Brotha Lynch Hung: "Meat"

Brotha Lynch Hung has a new album coming out soon, called - get this - Dinner and a Movie, and it's going to be accompanied by a mini-movie. The video above is the first chapter. The fact that the protagonist is not actually played by Brotha Lynch is a good start. Nothing against raptors (shouts out to Dallas Penn for that one), but I feel like rappers really limit their storytelling capabilities by always playing their film counterparts. It leads to some really self-serving screenwriting. Anyone who has seen Baller Blockin should know what I'm talking about. Are we really supposed to expect that Manny, Baby, BG and Wayne get away from a platoon of NOPD squad cars and helicopters with their pants around their ankles?

Not to ruin the ending for you.

Back to "Meat". My high school stoner thoughts were vindicated by this one, in that it only hints at the connection between meat, murder, and putting food on your table, unlike his most infamous song. Back when I smoked weed, I listened to "Return of the Baby Killa", and it occurred to me that this song was not meant to be taken at face value; it's not actually about killing and eating babies for sustenance, though that is an awesome premise for a rap song. It's a song about the everyday street violence that plagues inner city America, and that by killing others to put food on your table, you might as well be eating people. Because that's the essential transaction when you kill someone for money: their flesh for your well-being.

It's similar to the idea that David Foster Wallace puts forth in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men that women might understand men better if they were raped. Pretty awful thing to suggest, but the idea is that women cannot possibly understand the way men objectify them until they see it in its rawest, most violent extreme (keep in mind that I haven't actually read Brief Interviews, but I watched the awful film adaptation. I'm gonna go ahead and assume the guy from The Office didn't add that little flourish, and the idea is pure DFW. Think that's a safe bet). In a certain way, that's the same logic that I find in Brotha Lynch's music about eating people. He takes gangsta rap's ethos to its logical extreme, and it's frightening. Literally visceral.

On "Meat", unlike "Return of the Baby Killa", Brotha Lynch doesn't even hint at eating people, but the connection between putting meat on his table, and possibly killing people to do so is made quite clear. In that regard, it's more unsettling than "Return", just because it's so much less cartoonish. So much realer.

That, and the film looks pretty awesome. Since some idiot kid at Tompkins ruined the ending of Shutter Island for me today, it looks like this will have to do.