Tractatus Logico-Dessalophicus

1 Dessa Darling is a writer. ^*

1.1 Most people know Dessa as a rapper—the tall boricua in the local rap crew Doomtree. It would seem logical to say all rappers are writers, but that’s not really the case. (Forgive the geometry, but local rappers are sort of like parallelograms— some of them are writers and all of them are squares. Snap! Just a little inside concious hip-hop joke.) What I mean is, though all rappers express themselves primarily through words, only some deliberately write their rhymes on paper as Dessa does. In fact, she started off as a slam poet, considered the most writerly (and scorned as the least “authentic”) of hip-hop’s subgenres—one associated more with imagery and argument than percussion and flow.

1.2 With the recent release of Spiral Bound (the first book published by the newly minted Doomtree Press), some will come to know Dessa as an essayist. A pocket-sized volume containing only four poems and six pieces of narrative nonfiction, Spiral Bound is a slim book filled with ambitious philosophical ideas. In it, Dessa writes about father atonement and brotherly love, nostalgia, eternal recurrence, melancholy, suicide, addiction, the problematic nature of the “virtue” of personal beauty, and the cognitive dissonance encountered while watching dead actors on film.

1.3 A growing number of people know Dessa as a professor. As a member of the adjunct faculty at McNally Smith College of Music, she teaches a 100-level composition class. But even while wearing a demure cowl-neck sweater, gray slacks, and black Chuck Taylors, Dessa’s presence in the academic environment is an odd fit, in the way Hollywood’s iconoclastic but beloved teachers—whether rappers (Coolio in the television version of Dangerous Minds) or writers (Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society)—are often portrayed as people who are out of place but who have more worldly ideas to offer because of it.

2 Dessa has a writer’s command of the English language, not a rapper’s.

2.1 She demonstrated an interest in linguistics from an early age. She recalls interrupting her mother to request a new game. “Hey, Mom . . . Mom,” she would pester, “I wanna do that thing where you talk, and then I talk, and then you talk, and then I talk.” Her mother would answer, “You mean conversation?”

2.2 She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a BA in philosophy and gravitated toward the empiricists and their descendents: thinkers such as David Hume and Bertrand Russell. But she was precocious in a way that tested the patience of her instructors—she had an annoying habit of trying to point out the logical errors in the work of the greatest minds of Western civilization. “I can imagine my professors had to be thinking, ‘Aren’t you so . . . cute,’ ” Dessa recalls. One instructor stood up for the poor dead white guys, though, and Dessa internalized the professor’s reasoning: “She said, ‘Well, since Locke isn’t here to defend himself, we should give his argument our most charitable interpretation’—which basically meant caulking the holes in his argument for him.” In this way, Dessa learned to argue on behalf of her opponents, a rhetorical skill not completely alien to rap (e.g., Eminem in 8 Mile), but one much more closely associated with essay writing.

2.3While the language used by most rappers is an affront to grammarians (if not an outright assault), Dessa practices a crisp formal knowledge of linguistics in the McNally Smith classroom. Either standing at a whiteboard or an overhead projector or crouching down in the center of the room and gesturing enthusiastically, she leads lessons addressing the importance of pronoun and tense in song craft, the difference between connotative and denotative meaning, and the ability of metaphor and simile to dramatically shift a listener’s perspective.

2.4 Her collaborators in Doomtree acknowledge Dessa’s more writerly approach. One of her producers, DJ Lazerbeak, bestows the distinction “rappin’ ass rappers” on an MC (rapper) who takes a track offered by the producers—no questions asked—and, as he describes, “spits fire [raps] over it.” (Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger are the two permanent DJ fixtures in a Doomtree roster that rotates regularly.) Dessa is not a rappin’ ass rapper—she’s more selective and spends more time looking for backing tracks that evoke a particular mood. (Which mood would that be? Both Beak and Paper Tiger answer simultaneously: “Sad.”)

“It took some time to get used to it at first,” Beak says. “She’ll take a track and then come back to you weeks later with suggestions. She’ll want to work with you, which is cool, but she doesn’t give you that immediate positive gratification.” He touches his eyebrow and looks down. “Yeah, at first it kind of hurt my feelings a little bit.”

3 As a woman and a writer, Dessa both stands out and apart from the rap genre.

3.1 At times, Dessa seems extremely uncomfortable with the hypermasculine attitude of her chosen milieu. “I was apprehensive about approaching a genre so often full of braggadocio,” she says. She is ill at ease with so-called gangsta rap and has no interest in using the words nigger and faggot . “I’m more interested in making beautiful rap,” she says.

3.2 Like Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers—lone female members of male literary societies—Dessa is Doomtree’s token chick. And like her literary predecessors, she has learned to sublimate her anger in the pithy couplet. On “The Wren,” she suggests a vengeful role reversal that’s been a longtime coming: So hold down the magician/the beautiful assistant should get her turn with the saw.

3.3 In both her music and essays, Dessa returns to the same poetic motifs: drowning, seasickness, spiral staircases, and a small nervous bird tethered by a ribbon to her mind. “I’m a good [vocal] percussionist, not a great one,” she says. “People listen to Ludacris for his brilliant staccato patterns—they probably listen to me for my content.”

3.4 Much of Dessa’s imagery flows from an invasive surgery and its aftermath. In 2003, one of her ovaries had to be removed. After the surgery, she prematurely went into menopause and slowly deteriorated in her father’s basement. “My thighs didn’t touch because I lost so much weight,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep and had little control over my thoughts—I was moving at a speed I didn’t feel comfortable with and felt like I didn’t get the same brain coming out of surgery that I had going in.” After a car accident, brought on by a bout of rocking-in-fetal-position self-loathing, she committed herself to a hospital psych ward.

The dual impact of her traumatic surgery and brush with mental illness may be why Dessa keeps returning to writing and rapping about finding peace or safety, whether enclosed in the womb of a car wash or in the cabin of her father’s boat or connected by pill or amaretto-on-ice to an oceanic feeling of calm. In a story from Spiral Bound, “Sleeping on the Stairs,” she describes her tolerance for anesthesia and a “New Agey” self-hypnotic sleep technique she learned as the result of a disastrous dental appointment: descending a mental staircase into a pool of water. “So it goes, very deliberate and controlled,” she writes, “as I effectively drown myself to sleep.”

3.5 Dessa adopted her current rap style when a then-boyfriend encouraged her to “rap like you write.” In one of life’s tender little twists, that ex-boyfriend is P.O.S—Dessa’s still-crewmate and, moreover, Doomtree cofounder and alpha MC, both commercially and artistically. Anybody who’s worked alongside an ex can probably understand the lingering mix of pain, competitiveness, nostalgia, and flickering joy that pervades this sort of a relationship. But few have felt this on tour with seven other crew members, all stuffed in the same van.

4 Dessa is surer of her voice while writing than while rapping.

4.1 She prefers a lower, more forceful masculine register. “You always sound smarter when you hear yourself in person,” she says. She likes her singing voice, a soft alto with a warm tone that works as a perfect melodic accompaniment to her speaking voice—but, she admits, “I hate hearing my voice when I rap.”

4.2 Dessa’s long-rumored full-length album was originally slated to come out this fall, but it’s nearing spring and a release date has yet to be determined. She confesses that although she writes rhymes much more slowly than her peers, she has the songs—she’s had them for months—but spends hours recording hundreds of takes. “I’m nervous,” she says. “I like my ideas, but I have a hard time capturing performances that are as good as my ideas.”

4.3 Despite her success as a rap artist, Dessa says she is most comfortable with her voice on the page. “Writing involves all of the things that I’m good at and few of the things I’m not good at,” she says. “With rap, I have a hard time projecting and I’m a little bit clumsy [onstage]. But with writing—I enjoy the manipulation of phrasing, I like the expression of abstract ideas and the formation of metaphor, and I relish the challenge of trying to find the appropriate structural format.”

5 Ontologically speaking, Dessa is more of a writer who raps than a rapper who writes.

5.1 On “Mineshaft,” a song off her 2005 debut CD, she raps so herself: Living in the heartland/living on the small chance/luck would save the last dance/for an underrated writer/overrated rapper . . .

5.2 As Dessa is aware, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously concluded his Tractatus with the proposition, “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to Dessa’s artistic paradox isn’t as wonderfully pat.

6 Dessa Darling can keep on both rapping and writing.

6.1 Or not.