Rap Sh!t.
When the first season of Rap Sh!t came out, I’d binge watched it around the time I’d first started dating my boyfriend. I remember telling him that this show—also created by Issa Rae—was maybe better than Insecure. He didn’t believe me, which is understandable because it was a big claim to make, and while I very much loved Insecure—and Issa Rae’s web series before that, The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl—I think what makes Rap Sh!t particularly compelling is how specific it feels.
The show is about two Black women in their twenties who join together, despite initially being a bit estranged, to become a popular rap duo. Though they’re both Black women and both rappers, they’re also very different. One went to college and became a bit holier-than-thou—she’s very fixated on making art that means something, that doesn’t give into any capitalistic or objectifying pressures—and the other stayed in their hometown (if Miami can be called a hometown), is a mom, and is more interested in making music that people can relax and have fun with.
The conversations the characters have about the intentions of Black music—whether it should be more politically conscious (like Kendrick Lamar, Noname) or more about having a good time (like Megan the Stallion, Drake)—were especially interesting. This show—more maybe than Insecure and especially more than most shows for a general audience—does such a great job of having an array of Black characters who all have different intentions and goals. To be a show about Black female rappers—who for the most part are seen as interchangeable and one-dimensional—Rap Sh!t allowed room for complications and interiority and specificity in a way that I loved. Maybe one way to get around stereotypes and unhealthy representation is exactly this: to make your characters specific. To not pull what you know about people from ideas or the Internet or other shows, but from real people who are—like good characters—also specific.
I loved how drawn out and individual the characters are in Rap Sh!t, and I also loved how the show centers Black women without doing away with Black men. The show gives both Black men and women room to be complicated, to be neither wholly good or bad. They are allowed to be selfish, to realize that their actions have consequences, to step back then and maybe choose differently next time. I especially liked the character Lamont, the dad to one of the rapper’s (Mia’s) daughter. He is masculine and a music producer, but also a very present father and a good co-parent. He is allowed to have his feelings hurt without becoming monstrous, and this move—to let him be angry but also mature, to let him be steady and happy and flawed—felt both generous and progressive. Another Black male character, when about to be sent to prison for a kind of complicated, drawn out crime, cries on his cousin’s chest, and it’s neither melodramatic nor muted. Maybe because this show isn’t supposed to be for the largest audience possible, its characters are allowed more room to move outside of White expectations. This is a benefit, I think, of making art for people like you, as opposed to trying to reach everyone, as it seems the further you get from people who understand your experience, the more confused they are when your art gestures outside of what they imagine you to be. Sometimes this broadens their understanding of who you are, but more often you are pushed back into the stereotypical, the comfortable for them. I like how Rap Sh!t, in being perhaps more narrow in its audience, is broader in its portrayal of Black people.
I also liked how queerness—though tangential—was at least present in the show. The Black queer character Chastity is given a spotlight that is slowly getting a bit less rare in Black TV (I’m thinking of the Black lesbian character in Harlem and in First Wives Club). Even better than this spotlight was the moment where Chastity was allowed to encounter another Black queer woman, her vulnerability around a potential romance different than her more prevalent vulnerability around trying to make it in the music industry. It’s just as important to show people at the intersection of Blackness and queerness/transness as it is to show those at the intersection of Blackness and gender if we are ever going to move past our own prejudices and discomforts with difference in the Black community.
Rap Sh!t is funny and awkward, ambitious and colorful in a way that one would expect from Issa Rae, but considering follow-up projects to runaway hits tend to flop more often than not, to see Issa Rae instead get more specific here, more grounded maybe, honed in, feels not only impressive but necessary.
Image: Max
