FoodSexLit

Today’s vagina dentata reference brought to you today courtesy of Lil Wayne.

Weezy is a genius.

Now before you get all up in my grill about the evils of mainstream rap, I am not one of those white people who reject all black music black people actually listen to simply for the sake of appearing more conscious or more intellectual.  When it comes to poetry, I know what’s good, and it’s not just the old school shit or nerd hip hop.

Which I also love, of course.  Especially Del tha Funkee Homosapien.  So I’m going to let his words from “At the Helm” set the parameters for today’s discussion:

“Rap ain’t about bustin caps and fuckin bitches

It’s about fluency with rhymin ingenuity.”

Ok, so Lil Wayne may not fit the first half of that statement (he’s definitely from what I term the “Bitches and Bling” school of mainstream hip hop), but I’m going to overlook that for today– not because I’m not a feminist, and not because I am not sympathetic to those readings of rap music, but to riff on a quote by Joan Morgan, my favorite hip hop feminist, “sometimes patriarchy makes my nipples hard.”

Plus, there is no doubt Lil Wayne has some serious lyrical prowess.  As I said in a previous blog, I love a cunning linguist, and that Lil Wayne is that—literally.  That motherfucker knows his way around a metaphor, and, apparently, a woman’s body.  But we’ll get down to the going down later down the page.

First let’s talk about Weezy being on the receiving end.  The first time I heard “Lollipop,” I thought, Oh!  Listen to the metaphors!  The double entendres!

As we know, a lot of mainstream rappers are just not skilled when it comes to the more poetic aspects of rapping.  As Ricky Pharoe says in “Six Step Seminar: How to Rap”:

“Now here we go to Step Four:

it’s called clichés, similes and metaphors.

Are you hot like the sun?  I’m hella bored.

That last line makes my dick numb stead of yours.”

There are many, many examples of rap songs that make my metaphorical dick numb.  My favorite example is still that MIMS song from a few years ago: “This is Why I’m Hot.”

Brief Tangent #1—A Fun Game to Play On Road Trips: A fun game I like to play on road trips (and sometimes the first day of the Poetics of Rap and Hip Hop class I teach in the spring) is called “Rap Comprehension.”  Take the song with the lamest lyrics you can find and then make up comprehension questions, a la second grade reading class, for your partner.  Remember to answer in complete sentences, using part of the question in your answer.   

Observe:

Q.  Why two reasons does the narrator provide for his hotness?

A.  The narrator is hot because he’s fly, and the narrator is hot because you’re not.

The year “This is Why I’m Hot” came out, so did “Ms. New Booty” by Bubba Sparxx.  That year, the guy I was dating and I went to a lot of concerts at the Gorge, so we played the game a lot.

Q.  What two things does the narrator suggest Ms. New Booty do?

A.   Ms. New Booty should hit the playa’s club for ‘bout a month or two.  She should also put on a tan on it.

Q.  What will happen if Ms. New Booty follows this regimen?

A.   The narrator and Ms. New Booty will then see what it do.

Oh the hilarity.

But back to Lil Wayne.

I’ll admit, the conceit (a conceit is basically an extended metaphor) is nothing special: a blowjob is to a sucking on a lollipop.  LL Cool J did that in “Around the Way Girl” years ago.

Brief Tangent #2—I Learn About Blow Jobs. “Around the Way Girl” was my favorite song in junior high, despite my friend’s Michelle’s horror.  “That song is disgusting,” she told me.  When I asked why, she looked at me witheringly.  “Ummmm . . .  ‘standing at a bus stop’?  ‘Sucking on a lollipop’”?

I didn’t get it.

“Duh,” Michelle said.  She lowered her voice to a whisper: “It’s a reference to a blow job.”

At this time, newly sex-educated at Holy Rosary School, the seventh grade girls were all horrified by the thought of giving head.  Your mouth on a guy’s penis?  Absolutely not.  No way.  We all got over it, I’m sure.  Catholic school girls, you know.

Well, I did.   In fact, the first rap song I ever heard was about blow jobs.

All the boys in my class were listening to rap in seventh grade.  I knew it because I would hear the talk in the coatroom as they stored their walkmen in their backpacks for the day, saw them trade tape cassettes with each other, heard names like Eazy-E and 2 Live Crew.

All I could hear of this thing called “rap music” was the tinny bass booming from their headphones.   Keep in mind this was before rap was mainstream—when radio stations were playing Madonna, not Tupac.  Hard to believe there was a time radio stations did NOT play Tupac, eh?  The closest thing I got to rap was Michael Jackson.

I don’t know why I wanted so badly to hear this thing called rap, but I do remember my desperation to find out.  I begged each one, individually, to let me listen, just to one song, just to a minute of one song, a second—but no one would oblige me.

Finally, one day, one of them slipped his headphones over my ears.  The song?  “Just Don’t Bite It” by NWA— a tutorial on how (not) to give head.

But again, I digress.  “Lollipop” is still a very clever song, mostly because of the punning: he’s so sweet, she wants to lick the wrapper/rapper . . .

Oh Wayne.

But I have even more interesting things to talk about than penises and blow jobs.  I want to talk about vaginas.  Listen carefully to Kerri Hilson’s song “Turnin Me On.”

Lil Wayne makes his sexual skills in this area quite clear:

I hope your vagina tight
I go underwater and I hope your piranha bite hahaha . . .”

At first, we might assume Wayne, or, as we say in my Poetics of Rap and Hip Hop class, the narrator, is making a subtle reference to going down on a woman.  But perhaps it’s not that simple.

You may be familiar with the term Vagina Dentata.  Sing it out loud to yourself a few times to the tune of “Hakuna Matada.”  Roll it around in your mouth.  Familiarize yourself with it.  There you go.  Fun for everyone.

It translates to “Toothed Vagina.”  Yes, a vagina with teeth.  It’s a very common mythological image.

Tangent #3—A Brief Survey of Vaginas in Shakespeare’s Plays. It may very well just be that I just have vaginas on the brain.  After all, when my students were teaching Titus Andronicus, I was sure to tell the group doing the scene where Aaron the Moor tricks Titus’s sons and they fall into a pit that Marjorie Garber (my second-favorite-Shakespeare-Scholar) interprets it as a vagina dentata (Titus’s daughter Lavinia’s vagina, no less) and that they might want to cover that in their lecture.  And when they did their presentation, one of the women said, “One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot this quarter is vaginas . . .”

A proud moment for me as a teacher, I tell you.

But we had been talking a lot about vaginas, because King Lear, which we read just before Titus, has some choice words about women’s nether regions:

Down from the waist they are centaurs,

though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit;

beneath is all the fiends’.  There’s hell, there’s darkness,

there’s the sulfurous pit—burning, scalding,

stench, consumption!  Fie, fie, fie, pah, pah!—

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,

to sweeten my imagination.  (IV.vi.120-126)

I’m including a link to the SparkNotes “No Fear Shakespeare,” because I think their “translation” is hysterical.  First, they used the word “horny.”  Plus, there’s this gem:

“Women are sex machines below the waist, though they’re chaste up above. Above the waist they belong to God, but the lower part belongs to the devil. That’s where hell is, and darkness, and fires and stench! Death and orgasm! Ah, ah, ah!”

The original passage is rendered ineffectual, of course, in modern day language.  But I giggle at staid SparkNotes using terms like “sex machine.”  I dare a student to write that in a paper in any Shakespeare class– except for the one I teach, of course.

Anyway, in both these plays, one early (Titus) and one late (Lear) a woman’s vagina is something fearsome and disgusting, so perhaps Wayne, with his rampant sexism, is in good company with the Bard.

But then again, vaginas, at least in “Turnin Me On,” do not seem fearsome or disgusting to Wayne.

And we’re back on track.

Let’s take a look at those lines again:

“I hope your vagina tight
I go underwater and I hope your piranha bite hahaha . . .”

What’s down there while he’s going down?  As one of my friends said in a text message, “Puussssyyyyyy.”

Yes.  Pussy.

And what else?  A Piranha.  A man-eating fish.

Vagina Dentata!

That piranha’s are “man-eaters” is, of course, a myth—just like the vagina dentata.

If we take both myths to be symbolically true, then the lines create a sort of mirror-image: the narrator is pussy-eating AND he hopes to be eaten by the pussy.  Swallowed by the sex act.

Is this double-myth a coincidence?  Or is it an example of what Jung calls synchronicity?  To Jung, such connections without cause were never, ever, accidental—never senseless.  Never random.  Incidents of synchronicity are always fraught with meaning.

And how does Wayne know about the vagina dentata?

Yes, I know he’s smart.  Yes, I know he went to college.  But he also says some hella dumb shit.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the guy being interviewed and the guy who rapping are the same person.

So I have another theory—another Jungian theory, actually—that of the collective unconscious.  Which leads me to my fourth tangent:

Tangent #4—The Sun has a Penis. The best story I know about the collective unconscious comes from early in Jung’s career, around 1906.  One day, visiting a young man with paranoid schizophrenia, Jung entered the room to find his patient staring out the window—directly into the sun.  Moreover, the young man was moving his head from side to side, slowly.

When Jung asked him what he was doing, the young man replied that the sun had a penis.  Moreover, when he moved his head from side to side, he could move the sun’s penis—and make the wind blow.

Jung thought the young man was hallucinating and brushed it off.  But years later, he happened to read a two-thousand year old Persian religious text that made him re-read his experience with the young man.  Michael Talbot, in The Holographic Universe, puts it this way:

“The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions.  It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow.  Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man’s vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself.  Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it’s as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious minds.”

I think Lil Wayne, like countless other poets before him, is able to tap into the collective unconscious when he’s rhyming.  He’s able to use the words and the rhythm and the flow to get in touch with some ancient information he might not otherwise know consciously.

And I have to say that when it comes to the image of the toothed vagina, Lil Wayne might actually be more enlightened on the subject than his forebears.

If you look at the more classical interpretations of the vagina dentata ( look at the image from Julie Taymor’s film Titus I provided above)  and the language in Lear, you can see that for centuries, men have been terrified of being devoured by the female anatomy– literally.

And its’ worse than just getting your dick cut off by a pair of teeth.  In Titus, the vagina swallows not one but three men whole.  In Lear, the vagina is a symbolic hell on earth.  Lear is aging and death is on his mind: his world has been reduced to a hell-on-earth by his two elder daughters.  Is it any wonder that for Lear, the vagina is a place for fiends?   It not only has a stench of sulfur: the vagina is a place of fire and of bodily harm.

Lear’s last word is “consumption” and we have to imagine that this is definitely NOT a devouring devoutly to be wished.

But Lil Wayne (sorry, the narrator) appears to embrace the vagina dentata.  And remember the “No Fear Shakespeare” translation I was making fun of?  Maybe those editors are on to something with the “Death and Orgasm” bit.  After all, in the Renaissance, they called the orgasm la petit morte– the little death.  The narrator in “Turnin’ Me On,” unlike Lear and the male characters in Titus, is not afraid of women, of the female sex, of sex itself.  He is not afraid of death.

Jung said that the poet’s job was to bring up images from that collective unconscious—to bring them to the surface, to consciousness.  Then we can, collectively, deal with them: heal, transform, revision– all the things you do in therapy.

My friend also said that I might be over-analyzing the lyrics and that Lil Wayne just wants it aggressive—he is hooked on weed and cough syrup, after all.

But poets have been tapping into that collective unconscious for centuries, sometimes using LSD to do so.  (Allen Ginsberg and some of the Beat poets are prime examples.)

In his book, Talbot spends a considerable amount of time talking about the research on LSD done by Stanislav Grof.  Grof guided over 3,000 LSD sessions, each one lasting a minimum of 5 hours.  During those sessions, he watched patients relive what it like to be in the womb, assume the identity of a (female) prehistoric reptile, tap into the consciousnesses of close relatives and distant ancestors, discuss the embalming practices of the ancient Egyptians with ease.  Talbot says

“They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution.  They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of an entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos.”

But Talbot is using LSD as a metaphor for his model of the holographic mind, to prove to his reader that everything is intimately and infinitely interconnected.  And Grof went on, after his LSD research, to discover that subjects could reach what he called a holotropic state: which Talbot defines as “one’s biological, psychological, racial and spiritual history, the past, present, and future of the world, other levels of reality, and all the other experiences already discussed in the context of the LSD experience.”

Final Closing Tangent: Everything is connected. In Jung’s universe, and the one Talbot proposes in his book, everything is intimately and infinitely interconnected.

I think rappers can get in touch with that two-million year-old-man when they freestyle.   In Kevin Fitzgerald’s documentary Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, the first ten minutes talks about this very concept.

DJ’s can do it too—sometimes they can even get in touch with other life forms.  If you watch Scratch, Doug Pray’s documentary on the evolution of the DJ, Mix Master Mike uses his turntables to communicate with what he terms “intergalactic beings.”  He’s not speaking metaphorically, people.  Watch the clip.

But Q-Bert says it best at the end of the documentary:

“I believe everyone is one.  Everything is one whole big ball of energy—kind of like the Star Wars thing about the force.  Everything is . . . everyone is connected . . . we’re all just like one energy.  We think we’re separated but everyone affects everyone.  When you find out you’re not separated . . . everyone is a, a, lived of one whole thing . . . why would you want to hurt your hand, or hurt your fingers, or hurt your arms when you know that person is part of you?  So in order to help people, I make music for them.”

In one of my tangents, I talked about that yearning I experienced, in seventh grade, to know what rap music was– that I didn’t know why I wanted to know what rap was so badly.

At the time, I didn’t know that hip hop was a culture– that it had a history founded on that mystical poetic experience.  At twelve, I didn’t even know I wanted to be a poet.

But I grew up to be a poet.  And looking back at that tall, skinny, awkward girl begging the boys around her to just let her listen to just one song, just one minute of one song, just a second of one song . . . I think my desire was because I knew, unconsciously, that it would lead me to the kind of connection that Q-Bert is talking about.  And even though my introduction to rap music was so violent, so misogynist, I felt like Steinski (also in Scratch) said he felt the first time he heard rap: “This is music I’ve been waiting all my life to hear– and I didn’t know it.”

The break, scratching, rhyming, freestyling– it’s all poetic– it’s all poetry.  It can lead to transformation– to experiencing what Africa Bambaataa calls “your GodSelf.”  But those are other blog entries.

For now, I’ll end with this: maybe I don’t need to buy a dime sack and a sizuurp to get on Wayne’s level.