meek mill + rap friendship, and prison

Hi.

突然ですが I humbly submit to you that there is a particular kind of friendship that is not accessible, or at least not feasible, without hip-hop.

I will attempt to prove the above in the course of this email. But first, a video, which you can watch first if you like, or follow along:

The video, uploaded in 2019 by a producer named Knxwledge, is called 10mins., clocks in at only seven minutes and fifty-six seconds long, and it is, I suppose, a video of a video.

The original video from whence the footage is taken is indeed just over 10 minutes, is from October of 2008, and opens with a then up-and-coming Philly-based rapper named Meek Mill sitting ‘backstage’ in the studio of a Philadelphia radio station, playing Super Mario Bros* on an original 8-bit Nintendo.

He starts out wearing a hooded sweatshirt, but pulls the hood back to show us his fuzzy, unkempt braids, explaining he just got out of county jail.

But if we know 2008 Meek, we know that he often looked like this. Those braids are the braids of someone too preoccupied with life to think about looking good; the braids of someone working too hard to stop by a salon or even an aunt’s house before an important media appearance.

It is the hairstyle of someone ‘on the grind’, before such phrasing was used with irony.

The original video bears numerous indelible traces of its time: not just the low image quality, or even the myspace.com link we see occasionally flash across the screen, but most of all, in the name of the original channel: phillyheattv, which ties it to a moment when people put still ‘TV’ at the end of things to let you know that you could watch video on their corner of the Internet.

(Streaming video was still something of a novelty in 2008, but even then, ‘TV’ was a completely unnecessary suffix to add to a YouTube channel. It’s like a digital tailbone: a vestigial limb made unnecessary by evolution, and now functions primarily as a gesture to a now-obsolete ancestry.)

The video of the video, then, is a kind of visual remix. Knxwledge has replaced the original instrumental that is heard in the 2008 video with his own beat(s).

And the focus both in videos is ostensibly of Meek ‘freestyling’, which of course is to say a performance of Meek reciting rhymes that he has already written out. Don’t get me wrong, Meek’s rhymes are good, and the flows slick enough to make you miss the fact that for the first few bars, he is subtly (that is, without announcing it) counting up to twenty.

But I opened this text file to talk not about bars, but about friendship, which means that I need to talk about the dude standing directly over Meek’s shoulder.

I’m not the only one who has noticed him, viz. the top comment on Knx’s video:

This ‘non-verbal hype man’ has a name: Omelly. He is Meek’s first cousin, a relationship that I’ll touch on later, but for now I’ll limit our discussion to what we see in this video; which is to say, a kind of friendship that is expressed through looks that could be mistaken by the uninitiated as glaring rage, but are actually mixes of encouragement, support, and love.

For the full seven minute and fifty-six second duration of this video, Omelly stares fixedly at his cousin, occasionally mouthing lyrics: he knows every word Meek is about to say.

But the first moment that truly stands out to me is around 4:30, where Meek rhymes:

we be riding, riding /
slipping, sliding /
all through the city with that semi [automatic] right beside me /
balling like…

…and it’s not really important what he says next because at the precise moment Meek says ‘balling’, he and Omelly make the exact same jump-shot motion.

This would slip right past a radio listener because it’s not a punchline, and Meek doesn’t really emphasize it. Even the ‘applause’ effect comes late (it’s part of the original sample, by the way). But the motion Meek and Omelly make links it as a callback to Jim Jones’ 2006 ‘We Fly High’.

It only makes sense if you see it.

But more importantly, the absolutely perfect sync of their motions lets you know that something unusual is happening here.

This was not rehearsed. It is in-the-moment telepathy.

Thus, I wouldn’t call Omelly a ‘hype man’. A ‘hype man’ is a cheerleader, a helper. His purpose is to communicate to the audience, to help them better enjoy the main act. (The Platonic ideal is Flavor Flav: a good hype man is also a performer.)

But Omelly is not really peforming as such; and whereas Meek occasionally looks into the camera at the ‘audience’, Omelly never acknowledges that there is anyone in the room but his friend. He is here for Meek, and only for Meek.

Nowhere is this clearer than when Meek says:

Everybody know I’m bout to blow up like a bomb, boom

Meek makes a hand motion as he says ‘boom’, then continues the couplet:

Pull up in that 96 Impala, vroom

He doesn’t make the hand motion this time, he leaves it to Omelly.

Omelly doesn’t say the word, nor does he mouth it. Just puts out his hand as though to mimic gripping the wheel of said muscle car, and swerves it at the precise moment that Meek says ‘vroom’. He completes the triplet of thought-speech-action, for Meek.

It’s important to note here that Meek can’t see Omelly to confirm this is happening. Omelly is well out of his temporal field of view, and anyway Meek’s eyes are closed. But when he puts that alley-oop up into the air, he knows Omelly will bring it back down.

Ballin.

Goten and Trunks fuse to become Gotenks but blacker; Shinji and Asuka finally get in the robots, but set to 808s instead of flugel horns. Beyond a oneness or a partnership, a kind of greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts united for a singular purpose, a union that only happen in music, and specifically this kind of music.

You don’t vroom for someone in gospel, or in country, or opera. There is no room on the stage for a ‘silent hype man’, even in jazz. A wordless human interrobang would not make sense at a punk show or a dance recital. But in this distilled version of what has become hip-hop culture, it is completely natural.

The medium is the message, as we say. Not only is it impossible to see this friendship without video evidence, but without the specific boundaries and conventions of the freestyle-as-artform, it would be impossible for Omelly to express this friendship to Meek.

(I could write more about how difficult it is for men to express such deep care for one another, but instead, let’s get back to the video.)

Meek’s flow falls apart almost immediately after that boom/vroom line, as though so much psychic energy went into pulling the Spirit Bomb out of low orbit that he forgot the rest of his rhymes. He shrugs that off, though, and this is where the video takes a turn.

(This turn is not immediately noticeable in the original video; the same music keeps playing.) (But we are not watching the original video; we are watching what Knxwledge has done to it.)

We hear the beat change abruptly to something more somber.

This sets the stage for Meek, for the final seventy seconds of the video, to ascend into another plane. He suddenly changes topics:

They gave my nigga twenty years, man that wasn't even right
Got him in the hell hole living at the speed of light…

In the context of the radio show, this is a little jarring. Meek has been mostly talking about himself, bragging and boasting — essentially, lying — about cars, women, drugs, and money, for six minutes straight. But now he is talking about someone else. A specific friend, or perhaps an amalgamation of experiences and people.

He is now telling the truth, or as close to the truth as he’s able to get in front of strangers.

The camera has zoomed in. Somehow the person holding it has intuited that this moment is no longer about anyone else but Meek. He continues:

…praying that the time fly by so he can see the light /
See his kids, meet a wife, all over a key of white /
But why you think they take that time from you? Cause you need it right?
and you can't get it back…

One of the radio hosts who, up until now, was intermittently shouting ‘whoa!’ or ‘what?!’ into the mic in an attempt to interject himself back into the spotlight and remind listeners that this is his show, has stopped shouting. He’s backed away from his microphone to make room. He looks Meek up and down as to confirm that Meek is actually still there; but he’s not.

Meek is somewhere else. He goes on:

…so how they giving niggas life?
Like you gon’ live again, grow up, be a kid again

I’m not really sure what is going through everyone’s mind in the room here, and I won’t even hazard a guess.

Me, now, almost fifteen years after this video was recorded, I’m thinking of the handful of people I’ve spoken to, mostly in the course of work, who were put behind bars as children, who were ‘given life’, and how that phrase is a poetically bleak way to phrase a situation where your life is slowly taken away from you in regular installments.

The people who will never get that chance to live again.

…that's why I never waste time I cherish every minute in
Pray to god, faithful though, man half that shit I make, I blow
I don't even take it slow, cause any given day could go
And I can meet my death date, feel my last breath take
That's why I go and get it now, I be like fuck waiting

Meek keeps going, straight into the next verse. I won’t copy the whole thing, but I’ll leave you where he leaves us:

I just hope when God come arrest me that he read my rights…

There’s probably something to be said here about the depressing parallel that Meek is making here between the cops and God; the ‘they’ who are ‘giving niggas life’, and the Lord coming to finally take said niggas’ life (such as it is) away. The reality that for some people, in some parts of the city, it’s not just death and taxes that will inevitably come for you, but ‘they’.

But we don’t have long to dwell on this, because this is about where, again, Meek runs out of psychic steam and fumbles the rhyme. The video we are watching ends abruptly (the original goes on for a bit longer. But there is nothing much else to see. It is best left where Knx left it.)

As it turns out, Meek would, as promised, ‘blow up like a bomb’; and this ‘freestyle’ would later appear as a completed song on his first major label mixtape on Flamers 2. Here’s a link to the song: boom.

It’s terrible.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the person who made the beat, or the staff or A&R who put this on the mixtape, or to B.o.B, who sings the hook, or least of all to Meek, who ultimately allowed this to be released with his name on it. But in comparison to the moment in that video, it’s a pale reflection.

How fortunate, then, that Knxwledge has turned this song back into what it should have been — well, I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps better to say ‘what it could have been’. Or maybe just what Knxwledge saw, and wanted us to see also.

This is, of course, a conjecture, but beyond the music, I think Knx wanted us to see this friendship. Perhaps even to make us ask a question:

Do I have friends like this? Do I have someone who can wordlessly stand behind me, create with me, who believes in me? Someone who sees me?

I have been speaking of Omelly as a ‘friend’ here, which I should explain: as I mentioned, Omelly is a cousin to Meek. But what is being expressed here is beyond blood, or anything that a 23andme can tell us.

I’ve always appreciated how the first character in the modern Chinese phrase for ‘friend’ is 朋, which uses a side-by-side of 月, which we now read as ‘moon’ or ‘flesh’ alternatively, but actually comes from a depiction of two shells (which were used as money) held together, as a pair.

From there, a meaning of two people who stand side by side. This is something that doesn’t have a ton to do with a familial bond — but rather a pair that is tied together as it serves a purpose.

What we are seeing here then is perhaps just another manifestation of what we see when black people call each other ‘fam’: attempting to put into language a sort of closeness that doesn’t have a ton to do with a familial bond per se, but a choice, a purpose.

I use the word seeing deliberately: as we’ll know if we watch the original video, everything was taped during a live appearance on WKDU 91.7 FM: a radio program (which is why Meek is self-censoring every offensive word.)

But just hearing the original over the airwaves, or even listening to the Knx remix in the audio version still available on Bandcamp, would be to sit in the allegorical cave and watch shadows dance across the walls. It is not how the Universe intended us to experience the moment: only by clicking ‘play’ on this YouTube video can we turn around and see past the Socratic flame.

It’s also worth talking about that switch-up of the beat at the end. Knx doing this is deliberate, I think, and YouTube’s analytics show us that it has worked: that light-colored peak on the right side shows that those last few bars about incarceration is the part that most people have watched over and over again:

Knx dropped this video at the top of 2019, just after Meek wrote an op-ed in the New York Times demanding rights for incarcerated people, and sentencing and probation reform, paired with a video, also from the NYT in which he ‘reads us our rights’.

Meek would close out 2022 by personally paying the bond of 20 Philadelphia women so that they could come home for the holidays.

Maybe this video was Knx's, or the cosmos’, way to show us that, if we were looking, the seeds for this attaching to something bigger than just Meek were there all along.

If a ‘friend’ is someone who sees you, then we can also say that Knxwledge was extending a kind of friendship to Meek. (Knx also went to school in Philly, and has said he feels a connection to him).

Which is to say: what I’ve tried to do here is merely to show what Knx is trying to show us, with sounds.

In ‘10mins.’, Knx isn’t passive, but active. He’s bifurcated, playing both the parts of Omelly behind Meek but also standing in front, holding the camera. Both roles encouraging you to see what he sees.

朋友。

As with many friendships, Capitalism eventually gets in the way. This video is but one of a long series of Knx edits of old Meek freestyles, a series that recently came to an end over copyright strikes.

Anyway, Q.E.D., I think. But maybe all this isn’t that serious. Who knows? You’re reading a dude who is writing about a dude who made a beat over a video containing a dude who stared at a dude who made a rap about a dude who may or may not even exist.

But regardless of intent on the part of Knx or Meek or anyone, we’ve got this moment, nearly 15 years later, which, should we so choose, can function as a snapshot of the promise of a friendship that only comes from belief, and bars.

But I guess we see what we want to see.

What do you see?

===

*speaking of Mario, Meek has a song called ‘One For The Money’ that liberally samples the Super Mario Bros. theme, but infuriatingly makes absolutely no lyrical reference to the source material used for the beat. He didn’t have to go full Cocoa Brovaz, but still. Not a single Mario-themed punchline? I’ve been angry about this since I first heard it in 2009, and I have continued to harbor a grudge against Meek for this.