Ridiculous rap lyrics written by Tom Wolfe

Cafe Society
1

Tom Wolfe, old though he may be, loves to pen fictional lyrics for music in his novels. Like everything else in his writing, they’re always very over-the-top. Wolfe was pretty widely criticized for trying to write about college students as a man in his seventies with I Am Charlotte Simmons, and while I think he described the state-university environment pretty well, others thought his portrayal of Kids These Days was wildly inaccurate. Whatever your opinion of him is, it’s pretty hard to deny that the fake lyrics he wrote are absolutely hilarious.

From I Am Charlotte Simmons:

Rapper “Dr. Dis” sings:

Know’m saying?
Fucking gray boy say, ‘You, you a beast.’
I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo’ face.
Yo lo’l dickie shaking, it won’t cease
Faking you got heart. You ain’t got shit, yo.
Know’m saying?

…Call yo’self a cop? Swap yo’ dick and yo’ ass,
Evr’ry time you shit, yo’ balls go plop plop.
Wipe yo’ dick, and it bleeds choc’late.
You needs to fuck with yo’ but, cocksucking cop cop.
Know’m saying?

Know’m saying?
What you saving yo’ cunt for, bitch?
Some rich old sucker you be huntin’ for?
Motherfucker he be stuffing shit up his nose, too,
For a brain fuck, ain’t having no truck with ho’s, yo.
Know’m saying?

“Doctor Dis was so sociopathic and generally disgusting, Jojo had the suspicion that Doctor Dis himself was a cynic who created this stuff as a parody of the genre. He’d stick in words like “beast” and “cease,” words more than half the Dupont national basketball champions had never uttered in their lives.”

Later on in the book:

"Over the pickup’s radio, a throaty young woman wails in the pell-mell cadence of the new pop music craze, crunk:

  • -spears her haunches Dirty Sanchez dude what wants her nude and slutty pseudo-ruts her butt so rudely taunts her…*

Gots the curse her pad her madder hearse her cold cunt cash her outta odor…

And my favorite -

Aching for your wan love, sister, shoving Mister Johnson gently when he’s taking foreplay’s lazy torpor bending his big woody could be making his stones sorer maybe…

More from Doctor Dis:

Videotape the white apes with the badges and the blackjacks whacking a blood my blood yo’ blood it’s time you niggas get up off yo’ ghetto asses shove the blackjacks up the Mister Brown back alleys of the police thugs videotape the bloods my blood yo’ blood the brothers getting bigger crack some white apes upside they own haids videotape the suckers laid out daid eliminated by the bloods my blood yo’ blood videotape it motherfuckers

“until Jojo wanted to climb through the locker-room walls and demolish the speakers and then crawl through the wires until he found Doctor Dis and twisted his head off for him.”

And finally, a little ditty which recurs throughout the book:

Yo, take my testi-culls/suck 'em like a popsi-cull

Lole, Tom Wolfe.

A Man In Full, his earlier novel, also contained some rap lyrics sung by “Rapmaster M.C. New York,” a jailhouse entertainer:

*Yo, sugar! —think ‘at’s a ruby
You got stuck inside yo’ crack?

The fuck, yo’booty turned to gold
While you was lyin’ on your back?

Ain’ tryin’ no mo sweet talk, baby!
Hubba ho know street talk, maybe!
So you gon’ get a homey’s dick, ‘cause
This homey’s got a dicky itch!
An’ I ain’t gonna play 'at shit!
So…
Give it up, bitch!
GIVE IT UP, BITCH!
…

Short’s Johnson, he go roamin’
Homey’s jeans a his is packin’ heat
Inside that cracker hack’s own home, an’
Bottom lady wants 'at sweet dark meat.

No mo’ tiny Cracker dickies, Lordy,
Gimme yo’ big jimbo, Shorty!
Fo’at Cracker come back, ‘cause I
Cain’t take’at tiny gray hack’s mackin’!

At gray ho’s dyin’ fo’ Shorty’s pitch!
So…
GIVE IT UP, BITCH!
GIVE IT UP, BITCH!
*

And later on, another serenade:

*Little pubk, he gon’ get turned out,
He gon’ learn ‘bout comin’ through
For the real funk, he be ass-out!
Ram ‘at sucker, he gon’ pass out!
Fucker, he gon’ switch from him to her,
‘At jissum-sucker won’ know which,
An’ ain’t that rich!
GIVE IT UP, BITCH!
GIVE IT UP, BITCH!

Lil’ Wayne…Yung Joc…if you guys ever need someone to write lyrics for you in the future, I think Tom Wolfe is your man.

2

Hey, it’s better than *I’m Kan, the Louis Vuitton Don Bought my mom a purse, now she Louis Vuitton Mom *. I cracked up the first time I read that one and realized it was meant to be serious.

3

I thought they were pretty darn good considering who wrote them. I have mixed feelings about Charlotte Simmons. I think it has gotten far more negative criticism than it deserves. For instance I remember when some publication gave it the “worst sex” or “worst erotic writing” dishonor. Specifically they were referring to Charlotte’s play-by-play of her night with Hoyt. It was a very un-erotic description of sex, but that was the entire point. The criticism only showed the ignorance of the critics. It would literally be like criticizing Sound and the Fury by saying, “it reads like a retard wrote it.”

On the other hand I think I Am Charlotte is Wolfe’s worst novel, and excluding some great Wolfian extended observations, some of his worst writing. As for the raps, I think if a current rapper picked them up and produced them no one would even bat an eye, they seem pretty typical. Part of the problem is that they don’t scan well, but most rap lyrics don’t. The irregular rhythm of rap always makes it difficult to read the lyrics without a sense of the beat intended by the artist. Also, as usual, he misses badly on some of the slang, but that’s just Tom Wolfe, he hasn’t had a real hold over slang since the 60’s.

4

Agreed that the sex scene is meant to be terrible. But it’s just that EVERYTHING is so over the top. Oh no-a frat party! Oh no-a tailgate party! Oh no–a drunken hook up!

Okay, to be fair, I eschewed a lot of that in college. But I’ve seen drunken fools at bars and such, and it’s bad, but it hardly seems all that bad, or all that unique to our culture/time period. Is Tom Wolfe really so naive to think that when he was 20, this kind of stuff wasn’t happening? Sure, sexual mores have loosened but the college campus is hardly Sodom.

To be fair, I don’t think I really enjoyed any college set books/movies all that much. The closest I’ve gotten to finding an honest school type book was Prep.

5

I’ve put thought into what makes Charlotte so much worse than Bonfire and Man in Full. You have a good point in saying everything is over the top. But everything is over the top in his other two novels too. I mean it not like Charlie Croker lead the life of a typical contractor in Atlanta. Conrad too – I mean there is an earthquake that causes a prison break! And Bonfire isn’t exactly a guide to the typical life a NYSE trader is it?

Still, in Charlotte he seems to go way over the line in hyperbole. Maybe it is that more of us have actually been to college and, for the most part, had very banal experiences there. Another problem is that I think he took the sociobiology angle too much in this book. He has written some of the best essays covering the discipline in the past two decades, and it is clear to me that he wanted to explore sociobiological (especially E.O. Wilson’s) principals in a fictional setting. This is done at the expense of dehumanizing his characters too much. He focuses too much on the overt forces of socio-genetics at the expense of exploring the character’s feelings about those forces.

Also, I didn’t like any of the characters in Charlotte. It is difficult to slog through a novel when you don’t like any of the characters. Now I didn’t like any of the characters in Bonfire either, but I really didn’t like them, I hated them, and hate kept me reading. Whereas in Man in Full, I actually liked Charlie and Conrad, and I wanted to see them win.

6

Where’s the “Shanks Akimbo!” line from A Man in Full? I used to go around yelling that around when the book first came out.

I agree that they could be real rap lyrics – I actually think it sounds sort of like DMX. I love all of Tom Wolfe’s stuff.

7

I think the greatest part of the novel was his exploration of the social status plays both between and within groups. Wolfe is at his best when he matter-of-factly explains what everyone knows about and is afraid to say - the exposé of the racial spoils system and the symbiotic white guilt is what made Bonfire great, etc.

I agree that the literal accuracy of Charlotte Simmons suffers, especially since he sets it in a modern university where, apparently, nobody uses the Internet except for class. But I suspect that his other works are also somewhat inaccurate, and we can’t tell because while there are very few bond traders, almost everyone goes to college. Nevertheless, the social psychology is Wolfe’s real strength and that shines through here as elsewhere.

8

I haven’t read his other books so maybe criticizing him for over the topness isn’t good. Still…it’s less that it’s over the top and maybe more that it reads like a maiden aunt gasping and getting the vapors every time she sees something. Like we’re supposed to believe Charlotte Simmons freaking out when she sees a Cosmo magazine in the common room because there’s a tip on how to give good oral sex or get a good orgasm as part of the copy? I’m to believe no one read women’s magazines or got MTV in Sparta, North Carolina?

That’s part of the problem for me. There are sheltered kids at college. I was, for one. But for me it was less, “People are HAVING SEX AND DOING DRUGS!!!” and less that I was aware of that–I knew about the Real World and crap like that. It was that I had no idea how to join in. With Charlotte Simmons she joins in fine but seems just horrified that this stuff is happening. That there is casual sex, hook ups, and boys having bowel movements in the coed bathroom.