Mark Anthony Neal: I was 13 years old when "Rapper's Delight" dropped. How would you describe it, and how were you engaging with it at the time? Rodney Carmichael: I wonder if you could talk about your own relationship to hip-hop, and its performance of masculinity, as you were coming up in the Bronx. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To do that, Louder host Rodney Carmichael sat down with Mark Anthony Neal to talk about why hip-hop's standard bearers still find it hard to read or recognize some artists as authentic - and why there's still plenty of opportunity for those standards to change. You can hear that whole story in the podcast, but here we wanted to dig deeper into those tropes, how they've evolved, and whom they've left out of the conversation. His eventual coming out as gay in early 2017 helps us understand something about the fragility of masculinity in hip-hop. Makonnen challenged hip-hop's standards in a way Drake didn't. On our latest episode, we track the story of iLoveMakonnen's rise within the industry, and the particular impediments he faced along the way. While women in rap have been the primary focus of Louder Than A Riot's second season, misogynoir also manifests in the stories of male artists, especially those whose performance of masculinity counters the accepted cultural norms - that is, the kind of Black male presentation that Neal's book identifies as "illegible" to many audiences.
They made a hit together, and threatened to disrupt the status quo, before one of them perceived the other to be the potential threat. Through sonic innovations that helped set rap's SoundCloud era in motion, Drake and Makonnen each charted subversive, emo paths at a time when the genre's mainstream players were still marked by hardness and artifice. None of which left much room for artists who existed in between those rigid confines.
In Looking For Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, a book published just one year before Makonnen and Drake's fateful one-off, cultural critic and academic Mark Anthony Neal outlines the five tropes that defined hip-hop masculinity at the time: playas, pimps, hustlas, thugs and n*****.
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