The Nature of Mother

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.

Two songs on On Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s last album, Some Loud Thunder, have mother references in their titles, yet both are all but mute on motherhood. On “Goodbye to the Mother and the Core,” Alec Ounsworth sings, “She smiles / Then she laughs / And then she rights the wheel / On the road again / While all you fear are her thighs.” The lyric might address a lover or a mother, which is telling: In indie rock’s hedge maze of abstractions, the expressly biographical tends to dissolve into a haze of sense and feeling, in this case, boys’ attraction and repulsion to the feminine ideal. (There’s a long tradition of rock music that deals with the seamier side of our relationship to motherhood—feelings of burden and loss—from John Lennon’s “Mother” to Pink Floyd’s to The Police’s.)

Ounsworth’s mommy issues aren’t as overstated as, say, Xiu Xiu’s, but there’s a whole can of Freudian worms squirming under those fearful thighs; something childlike in the low perspective from which Ounsworth perceives them. The blurring of romantic and platonic love recurs on “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?”: “Things are not as you would have them / I’m no man and you’re no woman.” This oblique relationship to motherhood—this tendency to view mothers as distant colossi embodying creation myths and existential anxiety—is endemic to indie rock, from Iron & Wine’s “Upward Over the Mountain” (a heartbreaking song with a mother drawn so expertly as to be archetypal and specific) to Neutral Milk Hotel’s “A Baby for Pree.” While rap’s mothers are biographical, close-at-hand and inviolable; indie rock’s are conceptual, impossibly distant sources of confliction.

There’s a glut of evidence to support this stereotype, but, of course, not all mother-related music fits into the schema. (Indie rock might be more overt than rap in its weird psycho-sexual relationship to motherhood, but consider that in both genres, “mama,” “baby” and “girl” are all interchangeable synonyms.) On the topic of mothers, Eminem blends rap’s biography with Danzig’s transgression and he’s not alone in this. Biggie might have bought his mom a car and a coat on “Juicy,” but that was more of a trophy for him (in the same way that he parsed her breast cancer as personal stress on “Things Done Changed”); elsewhere, he’s less reverent toward mothers: “I wouldn’t give a fuck if you’re pregnant / Give me the baby rings and the #1 Mom pendant.”

Kanye West, currently pop’s most outspoken mom-appreciator, operates in spheres of surfeit and relative social ease (his mother, Donda West—a former chair of Chicago State University’s English department—died suddenly from complications of cosmetic surgery last November, and it’ll be interesting to see how a biographical lyricist who lauds his mother and silicon breasts in equally glowing tones will reconcile this in his music). On “Styrofoam Plates,” by indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard salutes his mom while castigating his deadbeat dad. And on “Dreamin’,” cocaine rapper Young Jeezy manages to embarrass and praise his mother in the same breath, while allowing himself a rare glimpse at the social fallout of his trade: “Mom’s smoking rocks / Same shit I’m selling / So who’s wrong, her or me? / She addicted to the high / I’m addicted to the cash / I almost put my hands on her / When I caught her in my stash / …I know it’s been hard but we made it baby / Ten years clean so she’s still my lady.” Beyond the overdetermined stereotype, there’s actually a great deal of consistency between indie rock’s and rap’s mothers: They’re always reservoirs for ineffable longing.

We talk about mothers as a means of indirectly talking about ourselves, our hopes, our fears, our insecurities and dreams, which seems to give our actual mothers short shrift. But as Smog implies in “I Feel Like The Mother Of The World,” motherhood is a foundational concept from which everything else descends, and the urge to approach such an awesome concept in the abstract is understandable. For myself, I remember my mother singing in church, in a strained near-falsetto, striving for the rafters beyond her reach. I remember coming home from school one day and overhearing her chanting in the kitchen, One, two, three and to the four, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre are at your door!

And I remember the protracted period of self-definition when I gradually abandoned the music of my childhood and began to assemble my own taste profile; the heavy symbolism of this tumultuous shift; how it mirrored other, more cataclysmic upheavals in my relationship with my mother, and the hearth and home she represented.