I Can't Understand What Desiigner is Saying, and That's OK

By Zack Boehm on June 28, 2016

Last weekend, the 19 year old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner, who was plucked from obscurity last year by G.O.O.D Music impresario Pusha T and who enjoyed immediate, meteoric success with his first properly released song, the ubiquitous “Panda”, dropped his first full length mixtape, New English. The project is breathless—36 relentless minutes of bludgeoning energy heavily punctuated with piercing “GrrrrAHHH”’s. But you couldn’t be blamed if you thought that the mixtape’s title was less meaningless abstraction (which it appears to be) and more a direct commentary on the nature of Desiigner’s rapping. There are moments on the tape where it sounds like he’s speaking some new, yet undecoded language.

via thefader.com

This isn’t a novel critique of Desiigner, and it isn’t necessarily a critique at all, but you really, really can’t understand what the dude is saying. I find myself straining to pick up the odd recognizable syllable or vaguely familiar phoneme and then filling in the rest with some pidgin, best-guess, speculative stab at what he may be trying to get across. Imagine my shock when, upon finally conceding and Googling the lyrics to “Panda”, I discovered that instead of rapping about a “Pegasus” he was actually rapping about a “black X6”, or that he was boasting about “selling bar” and not visiting a “salad bar”.

There’s a kind of futility in actually trying to learn the lyrics to a Desiigner song. It’s a Sisyphean struggle against arrant unintelligibility. And why even bother? If you’re rapping along with friends, so long as you make sounds that even crudely approximate Desiigner’s frenetic grumbles, there’s no way anybody can call you out with any integrity. As if they actually know what he’s saying. Yeah right.

via onyxtruth.com

Desiigner seems to be the next logical step in the mumble rap progression, a trend that, much to the dismay of “rap was better in the 90’s” old heads, has come to dominate both the airwaves and the aesthetic conversation in modern hip-hop.

The seeds of mumble rap have long been germinating in the fertile fields of avant-garde trap music. Gucci Mane, as well as being the near universally revered premier of the Atlanta rap empire, may be the mumble rap pioneer. Since the early aughts, Guwop has been burbling about his mischief and misanthropy over malevolent, thudding beats—a formula that we’ve seen endlessly reproduced and reconstituted. Gucci votaries like Future and Young Thug have followed closely in the footsteps of their forbear. Future uses his gravelly, aridly digitized voice as a kind of percussive synth instead of a mode of clear articulation, and Thug’s croons, squawks, and yelps bend his language so far backwards that melody and aurality become far more important than semantic meaning.

Gucci Mane the don, via pitchfork.com

Artists like these have proven that, even in a medium like rap where the spoken word is crucial and fundamental, the practical function of language is as pliable as language itself. They’ve tapped in to something primordial in language and vocalization that proves that speech can be expressive and captivating without always being linearly intelligible. In their best work, they show that language can be artful even when it’s not articulable.

And out of this alchemical cauldron of mumble rap history is born Desiigner, an artist who raps like he is completely unconcerned about whether or not you ever understand a single word he says. But why should he be concerned? The content of Desiigner’s raps are obviously secondary in importance to their evocative, kinetic force. If mumble rap is hip-hop’s cubism, tearing down conventional means of expression and then reconstructing the wreckage into something eerily abstracted but familiar, then Desiigner might just be mumble Picasso. After all, I was dabbing just as hard rapping “Pegasus” as I do when I rap “black X6”.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Get Top Stories Delivered Weekly

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format