Thank you for enrolling in “Pen & Pixel: An Academic Examination of Hip Hop Artwork.” My name is Charles Diggler. If you did not receive your syllabus on the way in, please see me after class. It contains all the assignments you will be responsible for this semester as well as several pictures of me drinking sherry with myriad and various black people, thus allowing me to haphazardly drop the N-bomb without fear of violent reprisal. My bona fides are ineluctable. Bow down to a Diggler that’s greater than you.

Today’s lesson will center on the touchstones of the Pen and Pixel artistic style. In the coming weeks, we will examine the art created to accompany the audio masterworks of Master P, 2-Def, and Mr. Stinky.

 

 

Our first work is from the perennially under-appreciated Solo Slim collection, hip-hop’s most fervent crochet aficionado. Much of the classic Pen & Pixel imagery is present: the gilded typography, the purposeful misspellings of the YouTube commentariat, the sleepy, vaguely displeased-seeming black man. Note the skewed perspective. The Brobdingnagian heft of Solo Slim’s knitting needle is typical of Pen & Pixel’s surrealist style. This work begs the question, “when the skyscrapers burst aflame, how many Slims will it take to sew’d it up?” The answer, as we’ll learn in week three, is less obvious than one might suspect.

 

 

Next, we ponder this seminal work from Pen & Pixel’s “Butterface”period. While other scholars will quibble with this assessment, saying Mercedes’ Rear End actually belongs in Pen & Pixel’s less influential “Butterbody” period, we’ll leave that for another lecture. Note the subtle, Victorian pose, the coquettish smirk, the coy, sophisticated choice of  garment. Why call it Rear End when we’re clearly staring at the front of a luxury automobile? Again, we hit on Pen & Pixels underlying surreality and its Lewis Carroll influenced lexicography. It’s both a rear end and a front end; verily two ends, both ends, devouring themselves like a ravenous ouroboros. There is indeed No Limit to the symbolic layers.

 

 

Pen & Pixel at times dabble in a Warhol-influenced Pop Art aesthetic. But unlike Warhol, whose drab silk-screens refused to reimagine their subjects in any real, concrete way, Pen & Pixel’s interpretations are cheeky and satirical, both an homage and a parody. Ask yourselves, could Warhol’s 100 Soup Cans not have been improved with a liberal sprinkling of bedazzled marshmallows? Again, note the distorted perspective, the seemingly accidental misplacing of the apostrophe, the quintessential confusion present in each cover. Is that a leprechaun or Ireland’s tannest pimp?

 

 

Ah, yes. Sexx Fiends’ Let’s Get Butt-Naked. Never have two shirtless emcees parasailed in one spiky brassiere with such libidinous panache. Again, note the additional “x,” indicative of a doubling of both men’s raw, erotic prowess. Note the mint green genie pants, indicative of men who enjoy wearing mint green genie pants. Note how the Sexx Fiend who does not look like a crudely caricatured Jamie Foxx simply points beyond the gaggle of comely lasses below, as if to say “I am half-butt-naked, but nary a slattern below will have the privilege of sexxing under the influence of my fully butt-nakedness.” I argue this as a stern rebuke of Paleo-Feminist ideologies in week seven’s class “Honeez, Titteez, and Azzez: The Birf of the Post-de Beauvoir Biyatch.”

 

 

Which brings us to what most scholars agree is Pen & Pixel’s masterwork, Big Bear’s Doin Thangs. Note the subtle sfumato of blunt smoke, the typical rap aesthetic reimagined through a prism of ursine gangsterism. Again, we come back to the underlying surreality—a man among the bears, a thuggish and ribald Timothy Treadwell. Is he safe? Or is he simply comfortable? Amidst a landscape of ripe berries, glittering jewelry, and spangled chalices, the viewer is forced to ponder what thangs, in fact, is Big Bear doin? While at first it looks like nothing, I assure you class, the answer is “everythangs.”

For your homework tonight, I’d like you to listen to Silkk the Shocker’s Charge it to the Game and be prepared to to discuss the inherent inequalities of the urban credit markets.

Peace out. One love. No homo.