[Paragraphs marked * were written c. January 2014 and slightly revised]

[Note: this essay contains racial language used for socio-analytical purposes. The NS identifies only one Human race and does not discriminate or condemn any individual solely for their personal, cultural, or religious practices. The NS does not, however, condone the thematically-exploitative historical practices of certain homogenous groups.]

Hip-hop music was once the voice of the urban Afrakan of the Diaspora (Black people), spoken by poor righteous teachers to inform us of our circumstances. In the era of Rakim, Tribe, Wu-Tang, and other 5%ers, Hip-Hop preached the pagan sun-gospel and the resurrection of the black body from the Wilderness of the North American ghettos.

Hip-hop was so effective at its initial mission to “wake up” the Black people that the Powers-That-Be, who were invested in keeping the Black population ignorant and depraved, thereupon infiltrated the ranks of our culture, poisoned our message, and created the genre of “Rap.” Rap was promoted by the Powers-That-Be into becoming the dominant mode of entertainment for Black youth. As such, it has been seeded with those same vices which our old-head teachers said would keep us subservient to the system: drug abuse, misogyny, glorification of violence, and the pursuit of empty riches.

This is not the first time that the Powers-That-Be have infiltrated the ranks of natural Culture. It happened over 2000 years ago in Lower Kemet, and it has been happening for the past 1000 years all over the indigenous world. In Ancient Kemet, the Powers-That-Be [Greece, Rome, Hyksos-Semites] conquered, stole, and corrupted the pagan science of nature into the abrahamic mystery religions. Hence, without intending any anti-Semitism, it is appropriate to call the originators of modern Hip-Hop culture Rap-Pagans, and the parasitic trap-rappers and cronies of the music industry, Rap-Jews.

Kanye West, a talented young producer who appeared on the scene at the end of the 90s just as the Rap-Jews were beginning to take over, presents an interesting model of a music artist in an age where the Black consciousness is torn between cultural piety and cultural exploitation. It is as if Kanye had begun his career wanting to reclaim Kemet for his people, but he was ultimately consumed by Babylon. In Part II of this essay, we will see how Kendrick Lamar, proud King Kunta Kinte, represents the alternative, true, inner Kanye West, the Kanye who succeeded in beating the system, instead of getting beat by it.

*Mr. West’s most recent album, Yeezus, which many lament and many praise, is not all boast. I believe that Mr. West is the divine prophet of the rap music industry, the chosen son of our god Gil Scott-Heron, and he has come to die for all the sins of his fellow Rap-Jews, who are mired in the vices above described.

*We may separate Mr. West’s career into Old and New Testaments, on opposite sides of the dramatic upset in his style between Graduation and 808s and Heartbreak. Graduation having been released in September of 2007, and his mother having died in November of that year, we may credit Mr. West’s emotional shift to that event which he has said proved to yield a devastating affect in his life.

*College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation—the Old Testament of Kanye West—exemplify his affinity for classic soul samples, the guilt he sustained from not completing college and letting his mother down, and his struggle to find his place in the rap world.

*In the Old Testament, we find verses from Talib Kweli, Common, Mos Def (the rapper currently known as Yasiin Bey), Lupe Fiasco, and other Rap-Pagans of this era, to an extent and quality that we find lacking in the latter period of Mr. West. We find West acknowledging and often lamenting the reality that he sees his people so mired in—how the institutions of white America passed down drugs, guns, and disease to break a people intent on trying to pull themselves up (see “Crack Music”)—as well as grappling with his image and his internal struggle between desiring the flashy luxurious toys that the Rap-Jew covets and being an upstanding role model for a younger generation (i.e., providing an image of the black male that is not steeped in lust-driven, gang-oriented, rags-to-crack-to-riches ideology). This internal conflict is epitomized in College Dropout, but also well-evoked in Late Registration:

How we stop the Black Panthers?

Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.

You hear that? What Gil Scott was “Heron”

When our heroes and heroines got hooked on heroine.

Crack raised the murder rate in D.C. and Maryland;

We invested in that, it’s like we got Merrill lynched.

And we’ve been hanging from the same tree ever since.

Sometimes I feel like music is the only medicine,

So we cook it, cut it, measure it, bag it, sell it,

The fiends cop it, nowadays they can’t tell if

That’s that good shit, we ain’t sure, man;

Put the CD on your tongue, yeah that’s pure, man.

This that crack music, nigga,

That real black music, nigga.

From the place where the father’s gone, the mothers is hardly home

And the Madigons lock us up in the Audy Home [a Chicago-area juvenile prison];

How the Mexicans say, We just tryin’ to party, holmes;

They wanna pack us all in a box like styrofoam.

Who gave Saddam anthrax?

George Bush got the answers.

Back in the hood it’s a different type of chemical–

Arm & Hammer baking soda raised their own quota

Right when our soldiers ran for the stove ’cause,

‘Cause … dreams of being Hova

Went from being a broke man to being a dopeman

To being the president, look there’s hope, man;

This that inspiration for the Moes and the Folks, man,

Shorty come and see his momma straight overdosin’

… And this is the soundtrack;

This the type of music that you make when you round that.

Our father, give us this day our daily bread,

Before the feds give us these days and take our daily bread.

See I done all this ol’ bullshit,

And to atone, I throw a lil’ somethin’ somethin’ on the pulpit.

We took that shit, measured it, and then cooked that shit,

And what we gave back was crack music.

And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies,

So our mommas ain’t got to be their cooks and nannies,

And we gon’ repo everything they ever took from granny.

Now the former slaves trade hooks for Garmmys.

This dark diction has become America’s addiction.

Those who ain’t even black use it.

We gon’ keep baggin’ up this here crack music.

*I reproduced “Crack Music” from Late Registration here in its entirety because I think it’s the most revealing of West’s Old Testament songs. Even when he is making a song in the spirit of the Rap-Jew, elaborating upon past drug-work and showing how one made it “out the ghetto” because of that occupation, he is being pointedly ironic. He is representing this type of degenerative rap as crack in and of itself. Music that glorifies the drug-life is poison for the people who have to experience this reality every day, and yet rappers continue to glorify this occupation at the behest of parasitic music industry executives who think that this image is what will sell records. Mr. West is pointing out that the Black community’s drug problems were and are imposed upon them by the Powers-That-Be in order to break them, in the same way that “crack music” is imposed upon young Black ears in order to keep those youths in a position where they will be swiftly cast off into the prison industrial complex and be out of America’s white hair. The way in which chemical warfare was executed in the Iraq War was the same way it was executed in the urban centers of America.

*Mr. West is trying to say that being a dopeman is no longer something that Black youths in city slums have to take as their given future; they have further options, and the later election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was a well-timed reinforcement to this sentiment. Despite the ironic ending to this song, Mr. West aims to instil hope in his listeners, or at least an awareness of the system in which they find themselves at the bottom. There are other options, he says; Black youths don’t have to look up to Hova (Jay-Z) as one of their sole role models because rap and professional sports are not the only options for black youth … which brings me to my next point.

*In this era we see Mr. West revere Jay-Z as a Yahweh figure, a mentor, even though Ye laments that the superstar did not give him much of a thought during the early part of his career (exemplified in “Last Call” on College Dropout, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” on Late Registration, and “Big Brother” on Graduation). That would change in the New Testament, however, when Mr. West would inflate his ego in order to prove himself to be a contender for Jay-Z’s throne as the Greatest Rapper on Earth Alive Today and the Greatest Of All Time (the GREAT GOAT).

*At the end of the Old Testament, we see the death of the Graduation Bear, that figure which served as a logo and branding marker for Mr. West’s early career; that image makes its last appearance on the cover of Graduation, signifying a moving-away from the college motif (i.e., the “student” persona) and a rebirth in musical spirit (i.e., the development of the “master” persona).

*808s and Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Cruel Summer and Watch the Throne (for our purposes), and Yeezus, signify the New Testament as it stands presently. [This paragraph was written prior to the release of Life of Pablo.]

*808s introduced us to the new sound of Mr. West—autotune and synthesizers as opposed to soul samples and MIDIs. This likely occurred as a result of the recent death of Mr. West’s mother and his inability to express his deepest feelings through rapping alone. Fans were, of course, skeptical at first, but whenever Mr. West sets a trend, it catches on. After its release, autotune became a staple in radio-rap music.

*My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, arguably Mr. West’s magnum opus, solidified his place as a tier-one musician—not only as a rapper—but as a bona fide composer, a musical genius of our time to rival Bob Dylan in his, and Mozart before him. But we see no more of the pagan consciousness of Mos Def and Talib Kweli. West adopts a whole new entourage—Rick Ross, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Bon Iver, Nicki Minaj, Big Sean, old Wu-Tang members, and his idol—though not for long—Jay-Z himself.

*In MBDTF, Kanye proved himself to be the equal of Jay-Z, if it were not the case that Mr. Carter was already falling off in terms of his lyricism.

*In Watch the Throne, a War in Heaven that Milton would have applauded, Mr. West effectively toppled Jay-Z from the GREAT throne: he kills his god.

*Prior to MBDTF and into the aftermath of the battle for the Throne, Mr. West surrounded himself with a following of rappers—the G.O.O.D Music crew—as his disciples, and released countless megahits, further solidifying his position as rap’s new father figure.

*Through it all, however, Mr. West never lost the awareness of his Blackness and the role he was expected to play by white America and the parasitic Rap-Jew music industry. Although he is aware of the internal conflict, he seems at loss to correct it, to harken back to a time of Kemet, a time of Zion. He appears, in the mid-New Testament, to be consumed by and assimilated into Babylon:

Inter-century anthems based off inner-city tantrums

Based off the way we was branded,

Face it, Jerome gets more time than Brandon,

And at the airport they check all through my bags

And tell me that it’s random.

…

I treat the cash the way the government treats AIDS:

I won’t be satisfied till all my niggas get it (get it?)

…

As long as I’m in Polo smiling they think they got me,

But they’d try to crack me if they could ever see a black me.

I thought I chose a field where they couldn’t sack me

If a nigga ain’t shootin’ a jump shot runnin’ a tack meet …

(“Gorgeous”)

You know white people, get money don’t spend it,

Or maybe they: get money, buy a business;

I’d rather buy eighty gold chains and go [ignorant]!

I know Spike Lee gone kill me but let me finish …

(“Clique”)

*Finally, Mr. West reveals himself as rap’s Jesus in the album of near-the-same name, released just earlier this year [2013]. It is profound and accomplished in its lyricism, arrangement, production, and intent. The sample of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” in “Blood on the Leaves” alone speaks volumes. Many have said that Mr. West simplified and vulgarized his previously-verbose lyricism on this record, but I think he is simply more controlled and as outspoken as ever:

My momma was raised in the era when

Clean water was only served to the fair of skin.

Doin’ clothes you would have thought I had help

But they wasn’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself.

You see it’s broke-nigga racism, that’s that “Don’t touch anything in the store”

And it’s rich-nigga racism, that’s that “Come in please buy more.”

What’you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond ring?

All you black want all the same things.

(“New Slaves”)

*If these are not the sentiments, the biting satire and scathing truths, of a deeply-conflicted and internally split Black man, then call me Lena Dunham. Because Mr. West is able to express such blunt and directed remarks on a record that will reach tens of millions of American ears, we must acknowledge that he is an artist in control of the message he wishes to spread, that he is learning about himself even as he is telling us about ourselves, and that we as a country are most definitely no longer in the 20th Century.

Given the above analysis [which was written 3 years ago], it remains that during this late-New Testament period Mr. West was slowly loosing control of his Self. It seems now that the maximal inflation of West’s ego during the Yeezus era was bound to be trailed by a decline into near-insanity. Furthermore, the Rap-Jew in Mr. West seems to have gotten the best of his Rap-Pagan at this time, and whether or not the Kardashians, MK Ultra, and the Entertainment-Propaganda Industrial Complex had a whole lot to do with it is anyone’s theory. But I think that the man had simply lost his way, forgot who he was in the midst of fame, had begun praying to mystery gods, and had begun to maintain self-destructive practice.

This analysis of Kanye West illustrates two things for the purpose of our essay’s theme, the return of the Rap-Pagan. The first point is that while the Rap-Jew has reigned on the radio from ~2000AD-present, Mr. West has staged a front-guard against the forces of ignorance which seek to destroy the consciousness of the Black people. Secondly, while this may be the case, he has ultimately [at this time] failed to carry through the mission himself, and his position in the conscious Black community is nullified until he divorces Kim Kardashian.

While the Gospel of Kanye West may or may not be over and done with, the advance-guard of the Rap-Pagans may be just beginning. I tell you—when I heard Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80 in 2011, and the future King Kunta rattled off Rigamortis—I tell you—the Trumpence of Revelations sounded and I discovered that the body undergoing the rigor mortis referred to in the song’s title was the dying body of the Rap-Jew Conspiracy and the white supremacy national complex. I think that Kendrick will reclaim Kemet for the People, if they don’t do him like Pac first!

Stay tuned for the next installment to hear about the significance of staying “Humble” in:

KING KHEM: The Return of the Rap-Pagan, Part II.