‘And So I Bust Back’: Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Hop

290 CLA JOURNAL “‘And So I Bust Back:’Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Hop” Anna Hinton During the internet show, Everyday Struggle, co-host and rapper, Joe Budden revealed that he has depression. He came to the following conclusion during his tearful response to Styles P’s August 2017 revelations about his step-daughter’s suicide on The Breakfast Club radio show: This [mental illness and suicide in the hip hop community] is something that probably will not ever be addressed, so you need people like Styles to speak out…I would love to see more people speak out on mental health issues the way that Styles is…I would like to see hip hop address it more…. Enough of us have died from mental health issues for us to look into it. Most of our favorite artists suffer from mental illness. . .. “Most of these niggas are telling us how sick they are and what they’re going through, so I try to listen for it” (Joe Budden Breaks Down”) This essay, much like Budden’s heightened awareness, probes various implications of mental illness and disability among men in hip hop—particularly in gangsta culture—and examines what lies behind widespread denial of these conditions. 1 More specifically, I analyze how this discourse is paradoxically ubiquitous even as it is suppressed or ignored. Moreover, I am concerned with how artists evoke, then erase disability. I argue that all too often, vulnerability and disability go undetected in black men and in black people more generally, and racist and ableist stereotypes bolster and reproduce this erasure. When black men reclaim/appropriate/signify on these types through rhetorical performances of violent masculinity, I argue that they reproduce this erasure. The potentiality for black male existence is divided into a binary of hyper-embodied, though shortlived life on one end and, on the other, death. Paradoxically, in what emerges in this genre is a narrative of black life with (and often because of) a disability. While themes of disability proliferate within the hip hop cultural products I analyze, disability fails to emerge as a facet of black men’s lives worthy of critical and political attention. 1  Though, as Tricia Rose has clarified in hip hop studies classic, Black Noise (1994), hip hop culture is typically used to reference rap music, break dancing, and graffiti art that black and Latino inner-city youth created, from this point forward I will use “hip hop culture” interchangeably and, most often, as metonym, for inner-city black (male) culture from which it spawned, including the gang memoirs I will later analyze. I recognize that contemporary rap music and hip hop has transcended these origins; however, this article is concerned with hip hop in this context. CLA JOURNAL 291 “And So I Bust Back”: Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Ho For instance, in 2005, rumors circulated that hip hop artist Houston Summers IV, known for the hit “I Like That,” allegedly attempted suicide by gouging out his eye. According to Capital Records representatives and Houston’s managers, “the singer had been under psychiatric care…for manic depression” and “struggled with PCP” (Rashaun-Hall). However, Houston and his family denied that he was in mental distress or attempted suicide. When an interviewer for Hood News, for example, asked Houston what happened to his eye, Houston replied, “I got an eye injury,” took off his sunglasses to show his disfigured eye to the camera and continued,“I’m from the hood, so where I come from it’s a whole ‘nother element. Where I’m from different from the Hollywood scene, which is why I stay in the background…’cause it’s too many fruitloops loose…” (“Houston Summers”). Houston does not answer the interviewer’s question. Instead, he focuses on his incompatibility with a Hollywood with too many LBGTQ people—whom he refers to as “fruitloops”. In this instance, he uses his urban background and apparent homophobia to avoid discussing how he injured his eye. The interviewer, however, pushes the subject and follows up by pointedly asking Houston if the rumors about his drug use and suicide attempt are true, to which Houston responds, and I quote at...