In an interview with CNN in 2019, Joe Biden’s characteristic eloquence sagged momentarily when he referred to his former boss, Barack Obama, as “Raprock.” Google is suspiciously stingy with the search results for this world-historical event, but it should be preserved and savored for generations to come. Though he didn’t say the full name, Biden did shunt the words Raprock and Obama together in the viewer’s mind, leaving them to think and sing “Raprock Obama!!” to themselves until their boss passed by their cubicle, the phone buzzed, or they deformed privately under the cosmic pressure of sublime juxtaposition. The Colbert Show hackily brought the malapropism to life, posting a quick and dirty meme of the ex prez featuring a salt and pepper goatee (sans mustache) and a backward Fred Durst style red Yankees cap, grimacing fiercely, on a post to the show’s Facebook page.
Obama, as an ex-president, has emerged as one of the world’s blandest men. Rather than using his cachet to fight for programs and policies either left incomplete by his administration or dismantled by McConnell and Trump, he has opted to trade politics for an unremarkable if high-profile media career and elitist social calendar. Gladhanding and wan podcasting aside, no small part of his post-presidential image derives from public declarations of personal tastes. He clearly aspires to influence millions while, weirdly, demonstrating total fealty to conventional sensibilities[1]. His year-end reading and Spotify lists hover and sparkle above a centrist uncanny valley—even the surprises (he likes Parasite, for example) are unsurprising[2]; they simply reveal what normie machine learning takes to be the border-texts of edifying arts and entertainment.
Despite Obama’s perversely middlebrow social media persona, it’s still just barely possible to imagine him enjoying a little rap-rock during leg day or before a pickup game with a clutch of mercenary body men. He likes Jay Z, and probably occasionally flicks on “99 Problems,” the grimy Rick Rubin production with PROBLEMATIC LANGUAGE and grunting guitars, when Michelle’s not around. So maybe Biden wasn’t completely wrong. While we don’t associate Obama with Durst-lidded ruffians, Raprock Obama is in there, no matter how many historical novels litter his nightstand. Of course, the fact that Raprock really exists makes Biden’s slip that much funnier; he wasn’t flubbing a line but revealing a ghastly, tacky truth.
When it comes to Obama’s image, clearly normal is winning but, in historical terms, it is just slowly and ineluctably replacing its erstwhile competitor: cool. If you shake your head kind of hard for a second, you’ll remember that Obama used to be cool, or, as Chris Rock said, in a preview of even blue America’s declining infatuation, at least “cooler than most politicians, [if not] not as cool as actual cool people.” He goes on: “[Obama’s] not cool like Jay Z's cool. He's not Eddie Murphy. But in a world of politicians ..." It’s funny that Rock cites other formerly cool guys, Jay Z and Eddie Murphy, for comparison. Jay Z is basically a hip-hip multinational corporation at this point and Eddie Murphy is as much Norbit as Dolemite. Both men are just slightly cooler than, say, Dan Ackroyd.
Rock was grading on the gentlest of curves, but his tempering reminds us of Obama’s latent but persistent ambition: to be normal in the coolest possible way, or vice vera. Why does he yacht around with a mega wealthy aggrieved mannequin like Richard Branson, which sane and decent people would obviously consider hell on earth? Because he thinks it’s cool. Why does his invite Bill Simmons’ insipid muse Eddy Vedder to his pandemic birthday party while cutting career-building confidants like David Axlerod from the invite list? Because he thinks having Eddy Vedder mumble and meander through his sprawling Martha’s Vineyard estate, catching him for a passing elbow bump over a plate of canapes or a tray of cocktails, is cool.
Rap-rock, like Obama, is the normal thinking it’s cool. The genre that wasn’t quite dead on arrival but was maybe wan on arrival is also weirdly unkillable in small doses. Aside from inspired moments here and there, from Run DMC to Suicidal Tendencies, rap-rock now looks, in retrospect, more like a shabby marketing gambit than an organic synthesis of tastes and demographics. 90s-to-early-00s practitioners lifted stock masculine musical techniques and tropes from rap and corny post-grunge alt-rock to make Solo cup party music. It’s early promise, as Christopher Weingarten puts it, gave way to “macho and mooky muscles.” True, there was Rage Against the Machine, but they were evidently a hard fucking act to follow[3], and their flashy but persuasive politics, flowing up from the global south of the Zapatistas to peak crime-wave, segregated urban America, were, I’m just guessing here, scarcely comprehensible to your run of the mill Linkin Park fanboy douche.
One early rap-rock lab experiment, the Judgement Night soundtrack, offered a glimpse of synergy and dream-team hypotheticals come to life—some inspired soul rammed bands like Anthrax and Biohazard together with the likes of Cypress Hill and House of Pain. I used to listen to it while smoking weed and playing Mortal Combat with a buddy of mine who, let’s call him Joe Pesci[4], eventually crashed a car at 15, shortly before moving to Florida and, about a minute later, dropping out of high school. I was a C- junior-high malcontent, recovering from a sporty, culture-less latency period, utterly lost in the wastelands of suburban adolescence save for hedonic reprieves such as these. We were, Joe Pesci and I, I dare say, the Judgement Night soundtrack’s core demo. We saw the movie too and thought it was "pretty cool."
Nothing legendary was spawned on that album, but it survives as a kind of better-than-expected mix tape from a long-expired zeitgeist. I tried listening to it recently, but I wasn’t getting psyched up for a big deadlift or anything, so I didn’t give it my full and enthusiastic attention, with one exception: “Fallin’” by Teenage Fan Club and hip-hop legends De La Soul. The song is shockingly good if maybe incomplete. It drops just two wistful, self-deprecating verses about the pitfalls of fads and fame before hitting cruise control for a protracted but mega-chill, and, I think it’s safe to say, uplifting outro. I cannot believe how sweet, cool, and alive it sounds each time I play it. Pos is presciently mournful, his sentiments so altogether apropos for the genre’s imminent shelf date that I can’t quite believe it made the album. Then again, I can’t imagine anyone was paying close enough attention to object. Behold:
Hey yo kids, (whats up?)
Remember when I used to be dope,
(yeah!)
I owned a pocket full of fame
(But look what you're doing now), I know, Well I know
I lost touch with reality, now my personality
Is an unwanted commodity (believe it)
Can't believe I used to be Mr Steve Austin on the mic
(Six millions ways) I used to run it
Briefly continuing the 6-Million Dollar Man theme, he name-drops Oscar Goldman, then Mother Goose, before he’s out a of there, the dream of a fictional flash-in-the-pan career following him into silence as the chorus soars and laments his descent, which is not just a once-in-a-lifetime collapse but, I think, a way of being, a steady, spiraling maple key flutter feeling that will last for a long time to come. Dave’s ensuing verse piles bluesy dada and psychedelic leaps onto Pos’s confessional exposition, ending with these inspired lines, too good, I say, for the mercenary endeavor at hand—a combo-genre novelty album for an Emilio Estevez movie—but whatever:
I bring it to the blues,
I pay all my dues
So what's gone's dead, let me use my forehead
Easy pack it up man, let me stop stalling
Cause everything I do is like falling.
My God.
There’s moment in Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters, when the Vaudevillian paterfamilias of the eccentric Glass family, Les, asks his son, the saintly Seymour, if he remembers riding around on the handlebars of performer Joe Jackson’s “nickel-plated trick bicycle” during a run of shows in Brisbane, when Seymour was very young. And Seymour says, in the presence of Buddy, his brother and Goldsmithian admirer and chronicler, that “he wasn’t sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson’s beautiful bicycle” (106). That’s how I feel about this song. It’s not just something I heard, but something I rode on, something that carried me long ago, and from which I never entirely dismounted. I used to badger Joe Pesci into playing it, as often as he might tolerate, while he was clearly hungry for heavier fair. Emotionally, Joe Pesci was usually just pissed at his stepmom (Susan) or looking to have a good time. Me, I had a precocious sense of lost opportunities, for some reason, and so the song spoke to me. I also liked the idea, and I still do, that someone could be cool and sad at the same time.
Neither rap-rock nor Raprock Obama seem very cool these days. But still, they have immense generative power as meme fodder. Is there any funnier combination of words than Raprock Obama? Who knows? Neither word means very much on its own, aside from evoking a catalogue of disappointments so fleeting it takes a fairly muscular effort to recall them. Together, though, they are a kind of magical bicycle you can ride on forever, or, at least, for as much of forever as you’re allowed to see.
[1] He is, it would appear, an influenceable person par excellence.
[2] Parasite won an Oscar after all.
[3] I remember seeing them perform “Bulls on Parade” on SNL and thinking that the rest of the show was pretty much pointless after that.
[4] My brother said he was reminded of Joe Pesci whenever this diminutive Italian-American friend of mine opened his motormouth.