The Nature of Mother

Writer: Brian Howe, illustration by Thomas Kuhlenbeck
Features, Issue 42, Published online on 08 May 2008 Page 1 of 2 Next >

Mother's Day is an ideal time for listening to the sons of popular music riffing on one of humanity's most universal concepts. So here are Paste's notes toward a schema of motherhood in rap, indie rock and points outlying. Could there be a more obvious starting point than Danzig?

As The Misfits’ lead singer, Glenn Danzig set out to profane every sacrosanct concept he came across. No surprise, then, that mothers—in Danzig’s mind, symbols of holiness and bourgeois convention—often found themselves in his crosshairs.

“I’ve got something to say,” he bellowed on The Misfits’ “Last Caress,” “I raped your mother today!” And on his iconic single “Mother,” after he’d left The Misfits, Danzig addressed moms directly, but still afforded them no measure of distinct humanity: “Mother, tell your children not to walk my way”—sound advice that had nothing to do with actual mothers and everything to do with Danzig portraying himself as a social maverick. But it’s an example of how motherhood is a malleable construct that can be co-opted for all manner of personal agendas.

The flipside of demonizing mothers for shock value is beatifying them for sentimental purposes; both strategies hang on the idea that motherhood is sacred. In this realm of popular music, rap is the undisputed champion. Many of us hold two images of Tupac Shakur in our minds:

In one, he’s spitting into a camera; in the other, he’s spitting a heartfelt encomium to his mom. “Dear Mama” is rap’s definitive mother-appreciation, and it set a template for a crime-rap trope nearly as common as cameos and skits.

Cam’ron professes love for his mother in his feel-good hymn “Love My Life”; The Notorious B.I.G. buys his mom an Acura and a mink coat on his pace-setting rags-to-riches anthem “Juicy”; Ghostface Killah comes close to tears on his devastatingly poignant “All That I Got is You,” and fondly remembers getting beaten for wetting the bed on “Whip You with a Strap.” Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Saigon, Beanie Sigel: The list of tough-guy rappers who’ve made time to salute their moms is practically inexhaustible. Even Clipse, one of the most unapologetically nihilistic rap groups working today, gestures toward reconciliation on “Momma I’m So Sorry.” These are rare flashes of vulnerability in music that usually affords such feelings no quarter.

These songs have a practical function: They serve to humanize and soften personae that verge on caricature. But perhaps there’s a deeper social force at play. Crime-rap’s representational milieu is defined by poverty, absent fathers, institutional depredation: a sphere in which the mother-child unit is encouraged to be close-knit by financial and spiritual imperatives. Take rap’s persistent better-days nostalgia into consideration and it becomes clear why mothers—as embattled providers and symbols of lapsed innocence—are irresistible fodder. The fact that indie rock—a milieu of relative plenitude and social stability—tends to have a more tortured and circumspect relationship to motherhood supports the idea that mothers are generally more important to us in spheres of social adversity.

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The Nature of Mother

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