[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi6z1u3opgU?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

“I’M RAW”

BY FABOLOUS

CENTRAL QUESTION:

Is impeccable but empty rhetoric dangerous?

Song length: 3:00; Video length: 4:39; Approximate number of similes in song: eleven; Celebrities referenced in song: R. Kelly, Fergie, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Alex Rodriguez, The Notorious B.I.G., Jamal Woolard, Wesley Snipes (in New Jack City), Amber Rose, Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka Flame; Author’s other nicknames: Funeral Fab, Loso, Mr. R.I.P.; Author’s real name: John David Jackson; Author’s age: thirty-three; Number of times author has been shot: one; Number of times author has been arrested: one; Representative couplet from mix tape: “I mean what I say, like the dictionary / I don’t write rhymes, I write obituaries.”

One is not instinctively inclined to take the Brooklyn rapper Fabolous seriously: his taste in beats is mediocre, he buys into modish audio gimmicks that will become the stuff of parody before they stop charting, and, even in a genre where most artists have dumb names, he has a really dumb name. But Fabolous is also a very good lyricist, one who sustains great promise even as he delivers on it, who even at his wittiest seems poised to move on to more serious, consequential things.

“I’m Raw,” from his 2010 mix tape, There Is No Competition 2: The Funeral Service, offers none of those things. Rather, it is a quick, chorus-free litany of boasts and threats and brand names, a sampler of rap swagger—I am rich, I am potent, I am smartly dressed and heavily armed—that covers a magnificent swath of rhetoric without actually saying anything. Its appeal lies not in its subject matter or social conscience, for it has neither, but in the verbal resourcefulness with which it tells us about nothing in particular.

Rappers are worth little if they’re not clever, and plenty are proficient in keeping their verses fresh even as their themes stagnate: Lil Wayne, Ghostface Killah, and the Virginia duo Clipse, to name three, have founded solid careers on rapping inventively about selling cocaine. What sets Fabolous apart is his single-minded exploration of an image’s literal and figurative plasticity, his dogged commitment to the extended metaphor. (The noirish video for “I’m Raw” contains ample footage of him butchering raw meat.)

Fabolous does punch lines, but at his best, as here, he deals in tightly coiled triple entendres that reward undergraduate-level close reading. See: “I’m raw, dog, y’all safe sex / You dicks belong in latex, not tape decks,” in which the first line demonstrates what the Greeks called a paraprosdokian, a device where the end of a sentence...