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.”