When you start off your video with a heavyset white man in a fake MAGA hat dropping a dozen n-bombs into the camera, it's pretty obvious we're dealing with a Serious Artistic Statement. This is a subgenre that tends to suck, but Mr. Lucas really delivered the goods here, spraying shots in all directions. He operates on so many simultaneous levels of caricature it approaches art.
The hype for Joyner Lucas is hard to avoid anywhere in New England, even the Outer Sticks I reside in. Despite that, I didn't know for a fact that he was black until about a minute into this video -- his grievances against other black men are just too articulated. Nobody wearing a real MAGA hat could muster such a cutting, knowing argument...not even Malik Obama, since he's actually a white guy running a (shitty) parody account on Twitter.
Now, most Trump supporters think Steve Jobs died of Gay AIDS, and Jewish physicists don't really resonate with that demographic. Joyner Lucas has a much higher opinion of white people than actual white people do, but this doesn't really dilute his big moment at all. He's grabbing so many third rails at once, the sheer juice powers past little details like that. Again, this is a Serious Artistic Statement.
As such, it bangs. This is a song that could have taken hundreds of wrong turns, but Lucas never lets go of the raw urgency and honesty of the opening barrage. More than that, his writing is tightly cut, a conversational jazz piece that camouflages the intricacy of his rhyme schemes.
As a career move, this reaches further and costs less than a Quavo hook or a Nicki Minaj feature. JUST SAY SOMETHING REAL. Everyone wants to be famous, but yet few self-professed artists are willing to put their dick on the line quite like this.
The secret sauce, of course, is nihilism. You see it in the refrains that run through both verses: the hypocrisy, the victimhood, the self-deception, the laziness -- humans in general are generally shit. America will never get over blackness or whiteness, it's true, but there's really no good reason that we should. I am all for poking these wounds in the meantime.
It's a shame he worships Eminem so much, though. Especially when he's delivering a better product than Marshall ever could have written.
Three Lil Dickys for the ambition & songwriting skills, and one more for the incredible lip-sync performance that tubby cracker puts on here. Without him, this video just wouldn't have the impact. Paul McCartney wrote a song about this with Stevie Wonder, I think.
