RGU Lesson One: The Signifyin' Monkey
Rap Genius University (Big Ups to the History of The Game)
brought to you by Professor Boss Lady Sarah AKA SanFranG AKA “The Thought Queen” AKA Sarah Geller Lappas, PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology @ UC Davis
Lesson One: The Signifyin’ Monkey
(or how you just got played, son!)
This story is older than America, as old as time itself. We might say it started with Legba, the trickster god of the Fon in Dahomey, the one those wack Catholic missionaries thought was the devil. Or we could say it started with Èşù, that Nigerian Yoruba god with the pimp-limp— brother had one leg in the realm of the gods and the other in the human world. Let’s start with the story in the good old U.S. of A.
The story of the Signifyin’ Monkey…
Back in the day you could have heard this story being told by slaves on the plantation, and you can still hear it being told by comedians today. The story itself is always the same. A monkey, a lion, and an elephant all live in the jungle. The lion thinks he’s all that, but he really ain’t shit. The monkey likes to mess with the lion by signifyin’ (or using word play to trick the lion). Usually the monkey makes the lion think that the elephant is talking shit about the lion’s people. The lion gets so heated that he goes off and steps to the elephant, who always kicks the lion’s ass. At the end of the day, the lion realizes he got played by the monkey and his signifyin’ ways.
Here’s the breakdown:
- Monkey= trickster, word-play genius, dopest MC of all time.
- Lion= anyone wack enough to take the monkey’s shit literally
- Jungle= THE GAME
Check out Rudy Ray Moore’s version of the story in his 1975 movie Dolemite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voxp3ckwJZ0
Like I said, the story is always the same. What makes the storyteller dope is how he tells the story. It’s kinda like how you hear haters bashing rap today, saying it’s all about bling, hustling, pimping, cars, women, money. What the haters are missing is how the story’s being told, am I right?
Signifyin’ is what keeps the story interesting. Signifyin’ is why the blues were great back in the day (just look at Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” or Ma Rainey’s “Prove it On Me Blues”) and it’s why rap is great today. So let’s break it down:
Signifyin’= word play, or the exploitation of the space between the literal meaning of a word and all the variant potential meanings. It includes metaphor, simile, homonym, allusion, chiasmus, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, hyperbole, and catachresis…to name a few. Don’t get scared. We gonna get through all of these, and you already know most of them. The major thing to know is that when an artist or story teller is signifyin’, those haters who won’t take the time to listen and understand won’t get it. A classic example is Jay-Z’s 99 Problems (already a play on Ice-T’s hit.) Remember when everybody thought Jay was being so misogynistic in that song? Calling women bitches and all that? When Jay says he’s got 99 problems “but a bitch ain’t one,” he’s never talking about a lady. He’s talking about a cop, about a police dog, about someone trying to step on his turf, never a woman. But y’all already knew that, I know. Bottom line is those who don’t listen right will get it wrong. Joke’s on you, son.
Let’s start with an easy one: metaphor. When a rapper figuratively uses a word or concept to refer to something else. This is gonna get heavy for a minute, but let’s think about the phrase “The Game.” The Game is often used to refer to the hustle, the coke game, selling drugs in the streets. It can also refer to the industry AKA the rap game. Dude gets popped in the streets for his stash, that ain’t no game, so that’s a metaphor. Talking about the rap industry as the game is a double metaphor. “Killing these other rappers in the game,” or “spitting crack” (to refer to great rapping) is a use of the coke game as metaphor. ( You not actually gonna kill the dude, right? But I might get addicted to your flow, for real! )
Simile: simple. Using like or as in a figure of speech. Take this one from 50 Cent’s Many Men (Wish Death):
When I rhyme, something special happen every time
I’m the greatest, somethin' like Ali in his prime
Homonym: playing on two words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings. Like Lil Wayne’s intro on Lollipop
I said he so sweet, make her wanna lick the wrapper
So I let her lick the rapper
Allusion: a reference to another text. This happens all the time in rap, in a few different ways. Think of all the allusions to Scarface and The Godfather movies. You might even call the act of biting other rapper’s lyrics a kind of allusion itself. Let’s look at Kanye West and Pusha T’s joint New God Flow for some examples of allusion:
Did Moses not part the water with the cane?
Did strippers not make an arc when I made it rain?
Did Yeezy not get signed by Hov and Dame?
And ran to Jacob and made the new Jesus chains?
Here Ye is alluding to the biblical stories of Moses, Noah (and the arc…making it rain) and Jacob, while flipping Jacob to talk about the store he ran to to get a Jesus chain (for more on this check out YeezyTaughtYouWell ’s explanation).
Allusions can also happen musically, like later in the song when Ye raps:
I don’t know but I’ve been told
(I don’t know but I’ve been told)
If you get fresh get all the hoes
(If you get fresh get all the hoes)
Here he’s melodically and lyrically alluding to the old military cadence.
Chiasmus: the use of repetition and reversal of a word. Like how Nicki Minaj changes the meaning of the word crack in I’m The Best:
Cause even when my daddy was on crack I was crack
Now the whole album crack you ain’t gotta skip a track
Metonymy: the substitution of the name of an attribute for the thing meant, like calling a business executive a suit or calling 24” rims 24’s.
Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa. Lil Wayne in The Rapper Eater:
I am New Orleans like carnival
Irony: expressing meaning by using language that would normally signify the opposite. For example “It took him a minute to get there” to say that it took a hella long time for dude to get there.
Hyperbole: use of exaggerated statement or claim. Happens all the time. Just one example: The Notorious B.I.G. on Big Poppa:
Believe me sweetie, I got enough to feed the needy
I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa, and I’m not convinced, Big. You mad rich though, I’ll give you that.
Catachresis: the use of a word in a way that is not standard. Catachresis is a kind of synecdoche for rap itself, if you feel me. Using words in non-standard ways is what the rap game is all about, so you can point to almost any lyric to find an example. A classic one is using the word sick or ill to talk about how good you are.
That’s all I got for now, kiddos. Stay tuned in to next week’s Rap Genius University post for more on this hip hop history joint. For a hip hop song explicitly in the Signifyin’ Monkey tale tradition, check out Schoolly D’s Signifying Rapper.
Props to Henry Louis Gates, Ralph Ellison, Alan Dundes, Roger Abrahams, and Zora Neal Hurston for being some of the OG thinkers and scholars on this topic.
Sarah Geller Lappas is a PhD Candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in African and African American popular musics, and currently teaches African American Music (MUS28) and American Music (MUS126) at UC Davis.
