David Banner ft. Pastor Troy - Fuck ‘Em

Obscenities are our last resort. The final vestige of the English language’s birth on the gutter tongues of Germanic tribes who raided and fucked everything on the European continent a few hundred years ago. It’s our first undoing; the jump we take in front of our parents, the shocking utterances as a child. Someone swears – in a classroom, a bank, even on a common grey street corner – and we’re all back wearing animal pelts.

But the notion of the curse (an, all curses are just secondary to “fuck”) has always had a role in rap. Using the curse is really the essence of rap; it’s vocal rebellion, the true ‘punk’ of the human voice. And as an article last week in The New York Times pointed out, it’s something pretty much every culture on the face of the earth has in common. Swearing and the slang that accompanies it evolve in punctuated periods of growth and the contemporary establishment rarely gets it.

So for someone so consumed with space as David Banner is with his Mississippi home, the creeping time that molds slang doesn’t hold him down. Quite the opposite. Each guttural curse and bark on the horrifically stunning “Fuck ‘Em” has Banner sliding further and further up the curve of linguistic time. He gets the purpose of curses: they get at the base emotions better than anything else. The rest of his haunting, clarion howl debut album – Mississippi – may touch on subtler notes surrounding the abandoning, destruction and ridicule of his home, but when Banner, like his comic book namesake, shuts off his “higher” emotions, the real ground shaking power takes hold.

At first, the surging, endless Bayou Classic marching band drum fury is announcement enough. Banner and Pastor Troy whip the track into a righteous fury. All haters, regardless of race, age or gender are “bitches” or “niggaz.” Call it ‘troubling,’ call it ‘obscene,’ whatever. It’s so forward thinking a slice of raw and new slang that we (the privileged online community of music consumers) have no real reaction but shock. That’s fine. How many kids drop “this sucks” in classrooms today with nothing but confidence? How many times do you stop and think what that actually means? Banner gets at the word that dig at us, the curses and syntax of curses so uniquely American and vicious

I’m not sure who Banner is railing against, but in a move of authority, he lumps everyone – white apologists, haters in the club, record labels who turned their noses up on Mississippi, black men and women ignorant of their shared past in Mississippi, Mississippi itself, himself, the whole world – into one army of detractors. He slanders the whole world.

There’s no apology for the righteousness, only Ronin death-wishes (“If I die tonight, man fuck ‘em all good / Cause I left this bitch grippin’ leather and wood”) and uncompromising vengeance (“I ain’t did nothing but praise God and my clip / So come to Mississippi and we taking yo hoes, pick in yo dome”). Banner isn’t just celebrating his home, he’s fiercely protecting it. Each treat sounds provoked; we’ve done something and Banner is coming at us with a fury. There’s not a pause in the song, and there’s no way the song could exist with any of them. I don’t want to call Banner the most dramatically human figure in rap, but he takes everything we think of the “south,” the nothing we thought about Mississippi and crashes them together in the same song. It doesn’t matter what the mood or tempo or length is. When you’ve got the past and future on your side, a single curse can stop time.