations, counter-disses and other discursive adjacency pair

parts – themselves absorbed primary genres. On analogy with the diss/insult relationship, beef as

a genre might best be considered a subset or derivative of a more general secondary genre of

dispute, being constituted primarily and specifically, though certainly not exclusively, by disses.

This is a major interdisciplinary pivot point, as the sociological and anthropological literatures

12

offer a wealth of theoretical and empirical treatments of (ritual) verbal dueling and poetic dispute

resolution practices, in both African American and other ethno-speech communities worldwide,

within which we might contextualize the tradition of Hiphop beef in the United States. This will

be briefly considered before turning to how MCs specifically take up and enact these generic

practices in the art of rap.

(Ritual) Verbal Dueling, Dispute Genres and Beef as a Hiphop musical genre sui generis

Outside of Hiphop studies, scholarship into the nature of verbal dueling and rituals of

conflict management and resolution have been a fruitful area of modern social scientific inquiry

for well over a century. Pagliai (2009) offers a beautiful and reference-rich synthesis of classical

and contemporary scholarship into verbal dueling practices globally and historically. She

proposes a relatively open and inclusive definition of verbal duels that dovetails nicely with the

felicity conditions underlying the diss:

a genre of argumentative language that entails exchanges between two persons, parties, or characters that challenge

each other to a performative display of verbal skillfulness in front of an audience. The dialogic form is fundamental

[…] in verbal dueling there is stress on the performance, the display, and the search for a public witnessing. […] there

is also a heightening of the poetic dimension of language. (2009, p. 63)

The author also perceptively notes, contra Labov and other scholars who historically

conflated verbal duels with ritual insults, that these are simply not the same thing: “A verbal duel

thus may deploy ritualized forms of insults, but not necessarily. Moreover, many insults used in

verbal duels are not ritualized (80).” Therefore, understanding different genres of verbal dueling

require careful attention to their particular contexts. Similarly the study of strategy within verbal

duels, part of what has previously termed the ethnography of speaking folklore, has unearthed

rules governing the use of both whole genres of folklore, and particular exemplars of those

genre, within the context of a duel (Dundes, Leach, & Özkök, 1970, p. 326). Overall, these

authors rightfully stress the need for a comprehensive treatment of the entire interactional

13

framework governing individual duels, including the functionality of particular insults and the

(meta)pragmatics underlying their usage.

In Hiphop, the canonical genre of verbal dueling is the freestyle battle, performed in a

live cipher, and it is from this genre that beef should be properly distinguished so as to avoid

hasty generalizations of all types of verbal duels within the culture. The battle cipher and its

attendant face-work has been examined by numerous Hiphop scholars as a site of sociocultural

identity formation and contestation, linguistic skill sharpening, and the policing of Hiphop

cultural values (Alim, Lee, & Mason Carris, 2011; Lee, 2009; Williams & Stroud, 2015).

Marcyliena Morgan’s extensively well researched longitudinal examination of battle and cipher

culture in Los Angeles (2009) is perhaps the finest ethnographic work on rap battling in Hiphop

studies to date. As her title suggests, battle rappers duel each other to demonstrate knowledge,

achieve power and command enduring respect from each other, their ciphers and their

communities. In the process of doing so, they seek to spontaneously (via improvisation)

construct poetic projections of self and target within the cipher that commands the respect of all

participants in the ritual space, including their rival, and simultaneously belittle and break down

this opponent by attributing transgressive qualities, actions and behaviors to their projected

poetic self. These disses tend to revolve around the target’s (poetic) originality, authenticity, and

their own disrespectful behavior14.

Of the wide body of literature referenced by Pagliai that speaks to poetic (de)construction

of self and others, I find Steve Caton’s phrasing of the core question a great point of departure

for studying Hiphop duels:

Why should poetry be considered a culturally appropriate and valued vehicle for this purpose? […] why should one be

able to vent one’s passions in verse, not in everyday language, without losing face? (Caton, 1990, p. 110).

14 This disrespect is co(n)textualized before, during and after the battle.

14

For Caton, the poetic composition of self is a public performance through which the poet makes

an argument to “instill in the listener an attitude of respect toward his person” to create himself

as a respectable person (ibid., 113). The freestyle battle works to the same interactional ends, and

the capacity for the freestyle battle to remain a purely ritual site of aggression, violence and

summary justice is only as strong as the MCs’ abilities to acknowledge and respect the discursive

boundary between play and nonplay, as noted by Kochman (2012) contra Labov, Abrahams, et.

al. It is precisely when this boundary is crossed that real verbal and physical violence can ensue,

though face-work mechanisms in the cipher tend to allow for disrespected MCs to escape

genuine embarrassment and risk crossing the line (Lee, 2009). Diss tracks and beef inherit many

structural and functional features from freestyle battles, but as will be discussed below are

necessarily of a different generic breed by virtue of being rooted in personal conflict

management resolution and manifesting in-and-through discontinuous semiotic encounters in

socio-space-time, rather than ritual poetic (de)construction of self/other in a single

spatiotemporally bound encounter. In short, beefs emerge over interactional chains eventually

linking MCs to their targets and to the massively distributed audience of listeners, as opposed to

a ritually-sequestered cipher of physically co-present combatants and audience for a bounded

interval of time.

It bears mentioning at this point that rap music scholarship currently suffers from an

underwhelming amount of research in regards to how best to classify the artistic subgenres that

Hiphop Heads understand to exist and have long since baptized with folk names, like beef. Two

decades ago the popular music scholar Simon Frith, synthesizing and expanding on the

pioneering work of Franco Fabbri, theorized that “genre rules” serve to structure ethical and

aesthetic values within a heterogeneous community of popular music consumers:

15

It is genre rules which determine how musical forms are taken to convey meaning and value, which determine the

aptness of different sorts of judgement [sic], which determine the competence of different people to make assessments.

It is through genres that we experience music and musical relations, that we bring together the aesthetic and the ethical.

(1996, p. 95)

In the case of rap music, Adam Krims comes the closest in Rap Music and the Poetics of

Identity, devoting an entire chapter to developing a genre system for rap music. His framework is

an interesting start but by his own admission “very much a blunt instrument” (Krims, 2000, p.

55), with only 3 hermeneutic variables (Musical Style, Flow, Semantic Topics) defining a rap

genre, and most significantly, no means of connecting a genre to its interactional contexts.

Krims’s work, while merit-worthy in its own right, is emblematic of a much larger scholarly

preoccupation with taxonomizing Hiphop artifacts based purely on aesthetic characteristics

and/or geographic origin. This has actually been highly productive, if only superficial in its

output. For example, the Wikipedia page15 for “List of Hip Hop Genres” lists pages for 59

musical styles derived from Hiphop, as well as 37 regional American genres/subgenres of

Hiphop and over 90 international Hiphop scenes and closely related genres, such as London

Grime, Greek Low Bap, and Urban Pasifika from New Zealand. While certainly these all

individually deserve the attention they have been given by scholars and others, more work needs

to be done on Hiphop genres that are defined by their interactional parameters, as these all

expose, transmit and reproduce the culture itself. Beef and freestyle battling are such genres, as

are rap elegies16, rap shout outs, rap protest tracks, rap skit, and numerous others yet to be named

but evident in the history of Hiphop.

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hip_hop_genres (accessed June 20, 2016) 16 Michael Eric Dyson (2001, pp. 228–9) describes some of the well-known conventions of rap elegy

16

Diss Tracks and Rap Beef as Conflict Management in (Mediatized) Hiphop

As just argued above, Hiphop has inherited the primary speech genre of dissing in its

semiotic practices, which have underpinned the formation of the secondary (complex) speech

genre of beef as a distinct genre of communicative interaction within the culture. Its first-order

function is to enable conflict management between feuding MCs in a way that is “Hiphop”, even

if those MCs never actually come into physical proximity with each other. The experience of

consuming Hiphop music is by and large a mass mediatized socio-semiotic process from start to

finish (Agha, 2011), originating in live performances and studio recordings and eventually

reaching the ears of Hiphop Heads at a live performance or via one or more commoditized

forms, such as physical singles/albums or digital tracks available for download/streaming. This is

just as true for artists themselves as it is for their collectives, fans and other bystanding audience

members – in particular, artists overwhelmingly discover the music of their peers before they

become mutually acquainted, alongside the rest of the listening community. This interactional

framework is of a fundamentally different character than that of a freestyle battle cipher, by

virtue of occurring over numerous segments of discontinuous socio-space-time.

This virtual separation of diss source, diss target, and diss verifier(s) has tremendous

implications for the uptake of diss tracks, impacting both lyrical content and the consideration

paid to the passage of time. In the battle cipher, because it unfolds in a finite amount of real-time,

close-proximity interaction, improvisation and unmediated creativity are the most highly valued

linguistic skills. Evaluation turns on how cleverly one MC put down another MC whom he likely

has never met before and only has a few precious seconds to assess and annihilate lyrically17.

17 It could be argued that the freestyle battle is a prototypical Interaction Ritual and that extending Interaction Ritual Chain (IRC)

theories to their analysis (cf. Collins, 2014) could be quite fruitful. Many ethnographers have already identified and described the

emotional energy that is generated, expended and replenished in-and-through the battle, affecting and affected by both

combatants and the gathered audience (Alim et al., 2011; Lee, 2009; Morgan, 2009), et. al. This type of work could also motivate

an extension of IRC to beefs themselves as “virtual ciphers”.

17

Because beefs play out over time, improvisation is not nearly as relevant anymore, and as such is

replaced by a mandate to display superior sociocultural knowledge and plan each diss

strategically in discrete moments of agonistic one-upsmanship. Because MCs who start or are

embroiled in beef have time to plan their responses (musically and lyrically), they are expected

to be extremely thoughtful once they’ve crafted their diss tracks and not rely on obvious,

superficial or stereotypical modes of conveying disrespect and disapprobation. Textual strategies

and tactics are designed accordingly.

But just as in the compressed space-time of the cipher, hesitation or delay in responding

is punished by the audience, not unlike a boxer receiving a ten-count by the referee before being

declared knocked out. MCs know that once a diss track has been released, and especially if it

gains popularity and wide circulatory status, they must response as quickly as possible in

addition to being as creative as possible. If they let the diss against them linger too long without

a response, it becomes akin to having an incoherent response or no response at all in the real-

time cipher, what might be best described a sort of virtual stuttering projected onto the

interactional chains constituting the unfolding beef. The discussion of the Bridge Wars later in

this paper will illustrate an example of this motivating one of the most iconic diss tracks of all

time, The Bridge is Over [Complex List #4].

The canonical uptake formulations for Hiphop music in urban America, certainly prior to

the 90s, were listening to the radio, listening to albums on physical media, and/or circulating

(remixed) cassette tape recordings of the either albums or the radio; every single repeated play of

a diss, whether in private or public, solo or group formations, is another micro-level instantiation

of that disrespect and disapprobation from one artist to another. The tradition of having beefs

play out over the radio began in a freestyle battle contest, with MC Kool Moe Dee dissing DJ

18

Busy Bee Starski at Harlem World in 1981. This singular event is widely held by Hiphop Heads

and veteran MCs to be the first battle to cement lyricism, as opposed to the ability to just “rock

the party”, as the way to win a battle in Hiphop18. This legendary “first diss” was entirely

spontaneous and unplanned, delivered after the contest had already been decided in Busy Bee’s

favor but prior to his actual presentation of the trophy, and resulted in the birth of beef as a

definitive genre:

Only a few battle masters know how to beat the party mc because in a lot of cases the party mc will look like he won,

but if you listen to it on wax or you listen to it once you got the tape home, you would probably hear more poetic value

in the other guy, but the party mc is about the live interaction.

(Kool Moe Dee in Spirer, 2003, Chapter 2)

A recording of the entire freestyle contest, with the diss as the final few minutes of content, made

it to local radio which then allowed it to be massively re-recorded by listeners at home with

pause tapes – cassette tapes used to record swatches of live radio shows, toggled on/off via the

cassette deck’s pause button – which were subsequently re-circulated and re-copied in

communities all over NYC and beyond. DJ Kay Slay, a Hiphop veteran once referred to by the

New York Times as “Hip Hop’s One Man Ministry of Insults”19, refers to this as the “battle tape

heard all around the world” (Spirer, 2003, Chapter 2) – significant because this was before any

semblance of a rap music industry existed anywhere in the world. Moe Dee’s diss contained

numerous textualities that would become prototypical diss themes in rap music henceforth, such

as the rhetorical presumption of knowledge, and troping on Hiphop names and exposing their

metalinguistic value in rap artistry:

And no matter how hard you try, you’ll see

You’ll get your mind into mine and can’t say it like me

But you wanna be – Busy wanna-be!

Cause you know he wanna be another Kool Moe Dee

So let’s all chant, because you know you can’t

Everybody salute to the new MC champ

18 The lyrics and a fleshed out contextualization of this diss can be found on Rap Genius at http://genius.com/Kool-moe-dee-

battle-w-busy-bee-harlem-world-1981-lyrics, as well as in the original Beef documentary (Spirer, 2003) 19 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/arts/music-hip-hop-s-one-man-ministry-of-insults.html

19

Hold on, Busy Bee, I don’t mean to be bold

But put that “ba-ditty-ba” bullshit on hold

We gonna get right down to the nitty-grit

Gonna tell you little somethin’ why you ain’t shit

It ain’t a emcee's jock that you don’t hug

You even bit your name from the “Lovebug”

And now to bite a nigga’s name, that’s some low-down shit

If you was money, man, you’d be counterfeit

(Kool Moe Dee, “Battle at Harlem World”, 1981)

The circulation and emanation of this tape’s content continues to this day and is regularly cited in

rap lyrics and metadiscourses. At the time it signaled a changing of the guard20 in that when MCs

have issues with other MCs, they must outperform them artistically to gain popular support for

their claims. The emergence of beef in sequential, discontinuous interaction chains, with positive

and negative messages being exchanged and emotional energy being exerted and replenished in

an on-going rollercoaster of semiotic encounters, tends to factionize individuals in support of one

combatant over another over time. These micro-level processes of schismogenesis (Bateson,

1972), if left unchecked, can scale to encompass entire geographic regions and generational

strata, subsuming numerous communities of practice (e.g. East Coast vs. West Coast, Old School

vs. New School, Gangsta vs. Conscious, etc.)

Thus it becomes plausible to treat rap beef as the mediatized projection of the freestyle

battle cipher, which facilitates (ostensibly) nonviolent conflict resolution anywhere within

Hiphop culture. While spiritually (viz. folk ethno-metasemiotically) linked, these two genres are

rooted in different ethical modes (poetic dueling versus personal conflict management), play out

in necessarily different interactional frameworks, and therefore play by different genre rules.

Though history has shown that often times these poetic rivalries can spill over into real life

interactions, by and large the genre is able to defuse the tensions between competing MCs before

any boundaries are crossed. The ECWC beef, discussed below, is the best known example of

20 Words used by KRS-One in (Spirer, 2003)

20

beef escalating beyond poetic boundaries. Modern scholarship has partially acknowledged the

boundaries and purpose of beef as a conflict-oriented communicative genre, though only

cursorily:

I refer to these bouts of contention between [rappers] as literary squabbles precisely because they are in fact poetic

combat and largely not physical confrontations. We see this in the “arguments” between Roxanne Shante and UTFO,

Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, Lil Kim and Foxxy [sic] Brown, and Nas and Jay Z. […] And one of the

significant features of the language […] is the employment of Signifyin(g). (Pate, 2010, p. 34)

Breaking Down the Top Disses

All lists like the Complex Magazine’s “The 50 Best Hip-Hop Diss Songs” are somewhat

arbitrary and inherently biased by the perspectives of co-participating individuals within the

media organizations generating them. The prototypical “first diss” of Kool Moe Dee towards

Busy Bee Starski, as one example, does not make it to this particular list despite being of

tremendously salient historical significance within Hiphop culture, as well as a really effective

diss-in-context. Frankly, many diss tracks that could be considered iconic or legendary don’t

make this particular list, and some which do might not merit their placement on the list contra

some of those which were ultimately left off. Nonetheless, the tracks on this list by and large

constitute a set of largely-agreed-upon-to-have-been-successful diss tracks that span the history

of Hiphop in the United States, as well as American geography. Furthermore, for the purposes of

this analysis the ranking of the tracks is mostly unimportant to lyrical (and thus evidentiary)

quality. These rankings mostly map the tracks onto their historical circulatory success in the rap

Game – Jay-Z’s “Takeover” diss at #1 is certainly a tremendously successful diss track, but was

also boosted by its central inclusion on his now legendary multi-platinum album The Blueprint,

released on September 11, 2001. It would take this paper too far afield to consider the degree to

which lists like these (and the institutions like Complex generating them) are considered

authoritative in their declarations.

21

In this investigation a single text of all 50 diss tracks’ total lyrical content was compiled,

cleansed21 and coded so as to expose philosophical values (cf. Saldana, 2016), and to compile

sets of direct and indirect references (icons, indexes, symbols), propositional strategies

(rhetorical questions, accusations, threats, etc.) and citations. The findings presented in this

section do not exhaust the range of diss phenomena observable in the corpus – very far from it –

but are selected so as to provide evidence of some of the more commonplace tactics that proved

to be effective in context. I would offer a final disclaimer before examining significant

textualities in the corpus. When analyzing a large body of poetic texts, no hermeneutical

approach can be entirely appropriate or exhaustive, and should not attempt to be. This analysis is

just looking for interesting moments and higher-level tendencies in both forms and functions,

that is, denotational and interactional tendencies. Prevailing semiotic trends might point to

interdiscursive legacies being sustained in-and-through their deployment, and even some ritual

(i.e. hypermetasemiotic) dimensions of the genre. An even larger corpus might scale these

findings, or complicate them in unexpected but nonetheless productive ways.

For instance, as one interesting property of the text corpus considered en masse, it turns

out the most common fixed-order two-word combination (viz. 2-gram) across the entire

compiled diss track corpus is the constituent ‘you know’. Most often this is the lead in to a direct

presumption of knowledge or rhetorical question, often an act of signifyin(g) if intended

ironically (e.g. “You know who the realest is”, “You know the rules”, “[Don’t] you know that

he’s out of touch?”, “You know I’m the one that flowed better”, “What you know about

[_____]?”, etc.). It does not seem farfetched to try and argue for deep significance to this areal

21 This involved leveling different vernacular transcriptions and removing any repetitive lines such as in choruses, intros and

outros, etc., so as to not distort frequency counts in an unprincipled way.

22

property, but such abstracted cotextualities will not be the focus in this particular corpora

analysis, mostly for reasons of economy.

Signifyin(g) on Names

They don’t respect you a checks due for me for your fame

Mega I hope you blow so I'm saying your name

(Nas, "Destroy & Rebuild", 2001) [Complex List #22]

Figure you can diss me to jump start your career

I punch you in your fucking chest 'til your heart kicks in gear

And fuck your underground buddies' nameless crew

Like I'mma say they names so they can be famous too

(Eminem, “Girls”, 2001) [Complex List #29]

I heard a little homie talking reckless in Vibe

That's quite a platform you chose, you should've kept it inside

Oh, you tried

It's so childish calling my name on the world stage

You need to act your age and not your girl's age

("6PM in New York", Drake, 2015) [Complex List #48]

The above examples are but a small handful of disses which treat the name as a multi-

dimensional semiotic anchor of fame, identity and personhood. These tend to discursively treat

the name in one of three ways: as an externalized object around which a MC will orient and

verbally reflect on, as a characteristic mask or veil that provides a buffer between a rap identity

and other fractional identity constructs, or as a total embodiment of subjective personhood with

characteristics imbued within and inherited from a widely circulated and socio-culturally salient

moniker. In the 3rd example above, Drake cites his target Tyga’s October 2014 interview with

Vibe Magazine and his comment: “I don’t like Drake as a person.”, which was subsequently

taken up on Twitter and massively re-tweeted/shared to millions of these MCs’ followers. Drake

is also signifyin(g) against Tyga and his rumored girlfriend Kylie Jenner who was (at the time)

only 17 years old. It is interesting to see the modern characterization Drake makes of

transgressive name-dropping as indexing immaturity and lack of reverence/sophistication,

beyond just being an un-Hiphop thing to do. In a way this echoes Roxanne Shante's diss towards

Boogie Down Productions in “Have a Nice Day” (Complex List #31) through its indexing of the

23

media and a genealogy of Hiphop, which will be taken up in the following section on the Bridge

Wars.

Signifyin(g) on Identity and Authenticity

The corpus is rich with interdiscursive transfigurations of identity into canonically African

American roles of servitude – one such example is the dichotomy of “house niggas” and “field

niggas”:

I saw your second "House Party," it figures:

Two house parties for two house-ass niggas

Two house motherfuckin' niggas - do y'all niggas know what a house nigga is?

A house nigga is a nigga who works in the house

Who cleans the master's ass, who cleans behind the master, who wash the master's ass

Y'all house niggas. I'mma field niggas, we field niggas here in Miami

(Luke, “Pussy Ass Kid and Hoe Ass Play”, 1992)

These lyrics are from a diss track towards Kid and Play by MC Luke in the early 90’s (Complex

List #40), in a beef that did not receive tremendous coverage outside of New York City and

Miami. This track Signifies on the rap duo’s most famous exploit outside of Hiphop, their

starring in the classic, highly successful comedy film House Party and its several sequels in the

1990s, flipping the term ‘house’ to now attribute insinuations of being inauthentic, Uncle Tom

types of black men. The contrast between ‘house niggas’ and ‘field niggas’ is salient for anybody

even marginally familiar with African American history and the legacy of black servitude under

slavery, and has become a common way of signifyin(g) against individuals deemed inauthentic

in rap music. Another example can be found in the beef between conscious MC Common and

West Coast gangsta rap collective Westside Connection, with Common denying charges of a

subliminal diss against the West Coast rap scene in his reflective track “I Used to Love H.E.R.”:

Now what the fuck I look like dissing a whole coast

You ain't made shit dope since AmeriKKKa's Most

Wanted to cease from the Midwest to the East

On the dick of the East for your 1st release

Your lease is up at the crib, house niggas get evicted

In videos with white boys talking you get Wicked

(Common, “The Bitch in Yoo”, 1996) [Complex List #8]

24

Similar type-sourced interdiscursivities deployed against inauthenticity that revolve around black

servitude are also commonly deployed, including more direct figurations of targets as slaves or

traitors.

After the breakup of the legendary gangsta rap crew NWA in the early 1990's, the now

legendary beefs that ensued between its former members contained disses that challenged targets'

rights/claims to use certain names, like those of certain gangs, people, or particularly some

special place names (e.g. claiming Compton or identifying with a particular gang / set). Shortly

after member Ice Cube departed the group in 1991, NWA released their second and final studio

album Efil4zaggin (a reverse spelling of Niggaz4life), which contains numerous diss tracks

targeting Cube. One of the best known is a short interlude track entitled "Message to B.A." This

track echoes (and thus Signifies on) the musical beginning of Ice Cube's song "Turn Off the

Radio" from Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted album, Cube’s very first project as an ex-

member.

A message to Benedict Arnold

No matter how hard you try to be...

Here's what they think about you!

("Message to B.A.", N.W.A., 1991)

Ice Cube is nomically transformed into Benedict Arnold, indexing the quite infamous general of

the American Revolutionary war who ultimately defected to the British Army, and is arguably

the most salient traitor in American history. These lyrics are followed by several answering

machine messages22 which scornfully Signify on numerous moments in Cube’s biography,

including a recent fight with former label mates Above the Law (ATL), which LA neighborhood

Cube actually hails from, circumstances surrounding his entry into NWA in the first place, and

his highly publicized move to New York after departing the group.

22 See Appendix A

25

This provoked a scathing response from Ice Cube that would go down in rap history as

one of the most infamous and effective diss tracks of all time, the legendary “No Vaseline”

(Complex List #5). No Vaseline would contain a flurry of aggressive disses, but perhaps his most

effective were those inspired by the comparison drawn between him and the General in

“Message” – the ones that Signify on names. The interdiscursive chain in this case is forged with

the Alex Haley novel Roots and its popular TV miniseries adaptation:

So don't believe what Ren say

Cause he's going out like Kunte Kinte

But I got a whip for ya, Toby

Used to be my homie, now you act like you don't know me

It's a case of divide-and-conquer

Cause you let a Jew break up my crew

House nigga gotta run and hide

Yelling Compton, but you moved to Riverside

("No Vaseline", Ice Cube, 1991)

In typical agonistic form, Ice Cube simultaneously nullifies one nomic transformation of self, the

one imposed upon him on the previous track/album, and engineers new transformations of his

assailants, in this particular segment NWA member MC Ren as the iconic slave figure Kunta

Kinte, slave name Toby. This sequencing of names23 is interesting in that it only chains Ren to

the slave identity – no pun intended – but also figures Cube as the slave master. It also critiques

NWA’s authentic claim to Compton, seeing as how they recently moved to the suburbs. We also

see the invocation of the house/field nigga dichotomy as well as in the final verse which strongly

Signifies on the entire group’s authenticity as gangstas in real life:

I never have dinner with the President

And when I see your ass again, I'll be hesitant

Now I think you a snitch

Throw a house nigga in a ditch

Half-pint bitch

Such progressive and multi-laminate indexicality is the one of the powers afforded by creative

signifyin(g), particularly when sourced interdiscursivities can be accessed by a large and varied

23 Ren (Hiphop MC) – KK (Free but Vulnerable African)– Toby (Slave)

26

set of familiar denotata. This diss track achieved legendary status immediately which endures to

this day because these and the other disses throughout it are vicious but poetically beautiful. It

has been intertextually incorporated in numerous diss tracks since its release, including in some

by Ice Cube himself in later beefs of his own:

Everybody in the Ghetto, know what you're doing

1 white boy and 2 fucking Cubans

Claiming that you're Loco

But you ain't Mexican

Listen to "No Vaseline" before you flex again

(Ice Cube, “King of the Hill”, 1997) [beefing with Cypress Hill]

It can also be found deep in the heart of Long Island, NY in the 90s beef between recently

separated EPMD members Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith (PMD) – the title and chorus lyrics

of PMD’s track “I Saw It Cummin’” off his album Shade Business in 1994 are a reference to Ice

Cube’s lyrics from No Vaseline that Signified on NWA’s credibility:

Looking like straight Bozos

I saw it coming, that's why I went solo

And kept on stomping

While y'all mothafuckers moved Straight Outta Compton

The Centrality of Interdiscursivity in the Beef Tradition

This section will more closely examine the historical evolution of two historically

significant beefs and some of their diss tracks, which illustrate the particularities of

interdiscursivity within the tradition of beef and point to its robustness as a communicative genre

within Hiphop. It will also examine the creative ways MCs will reflexively cite discourse they’ve

produced, as well as poetically chain in other texts and semiotic encounters, in their ongoing

beefs.

The Bridge Wars - Exposing the core values of a coalescing culture in local rap practices

Remember Bronx River, rolling thick

With Cool DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chillout on the mix

While Afrika Islam was rocking the jams

And on the other side of town was a kid named Flash

Patterson and Millbrook projects

Casanova all over, ya couldn’t stop it

The Nine Lives crew, the Cypress Boys

The Real Rock steady taking out these toys

27

As hard as it looked, as wild as it seemed

I didn’t hear a peep from Queens . . .

(Boogie Down Productions, “South Bronx”, 1986)

This complex swatch of diss was the one of many contained in the now legendary diss

track “South Bronx”, the first shot in what many consider to be the first major beef in Hiphop’s

Golden Age, the infamous Bridge Wars of the mid-to-late 1980s. Four of the Top 50 Diss Tracks

of All Time on Complex’s list24 were part of the feud between the Queens-based Juice Crew and

the Bronx-based Boogie Down Productions (BDP). The beef emerged when MC Shan and

Marley Marl of the Juice Crew convinced an influential NYC radio disc jockey named Mr.

Magic to play and promote a track of theirs called “The Bridge”25, a nostalgic track which

glorifies Queens and its early pioneering rap crews. This was taken by BDP members KRS-One

and Scott La Rock to be an implication that Queens was where Hiphop began, despite no direct

denotational text in “The Bridge” to that effect.

“South Bronx”, thus, was a reaction to an inferred cultural transgression, one which BDP

was compelled to make as MCs whose very moniker is an homage to their home borough (viz.

the “Boogie Down Bronx”). A number of significant beefs in Hiphop history were sparked by

similar perceived transgressions that were denied by the transgressor. The diss track is full of

direct disses, acts of signifyin(g), interdiscursive integration of other beefs, and structural

parallels to “The Bridge”. From a discourse point of view, we observe an exceptionally high

number of New/Unused referents in the previous lyrical swatch from “South Bronx”26. This is a

strategic discursive tactic. By invoking various hyper local referents drawn from the chronotope

of Hiphop’s birth years in the Bronx, both persons and places, BDP are simultaneously seeking

to construct their own authenticity and Signify (in the final line) on the Juice Crew, and Queens

24 #4 “The Bridge is Over”, #13 “South Bronx”, #19 “Kill That Noise”, #31 “Have a Nice Day” 25 Referring to the 59th Street Bridge, locally known as Queensbridge, connecting the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan 26 Applying the framework of Assumed Familiarity introduced in Prince (1981)

28

MCs more generally. At the time this was unprecedented in rap aesthetics, and it signaled the

emergence of an trend towards intensified spatial terminology, with KRS-One operating within

“a discursive field featuring spatialized themes of intense locality” (Forman, 2000, p. 188).

BDP’s lexical choices denote more than just geographic landmarks and historical persons

associated with the Bronx, but also the commonly understood and culturally-prescribed prestige

and status associated with them as the “Old School”. This made for an appropriate and effective

attack in a Hiphop context. If these referents were entirely unfamiliar to the verifying audience,

these indexicalities would be lost and only a general sense of insult would be perceptible, and

this diss would be significantly less effective in context.

The significance of referential familiarity in establishing authority and authenticity within

a beef has been utilized as a discursive strategy in Hiphop. As Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabrielle

Vom Bruck note in their introduction to The Anthropology of Names and Naming: “the recitation

of names is a crucial aspect of memory, an active not-forgetting, that validates the present order

more often than not, bringing the political aspect into view (Von Bruck & Bodenhorn, 2006, p.

6)” MC Shan later remarked that a specific personal deictic choice exonerates him and Marley

Marl from any accusations of transgression in “The Bridge”.

Kris claimed that I said that Hiphop started in Queensbridge. Which I didn’t. In the beginning of the song you hear

Marley say “yo they wanna tell you a story about where they come from”. That’s the key word, where they come from.

The Bridge, th-th-the bridge. Well Kris took it and he’s like thinking “[grumbles] oh they’re talking all this stuf-”

Everybody knows Hiphop started in the Bronx, Kool Herc, every… you know (MC Shan in Spirer, 2003, Chapter 4)

This is variously formulated in the Juice Crew’s response track to South Bronx entitled “Kill

That Noise” (Complex List #19), including the examples:

I don't really mind bein' criticized

But those who try to make fame on my name: die

Lesson number one: first strike aim

You shouldn't do things to degrade my name

(MC Shan, “Kill That Noise”, 1986)

29

Shan never mentions explicitly KRS-One or Boogie Down Productions in “Kill That Noise”,

deploying the common discursive technique Morgan (2002) has termed “baited indirection”. He

makes enough not-really-ambiguous references and re-contextualizations for listeners aware of

the beef to make the connection, but by not uttering any names it forces the indirect target to

identify themselves as such if they chose to respond, which in this discourse would mean

accepting responsibility for false dissing. If Shan were to have directly named KRS, Scott La

Rock or BDP, they could cook the beef further by denying the charges and counter-dissing. But

by not doing so, he sets a discursive trap which denies BDP the respect they are certainly trying

to garner for themselves. The track even contains a frank, un-rapped swatch of interaction

between Shan and Marley Marl citing the moment in “The Bridge” that allegedly inspired BDP

to release the “South Bronx” diss in the first place:

[Marley Marl:] Yo Shan, I didn't hear you say Hiphop started in the Bridge on your record

[MC Shan:] I didn't, they wanted to get on the bandwagon [Shan’s emphasis]

(‘Kill That Noise”, 1986)

Their suggestion is that BDP intentionally misread The Bridge as a diss on the Bronx by

suggesting it all started in Queens, way back when, and they did this by intentionally

overlooking/misinterpreting the highlighted pronoun above. This was done so as to artificially

fabricate a discursive space for non-transgressive, and in fact culturally sanctioned, dissing. KRS

and Scott La Rock wanted to beef because coming correct at Queens-based MCs could bring

them fame in the Bronx and grant broader circulation to their music in the NYC radio market.

Thus it behooved MC Shan to call this invalid beef out directly and reflexively in “Kill That

Noise,” via the name as the source of fame that BDP was looking to tap into and acquire for

themselves.

Other members of the Juice Crew also released diss tracks around this time that similarly

Signify on personal names – in “Have a Nice Day” (Complex List #31), Juice Crew member

30

Roxanne Shanté also attacks BDP's members via their names shortly after her reflexive

backronyming and fortification of her skill as an MC:

Shanté, the baddest around

And a name like that can be broken down

As Supreme Highness Almighty Noble Topics Exponent

KRS One, you should go on vacation,

with a name sounding like a wack radio station.

and MC Scott La Rock, you should be ashamed,

when T La Rock said 'it's yours', he didn't mean his name

["Have a Nice Day", Roxanne Shanté, 1987]

These disses against both members of BDP’s rap names interdiscursively chains in two

prominent institutions of value in the culture – the radio station, at the time the prevailing source

of Hiphop mass mediation, and the history of Hiphop itself, a perennial source of interdiscursive

resources for poet MCs27. As well, these raps seek to go beyond just defending one's

names/fames against other MCs' attempts to generate notoriety from their mentioning, they

actively suggest that their targets' names are vacuous and unoriginal, suggestive of their skills as

MCs. While "Shanté" as a name can be read to have deep meaning upon reflection, "KRS-One"

and "Scott La Rock" are as empty as their attempts to ostensibly defend the Bronx from Queens.

There is also a condemning power that comes from connecting ashamed and name in rhyme.

Examples akin to this can be found in many of the several dozen diss tracks that circulated

between camps in the Bronx and in Queens for years to come.

The most successful diss track in the Bridge Wars was the promptly released response

to “Kill That Noise” by BDP entitled “The Bridge is Over”. Pointing to the effects created by

this beef playing out over NYC radio, KRS-One vividly recalls needing to produce this track as

quickly as possible, lest the stinging effects of the counter diss “Kill That Noise” sink his nascent

career ambitions.

27 "It's Yours" was released by T La Rock in 1984 as the first single of nascent record label Def Jam. It is now considered a

classic of the Old School era.

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South Bronx came out, then Kill that Noise came out, then I put out The Bridge is Over cause its all I had! These are

rhymes that I was saying. So I ran back in the studio the next week, and made this record The Bridge is Over.

(KRS One in Spirer (2003), emphasis his own)

This track re-utilized similar linguistic devices used in “South Bronx” to attack the Juice Crew

and the borough of Queens, and even interdiscursively chains in an entirely different popular

music genre via interpolation and lyrical citation of Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to

Me”28. It also introduced an entirely new and at-the-time unheard of mechanism for dissing –

phonotactic manipulation (i.e. accent projection). In “The Bridge is Over” KRS-One, rather than

rapping in his standard New York accent, raps with a heavy Jamaican accent, and introduces

metrical fillers, mostly sentence-final unstressed vowels or shouts, and other free morphology to

the track to index the genre of reggae in the lyrics:

If you want to join the crew well you must see me [-ə]

Ya can't sound like Shan or the one Marley [-ə]

Because Shan and Marley Marl dem-a-rhymin like they gay [-ə]

Pickin up the mic, mon, dem don't know what to say [-ə]

Sayin that hip-hop started out in Queensbridge [-ə]

Sayin lies like that, mon, you know dem can't live [-ə]

Manhattan keeps on makin it, Brooklyn keeps on takin it

Bronx keeps creatin it, and Queens keeps on fakin it

--“The Bridge is Over”, Boogie Down Productions, 1987

This track was one of the first recorded blendings of rap and reggae musical styles, though it is

well-known and accepted that Hiphop culture and rap music has strong roots in Jamaican

Dancehall and other Afro-Caribbean musical practices (Chang, 2005, Chapter 2; Ogbar, 2007,

Chapter 2, and many others). However, far from just being a creative and artistic innovation, it

was specifically intended as a mode of attack against the Juice Crew. Jamaican accents, apart

from invoking the imagery of Rastafarians, beaded dreadlocks and coconut rum, additionally

interdiscursively cite the very roots of Hiphop culture itself, the casus belli of the entire beef in

the first place. The verbal onslaught through these n+1th indexical tokens (Silverstein, 2003)

28 An intelligent, if unexpected, interdiscursivity as Joel’s track is a cynical critique of new upstart music genres and trends

threatening a more pure tradition of rock n’ roll.

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serves to solidify affiliation with the Bronx, and more importantly to connect that borough to the

core of the argument, the true origin of Hiphop culture. By doing so in a non-alienating manner

that listeners to the radio airwaves acknowledge is a legitimate discourse paradigm, BDP was

able to effectively gain the upper hand in this beef for good.

I found myself representing the Bronx, I mean like, representing. I didn’t realize how much a record, did, you know,

what a record did for pride, what a record did for esteem. The Bronx was alive again.

(KRS One in Spirer, 2003, Chapter 4)

Despite dozens more exchanged diss tracks, MC Shan was widely seen by Hiphop Heads as the

loser of this ritual conflict, never really recovered his reputation and later effectively retired,

while KRS was able to forge an extremely successful solo career and remains an important elder

figure in Hiphop culture. KRS is the first to acknowledge, however, this is precisely because

Shan understood the rules of Hiphop and the implications on his identity as a Hiphop MC if he

allowed disrespect like South Bronx to go unanswered:

MC Shan could have won the battle simply by ignoring me. I’d be nowhere. There’d be no KRS One, there’d be no

twelve albums, no Stop the Violence Movement, no Human Education Against Lies, no Temple of Hiphop, nothing! It

was because MC Shan understood Hiphop, that he said oh no, this guy’s steppin’ to me?!

(KRS One in Spirer, 2003, Chapter 4)

The interdiscursive legacy of “The Bridge is Over” as diss type and token is strong, with

many MCs commonly citing the track and its lyrics. Sometimes this is done only in reflection, as

with alternative Hiphop group Cunninlynguists track “Old School” recounting the history of the

culture:

I told Jesus that GZA said sandals were feminine

So he copped some shelltoes and suede Timberlands

Remember when KRS ripped Shan? Do ya homework

That was Amadeus playing the Bridge Is Over

(Cunninlynguists, “Old School”, 2003)

But more commonly it is chained in to provide intensity to diss tracks. One prime example can

be found in the refrain and outro for the Nas track “Destroy and Rebuild” (Complex List #22),

part of his ongoing beefs with Cormega and Jay-Z. Perhaps the greatest MC to ever come from

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Queens, he chains in (musically and lyrically) and flips the diss track that originally targeted his

native boro 15 years earlier:

They say the bridge is over, the bridge is over

Nah this is a time we destroy and rebuild it

They say, the bridge is over, the bridge is over

Nah we the strongest hood but weak niggas kill it

So they say, the bridge is over, the bridge is over

-

The Bridge is over my dick!

The Bridge'll never be over long as I'm alive and breathin'!

Braveheart to the graveyard!

I'm the William Wallace of this shit!

The explicit and implicit citations of the dozens of Bridge Wars diss tracks have established

venerated icons, indexes (i.e. the Bronx = the birthplace of Hiphop) and symbols (i.e. the Bridge

metonymically standing for Queens) that are continually type- and token-sourced to the current

day.

The East Coast – West Coast (ECWC) Rivalry – Beef in the global spotlight

I think that the violence came into, the whole sport of battling, once the lyrical content changed. […] like now when

you listen to, uh, brothers battle, and you listen to the lyrics they say, I mean, you know they going at it like you know

like straight up like its Mafia threats. (Big Daddy Kane, Beef, Ch. 6)

The now legendary East Coast - West Coast beef (ECWC) of the mid 1990’s emerged

from an unprecedented scaling up and fusion of numerous smaller beefs that, as it turns out,

could not be resolved within the rules of Hiphop. ECWC is undoubtedly the most famous beef in

the entire history of Hiphop culture. In 1991, frustrated with a recent trend of record companies'

rejecting East Coast artists and the coeval surging popularity of West Coast Hiphop, Bronx

rapper Tim Dog opted to voice his anger on a notorious diss track, "Fuck Compton" (Complex

#16). It contains many direct shots and violent threats at the entire LA rap scene, artists and

record labels. The music video featured depictions of violence aimed at lookalikes of Eazy-E,

Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Ice Cube, and even Dr. Dre’s girlfriend at the time Michel’le. This track

would be among the first of dozens to emerge over the coming years, pitting entire rap

collectives, record labels, neighborhoods, cities, states and eventually entire regions of the

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country against each other in an emergent symmetrical schismogenesis (Bateson, 1935, 1972)

that the American and Hiphop Nations had never seen before, or ever since. A swatch of lyrics

from 2Pac’s “Hit Em Up” (Complex #2 – and on many lists it has been #1), perhaps the peak

diss track of the entire beef, readily sums this up:

Now when I came out, I told you it was just about Biggie

Then everybody had to open their mouth with a motherfucking opinion

Well, this is how we gonna do this:

Fuck Mobb Deep, fuck Biggie, fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label and as a motherfucking crew!

And if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too!

(2Pac, “Hit Em Up”, 1996)

In the 1990s, many Hiphop artists actively requested that their words be taken as true and

authentic, reflecting their actual lived experiences, and instructed their listeners to weed out

“fakes” and reject them (Perry, 2004, p. 91). Lyrically and thematically, west coast gangster rap

emphasized skills on the streets as much as, if not more, than skills as an MC. The ever

increasing need to “keep it real” further blurred the aforementioned boundary between play and

nonplay in dueling contexts, which mutatis mutandis in the rap Game is conceived as the line

between “the studio” and “the streets”.

Seeking Citational Fuel – imagined rivalries amplified by the mass media.

As chronicled in the original Beef documentary, many non-related events and grievances

were attributed to the larger ECWC beef, and the many large and small-scale feuds were given

sensational, round-the-clock coverage by local and national media channels, periodical

publications like magazines (esp. Vibe and The Source), and other journalistic outlets. This

served to factionize millions of interested people inside Hiphop communities and in broader

society on which MCs best represented them in the coast to coast battle for supremacy. Many

MCs saw the inevitable outcome of this nationwide lyrical arms race as physical violence, and

angry that major media outlets were largely unscrupulous in their pursuit of quotes and

statements which might eventually get someone hurt or killed.

35

My whole career was never, I had never been in an interview where they didn’t ask me about [deepens voice] “East

Coast West Coast”. East Coast West Coast beef. Oh, you don’t like [MC] Hammer, or you don’t like Will Smith—you

know, let’s just get you to say you don’t like somebody. When you’re new in the game, you got an open mouth, and

you not aware of the game they’re playing with you and you may open your mouth and say something about somebody

that you didn’t have to. When you read your article, that’s the piece that’s blown up, that’s in the big letters, like OH!

(Ice-T, Beef, Ch. 6)

Examples of stories that achieved significant media circulation during the years of the rivalries

included rumors that Tupac Shakur had sex with Biggie Smalls’ wife Faith Evans, and that

Tupac had been raped while imprisoned in Rikers Island before his rap fame. Treach of veteran

rap collective Naughty By Nature explains how many at the time were compelled to take action

just on the implication of a rivalry:

When you see a Vibe magazine, when you see Puff and Biggie on the cover and see East verse West, niggas in the

hood don’t read articles, they just see East verse Wes—oh its on. When I see them niggas its on. (Treach, Beef, Ch. 6)

Treach, Ice-T, Tupac himself and many other MCs recognized this exploitation as it was

occurring and actively took explicit stances against fueling media interests in the midst of

escalating coastal beef(s), sometimes directly to the faces of the journalists themselves.

The progressive schismogenesis, and the lyrical content of tracks like “Hit Em Up”,

“Against All Odds” [Complex List #12], “Drop a Gem on Em” [Complex List #27] and dozens

of others signaled at the time a breakdown of the genre rules in socio-semiotic practice. In the

aftermath of Tupac and Biggie Smalls’ deaths in late 1996 and early 1997, MCs began to awaken

to the fact that the boundary between the streets and the studio (viz. between resolving conflicts

in a Hiphop way vs. direct personal violence) needed to be re-established – numerous tracks

were crafted in this spirit of rebuilding positive bonds between East Coast and West Coast MCs.

The 2001 Hip Hop Summit29, sponsored by Def Jam executive Russell Simmons and featuring

Louis Farrakhan, firmly re-established the need for a poetic boundary to keep Hiphop culture

29 Hiphop historian Davey D has chronicled this momentous occasion on his personal blog -

http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2013/11/06/hip-hop-history-remembering-historic-2001-hip-hop-summit-farrakhans-incredible-

speech/

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safe from imploding on itself, and would itself become a reflexively cited event in rap lyrics well

into and throughout the new millennium.

Legacy of the Bridge Wars and the ECWC Rivalries

MCs are expected to have a command of the history of Hiphop culture strong enough to

be able to deploy in their rap. The capacity to name names, cite individuals and events, and

otherwise demonstrate superior knowledge is critical to receiving a positive evaluation as a

lyrical MC. This holds especially true in the case of beefs, where moral authority arises in part

out of the performance of one’s wisdom for one’s target and the audience to internalize. As such

these two large-scale conflicts remain salient to this day in the minds of any true Hiphop MC.

Both the Bridge Wars and the ECWC beef are cited time and time again in rap music to this day,

as for example in the “Destroy and Rebuild” track cited above, which in a short span actually

cites both legendary beefs, and manages to throw a subliminal diss at Jay-Z (the owner of

“ROC”[-a-fella] Records):

I put the name on the map after Marley and Shan

Q.B. before the ROC had one jam

Before the Death Row and Bad Boy beef

Had streets locked with raw talent, I laugh at the weak

(Nas, “Destroy and Rebuild”, 2001)

Eminem similarly invokes 2Pac when dissing Limp Bizkit, both directly by name and implicitly

in 4 bars of rhymes which virtually transfigure 4 bars of “Hit Em Up”. The majority of the entire

track actually is a transformation of the original 2Pac track, though not to the same extent as the

“Children’s Story” track analyzed in the next section. This particular swatch is significant

because it cites 2Pac lyrics which themselves quote nearly directly30 the chorus of an even earlier

diss track, MC Lyte’s 1988 diss track “10% Dis” [Complex List #21]. The lyrics in brackets

below are taken from Hit Em Up, and those with *** are themselves originally from 10% Dis.

30 The only difference is that Hit Em Up says “…aint shit but a faker”; 10% Dis says “…ain’t nothing but a faker”, reflecting a

much higher level of hostility in this beef relative to Lyte’s feud with MC Antoinette over beat jacking.

37

Keep your restaurant locked and block your door

Cause we "Hit 'Em Up" like motherfuckin 2Pac Shakur

You a, 'Black Jesus,' heart attack seizures [You's a beat biter, a Pac style taker]***

Too many cheeseburgers McDonald's Big Mac greases [I'll tell you to your face you ain't shit but a faker]***

White devil, washed up honkey [Softer than Alize with a chaser]

Mixed up cracker who crossed over to country [About to get murdered for the paper] Yo, aiyyo cut this shit off

(Eminem feat. D12, "Quitter/Hit 'Em Up Freestyle", 2001)

All three diss tracks invoking variants of those two bars are semiotically unified in that they all

point to the transgressive behavior of their targets’ stealing (jacking) beats and lacking

originality. This progressive chaining of diss co(n)text in new diss tracks produced 6 (and 13)

years later is characteristic of beef when viewed as a genre constituted in and stabilized by

interdiscursivity. Numerous examples like this are found all over the historical rap music canon.

The Art of the Diss: Discourse-level Signifyin(g) in a “Children’s Story”

In 1988, the same year Skip Gates published the first edition of The Signifying Monkey,

a MC named Schoolly D produced a track that Signified on the tale of the Signifying Monkey

itself known as “Signifying Rapper”. In Schoolly’s version of the tale, which infamously

samples the main beat of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”, the “Signifying Rapper” is joined by the

“Badass Pimp” and the “Big Bad Faggot”, signifyin(g) on the roles of the Lion and the Elephant

from the original tale respectively31. On top of all this, the introduction to the song Signifies on

the opening track from Parliament’s Mothership Connection, “P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked

Up)”, which imbues the MC on the track with coolness32. It is absolutely chock full of instances

of signifyin(g), and was the first commercial rap track to explicitly name the act itself and situate

it within a Hiphop narratology33. The transformation of experience in this narrative is a very

31 While many listeners typically read wanton homophobia into rappers using words like “faggot”, in this track this character is

aggressive and a great fighter, flipping cultural stereotypes in yet another act of signifyin(g). 32 This is actually a very clever double-act of signifyin(g), as there is both an indirect structural resemblance to the original text in

music and lyrics, as well as a direct recall of the track itself in the lyrics “Remember that law / When you have to put your shades

on to feel cool?” / Well, it’s still a law, you gotta put your shades on so you can feel cool” 33 This was not the first popular music track to reflexively construe signifyin(g) – the Rolling Stones connect it to “jivin’” and

“lyin’” in their 1972 song “I’m Not Signifying”, and more significantly for Hiphop is the notoriously graphic and explicit telling

of the Signifying Monkey tale by Rudy Ray Moore, the man behind Blaxploitation legend Dolemite, in the early 70’s on his

highly controversial X-rated album “This Pussy Belongs to Me”

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complex act of (multiple) signifyin(g), but is done purely for aesthetic playfulness, in an instance

of what Gates distinguishes as “unmotivated” or cooperative signifyin(g). Unmotivated

signifyin(g) takes the form of the repetition and alteration of another text, which “encodes

admiration and respect” and is evidence “not the absence of a profound intention but the absence

of a negative critique." (Gates, 1998, p. 992)

A great majority of Hiphop MCs’ myriad uses of signifyin(g), as this paper has labored

to demonstrate, are absolutely done with the intent to critique, discipline, admonish their targets,

not just play around with them. In some exceptional cases, a track conceived within an entirely

different genre on the surface can become a diss in a complex act of signifyin(g). One of the

most enshrined examples of Hiphop storytelling was born in 1988 with the release of “Children’s

Story” (Island Def Jam) by Slick Rick34. It has served as an extremely popular source of

intertextuality ever since, with dozens of citations of individual phrases, whole verses, and in

some cases the entire text of the track. A now legendary example of the latter case came with

Black Star’s35 “Children Story” from 1998, a decade after the release of the original. While Rick

tells a cautionary story about the dangers and ultimately tragic outcomes of youth entering into

criminal life, Mos Def raps an equally cautionary story of the consequences of “selling out” and

losing authenticity as a MC in the music industry.

But beyond just a generic transformation and repurposing of the original track, a higher-

order significance is inscribed when one considers the total cotextual patterning of transformed

(as well as preserved) denotational elements – the track is widely understood to be a subliminal

34 It ranked #1 on a Top 50 Best Storytelling Rap Songs list put out by Complex Magazine in 2013 -

http://www.complex.com/music/2013/07/best-storytelling-rap-songs/ 35 A duo of Hiphop veterans consisting of MC Mos Def and producer/DJ Premier

39

diss36, a discourse-level act of signifyin(g) against specific unnamed individuals and institutions,

not just a poetic commentary or lament on an evolutionary step in Hiphop culture. It is

specifically an attack on Bad Boy Records, the dominant East Coast Hiphop label of the time37,

and its CEO Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, though neither are ever named explicitly. Conscious

Hiphop MCs like Mos Def have consistently protested against a commercially-driven corruption

of Hiphop’s core cultural values by those who would seek to capitalize on prevailing stereotypes

and make a capitalistic game out of rap music production. Diddy, as Puff Daddy now calls

himself, was (and to some still is) a living emblem of this type of industry “player (playa)”. This

transformation of experience is achieved through a systematic mirroring of the original text,

lexically and prosodically, and importantly through strategic deviations from the original text so

as to realize updated references, modes of predication, and propositional content / discursive

markings. The contexts and patterning of these mirrorings and deviations may help shed light on

how storytelling MCs are able to achieve salient poetic intertextuality across entirely different

Hiphop genres, in this case canonical narrative types (i.e. cautionary tales) and tokens (i.e. the

original “Children’s Story”), while still leaving enough textual room for purposive, idiosyncratic

artistic expression that can be performatively evaluated so as to fuel diss efficacy.

A side by side coded diagram representing the complexity of the denotational

transformations, acts of signifyin(g) and interdiscursive moments in the two tracks is included as

Appendix B. I chose to close read both tracks with attention paid to four possible textual

relations between them: identity (lexical and prosodic mirroring), transformed reference,

36 It behooves me to note that this is only the first instance of Rick’s “Children’s Story” being repurposed as a diss, not the last.

Eminem re-interpreted it as a diss song entitled "Can-I-Bitch", which including direct and indirect shots towards Jermaine Dupri

and Canibus. Like Black Star’s version it follows the flow and concept as the original, including the intro of children asking

"Marshall, will you please tell us a bedtime story?" 37 This chronotope has been frequently cited in subsequent years of rap music, particularly via indexing the iconic “playa”

fashion popularized by Bad Boy artists in their media appearances and particularly in their music videos (e.g. the 1997 videos for

“Mo Money Mo Problems” and “Been Around the World”)

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transformed (modalized) predication, and transformed propositionality/marking of discursive

function. These 4 correspondances are reflected in the text highlighting scheme I’ve adopted for

this track’s analysis - identity:yellow, reference:red, predication:green, and

propositionality:blue. I call this somewhat eclectic coding method, riffing off of Saldana (2016),

“denotational remix coding”. Note that relations of identity, transformed reference and

transformed predication involve a preservation of grammatical category (I.e. Noun/Determiner

and Verb Phrases remain as such), while a relation of transformed propositionality often involve

shifts in grammatical categories, whether or not the proposition is a full or reduced clause.

The track begins identically as the original; the first 4 lines are identical save for one

transformed reference (*Adidas <> pajamas) and one transformed predicate (*hip-hop was good

<> they ought ta good). The co-occurrence of so much identity, particularly in the iconic genre-

indexing first line ‘Once upon a time [not long ago]”, with these deviations serve to put the

reader in a different interpretive/evaluative chronotope for receiving the narrative (Bakhtin,

1981), an imagined time and place in the Hiphop historical imaginary. The indexicality of

Adidas points highly unambiguously to the 1980’s and a period popularly conceived as the

“Golden Era” of Hiphop, of which a canonical emblem is Run D.M.C.’s 1986 single “My

Adidas”. The next deviation from identity is a referential transformation (*a little Sha-tan <>

another lil’ boy), initiating the first substantial transformation of experience in the new story; the

transformation is completed via the next deviation in the following line (*kid <> Ty), which

constructs the *Sha-tan as an individual in a position of power and influence over the *kid, as

opposed to “another lil’ boy” who addresses the protagonist by his name “Ty”, suggestively

indexing similar-age friendship bonds. This asymmetry signals the repurposing of the original

story into something entirely different, in this case a diss track. Many in Hiphop have since read

41

Sha-tan to be Puff Daddy, and perhaps even the protagonist kid to be Biggie Smalls, the sacred

King of NY himself. This is the beginning of intense baited indirection, this time within the guise

of a story.

Immediately following this inaugural transformation is another more complex one, the

transformation (*Jacking old beats <> Robbin’ old folks) which on the surface appears to

involve fundamentally different propositions entirely, despite sense-synonymy in the verbal

element (“jacking” being deliberately chosen for its more “Hiphop” flavor); however, their

poetic correspondence hinges on the embedded identity of “old”, which is preceded by a

predicate transformation and followed by a reference transformation. To overlook this identity

(i.e. to gloss the entire predicate structure with a blue line) would be to efface a significant

formula (transform-identity-transform) for intertextual engineering, one that will demonstrate its

usefulness several more times in this narrative. In fact, the next instance is in the next line

(*jacked the beats <> did the job), which like all previous lines so far also finishes in identity

with the original text (‘and making the dash’, ‘money came with ease’); so too would the next

line, containing a reference transformation (*son, he <> one) that in fact creates a moment of

tension with the original narration, and thus opens a space for extended idiosyncratic expression.

The original use of ‘one’ suggests, for that moment, an (albeit not incredibly salient) ambiguity

in who is the subject of the predicate and subsequent evaluation ‘couldn’t stop, it’s like he had a

disease’ – is it the main kid or is it the corrupting other lil’ boy? The current use of “*son, he”

makes it unambiguous who is the subject, the main kid. Though the ambiguity would soon be

contextually resolved in the original, its blockage in the current story focuses the audience on the

transgressive nature of the main character’s actions from an earlier point in the shared

narratological scheme. What follows is another, line-sized instance of the transform-identity-

42

transform formula (*He jacked <…> <> He robbed <…>), reinforcing the ongoing, habitual

nature of the protagonist’s transgressive behavior.

At this point we have a temporal/aspectual discontinuity between the events of the

current story, as compared to the events of the original story. The transformed

predicate/proposition (*Set some R&B […] <> Tried to rob a man […] ) signals a continuation

of the habitual nature of the actions described in the preceding line, granting it status as an

orientation clause (Labov, 1972b) with considerable (imaginable) ordering flexibility; whereas

the original predicate signals a marked turn in the course of events for the rest of the narrative,

and quite arguably the emergence of a new episode arising from a discrete, bounded

complicating action which cannot be temporally transposed with any other events (ibid.). The

current narrative continues to orient the audience to the context of “the story yet to be told”

precisely where the original story initiates the “beginning of the beginning of the end”, as it

were. This is the textual point where the narratives diverge into conceptually different spaces

until the end resolution / coda, and instances of mirroring and deviation are reversed in their

indexical prevalence/significance – that is, identity becomes the exception rather than the rule,

and these liminal moments are strategically deployed to continually harken back to the original

text in the contextual midst of seemingly (radically) different episodes and events.

One instance of liminal identity creating and maintaining an alternative hermeneutic

scheme turns on the pronoun he, starting with the act of quotation (*He said “Yo <…> <> He

said “Keep still, boy <…>) and continuing 2 lines to (*But little did he know that his joints was

wack <> But little did he know the lil’ boy was strapped). In the current story, he is consistently

co-referential with one person, the protagonist; in the original, he actually refers to the cop,

meaning the quote in the original is directed dialog, but in the current story is internal

43

monologue. Poetically this can be seen as achieving an internalization of the struggle that was

played out dialogically by the cop and the kid in Rick’s story. This achievement stabilizes the

intertextual correspondences already constructed as well as those yet to be articulated.

The next line exhibits a highly creative transformation that remains isomorphic with the

entextualized form of the original, another type of [transform-identity-transform] formulation: [X

said Y]. Whereas the original story constitutes X as a whole proposition plus a reinforcing

pronoun (The kid pulled out a gun, he), the current story only uses a modified R-expression

(*The shiny A&R) – placing these two forms into paradigmatic contrast with each other is not

arbitrary, and is in fact strongly suggested and justified by the prosody, particularly the fact they

are both six syllables. Both stories move towards an internal quote on part of the protagonist,

though where the original (currently narrated from the cop’s perspective) needs to shift back to

the kid’s perspective explicitly, the current story (already in the kid’s perspective) maintains this

perspective via clausal conjunction, thus yielding the interesting transformation (*and <> the

kid), which shares in identity with the original the remainder of the clause (“he starts to figure”)

and presents the kid as the unambiguous reference of he.

The transformation (*So he’s in the studio <…> <> So he cold dashed <…> ) performs

similar work to the previously mentioned (*Set some R&B <…> <> Tried to rob a man <…> ),

in that it signals a continuation of the habitual nature of the actions described in the preceding

line (granting it status as an orientation clause), whereas the original, like before, signals for a

new complicating action and arguably a new episode. The textual identity of “this sista” across

story versions playfully obscures a nontrivial non-coreferentiality – nontrivial in that the deictic

this doesn’t even index a specific individual in the current story (i.e. he meets a random female),

whereas in the original this points specifically to the lady cop just introduced in the previous line.

44

Thus, an interesting sort of referential abstraction is achieved under intertextual identity, as is a

markedly different relationship between the protagonist and this female indexed by both the

metapragmatics of the finite verb itself (*met <> saw) and the propositionality of the subsequent

line – note the poetic work done by the complex transformation [Transform-Identitybut-

[Transform-Transform-Identity]] (*[Who couldn’t sing for shhh] butidentity [the mix would assist

her] <> [A shot for the head, he shot back] butidentity [he missed her]), which transforms a hostile

shootout between a cop and a kid into a moment of potential mentorship, which in the larger

moral scheme of the narrative is poisonous and thus potentially lethal, just like the shootout. This

interpretation receives further textual support a few lines later.

Not much seems to turn on the transformation (*radio <> subway), but following the

identity “and he made a left”, a major departure from the original story occurs. The current story

introduces a new complicating action, namely the main character running into the story’s

narrator, where the original story continues to comment on the ongoing act of running (*and ran

into Mos Def <> till he was outta breath). This participation of the narrator in the story itself is a

completely novel action with no precedent in the original story, thus making for a salient

signature of the individuality of this story despite its eminent status as inspired. The line (*I

slowed the young man down and I started “Yo money <…> <> [he] knocked an old man down

and [he] swore he killed him <…>) forcefully shifts the narrator’s perspective from 3rd person

omniscient to 1st person by recovering and articulating two elided he pronouns from the original,

and substituting I in their places. This poetically productive liminal gap between the two stories

is closed by the identical line “he ran upstairs up to the top floor”, though the subsequent lines’

identity differs in the use of one deictic, a temporal one versus a spatial one (*then <> there),

which likely has to do with the presupposability of what is likely to happen next, knowing that

45

the kid intended to go to the radio station (versus the uncertainty of an abandoned building in the

original).

The discovered referent who answers the previous question (*Jane the chickenhead radio

host <> Dave the dope fiend shooting dope) is clearly a symbolic transformation of a figure of

personhood/subjectivity under critique by the narrator. The nature of this critique is signaled by

the identity of the relative pronoun “who” followed by a predicate-transformation and a

reference-transformation (*don’t know the meaning of water nor soap <> be yapping ‘bout beef

between east and west coast), which turns out to be one of the strongest points of transformation

of evaluation in the entire narrative. Any Hiphop fan interpreting this narrative, particularly in

1998, would understand the strong negative valorization of “yapping” (i.e. talking ignorantly)

about coastal beef (rivalry/feuding), as this was a common practice among unscrupulous radio

personalities in the 90’s that is believed to have played a very significant role in escalating the

ECWC beef that had very recently claimed the lives of two of Hiphop’s greatest MCs.

Interdiscursively connecting this concept to that of not knowing the meaning of water nor soap

clearly forges a semiotic link between Jane and Dave mediated by dirt - both are dirty and doing

dirty things in medias res. The next two lines illustrate the complicity of this person in pushing

the protagonist further towards tragedy; note the identity of “he said”, the use of “bullet(s)” and

“run!”/emphatic voicing in the quote, and the determiner phrase transformation (*The chicken

<> The dope fiend) co-textually linked to the narrator’s initial act of naming/identification.

The identity of the line “He went outside” explicitly, temporally recalibrates and pushes

the narrative forward, though still in conceptually-distinct and (for the moment) affectively-

polarized spaces (e.g. *props <> cops, *his ride, the 4-point Rover <> a car, a stolen Nova).

However, the identity of the line “Raced up the block doing 83”, itself perhaps the most

46

reflexively salient (i.e. textually self-conscious) identity in the entire story because of the

specificity of the number 83, serves to bring the current narrative into the same conceptual-

affective space as the original story – the very negative and now inevitable “beginning of the

end” which starts in the following transformation (*Some cats with Hennessey saw him at an R-

E-D <> Crashed into a tree near University). While the original protagonist is aware of how dire

his situation is becoming, however, only the narrator (and an attentive audience) is aware of the

current protagonist’s dilemma (*Escaped alive though the car was battered <> He winked his eye

like his star status mattered). The identity in the delocutionary predicate “rat-a-tat tatted” is

understood to be gun fire, though the agent of that action is fundamentally different this time.

The protagonist has been mortally wounded at this moment; by contrast, the boy from the

original story is the one doing the shooting, and is not revealed to have been killed until the coda.

The remainder of the narrative thus is resolving action after the climatic event, the

character being mortally wounded at the traffic light; this resolution strategy contrasts with the

original story, which continues to push the rising action towards a climax that comes just on the

heels of the coda (“he dropped the gun, so went the glory”). In re-appropriating this section of

the narrative for the purpose of resolution (as opposed to continued rising action/evaluation),

Mos Def is able to animate new characters who voice (via quotation, which in the original serve

the purposes of rising action) the causes of the shooting (i.e. *You rocking crazy ice and all you

do is cling static, etc.), and begin foregrounding the moral of the story, as it were. Note the

interesting deviation in the otherwise identical line of self-realization (*Deep in his heart he

knew he was gone <> Deep in his heart he knew he was wrong) – reflecting, somewhat

ironically given what the two main characters have gone through up to this point, a harsher

reality for the current protagonist.

47

The line signaling the arrival of the end of the story, the coda within a Labovian

framework, is unsurprisingly identical to the original (“And this is the way I got to end this

story”). The difference between the current coda and the original are substantial, save for the

identity of another line which indexes the fact the narrator has reached the end of the story (“This

ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh”), and this is unsurprising given the prescription of two

different (and yet still symbolically connected) moral apothegms. The final two lines capture this

most succinctly, particularly the transformation (*your hands can grasp <-- yo' soul gets cast).

Conclusion

Rap beefs are emergent discursive-interactional spaces where feuding MCs can

adjudicate and resolve their conflicts in a manner consistent with the most fundamental Hiphop

cultural values. They are central to understanding the communicative practices and values within

the Hiphop Nation, and are attested in the canon of rap music since the very beginning. These

beefs are characteristically marked by interdiscursive chaining and generic reflexivity across

socio-space-time, as well as a wide range of complex (trans)forms employed by MCs within the

generic space of dissing as a means of communicating disapproval, disrespect and

disapprobation.

It would be remarkable to see future extensions of beef-as-genre theories to Hiphop’s

other semiotic modalities, such as graffiti artist beef, breakdancing beef, and DJ beef. Any

findings could motivate further ethnographic work on beef in other sociocultural and linguistic

contexts, accompanying the spread of Hiphop globally as many other linguistic and discursive

practices have done. As just one example, it would be enlightening to revisit the scholarship of

Dundes et. al. that examined the verbal dueling practices of Turkish boys in the 1960s, in the

context of global Hiphop and the emergence of a strong Turkish Hiphop scene since the 1980s.

48

Similarly, social scientific scholarship on conflict/dispute resolution, communicative genres and

interdiscursivity can and should be brought to bear on popular music genres outside of Hiphop,

seeking to describe beef (if under a different folk name) within and across other music genres

(e.g. jazz beef, country rock beef, classic rock vs. disco beef)38. The scholarly significance of

extending theories and methods of linguistic/semiotic anthropology to conflicts within genres of

popular music remains to be seen, but should be quite promising.

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Appendix A

“Message to B.A”

[Answering Machine Messages]

[Female caller 1]

Hello? I was at The Celebrity... and I was wonderin' how that punk Ice Cube got his ass beat by

ATL [Above The Law]!

[Beep]

[Male caller 1]

Yo! Dat nigga was sayin' he from Compton, he ain't from Compton

He from a planet called: "Punk!" It is full of pussy protein and pearl tongue

[Beep]

[Female caller 2]

All I wanna know is why y'all let his punk-ass in the group in the first place, when you knew

what kinda bitch he was?

[Beep]

[Male caller 2]

Yeah, I was in the New Music Seminar in New York!

And I watched that punk muthafucka run... while the rest of his homeboys got they ass beat!

[Beep]

[Female caller 3]

Hello? I'm callin' to say since Ice Cube was suckin' so much New York dick...can he come and

eat sum of this Chicago pussy?

[Beep]

52

Appendix B

Slick Rick. “Children’s Story”. The Great Adventures of

Slick Rick. (1989)

Once upon a time not long ago

When people wore pajamas and lived life slow

When laws were stern and justice stood

And people were behavin' like they ought ta good

There lived a lil' boy who was misled

By another lil' boy and this is what he said:

"Me and you, Ty, we gonna make some cash

Robbin' old folks and makin' tha dash"

They did the job, money came with ease

But one couldn't stop, it's like he had a disease

He robbed another and another a sista and her brotha

Tried to rob a man who was a D.T. undercover

The cop grabbed his arm, he started acting erratic

He said "Keep still, boy, no need for static"

Punched him in his belly and he gave him a slap

But little did he know the lil' boy was strapped

The kid pulled out a gun and said "Why did ya hit me?"

The barrel was set straight for the cop's kidney

The cop got scared, the kid, he starts to figure

"I'll do years if I pull this trigga"

So he cold dashed and ran around the block

Cop radioes it to another lady cop

He ran by a tree, there he saw this sista

A shot for the head, he shot back but he missed her

Looked around good and from expectations

He decided he'd head for the subway station

But she was coming and he made a left

He was runnin' top speed till he was outta breath

Knocked an old man down and swore he killed him

Then he made his move to an abandoned building

Ran up the stairs up to the top floor

Opened up the door there, guess who he saw?

Dave the dope fiend shootin' dope

Who don't know the meaning of water nor soap

He said "I need bullets, hurry up, run!"

The dope fiend brought back a spanking shotgun

He went outside but there was cops all over

Then he dipped into a car, a stolen Nova

Raced up the block doing 83

Crashed into a tree near university

Escaped alive though the car was battered

[He] Rat-a-tat-tatted and all the cops scattered

Ran out of bullets and still had static

Grabbed a pregnant lady and pulled out the automatic

Pointed at her head and he said the gun was full o' lead

He told the cops "Back off or honey here's dead"

Deep in his heart he knew he was wrong

So he let the lady go and he starts to run on

Sirens sounded, he seemed astounded and

Before long the lil' boy got surrounded

Black Star. “Children’s Story”, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are

Black Star. (1998)

Once upon a time not long ago

When people wore Adidas and lived life slow

When laws were stern and justice stood

And people was behaving like hip-hop was good

There lived a little boy who was misled

By a little Sha-tan and this is what he said

"Me and you kid we gonna make some cash

Jacking old beats and making the dash..."

They jacked the beats, money came with ease

But son, he couldn't stop, it's like he had a disease

He jacked another and another, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder

Set some R & B over the track for "Deep Cover" (187!)

The kid got wild, started acting erratic

He said "Yo, that presidential I got to have it..."

With liquor in his belly son, he made up the track

But little did he know his joints was wack

The shiny A & R said "Great new hit, G!"

"Whenever you need a loop, yo come get me..."

The kid got amped and he starts to figure

"I'mma get dough like all of these other niggas!"

So, he's in the studio working round the clock

For pop radio, jacked the beat to 'Planet Rock'

Was out in the street when he met this sister

Who couldn't sing for shhhh but the mix would assist her

Hooked up the track and in excitation

He decided he'd head for the radio station

But he was running and he made a left

Was skeezing top speed and ran into Mos Def

I slowed the young man down and I started: "Yo money

Yo, why you selling lies to our wives and children?"

He ran upstairs up to the top floor

Opened up the door then guess who he saw?

Jane the chickenhead radio host

Who be yapping 'bout beef between east and west coast

He said "This one's a bullet, you got to give it run!"

The chicken said "Thanks" and spanked it #1

He went outside, was getting props all over

Then he dipped into his ride, the 4-point Rover

Raced up the block doing 83

Some cats with Hennessey saw him at a R-E-D

He winked his eye like his star status mattered

They rat-a-tat-tatted to make his blood splatter

"You rocking crazy ice and all you do is cling static

And rolling out in Brooklyn late night is problematic..."

His eyes was bloody red, he hung on every word they said

They told the kid "Back down, that player shit is dead."

Deep in his heart, he knew he was gone

But he grabbed his .45 and decide to blaze on

With shades on founded had him astounded and

Before long the young man got surrounded

53

He dropped the gun, so went the glory

And this is the way I have to end this story

He was only seventeen, in a madman's dream

The cops shot the kid, I still hear him scream

This ain't funny so don't ya dare laugh

Just another case about the wrong path

Straight 'n narrow or yo' soul gets cast

Those grabbed the guns, so goes the glory

And this is the way I got to end this story

He was out chasing cream and the American dream

Trying to pretend the ends justify the means

This ain't funny so don't you dare laugh

It's just what comes to pass when you sell your ass

Life is more than what your hands can grasp