“I See Death Around the Corner”: Black Manhood and Vulnerability in Me Against the World

Rap, Race, and Representation in the Popular Media

Imagined as violent, mindless, and predatory, Black men have been conceived almost entirely through the eyes of patriarchal White supremacists (Curry, 2017) who hold considerable control over the media and the representations it circulates. Popular mainstream media depicting Black men have rested commonly on a few reductive archetypes, including the buck and Uncle Tom (Collins, 2004; Jackson, 2006; West, 1993). The buck, as he is commonly represented, is “an indiscreet, devious, irresponsible, and sexually pernicious beast” (Jackson, 2006, p. 41). Still prevalent and taking numerous forms, the buck can be traced to the post-emancipation Jim Crow South where the Black rapist myth was conjured to control Black men’s bodies. In television, because writers, producers, directors, and media executives continue to be primarily White men, representations about Black maleness continue to be fueled by racist and reductive ideas about Black life through the scripting process. Jackson (2006) states that “[a] scripter is usually an institution or individual in a decision-making position who has the authority to develop and mass-distribute images” (p. 74). In television, scripting happens when network executives and writers “make critical decisions about racial, cultural, class-based, gendered, or homosexual representations” (p. 74). Circulated broadly, these representations are usually based on fantasy fueled racism written from White writers’ imaginations, which can harmfully act as a template for understanding Black life (Bell & Harris, 2017).

Television and film continue to be heavily controlled by White authors; however, Black men have had increasingly more control over their representation through hip-hop despite the genre’s commercialization and control by mostly White men. Gray (1995) notes that “[w]ith great authority, young rap musicians aggressively claimed and celebrated their right to speak and represent blackness” (p. 54). In this way, hip-hop functioned as a resistive site for Black self-representation against White patriarchal supremacist society’s reductive gaze. Like many emerging musical styles, gangsta rap began outside the public’s view and corporate media’s borders and was pioneered by young producers, artists, and entrepreneurs who saw the musical style as transgressive (S. C. Watkins, 2005). Even as hip-hop’s popularity and marketplace appeal expanded, Neal (1997) points out that rappers “reclaimed the critical possibilities of popular culture, by using popular culture and by extension the marketplace, as the forum to popularize critical issues within their fractured urban locales to stimulate a broad discussion” (p. 134). These discourses and the discussions they invoked centered around anti-Black racism, poverty, crime, quality housing, and mass incarceration among other issues.

Despite how hip-hop gave Black men a forum to represent themselves and their communities, Rose (2008) points out that gangsta rap music’s social and cultural complexity slowly waned through the 1980s and 1990s with its ascendance into the mainstream, which altered the genre’s themes and commitments. Speaking to how hip-hop’s mainstream success influenced production, McCann (2017) contends that rappers began to musically perform criminality because it became lucrative to sell young suburban White boys and men, who had much more financial power, their racist fantasies. In this view, gangsta rap often gets figured as “a shrewd, market driven performance that craftily exploited America’s fear of poor ghetto youths” (S. C. Watkins, 2005, p. 45). Here, the argument has been that some Black male rappers have been complicit in the mainstream music recording industry’s ghettoization of Blackness. Highlighting how such arguments may be an oversimplification, Rose (2008) points out that often “structural forms of deep racism, corporate influences, and the long-term effects of economic, social and political disempowerment are not meaningfully related to rappers’ alienated, angry stories about life in the ghetto” (p. 5). So, what may appear as complacency by some gangsta rappers may actually be the failure to conceive gangsta rap’s themes as emerging from the anger and frustration of living in an anti-Black society. For instance, Perry (2004) argues that the rage often appearing in hip-hop is an understandable but generally unwise reaction to impoverished Black life and that violence perpetrated by Black men should not be seen as reaffirming racist stereotypes but rather the “brutality of American racism and class inequality” (p. 125). This is not to say that rap music should be taken as unadulterated truth. As Balaji (2009) argues, “negotiations among the artist, the label, and the audience are critical to how the artist is commodified into both a ‘buyable’ and an ‘authentic’ cultural product” (p. 35), highlighting how representations around identity in hip-hop can be complex. While navigating this complexity can be tricky, this does mean that the lyrical portrayals about Black life crafted by Black male artists are patently false but rather that there are certain rhetorical constraints that artists must sometimes attend to in ways that can complicate musical representation.

Gangsta rappers negotiating between their lived realities and their audience’s and record label’s demands have often used vivid and detailed storytelling to navigate these competing tensions. Like autoethnography, hip-hop lyrics are sometimes understood to give voice to Black artists’ realities as Black men navigating their social lives (Hess, 2005). Hip-hop’s narrative feature makes it uniquely equipped to represent Blackness on an everyday level. To this point, Gray (1995) notes that “[w]here film works the imaginative space by representing blackness as spectacle writ large, rap works the terrain of representation through the experience of everyday life” (p. 53). Through combining intricate life stories and precise and perceptive delivery, Jay-Z’s music, for example, “probe[s] the psyche, pleasures, and paranoia of the street hustler, and . . . composes lyrical vistas that champion the ‘good life,’ even as he carefully portrays the grim realities of a life he vows never to forget” (S. C. Watkins, 2005, p. 75). In this way, hip-hop artists use storytelling to craft stylistically compelling narratives attendant to both the pleasures and pains experienced by those who have struggled and persevered through life.

Contesting Black Masculinity’s Invulnerable Black Man

Paying close attention to their racialized histories shows that Black men organize their manhood in distinct ways. Exploring how “street life-oriented” men chart their manhood, Payne (2006) contends that Black American men understand their masculinity “in the face of perpetual social injustices” (p. 288). Similarly, Curry (2017) argues that historical oppression has meant that Black men “have developed a separate historical consciousness of manhood that is quite distinct from that of (white) masculinity” (p. 25). Thinking about Blackness as an orientation, Weheliye (2014) states that “the Negro appears not as a social Darwinist fait accompli but, rather, as the conglomerate effect [emphasis added] of different racializing assemblages” (p. 20). From this perspective, race as a sociopolitical apparatus disciplines individuals into distinct categories: humans, nonhumans, and those in between (Weheliye, 2014). Linking discourses about humanness to genocide, Wynter (1994) argues that locating Black men outside humanity has rationalized violence against their bodies and their deaths in ways appearing ordinary. Working from a similar perspective, Curry (2017) proposes analyzing Black men as the Man-Not, a theoretical formulation for analyzing Black maleness in a world discriminatory against Black men and rejecting the notion that Black manhood is synonymous with patriarchal White masculinity. To this point, Curry (2017) argues that Black boys in contrast to White boys “are socialized to understand manhood in the context of their vulnerability, the dangers their assertiveness and competitiveness are perceived to have in the larger society” (p. 21). Subsequently, Black boys and young Black men are often taught to regulate their bodily gestures and vocal expressiveness. As Stoever (2016) points out, the “ability to be audibly annoyed at getting a traffic ticket and live is a contemporary marker of a very old strain of white privilege” (p. 3). Failure for Black boys and men to comply with these codes can result in bodily harm or death. Moreover, Black boys and men are routinely faced with the societal fact that Black lives do not matter or matter less as “officers who kill black ‘suspects’ need only invoke fear as a motivation for the killing and they will be let go” (Lipsitz, 2015, p. 120). The realization that Black lives matter less through how police can murder Black boys and men and face no punitive measures in addition to other social and economic factors negatively influences Black mental health. D. C. Watkins, Green, Rivers, and Rowell (2006) point out that because Black people and men particularly are exposed to greater social and economic inequalities including racism, violence, and poverty, their mental health is adversely impacted. However, because there is a stigma attached to psychological distress, D. C. Watkins, Allen, Goodwill, and Noel (2017) note that these mental health problems persist silently. To this end, the racialized circumstances that Black men face show that they are oriented differently than White men.

Curry (2017) uses the term Black male vulnerability to attend specifically to the disadvantages Black men experience socially, how their lived experiences are erased from theory, and the violence and death they perpetually risk facing. Recognizing the relationship between social relationality and vulnerability is important for understanding Black male vulnerability. Supposing that vulnerability is consequential to social relationality, Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay (2016) argue that vulnerability should be understood socially and that vulnerability “always appears in the context of specific social and historical relations that call to be analyzed concretely” (p. 3). Perceived as a perpetual risk to be managed, Black men may never completely possess bodily autonomy. Butler (2016) notes that while individuals may strive for bodily autonomy, insofar as bodies are constantly impressing on one another, bodily agency in its purest sense seems elusive. Pointing out how Black men are always positioned vulnerably, Curry (2017) states that Black males “are literally perceived as the dangers and fears that others project on them” (p. 169). Consequently, Black men are always culpable for the violent disposition imagined onto them, which is used to justify harming and murdering them.

While mass media is widely responsible for circulating Black criminal behavior, the academy has played an equally troubling role. Payne (2006) notes that social science discourses, with few expectations, have conceived Black men oriented by street life through stereotypes. Furthermore, Curry (2017) states that “too often, Black males are projected into academic projects as the stereotypes individuals perceive them as rather than how they actually exist in the world” (p. 8). Similar to how racist stereotypes are imposed on Black men moving through their public lives (Coates, 2015; Curry, 2017), scholars using Black masculinity as analytical frameworks often perpetuate racist ideas about Black men. Across disciplines, racist caricatures have become revered concepts for understanding Black males rather than their actual social and historical relationships to the world around them (Curry, 2017). By imposing these caricatures, the social relationships foregrounded in subjugation and discrimination organizing Black men’s lives disappear. In this way, Black boys and young men are denied the trauma precipitating their interpersonal conflicts in adulthood and discourses representing Black men without fathers, power, or employment are understood as evidence indicating their incompleteness rather than their social subordination (Curry, 2017). When ideas about Black masculinity are merely projected on Black men, the social structures orienting Black men and how they understand their manhood are erased, which ultimately serves patriarchal White supremacist society’s interests.

The way that structures orienting Black men get erased and silenced is precisely why examining hip-hop is important as it allows Black male artists to publicly articulate and assert their perspectives, speaking to their vulnerability in an anti-Black society. In the academy and society more generally, perspectives circulated by Black men in hip-hop are often dismissed as anti-social when they lyrically portray their proximity to violence, death, and suffering. Here, the social and political context that rappers use to foreground their vulnerability gets erased. Curry (2017) contends that

[t]he death of Black men and boys by state violence, white vigilantism, and economic deprivation not only removes this group from being seen in society but also erases them, censors the meaning of their lives for the sake of maintaining ideological coherence. (p. 177)

As Curry (2017) continues, “[d]emocracy, hard work, capitalism, education, and civility can work if we simply do not see—ignore and disown—the large number of Black males who do not exist in this social register” (p. 177). So, if hip-hop music has been largely equipped by Black men to highlight their erasure, assert their humanity, and chart their lives as they have lived them, it is of no surprise that hip-hop artists and their intellectual capacity stay under assault.

Despite how White patriarchal society refuses to see Black men as intelligent and socially conscious, Jenkins (2011) notes that at their best, “the lyrics penned by hip-hop artists are a valuable form of nontraditional knowledge and social critique of the American experience” (p. 1240). In this way, Black men have used hip-hop to articulate several important philosophical themes. For example, Curry (2014) contends that even though Kanye West’s discography is attentive to anti-Black death, corporatism, and neoliberal aspiration, which deserves to be taken seriously, his Black male body “lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking” (p. 18). Taking his music seriously, Curry (2014) explores themes in West’s song “New Slave” about anti-Black racism and argues that his “[song] is an attempt to articulate the continuation of Black enslavement despite the artificial political and social changes that are attributed to racial progress and social equality through the lens of (the anxiety and fears endemic to) Black manhood” (p. 18). Similarly, Payne (2016) contends that Young Jeezy’s album The Recession “positions the perspective of street-identified Black men against a structural analysis, as a way to communicate to the listener the unforgiving impact of economic inequality on low-income Black communities” (p. 128). As the album’s title implies, The Recession includes themes that speak to how Black men have little economic and educational opportunity, endure poor living conditions, and face a corrupt political system and how these structural inequalities manifesting from anti-Black racism orient Black men into adopting a “street identity” (Payne, 2016). While White patriarchal society attempts to silence and delegitimize their perspectives, Black male hip-hop artists offer tremendous insight into the particular ways ideas about Black maleness are organized in an anti-Black society.

“It Ain’t Easy”: Structuring Black Men’s Lives

While Black men are vulnerably positioned through their relationships to social and political structures, making them prone to injustices like poverty, mass incarceration, and police brutality, Shakur’s album illuminates how Black men learn about and reflect on this positionality through considering the challenges their mothers, who are imagined as heroes, face navigating a discriminatory patriarchal White supremacist society. This insight is valuable for thinking about how Black male rappers such as Shakur organize ideas about Black maleness. Not unlike other Black children, Shakur describes being raised by a single mother and observing her economic hardship in ways that hardly went unrecognized. Pointing out his family’s poverty and how it distinguished his family from others, Shakur raps “Over the years we was poorer than the other little kids” (“Dear Mama”). While poverty in Black families tend to illuminate how structural barriers to equality persist and impact economic mobility, Shakur’s album specifically references growing up in a single parent household. For example, Shakur raps “No love from my daddy cause the coward wasn’t there” (“Dear Mama”). While Shakur is vague about his father’s noninvolvement, this sentiment underscores how Black families are often without Black fathers for reasons such as death or incarceration, which may lead to resentment when Black mothers are left to laboriously compensate as single parents. Overtime, Black women are recognized by their children as strong or superhuman. As Shakur demonstrates in his lyrics, Black boys and men come to see their mothers as possessing qualities resembling superheroes. Specifically, Shakur refers to his mother as a “Black queen” (“Dear Mama”) to pay tribute to her labor and tenacity despite the odds being stacked against her as poor, single, and on welfare. Speaking to his mother’s heroic persistence, Shakur raps “You always was committed / A poor single mother on welfare, tell me how ya did it / There’s no way I can pay you back” (“Dear Mama”). As Shakur’s lyrics show, Black children observe that their mothers persevere despite being economically disadvantaged. Here, the different ways Black mothers are positioned vulnerably impact their children as they are routinely exposed to the same challenges (Majors & Billson, 1992). Shakur’s lyrics show that through thinking about their mothers as superheroes, Black men understand their mothers to be courageous and hardworking despite being positioned vulnerably, speaking to the obstacles single Black mothers face in a patriarchal White supremacist society. Recognizing the challenges endured by their mothers, then, illuminates how Black boys and men understand themselves as vulnerably positioned.

Speaking to his social vulnerability mostly in his teenage years, Shakur raps about participating in the illegal economy to make do with how Black men are positioned in ways that limit their legal economic opportunities. Similar to how their mothers made do despite their economic precarity, making do for Black men as Shakur demonstrates refers to how they are locked out from the legal economy and turn to the underground for survival. In “It Ain’t Easy,” for example, Shakur raps “Through the years trying to stack a little green / I was only seventeen, when I started serving fiends / And I wish there was another way to stack a dollar” (“It Ain’t Easy”). In these lyrics, Shakur expresses turning to the illegal economy as his only option, demonstrating how Black men may make do by “serving fiends” when unable to see other viable options within reach. As Shakur’s lyrics suggest, ideas about having no legitimate avenues for earning income show that even before adulthood, Black boys and men are already oriented in ways teaching them that they are shut out from the legal economy, meaning they are left to make do with what is left. Despite framing his decision to distribute drugs in reluctant terms when he raps “I wish there was another way” (“It Ain’t Easy”), Shakur ultimately expresses not feeling guilty as he had to improvise to provide for himself and his family. Specifically, Shakur raps “I ain’t guilty cause, even though I sell rocks / It feels good putting money in your mailbox / I love paying rent when the rent’s due” (“Dear Mama”). As Shakur’s lyrics suggest, this apathy about participating in the illegal economy may come from perceiving Black men as having no other viable choices beyond selling “rocks” given how they seem to be consigned to a permanent underclass that forecloses economic alternatives. Subsequently, Black men learn that if they are to survive, they must be persistent like their mothers and make do with what is in reach. This relationship to the (illegal) economy highlights how Black men are socially vulnerable in addition to their consciousness about this vulnerability as they turn to the underground economy despite, as Shakur raps, “[wishing] there was another way” (“It Ain’t Easy”), suggesting that other options are considered and exhausted to no avail. To this end, making do, which suggests working from a deprived position, is central to thinking about how Black men locate themselves as socially vulnerable in a patriarchal White supremacist society that bars them from (legitimate) economic participation.

Comparing Black maleness to a “curse,” Shakur raps about his social precarity growing up in impoverished and brutal neighborhoods, demonstrating how the Black male body is situated vulnerably to harm and death and highlighting how social vulnerability under these circumstances organize Black maleness. This is best articulated when Shakur raps “I’m just a young Black male, cursed since my birth / Had to turn to crack sales, if worse come to worse / Headed for them packed, jails, or maybe it’s a hearse” (“Heavy in the Game”). Comparing Black maleness to a curse, Shakur’s lyrics highlight how the social vulnerability Black men often face economically manifests from necessarily turning to the illegal economy in ways that exacerbate rather than curtail their social precarity. Shakur’s notion that Black maleness is a curse highlights how Black men are positioned vulnerably by virtue of their Black maleness, leaving them only with options guaranteeing their eventual demise, imprisonment or death. As Lipsitz (2015) points out, “[t]he sudden violence that took Michael Brown’s life took place in the context of the slow violence perpetrated by unemployment, educational inequality, environmental racism, housing and food insecurity, and aggressive and oppressive police harassment” (pp. 123-124). Under these conditions, dying in one of these ways or an amalgamation of several seems inevitable. For Shakur, this inevitability, the fear of a premature death, is what constitutes the Black male curse where Black men are taught to await their demise despite their make do efforts to survive. To this end, Shakur’s representation about being cursed at birth through having only options that exacerbate Black men’s social vulnerability by hastening their imprisonment or death helps organize his perspective about Black maleness.

“Death Around the Corner”: Black Men and Their Perpetual Susceptibility

Shakur’s lyrics convey how Black men are perpetually susceptible to death as a key feature of social life, which acts as a kind of haunting, and how this perpetual susceptibility is learned by frequently overserving Black men having their bodies destroyed. Communicating how death seems to always be around the corner for Black men, Shakur raps “every single day it’s a test, wear a bulletproof vest / And still a nigga stressin’ over death / When everyday it’s another death, with every breath, / It’s a constant threat” (“Lord Knows”). In these lyrics, Shakur points to how frequently lives are taken around him and how this commonality leads him to stress about the possibility that he could be next, which, in a psychologically distressing way, frames death hauntingly. Subsequently, Shakur’s lyrics show that Black men become particularly invested in protecting their bodies. For instance, Shakur raps about wearing a “bulletproof vest,” either real or metaphorical, highlighting the need for Black men to actively shield their bodies to avoid death while calling specific attention to how gun violence specifically threatens Black men. As Shakur’s lyrics demonstrate, Black men learn about how their bodies are perpetually susceptible to murder through their regular exposure to Black male death. For example, Shakur raps “Done lost too many niggas to this gang-bangin’ / Homies died in my arms, with his brains hangin, fucked up!” (“Lord Knows”). Shakur’s lyrics highlight how Black men learn and are reminded about their mortality by losing men in their lives similarly positioned. Shakur’s representation about having his friends commonly taken by violence illuminates his own vulnerability to death, demonstrating how the specter of death haunts Black men in ways that inform what it means to be Black and male in an anti-Black society.

Shakur’s lyrics represent the police as antagonists that are untrustworthy and unwilling to protect his body, highlighting how Black men’s susceptibility to death is exacerbated in a society where Black men are unprotected and often targeted by police officers themselves. Framing police officers as antagonists, Shakur’s lyrics convey that Black men are not just situated outside the state’s protection but are sometimes its target. For example, Shakur raps “Stress in the city, the cops is hot for me / The projects is full of bullets, the bodies is droppin’” (“Me Against the World”). Here, Shakur notes how the “cops is hot for [him]” to illuminate how he is targeted by police officers while perhaps also suggesting that the police divest from the projects, a highly racialized space, failing to protect Black bodies from death and perhaps being partially responsible. Situating Black men vulnerably, this relationship to the police is one where Black male death is sanctioned. This sentiment about police and their complicity in Black male death and precarity is echoed when Shakur raps “Always keep my eyes on the prize, watch the police / Seen so much murder, neighborhoods getting no sleep” (“Heavy in the Game”) and “Fuck the five-oh cause they after me / Kill me if they could, I’ll never let em capture me” (“Lord Knows”). Here again, Shakur conveys the role that police play in making Black male life precarious through their relationship to police officers, accentuating how “black people [have] controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies” (Coates, 2015, p. 62). Framing police as antagonists, Shakur’s lyrics highlight how whether police officers are spatially present or not, they are understood to be divested from preventing Black male death and in some cases the cause. This reality engenders Black men’s fears and skepticism about the criminal justice system as this system seems to ignore and actively work against them. This dynamic ultimately teaches and reinforces how Black men are socially vulnerable in relation to the state, a reality that Black men seem to stay perpetually aware of as they move through their social lives.

Because the specter of death is always near and police officers cannot be trusted to protect Black bodies, Shakur raps about the necessity for Black men to protect themselves so they may thwart attempts at harming their bodies. This highlights how Black men are socially vulnerable as this decision to arm themselves is often in response to the state’s failure to protect their bodies in the first place. In “Fuck the World,” for instance, Shakur raps

Fuckin’ with the young Black male, tryin’ to stack mail / And um, stay away from the packed jails / I told the judge I’m in danger / And that’s why I had that fo’-five with one in the chamber / Fuck the world!

As Shakur articulates in his lyrics, guarding one’s body is crucial in a racist society that “[fucks] with the young Black male” (“Fuck the World”). Despite how Black men carrying weapons are pathologized as murderous criminals threatening the (White) social order, Shakur’s lyrics highlight that the decision some Black men make to arm themselves is informed by their perceived danger in a racist society that not only does not protect Black men but harasses, abuses, and kills them. As Curry (2017) points out, racism is ultimately about “materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the death of the inferior race” (p. 4). Shakur arming himself, then, is not only a response to how Black men are without protection from harm but about refusing the death patriarchal White supremacist society commands. Echoing his sentiment about staying armed to protect himself, Shakur raps “And if you’re Black, you better stay strapped.” Here again, Shakur points to the need for Black people to protect their bodies. While patriarchal White supremacist society may view armed Black men as evidence demonstrating their supposedly violent nature and therefore justifying violence against them, Shakur’s lyrics show that some Black men arm themselves in response to their social vulnerability from being disposed and unprotected.

“Me Against the World”: Black Men’s Mental Health

Shakur’s album musically represents a Black manhood where Black men are emotionally debilitated by being continuously aware that (their) Black bodies can be harmed or murdered without a moment’s notice. This psychological distress results ultimately from being positioned vulnerably in a patriarchal White supremacist society and is best expressed through Shakur’s sentiment “It’s just me against the world” (“Me Against the World”). Shakur’s idea about being set against the world speaks to the enormity behind how Black men are silenced and vilified in an anti-Black society appearing to be collectively against them. For example, Shakur raps “The question is will I live? No one in the world loves me / I’m headed for danger, don’t trust strangers” (“Me Against the World”). Shakur’s lyrics highlight the precarity around his survival and the toll that being positioned vulnerably in an anti-Black society has on Black men and their mental health as they are chipped away at and feel like “No one in the world loves [them]” (“Me Against the World”). This sentiment is demonstrated further when Shakur raps “And even if I did die young, who cares / All I ever got was mean mugs and cold stares / I got homies in my head / Who done passed away screaming” (“Death Around the Corner”). Convinced that he is seen as worthless and referencing his exposure to Black male death, Shakur’s lyrics illuminate the psychological distress that Black men develop from being taught and reminded by society that their lives matter less, which speaks to structural racism’s oppressive power. To this end, Shakur lyrically represents a Black masculinity where Black men are emotionally debilitated by being positioned vulnerably in ways that cause them to feel hopeless and unloved. However, unlike the caricaturized and reductive Black masculinities that prevalently circulate popular culture and the academy, Shakur’s representation is one where Black men are keenly aware and upfront about their psychological distress.

Because Shakur’s precariousness degrades his psychological wellbeing, he turns to alcohol and marijuana to help remedy his emotional debility. Shakur’s decision to self-medicate represents a Black masculinity where despite acknowledging their mental health, Black men attend to their psychological distress in ways that are accessible even though these avenues may be unhealthy and unsustainable. For instance, Shakur raps “Ran out of endo and my mind can’t take the stress / I’m out of breath / Make me wanna kill my damn self” (“Death Around the Corner”). Highlighting his attentiveness to his psychological distress, Shakur raps about how smoking marijuana is important for helping him reduce his stress and how in its absence he is consumed with suicidal thoughts, demonstrating that the ways Black men are positioned vulnerably can diminish their mental health. This psychological deterioration, as Shakur represents, is driven especially by his proximity to Black death. To this point, Shakur raps “Damn, another funeral, another motherfucker / I smoke a blunt to take the pain out / And if I wasn’t high, I’d probably try to blow my brains out” (“Lord Knows”). In these lyrics, Shakur not only demonstrates how being exposed to Black death is mentally exhausting and can lead to suicide ideation but that Black men may come to depend on getting high as a way to manage their psychological distress by becoming numb. Shakur also highlights how drinking alcohol can be similarly helpful when he raps “I take a shot of Hennessy now I’m strong enough to face the madness” (“It Ain’t Easy”). Here, alcohol is discussed through its numbing ability that allows Black men to face the world. Speaking prevalently to smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol to manage his mental health, Shakur highlights how these particular avenues at the exclusion of others (e.g., therapy, meditation, prescribed medication) are what is accessible, highlighting how healthier and more sustainable approaches attendant to mental health may be highly stigmatized or out of reach. While it is known that Black men may use alcohol and stigmatized substances such as marijuana to manage their stress (Majors & Billson, 1992), scholars have pervasively ignored these instances in Black popular culture and have instead been hyperfocused on how alcohol and drugs are used nefariously by Black men and to negotiate a party lifestyle image. As Shakur’s lyrics demonstrate, Black men’s alcohol and drug use magnify how Black men are left to deal with their psychological distress in a patriarchal White supremacist society that seems committed to ensuring or at least not preventing Black male suffering.

When drinking and smoking are not enough to numb his pain, Shakur raps about suicide ideation, which is an important but significantly understudied theme in hip-hop music that demonstrates how being vulnerably positioned affects Black men’s mental health and teaches them that there is no future (for them) without suffering. Although rarely represented in popular culture, Shakur’s album frequently mentions suicide in tracks like “Death Around the Corner,” “Lord Knows,” and “So Many Tears” and speaks to how Black men and boys ¹ are particularly at risk for falling victim to suicide. In “Death Around the Corner,” Shakur raps “my mind can’t take the stress / I’m out of breath / Make me wanna kill my damn self [emphasis added]” and “Damn, another funeral, another motherfucker / I smoke a blunt to take the pain out / And if I wasn’t high, I’d probably try to blow my brains out [emphasis added]” in “Lord Knows.” In both tracks, Shakur represents his suicide ideation as manifesting from his stress and pain from living while Black and male; however, “Lord Knows” speaks specifically about suicide as a symptom from being exposed to Black death when he raps “Damn, another funeral” (“Lord Knows”). Because the present that Shakur raps about is characterized by such loss, Black men, as Curry (2017) points out, come to believe that there is no future worth living. Subsequently, suicide becomes an option for Black men that have been legally unemployed, are forced into drug distribution for survival, are consistently harassed by police, have constantly feared death, and who see Black bodies like theirs mercilessly harmed and murdered. Lyrically represented in Shakur’s music, suicide ideation manifests as an amalgamation of the aforementioned social conditions, which suggest to Black men an unlivable future.

Conclusion

Taking seriously how Black men have used their music to define themselves in ways speaking to what it means to be Black and male in an anti-Black society, this essay used Shakur’s MAtW album as a case study examining representations about Black male vulnerability in hip-hop music. As represented in Shakur’s album, Black men come to understand what it means to be vulnerable through their relationship to their mothers in addition to the (illegal) economy. Shakur’s album also represents a Black manhood where Black men are perpetually susceptible to harm and death, which means finding ways to protect their bodies and survive. Finally, Shakur’s album presents a Black manhood where Black men’s vulnerable social position teaches them that harm and murder are always near, leading to loneliness, self-medication, and suicidal thoughts. Although Shakur does not represent attending to his psychological distress in healthy and sustainable ways, his album helps normalize discussions about Black men’s mental health through representing his experience.

Engaging Curry’s (2017) concept of Black male vulnerability in tandem with the literature on hip-hop music and Black masculinity, this essay highlights how Black men have used the genre to organize ideas about Black maleness around vulnerability for decades despite how generative discourses about Black male vulnerability in popular culture have been sparse or nonexistent across disciplines. Acknowledging that Black men have been reductively conceived through popular caricatures as Payne (2006), Rose (2008), and Curry (2017) point out, this essay hopes to help remedy this disparity by demonstrating an alternative Black masculinity often ignored in the academic literature. Because ideas about Black men as vulnerable are generally illegible within the academy, attempts at highlighting Black male vulnerability especially in hip-hop music are dismissed since Black male vulnerability is understood to be an impossibility or a crafty and calculated façade. Given this racism-fueled disparity, this essay calls on scholars to further explore how race, vulnerability, and masculinity converge to generate new insights about how Black male vulnerability is negotiated and represented in popular culture. Paying close attention to Black men and how they use popular culture to write their stories offers tremendous insight into how dominant narratives about Black maleness can be rewritten.