After the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC) narrowly voted against decommissioning Waiilatpu, the college’s yearbook, various students across campus reported that, oh yeah, guess we have a yearbook at Whitman again.

Although Waiilatpu will receive much less funding than its supporters had hoped, ASWC’s decision ensures that, uh, the … oh yeah, the yearbook will continue being printed for at least another year.

“Uhh … ” said ASWC Finance Chair Cam Cadeghi. “Wait, what?”

Eighth-year Marshall Davis, ASWC’s hardline fiscal conservative, is unhappy with the decision.

“Christ, we spend a lot of money.  Where do we get all that fucking money? First those kids wanted to go rock climbing and then there was that whole thing with the school newspaper and the feminists and now … what was the question?” Davis appeared confused when we reminded him that we’d asked about the, um, yearbook, but we must have appeared confused too because we forgot the damn thing existed. “Wait, we have a scrapbook?” said Davis.

Opinions about the thing varied considerably. Many students expressed a gentle indifference, like junior Max Michaelson, who told reporters that “uhhhhh … what?” while others demonstrated something like impassioned unawareness, like senior Anne Wadson, who noted that “?????!” Generally, though, sources across campus concurred that oh, right, the yearbook.

Outgoing ASWC President Vaykon Raccoonzian wasn’t sure if, uh, he missed something when the resolution to decommission the yearbook failed.

“Wow. I mean, talk about a … Jesus, this, uh, yearbook really is a thing now, I guess. They just really snuck that one in there. Did I, uh, just totally miss that one?” said Raccoonzian, pointing out that “I don’t know if anyone really realized it.”

So, uh, there’s that, sources added.

Huh.

Waiilatpu ordered 150 copies of this … Waiilatpu … of the 150 … yearbook. For this year? Yeah, that’s right. Several members of Waiilatpu admitted that “yeah, we wanted to do that whole thing while ASWC wasn’t really looking” and “Got ‘em!” Marshall Davis, on the other hand, expressed his excitement with Whitman’s “new football team.”

“We see it … the, uh, the … yearbook, I mean, as really important to preserving, uh, Whitman’s whole history,” said Parker Zachary, an outspoken supporter of the, well, you know.

First-year Jacqueline Hardcastle, meanwhile, seemed to have a little better idea as to what was going on and stuff.

“I’m gonna try and get the quarterback to sign it!” she reported.

An ASWC-sponsored survey was released last week in order to better understand public opinion of the .74 percent of respondents voted that “Wait, a what?”, while 53 percent voted that “Oh, right. Well, this is happening.” Only 11 percent of respondents remembered having their pictures taken for the thing, you know, that we’ve been talking about this whole…

Oh. Okay. Right.

Christ, how’d they do that?

Illustration by Emily Jones

This time of year, it’s not uncommon to see Frisbees flying across Ankeny Field like carrier pigeons. Reasonably athletic Whitties dress up in backwards hats, synthetic jerseys, soccer cleats and something the kids are calling “friction gloves” to throw plastics across the lawn.

In a recent study performed by Whitman’s sociology department, it was discovered that a small percentage of these plastics were thrown by Jean-Paul Cathcart (the last “t” is silent), a junior French major and recently converted plastic-throwing fanatic.

Cathcart’s recorded plastic tosses should come as no surprise, but they do. This weekend, the Whitman Sweets hosted Onionfest, an annual invitational Frisbee tournament which attracts teams from all over the Pacific Northwest. This year, Whitman fielded three teams. Unsurprisingly, Cathcart’s team, Whitman Team C, emerged from the pack to win 16^th place.

“Whitman C’s success can be at least partially attributed to the stellar play and leadership of Jean-Paul Cathcart,” said captain Raymond Fatthew ’14 following the defeat of a team of Willamette University alums. “I mean, he was definitely on the field today. I think we all learned a lot from that. The less experienced guys like [Jacob] Janimal can really gain a lot from watching Jean-Paul be on the field.”

Cathcart smoked cigarettes and quoted the French existentialists off the field, but on the field he smoked opponents and quoted the French existentialists. Playing primarily as a cutter, he managed to get himself in position to catch the disc on several occasions. After his team’s victory, Cathcart spoke to The Pioneer about his play and his strategies.

“They forced backhand all game. I knew Janimal was trying to huck O-I, so I got in the ho-stack and tried to work on my unders. I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world,” he said.

Cathcart also told reporters that he doesn’t run at all, ever, and dispelled allegations that he was an elite athlete.

“I’m not really sure if my heart’s supposed to be beating this fast, but I definitely made some sick up-bids today. And a down-bid. I also made a couple of stationary bids today, too. Man is condemned to be free, because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Perhaps Cathcart’s most impressive performance this weekend came in the famed onion-eating contest, held at halftime of Whitman’s showcase game between current Sweets and alumni players. Typically, contestants opt to eat the sweet onions raw. However, Cathcart julienned the onions with a santoku, caramelized them, simmered them in thickened beef broth and red wine and topped them with gruyere cheese-covered croutons.

“The rustic French onion soup method really worked for me,” said Cathcart. “I was able to maintain the rich natural flavor of the onions by slow-cooking them in a crock pot, but I balanced it with an appropriate savory stock and some Tunisian sel de mer. I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on raw onions.”

Illustration by Julie Peterson

1520 Sedgwick Avenue is, by most accounts, an unremarkable apartment complex: an imposing brick-and-steel reminder of New York’s failures in public housing, a specter looming and mute cast over the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

It is the Bethlehem of hip-hop music. Inside 1520’s recreation room, Clive Campbell, the oldest of six siblings who immigrated from Jamaica to the Bronx, became Kool DJ Herc, the man who extracted hip-hop’s sonic revolution from soul records and turntables. Herc’s exercises in musical curiosity filled the rec room, city parks and schoolyards with crowds who danced maniacally to the sounds he uncovered. In 1973, hip-hop was as humble as the high-rise that give birth to it.

Fast-forward 30 years—the highly controversial music video for “Tip Drill.” There’s Nelly, a rapper from St. Louis, throwing dollar bills on a scantily-clad woman, her already hard-working bikini bottom poised to snap and break as she stretches her legs behind her head. This is popular hip-hop in the new millennium. “Must be your ass, ‘cause it ain’t your face,” Nelly raps. The one-dimensional, oppressively masculine heterosexuality of a genre emerges from his growling timbre, punctuated by his staccato demands. He wants more from the women on the screen.

Nelly’s braggadocio refrains reflect an identity crisis hip-hop has become slowly acquainted with over a decade. In 2003, Herc must have felt like he had been mocked. His experiment in percussion has mutated into a misogynistic, predatory monster wearing an enormous football jersey, a bandana and a pair of $500 Jordans. Hip-hop now feels more comfortable throwing dollar bills in a strip club than putting pen to paper. Aesthetic objectification in popular hip-hop music videos has compounded to this change.

Several years later, filmmaker Byron Hurt expressed this push-pull between getting radio spins and keeping the music real, assuming the voice of jilted hip-hop listeners everywhere: “I would always defend hip-hop. But the more I grew and the more I learned about sexism and violence and homophobia, the more those lyrics became unacceptable to me, and I became conflicted about the music I loved.”

At Whitman, where spirited discussion of gender equality abounds, the very mention of hip-hop can outrage our sensibilities. Understandably so—the Whittie unacquainted with the larger canon of hip-hop music is much more likely to learn that “bitches ain’t shit” before discovering hip-hop’s inspiring messages—those of unity, political change, love and sincere appreciation for the music’s creative power—beneath the layers of dust.

But the music’s rhythms are as surprisingly pervasive as its lyrics are insidious. Mainstream hip-hop pumps unapologetically through speakers in frat basements. We hear it, but we don’t always listen to it. Sometimes, we’re desensitized, removed from the lyrics. The hip-hop industry quietly performed a massive marketing coup, mandating an ethos of hypersexual masculinity as a mainstream standard. We’ve been gently rocked to sleep. We’ve become used to this conception of mainstream hip-hop. It’s been like this for so long.

“Whitman students talk a lot about gender and they point it out in the music, but that doesn’t stop anyone from playing it. People keep going back to it anyways—that’s the problem,” acknowledges junior Claudia Sanchez-Ayala.

Hip-hop has been a multitude of things since its accidental conception: It has been challenged, screwed, chopped, remixed, cut, mashed up, slowed down, absorbed by various regions, recycled, regurgitated and reinvented. It is diverse beyond classification—it is political and intentional and sometimes it is a display of linguistic gymnastics, the peacock flashing its feathers triumphantly. At its core, hip-hop liberates and speaks for the multitudes. Now, mainstream hip-hop is defined by its misogyny.

How the f— did that happen?

In 1986, female rap trio Salt-N-Pepa released their debut album, Hot, Cool and Vicious, to an incredibly perceptive America—the album went double platinum. Such commercial success was almost unimaginable even for male rap artists in the mid-’80s. As a result, women rappers began to receive record deals at a far greater rate, carving out an important cultural space in which the conventions of sexual subordination and commodification of the body were challenged before an audience.

“Some think that we [women] can’t flow/Stereotypes they got to go/I gonna mess around and flip the scene into reverse/With a little touch of ladies first,” Queen Latifah rapped, asserting the credibility of femininity in a rapidly evolving genre.

In 1989, three years after Salt-N-Pepa demonstrated the possibility of female commercial success in hip-hop, 2 Live Crew dropped their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. In the album’s leading single, “Me So Horny,” Fresh Kid Ice exemplifies a disturbing facet of hip-hop’s sexism: The song does not merely configure sex as a masculine obsession; it promotes sex as an act of violence towards women.”I won’t tell your mama if you don’t tell your dad/I know he’ll be disgusted when he sees that pussy busted,” he raps in the song’s second verse. The next year, U.S. district court judge Jose Gonzalez ruled that the misogyny in As Nasty as They Wanna Be reached illegal levels of obscenity and thus could not be sold. The members of 2 Live Crew were arrested shortly thereafter for performing the obscene material live. They were cleared of all charges, however, after Henry Louis Gates, Jr. testified on their behalf, defending their lyrics. Perhaps the most renowned researcher in his field, and a professor of African American Studies at Harvard, Gates visited Whitman College in 2011 and elucidated his fascination with African-American genealogies. The album, like Salt-N-Pepa’s debut, went double platinum.

Sexism in hip-hop undoubtedly reflects and derives from sexism in prominent American institutions, but the severity and the violence reflected in mainstream hip-hop’s treatment of women suggest an ideological shift in the music industry. Perhaps the example of 2 Live Crew showed rappers and record execs that violent masculine sexuality could not only be produced, but engender major commercial success. The resulting popularity of G-Funk—the West Coast’s response to the emergent political gangsterism of New York hip-hop—gave us Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and Too $hort’s “Gangstas and Strippers,” confirming this suggestion. Additionally, Michael P. Jeffers points out that record labels provide another space for sexism: “The most famous and influential hip-hop labels, such as Def Jam, Interscope and Bad Boy, were founded and are run by male executives who sign and develop male talent.” The performance of masculine hegemony has been augmented by an ethic of disrespect. Tricia Rose suggests that men become hostile towards women in large part because the fulfillment of heterosexual male desire is challenged by women’s defense of their own bodies and sexual agency. For over 20 years, then, hip-hop has been embroiled in a self-reflexive crisis of masculinity.

Not long after they arrive on campus for their freshman year, Whitman students are taught in residence hall workshops that gender and sexuality are spectra. These workshops, along with a thriving Gender Studies program, engender a vibrant discourse and encourage Whitties to look critically at both gender roles in mainstream institutions and the way they themselves perform gender and sexuality. Students at Whitman acknowledge the willful and unrelenting sexism within American culture at large, and the same issues translate into the misogyny of hip-hop culture—at least how it is experienced visually and musically. Whitman decries the paradigms of hegemonic, hypersexual masculinity, condemning both public operations of violence towards women and the silent operations of reducing women to their aesthetic appeal.

These operations are not simply paradigms of hip-hop. Misogyny in hip-hop is not merely the normalized action of African-American men with microphones and money. Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP sold nearly two million copies in the week after it was released, and nine of the album’s 14 songs discuss killing women. Professor George Armstrong from Murray State University estimates that The Marshall Mathers LP contains four times as much misogynistic lyrical contact as the average gangsta rap album from the early ’90s. It’s not just black rappers. It’s not just rappers—misogyny in hip-hop is a microcosm of a deeply entrenched institutional failure.

Whitman senior Diana Boesch agrees that American culture and hip-hop culture reflect each other. “Songs, especially immensely popular songs, can have a large impact on our society, the way we view and treat women, and the way women view and treat themselves. I think that hip-hop artists need to take more responsibility with the language they use, as well as the messages they are sending about women,” Boesch suggested. “I think that there is a potential for a media like hip-hop to have a positive impact on our culture and to send positive and reaffirming messages about women, but that requires thoughtful action from both artists and listeners.”

Hip-hop’s gender problem is undoubtedly more complicated than blatant expressions of sexism. Inevitably, mainstream rap’s social position is subconsciously and subversively connected with masculine domination. The music could not conceive of itself as masculine if men and women were represented as “enjoying” hip-hop in the same way. Whitman has in abundance something mainstream hip-hop lacks almost entirely: a space for discussion about the performance of gender. Whitman teaches its students to recognize the multifarious effects that gender has on them. Mainstream hip-hop teaches its students to adhere to hyper-masculine dogmas.

This said, Walla Walla is by no means a hotbed for hip-hop culture. Ian Andreen, a first-year, suggests that “the majority of people who listen to hip-hop at Whitman listen to what their friends refer them to. There’s only a small group of people who really find their own music.” Similarly, senior Gus Friedman acknowledges that “hip-hop music isn’t shared around Whitman very much. There are only a few radio stations in Walla Walla that play hip-hop, and the type of hip-hop they choose to play sucks in a lot of ways. The sense I’ve gotten around campus is that people at parties just want to listen to Top 40 music.” Far removed from a city with an influential local hip-hop scene, Walla Walla is left floating upside down in the mainstream. Friedman grew up in Seattle, listening to local hip-hop artists like Blue Scholars and Common Market which avoid misogyny and instead provide uplifting messages that transcend issues of gender. The relative paucity of hip-hop at Whitman correlates directly to the lack of options readily available.

It is wholly reductive to suggest that the whole of hip-hop is misogynistic. It is undeniable that hip-hop’s Columbus-like crossover to the mainstream consciousness was followed by an affirmation of masculine hegemony, but the history of the music is just as full of rappers who have delivered positive messages and heart-rending narratives. There are producers who embody Kool Herc’s childlike curiosity and excitement with pushing generic boundaries. The truth is that brilliant and affirming music abounds behind this veil of oppressive mainstream masculinity. It always has. From Nas’s stunning and ultimately uplifting delivery of social conditions in the Queensbridge Projects in Illmatic to Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s offerings of leadership in the wake of Biggie’s and 2Pac’s death to Common and Lupe Fiasco and The Roots and Zion I and Little Brother and Gang Starr to stage-rocking women like Jean Grae and Lauryn Hill to alternative rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Madvillain and Jurassic 5—so much of hip-hop defies the destructive trends that the predatory and exclusive industry has proliferated.

It is also reductive to say that Whitman students hold a completely negative attitude about hip-hop music. Those willing to delve deeper into the canon of hip-hop have found that artists old and new have so much else to say that isn’t misogynistic.  “Some artists are bringing back the storytelling aspect of hip-hop—I think of Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era Crew from New York, or more experimental artists like Shabazz Palaces, but even Kendrick Lamar avoids misogyny,” Andreen says. Kendrick’s Good Kid, m.A.A.d City accomplished massive commercial success while offering a spirited and ultimately affirming story of his childhood and maturation in Compton. Devoted hip-hop listener and rhyme-writer Zac Shaiken, a first-year, has his own favorites. “I love Qwel and the Typical Cats—they stay away from overly misogynistic themes. They focus more on the poetry of hip-hop,” he says.

It’s hard to know whether to actually take “Tip Drill” seriously. Maybe Nelly’s “joking” when he swipes a credit card between a voluptuous woman’s buttocks. Maybe he isn’t joking. Does it matter?

“There’s a difficult balance between enjoying music for music’s sake and criticizing the values the music puts forth … The music video to ‘Tip Drill’ makes me more uncomfortable—that’s where you can see that misogyny is really perpetuated,” says senior Martha Russell.

Jokes aside, the best policy for hip-hop is equality. Whitties are familiar, undoubtedly, with the age-old cliche that our college teaches us how to think; the best we can do is to consider the implications of our own choices in hip-hop music and encourage others to do the same. Globally, though, the gender problems of mainstream hip-hop and the profiteering industry which packages it must be considered and addressed alongside the gender problems of other institutions and taken just as seriously—the unfortunate fact remains that misogyny in hip-hop is not, and will never be, simply a hip-hop problem.

Why do we use metaphor?

Are we just decorating our prose, as though we’re peacocks flashing our linguistic feathers?  Are we intending to dramatize it, to make it visceral, to invoke an emotional response?  Or are we mapping experience, participating in our own game of synesthesia in order to elucidate the idiosyncrasies of our own, unique perceptions?

In other words, is metaphor an aspect of something writers might call “style”, or is it just something we do?

In reality, language cannot escape figuration; it is something humans do to language habitually, simply by perceiving.  Frederick Nietzsche suggests that the “language of truth, language supposedly purified of figures and tropes, is simply language to which we have become so habituated that we no longer recognize it as figurative”.  There are two opposing but equal implications of this: one is that figurative language is ubiquitous, and the other is that figurative language is unrecognizable.  So when Common implies in “I Used to Love H.E.R.” that hip-hop is a woman, hip-hop is a woman and we have no choice but to believe him and admire him.

Several rappers have used women, or the names of women, as metaphors—Epmd’s “Jane” and Atmosphere’s obsession with a “Lucy Ford” are prominent examples.  Common, known at the time as Common Sense, was not the first artist to invoke a certain woman to create extended metaphors, but his effort in doing so held, and continues to hold, exceptional literary value for hip-hop.  This effort was not only incredibly poignant, but it fostered an ongoing dialogue, engendering an arena for hip-hop to think about itself.  So many rappers bite this song, it’s ridiculous.  In “I Used to Love H.E.R.”, “H.E.R.” stands for “Hip-Hop in its Essence and Realness”, but Common also claimed when the song was released that it was an acronym for “Hearing Every Rhyme”, a direct call to hip-hop heads, insisting that they listen carefully and critically.

That was 1994.  It was a song ahead of its time, incredible in its clairvoyance, able to detect the decline of hip-hop long before it happened.  The same problems the song alluded to exist still in today’s rap game.

I have argued that mainstream hip-hop suffers from a misogyny problem.  My mother insists that hip-hop is too violent and too misogynistic for her to listen to—it’s hard to blame her though, considering the brand of hip-hop which tends to garner spins on the radio.  Though it is impossible to apply “violent” and “misogynistic” to the multifarious umbrella genre of “hip-hop”, the unacquainted listener will experience mainstream misogyny before experiencing the more admirable qualities of much of the music—its enthusiastic, relentless wordplay, its attention to earlier musical forms, or even its capacity to unite and uplift.

Common uses the extended metaphor of the woman to allude to the trends of misogyny and violence, nascent in hip-hop in 1994 as more violent and misogynistic G-Funk and West Coast hip-hop came to prominence.  Clearly, Common’s choice to compare hip-hop in this time to an increasingly degraded woman is on point.  Hip-hop was on the verge of a Columbus-like crossover into the mainstream consciousness, and the music at the forefront performed the degradation of the woman to which Common so skillfully alludes.

Common personifies “H.E.R.” not only through pronoun use (I will refer to Common’s personification of hip-hop as “her”), but through an even stronger anthropomorphism (“human-izing something)–he affords “her” physicality and consciousness.  Why does this work?  Or does it?  Common could even be recalling a literal person to represent the figurative person.  This could be a childhood love, someone who hung out with rappers, or even a rapper–”she” or “it” was once “original, pure and untampered”.  This would lend credibility to the idea that one’s figuration can be understood through one’s socialization, one’s political, cultural and social understanding of the world.  He sets out his extended metaphor by portraying “her” in her youth, innocent, respected and unfettered: “Not about the money, no studs was mic checkin’ her/But I respected her, she hit me in the heart/A few New York n—as, had did her in the park/But she was there for me, and I was there for her”.  Here we see hip-hop as it was in its stages of infancy in New York.  A burgeoning local art form.  A joyful celebration of genre-pushing innovation.  Music created simply for the fun of creating music.  Ciphers, break-dancers and spray paint, but no violence and no misogyny.  Not yet.

In the second verse, the consequences of the problems alluded to in the first verse begin to play out.  Common places “her” in clubs and parties, suggesting a new arena for consumption of the music.  The turning point in this narrative, however, is “her” geographic shift from New York to Los Angeles: “But then she broke to the West coast, and that was cool/Cause around the same time, I went away to school/And I’m a man of expandin’ so why should I stand in her way?/She’d probably get her money in L.A.”.  Already the contrast to the song’s first verse is manifestly visible; Common has suddenly implicated “her” in the pursuit of money.  Indeed, the beginning of the 1990s saw the rise of Los Angeles and California at large as a fertile region for hip-hop production, but this necessarily meant that the genre was to be commercialized and diversified.  As such, Los Angeles became known for its distinct brand—G-Funk.

Common’s final verse portrays the detrimental and destructive effects of this brand.  He ascribes to “her” an “image and a gimmick”, insinuating that hip-hop’s rise to mainstream eminence was accompanied by an insistence on performing one’s credibility.  This, in Los Angeles, meant street cred, often performed in the discussion of violent acts.  Common raps:
“[She’s] talkin’ about poppin’ glocks, servin’ rocks and hittin’ switches/Now she’s a gangsta rollin’ with gangsta b—-es/Always smokin’ blunts and gettin’ drunk/Tellin’ me sad stories, now she only f—s with the funk”.  The metaphor reaches its climax, though, when Common links violence to misogyny in such a way that “H.E.R.” enacts violence and misogyny on her own body: “I see n—az slammin’ her, and takin’ her to the sewer”.

In response to Common’s effort to take “H.E.R.” back, to nourish hip-hop back to health, L.A.-based hip-hop collective Westside Connection released a song called “Westside Slaughterhouse”, which attacked Common directly.  Ice Cube (of N.W.A. and, later, “Friday After Next” fame) proclaimed the genre’s commodification of the female body: “Used to love her, mad ‘cause we f—ed her/P—y-whipped b—- with no common sense”.  In an effort to defend the gangsta image of Los Angeles hip-hop, Ice Cube helped prefigure the disturbing trends which, regrettably, came to characterize mainstream hip-hop music.  In delivering these lines, he rendered “her” disposable, taking geographic control of a metaphor and coloring it with brutal physicality.  This violence against “her” persists.

Metaphors can be prophetic.  They can be ugly.  Most of all, they are limitless, extending infinitely into time to be recycled and refigured, over and over again.

As the Whitman Missionaries baseball bus sped back from Caldwell, Idaho like a potato in a slingshot, catcher Mack Harden ’15 looked behind him and laughed as yet another one of his teammates doubled over and began vomiting.

“Back of the bus!” he jeered without mercy, pointing towards the quarantine area the baseball team had created in the back four rows. As expected, his 11 gastroenteritis-stricken teammates raised a salute of middle fingers.

Seven minutes later, Harden joined their ranks, clutching his stomach in pain.

“Back of the bus!” the back of the bus yelled, and Harden raised a middle-finger salute to the back of the bus.

A visibly distressed, gaunt and pale Harden appeared the following morning in the Pioneer media room. No, actually he didn’t, and The Pioneer doesn’t have a media room. He appeared in the Welty Health Center. Well, maybe “appeared” isn’t the right word, because he was sleeping there. He sat up in bed and coughed moistly.

“I’ve literally eaten nothing but chewing tobacco and yellow Vitamin Water for two days,” Harden groaned. The Pio asked a clarifying question, as this dietary habit is not unusual for Harden. “Well, usually I have some sunflower seeds too. But I can’t even keep the seeds down.”

Harden, like much of the Missionaries baseball team, has suffered from a violent outbreak of the infamous Norovirus. Known also as the “winter vomiting bug,” the Norovirus proliferated without warning and without sympathy, causing abdominal pain, loose stools, nausea, huge whiffs on hanging curveballs and a deluge of Norovirus-related Twitter posts.

“It was chill, though, ‘cause we made a snowman and put all our chews in its mouth,” said French exchange student and third-baseman sophomore Francois Mathieu, speaking about the effects of the Norovirus on the team’s play.

The Pioneer caught up with the Norovirus that afternoon in 2-West’s media room. That’s simply not true—2-West doesn’t have a media room either. The Pioneer caught up with the Norovirus that afternoon in the 2-West bathroom. Well, that’s not exactly right, because The Pio didn’t really intend to speak with the Norovirus. The Pioneer caught the Norovirus that afternoon in the 2-West bathroom.

The single-stranded RNA non-enveloped member of the Caliciviridae virus family apologized, but expressed gratitude toward Whitman’s newly-thriving baseball program.

“I feel really blessed,” said the recently-aerosolized virus from genogroup I, poised to start another outbreak of epidemic gastroenteritis. “That weekend was so much fun. Not every infectious agent gets the chance to build up inside members of Whitman’s baseball team—what an honor! The night I spent in Mack’s stomach was unforgettable. I mean, he’s the catcher on the baseball team!”

The virus lamented, however, that its remarkable performance was overshadowed by the fact that Whitman’s baseball team won a game that weekend, ending its losing streak against the College of Idaho.

Illustration by Asa Mease

Every November, Whitman College puts on one of its most widely-attended campus events—a not-so-real beauty pageant, known fondly as Mr. Whitman, in which eight senior men celebrate the completion of a three month-long fundraising drive for a charity chosen by a Whitman student. The eight contestants are judged on a combination of their fundraising successes and their performances in the formal, swimsuit and talent portions of the show. As with all beauty pageants, there must be a winner—and of course, as with all beauty pageants, there must be the grim, devastating consequences of losing—the pain associated with realizing that nobody ever remembers the runner-up.

Raymond Fatthew is a just-barely-living testament to the agony of defeat. The unshaven, filthy senior was discovered in the outdoor hallway of Olin East, known around Whitman as the outdoor hallway of Olin East, wearing a torn sweater and bright orange yoga pants. Passers-by seemed to think Fatthew was taking philosophy classes, oblivious to the several hairs that had sprouted on his chin and the spinach leaves scattered around him. A clearly scared first-year student, Jacquie Hardcastle, revealed through sobs that she recognized the despondent, stinky vagabond with the soiled orange pants.

“He…” she stammered moistly, “had a … jar of peanut b-butter with him … he looked right up at me with those dead, little eyes and … he, he asked, ‘is there any more room for me … in those sandwich?’  Like he didn’t know … Mr. Whitman was two m-months ago.  Then … he said he ‘caught the ball’ for some reason.”

Hardcastle acknowledged that she too had forgotten that Mr. Whitman was over three months ago.

The Pioneer caught up with Fatthew shortly thereafter, as he was trying to take nude pictures of a D-Slip. Clearly intoxicated, Fatthew teetered into the stairwell and began to stage an imaginary interview with himself. “Just gotta get this calendar done by last September!” Fatthew said, concerning his ideas for fundraising initiatives. “Larson! Get me a zucchini,” he yelled down the corridor, interrupting the imaginary journalist trying to ask him about his “Justin Timberlake quesadilla auction” idea.

A real-life journalist from The Pioneer finally stepped in and asked Fatthew if he needed anything. Pulling a banana peel from his pants and speaking into it, ostensibly thinking it was a microphone, he replied “I’m good, man. It’s good not being on duty tonight, man. Get to focus on the community a little. Barbecuing today.” When asked what he had barbecued last October, Fatthew responded with a very slurred “my talent’s gonna be soooo good!” and tried beatboxing into the banana peel.

A friend of Fatthew’s, Matthew Lelands, told The Pio that he had “seen Raymond around the TKE house a couple times” and had “always expected he was just living in the closet next to the TV room.” In actuality, Fatthew’s fate is even worse—though nobody remembers who he is, he will be followed always by the fact that he lost Mr. Whitman. (The other six non-winning contestants in the November pageant could not be contacted, except for Harry Raggyvan, who was last seen wearing a barbecue-sauce-stained white shirt, trying to teach Styx how to dance like Beyoncé.)

On music charts, the most impressive hip-hop album of the last five years hardly made a splash. Rolling Stone gave it a modest three and a half out of five stars. It appeared fleetingly, arriving unheralded and departing quietly like a specter in the mainstream consciousness.

It is perhaps fitting that “Undun” (2011) moved like a ghost in the hip-hop world—the album is in itself something of a psychological symptom, vast and empty, chilling and starkly beautiful.

“Undun” is an ambitious existential project chronicling the brief and tragic life and demise of Redford Stephens, a fictional character named after Sufjan Stevens’s song “Redford”. The 20 year musical career of The Roots has seen significant mainstream success, Grammy awards, worldwide tours, and now prominence on late night television, but “Undun”, a concept album which clocks in at less than 40 minutes, is the Philly hip-hop collective’s most compelling release to date.

The music reviewers at HipHopDX afforded an exceptionally rare “perfect” rating to “Undun”, reporting that “The Roots have crafted an album that … elevates hip-hop”. The ever-diversifying genre of “hip-hop” has always done well to resist rigid, watertight compartmentalization, but the lyrical content of hip-hop in the “Post-Drake” era has, by in large, eschewed the conventions of storytelling which characterized the music in its earlier stages. Perhaps the reinvigorated concern with narrative structure is implicit within the suggestion that “Undun” “elevates hip-hop”. Perhaps that’s exactly what they mean. The Roots have engaged in a bold, unapologetic project of reverse chronology; we know from the album’s first seconds that Redford Stephens’s story concludes in death, so we are left to gradually untangling the skein of his life over the course of the album. It is delivered like a hip-hop scene of Virgil’s “Aeneid”. The album’s ghastly subversion of causality marks a truly scintillating literary achievement.

“Undun’s” wraithlike first track, “Dun”, invites its listeners into its compelling tragedy. It enacts Redford’s death in reverse, beginning with the unfriendly sound of a flatlining electrocardiogram. Life crescendos out of the psychotropic, shrill tone of the EKG, beginning with a spacious and somber synthesizer loop, then revealing a heavy, fluttering heartbeat and finally a blood-curdling scream played backwards. The track places us in a murky, disorienting postmortem vacuum, but more importantly, the listener is informed that the album is utterly heartbreaking before it really even begins.

The effect of the tragedy “Dun” engenders is twofold. Like all literary tragedies, it ensnares us, demands an emotional response to the action. It invites our empathy and our despair. But the fact that Redford’s fate is already sealed makes this tragedy all the more enduring and menacing—in the schema of “Undun”, there is no justice and no possibility, only suffering and hunger.

“Sleep”, the second track, finds Redford in his last breaths, a brain reaching out into his past for explanation. Through his existential ruminations, we glean that Redford, like so many others born into insular poverty, has played out a battle between an ideal free will and a grim destiny in a world with no escape hatch, dominated by drugs and crime. The Roots’ Black Thought raps: “Illegal activity controls my black symphony/Orchestrated like it happened incidentally/Oh—there I go, from a man to a memory”. Sure, this is a storyline we’ve encountered before, but we’ve never seen it enacted in such a poignant way. “Sleep” is a muddled elegy, operating in an uncanny liminal space, standing somehow in life and in death at once.

This is where we get the sense that Redford might just be a ghost of the street corner. Bristol University Professor Andrew Bennett elucidates the modern conception of the “ghost”, which “involves the idea of a spectre, an apparition of the dead, a revenant, the dead returned to a kind of spectral existence—an entity not alive but also not quite, not finally, dead”. The whole of “Undun” treads on this ground; the narrators of Redford’s existential turmoil reveal more of his life over the course of the album, but the listener becomes engaged in a postmortem process of discovery. Each song is a puzzle piece which both clarifies and confounds.

But as Redford’s life is unraveled, we do come to understand the tragedy of his life more fully, just as we become acquainted with the tragedy of his death. In “The OtherSide”, another lyrical knockout buttressed by a commanding down-on-one drum groove and lit up by a soaring, organ-backed Bilal hook, Black Thought speaks to the limited scope of Redford’s aspirations: “But when that paper got low, so did my tolerance/And there ain’t no truth in a dare without the consequence/Listen, if not for these hood inventions/I’d be just another kid from the block with no intentions”. We glean that Redford’s frustrations with his own poverty have impelled him to seek financial gain by any means necessary. Black Thought brings out a cruel dramatic irony in this last line. The expressions of the discrepancies between our understanding of Redford’s ultimate fate and Redford’s justifications of his own behavior are the instances in which “Undun’s” reverse chronology reaches its maximum tragic effect. As listeners, we are intended to experience the sudden changes in Redford’s fortune—the peripeteias, in Aristotelian terms—more viscerally than he does. This puts us in the driver’s seat, makes us the omniscient narrators.

In “Stomp”, the seventh track, Redford subtly reveals his role in a drive-by shooting. Here, though, Redford is afforded a revelation which foreshadows—perhaps “alludes to” is more appropriate, given the reverse narrative arc—his own death. This song solidifies Redford’s fatalistic attitude towards his involvement in drugs and violent crime—“Never deviating from a plan/I drive by, headed for the valley of the damned”—but it also presents him when he is most self-aware. Redford’s moment of self-recognition (or anagnorisis, to use another Aristotelian term) occurs just after he has ostensibly committed murder: Thought concludes the song’s first verse by suggesting “It just as easily coulda been me instead of ya”. Sudden moments of recognition and reversals of fortune abound in tragedies, but in undun their purposes are reverted and complicated.

The album concludes with a four-track instrumental suite. In the final track, aptly named “Finality”, a weeping, bravado violin solo provides a heart-rending elegy for Redford’s innocence, interrupted by the crash of a low and dissonant piano chord which lingers in the listener’s consciousness like the hum of a malevolent machine. Thus, the album is bookended by death; darkness’s usurpation of beautiful, melodic innocence enacts the suddenness with which a street hustler’s life can hurdle towards unceremonious death. It is a fitting destruction, bleak and unsettling yet murky and inexact in its details, the sonic equivalent of Redford folding a nine-millimeter pistol into the creases of his hand.

“Undun” is not a “banger”; the word “accessible” does not apply easily to this album. In effect, there are no standalone tracks—the album is meant to be experienced in its shattering, astonishing totality. This is not Jay-Z’s rags-to-riches, dope-dealer-to-platinum-rapper story. It is a story of a doomed minion, a drug-runner fated to die as a drug-runner, a man living out his dependencies on the lowest rung of the most rickety ladder, neither a victim nor a hero. The understated musical and lyrical mastery of the album is crucial to hip-hop in the “Post-Drake” era, but what is perhaps most important is that “Undun” reasserts hip-hop’s credibility in storytelling, and it does so with a meticulous concern for pacing and staggering tragedy.

For the small, inbreeding population of Whitman students who are in happy relationships, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity for partners to celebrate each other and acknowledge their inherent superiority over the rest of the student population. For most other Whitman students, though, Valentine’s Day is only a consumer-supported reminder of their loneliness and disappointment with the conventions of Whitman’s “dating scene.”

While committed Whitties make restaurant reservations and consider shaving various areas of their bodies, and single Whitties prepare to throw food and rocks at the few happy couples on campus, senior Pete Boroughs has his own unusual designs for Valentine’s Day this year. The part-time student and ultimate Frisbee player confessed that his long-standing obsession with the music of St. Louis R&B artist Nelly has recently returned to him. This renewed fascination with Nelly’s musical styling and videography could not have come at a more consequential time.

“I’ve been watching a lot of Nelly’s music videos recently. In fact, last week was ‘Nelly Week.’ Usually I take some time to watch some rounds of Magic: the Gathering, but I can’t stop thinking about how much I need a Tip Drill this Valentine’s Day,” Boroughs said.

Nelly, an artist known for his dubious portrayals of women as much as his delightfully catchy music and misspelled song titles, was recently reported to have appeared in nearly every hip-hop music video from 2000-2006. When asked what he had planned for Valentine’s Day, Boroughs pointed to the obvious appeal of Nelly’s lifestyle.

“This is what I always dreamed of as a 14-year-old,” Boroughs said, pulling up the music video to “Hot in Herre” on his computer. “I think it’s about time that this dream comes true.” On the screen, a slutty referee mimed taking her slutty referee shirt off, sweat dripping from her jiggly bits.

Nelly’s music videos invariably feature a cadre of muscular black men who roam around clubs in slow motion, hugging other muscular black men or stopping to objectify well-formed, scantily-clad women who seem hopelessly attracted to men with doo-rags and band-aids under their left eyes.

Boroughs remembers how slighted he felt on Valentine’s Day in eighth grade, when an adoring girl gave him a box of chocolates and a really nice note: “No booty pops. No gold chains. No Air Force Ones. It was like she had no idea what Valentine’s Day was actually about.”

When asked how he intended to prepare for this year’s Valentine’s Day, Boroughs cited a long list of items he would need: enormous football jerseys for him and his friends to wear backwards, headbands, $500 Air Jordans, somewhere between 35 and 40 bottles of Patron Tequila, bubble bath, a bathtub and lots of dollar bills. Much of this he figures to acquire from Jewett Hall’s games closet.

“And of course, it ain’t no fun unless we all get some,” Boroughs concluded, swiping his Whitman ID card downwards in the air, as if one of many voluptuous, invisible women in his room would begin shaking her invisible apple booty in his face.

Last Sunday, Feb. 10 was Dilla Day in Detroit.  Hip-hop fans poured into the Filmore and they didn’t leave until after 2 AM.  Brooklyn hip-hop icon Talib Kweli and Detroit’s own Royce da 5’9” were the night’s two biggest names. The music of a broken city reverberated in triumphal celebration.

But the night’s most powerful performance was delivered without a hard-hitting bass groove or a vicious, metallic 808 snare.  It came courtesy of Maureen Yancey and Pepper Holton, the surrogate matriarchs of Detroit’s still-burgeoning hip-hop scene.  Seven years ago, both Yancey and Holton lost their sons—producer and rapper James Dewitt Yancey, known as J Dilla in the hip-hop world and rapper Proof (neé Deshaun Holton), perhaps best known as the second fiddle to Emimen’s bravado in the group D12.  Dilla passed away on Feb. 10, 2006 due to complications from lupus and a rare blood disease, just three days after releasing his instrumental magnum opus, Donuts. Proof died just two months later after an altercation in a Detroit club. Both Dilla and Proof were thirty-two, mature enough to have left behind a tangible legacy on Detroit and its hip-hop movement but too young, too fresh, too enamored with creative possibility to have their bright futures stripped from them.

It was at once fitting and momentous that the foster mothers of Detroit’s orphaned hip-hop generation rocked the stage this Sunday night. Known affectionately as Ma Dukes and Mama P, Maureen Yancey and Pepper Holton offered emboldening words which testified to the bonds of an embattled family in an embattled city. “We’re the soul capital of the world”, Ma Dukes exclaimed. “We are one. Let’s make it happen in the D.” Mama P spoke to the infinite potential of Detroit’s brand of hip-hop. “We are at the center of the hip-hop movement. There are so many gifted and talented people right in Detroit”.

Mama P alluded indirectly to one of hip-hop’s most unfortunate, crippling dogmas. The rugged, unapologetic history of hip-hop in its infancy proliferated an understanding of the importance of place.  Perhaps the B-Boys and renegade graffiti artists of the Bronx felt entitled to ownership of the culture, obligated to create its definitions. Over the course of the 80s this came to apply to NYC’s other boroughs.  Then came N.W.A. and G-Funk—now Los Angeles, too, asserted the toughness of its music and became firmly entrenched in a cultural battle with New York.  Feuding between Biggie and 2Pac—or between Bad Boy Records and Death Row, however one might choose to construe their rivalry—caused hip-hop listeners and artists to separate the music into strict categorizations of “East Coast” and “West Coast”.  The early 2000s saw the rise to prominence of a nebulous region called “The Dirty South”, encompassing Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans and sometimes St. Louis. There became three credible epicenters for hip-hop production.

Historically, Detroit has fallen victim to the hip-hop dogmas of place. It is possible that these dogmas have been, to some extent, destabilized by some remarkable mainstream exceptions—two examples are Macklemore’s recent commercial success and, more obviously, Detroit’s own Eminem—but these rappers are exceptions to the rule.  This dogma becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; aspiring rappers have long fled to New York or L.A. to try and “make it.”

There have been isolated successes in the history of Detroit hip-hop—the most obvious example being the unpredictable, substance-abusing and fiercely individualistic Eminem, whose debut, The Marshall Mathers LP sold faster in its first week than any hip-hop album in history.  There is no shortage of impressive lyricism in Detroit.  Binary Star’s 2000 low-budget indie release “Masters of the Universe” only sold 20,000 copies during its first issue, but there may be no hip-hop album in existence which so thoroughly barrages its listeners with figurative language and verbal gymnastics. Dilla co-founded Slum Village, a collective which produced their widely sought-after debut album “Fantastic, Vol. 1″ in 1996 but couldn’t release it until 2005 because of label politics. Two of its founding members, Dilla and fellow emcee Baatin, left the group. Gifted rapper Royce Da 5’9” received acclaim as both a solo artist and collaborator with Eminem in the duo Bad Meets Evil, but his label folded and his album was bootlegged.  The Detroit hip-hop artist, over and over again, has had success denied him, or in Royce’s case, taken from him.

J Dilla, much like 2Pac, has been kept alive through the posthumous release of vast, hitherto unpublished troves of music.  His death has been something like a second coming; Dilla has entered the mainstream consciousness through the homages and tributes which hip-hop artists have paid him. He is now justifiably regarded as one of hip-hop’s greatest musical minds, a wildly talented multi-instrumentalist with legendary vision and an ear more accurate than a metronome, a relentlessly excited creator with an ear to the streets always, a “drum god”, in the words of Kanye West.

Ma Dukes, in some ways, assumed the spirit of Dilla last Sunday night.  She, too, suffers from lupus.  The proceeds from one of Dilla’s posthumous projects, Jay Dee: The Delicious Vinyl Years, have been donated to her, enabling her to pay for her medication.  She lives in Conant Gardens, the same ghetto where James Dewitt Yancey became J Dilla, and works in a daycare there, still trying to keep her household afloat.  She has been unable to reap the fiscal benefits from her late son’s posthumous legend.  Despite her struggles, the embattled matriarch of an embattled city’s hip-hop scene has preached messages of unification, and Detroit seems to have listened.

See, something remarkable happened when Dilla died—hip-hop realized how much it need him.  The wealth of unpublished material he left behind stimulated an interest in his whole body of work.  This process of hip-hop historiography revealed the vast network of rappers and singers Dilla influenced. As the puzzle of his legacy was pieced together, the fierce factionalism of Detroit’s underground hip-hop scene dissolved.  Even self-sustained powerhouses like Royce da 5’9”, Elzhi and Black Milk have subscribed to this new familial dynamic.  Ma Dukes may have lost her biological son, but she has taken a generation of Detroit artists under her wing, guiding them under an ethic of mutual respect.

Ex-dealer Danny Brown paints Detroit’s ghetto landscapes with audacious humor and shameless depravity.  Prolific indie stalwart and industry genius Black Milk raps and produces his own albums; at age 29, his resumé boasts thirteen releases already.  One Be Lo, half of the aforementioned duo Binary Star, has seven solo releases characterized by the casual righteousness of his delivery and the complexity of his rhyme schemes.  Royce da 5’9” is back, anchoring the super-group Slaughterhouse.  Four-man troupe Clear Soul Forces has yet to garner mainstream attention, but their effortless interplay warrants breakout success.  On “Get No Better”, CSF’s E-Fav raps “While we be focused on a salary, lettuce to bring the croutons/I’m trying to have a dollar bill salad right on Obama’s lawn”.

Detroit is crumbling and empty, hacks the black smoke of industrial decay.  Public high schools graduate a quarter of their students.  300,000 people have left the city since 2000.  But the hip-hop community has never been healthier in the Motor City.

As Royce put it, “It’s good to be unified”.