Spitting Rhymes 'til Mourning Comes: an Exploration of Hip-Hop, Suicidal Thoughts, and Spiritual Lament

Abstract

This essay explores how the poetics of hip-hop—spitting rhymes—gives form to spiritual lament. Hip-hop is criticized, and rightfully so, for promoting misogyny, greed, violence, and nihilism—but does it do something else? Using hip-hop artist Biggie Smalls’s song “Suicidal Thoughts,” the author argues that spitting rhymes is a way that African Americans salvage lost aspects of the self, that is, parts of the self that have been silenced and, at times, terminated—by the self—because of trauma. He engages in an interdisciplinary study of African American history to discuss the ways in which the Sambo figure was constructed and utilized to deny the reality of Black suffering; sociologist Émile Durkheim’s On Suicide to delineate the various forms of suicide, some of which are the direct result of social regulation; biblical scholarship, for example, the work of Walter Brueggemann, to demonstrate that spiritual lament functions to protect a community from overwhelming despair; and psychoanalysis to address how the loss of ways to creatively confront our sorrow is harmful to the self.