Future

Hello and welcome to trap philosophy, a semi-regular series I will now be doing on my blog. The basic vibe is this: we talk about an album that’s meant a lot to me, then I explain how it’s not, in fact, ignorant as shit, but actually carries a strong political message with liberatory overtones. This week we’re going back to roots, to Future’s fourth mixtape, Streetz Calling. This mixtape came out in 2011 at the height of mixtape culture. All the telltale signs of that era are here: the offensively cheap cover art, the kitchen-sink compilation mentality, the dark, cartoony production. The main theme of Future’s music, which echoes the very form of mixtape culture, is disposability. For Future, it is all about getting stuff in order to consume it ostentatiously. With this theme, he embodies the non-respectful attitude rappers typically hold towards traditional objects of consumption: food, clothes, cars, drugs, hoes. My opinion is this: there’s nothing wrong wrong with Future’s attitude to life, but it’s not sustainable. Its similarities with mainstream capitalist ideology suggest that, like Future, we all have some work to do.

The Future is Meaningless

Future commits to a form of nihilistic realism, wherein objects are only valuable insofar as he attaches value to them, and that’s the way things are because that’s the way reality is. For him, there is no inherent value in the clothes he buys, the cars he drives, or the women he sleeps with, save for the status they confer on him, which he chooses to validate. Future’s philosophy has a lot in common with capitalist realism: ‘the trap’ is the only game in town, meteoric individual ascensions are the only way out of it, and you better get on with it, or you will drown. To the extent that Future’s music manages to turn this suffering into a positive, he fulfils the cultural role of the establishment poet, who makes culture’s values taste better so we don’t mind eating them up. As long as Future’s enjoying it, and on our side, we should be able to enjoy it too. However, whilst Future’s attitude makes it easier to bear a world in which escape from the nosedive is impossible, in a world in which escape is possible, it hurts. Future’s philosophy is a rational response to a world which tells us that capital value is the prime mover of social value. Hence, it indicates the need for change. First, I want to show you what’s inspiring about Future’s philosophy. Then I will show you how its inconsistencies mean that it cannot survive for long.

P1: Life is fucked, get yours

Future’s music is inspiring. It is inspiring, in part, because it starts not from a position of hope, but from one of abject nihilism. ‘When you getting money say you join the illuminati/ only time they talk/ when you getting money’, he raps in ‘Can’t Make This Up’. He takes a hard-headed, ‘realist’ picture of the world: people only care about you when you’re on the up, and when you’re on the up, they’ll try and bring you down. He’s saying ‘its OK for me to be this toxic; this is what the world is like’. And he’s so nearly right. Despite this despair, Future still seems motivated to get on with things. The opening track on Streetz Calling, Made Myself A Boss, demonstrates the appropriateness of Future’s nihilistic realism to the situation in which he finds himself. Atlanta is a capitalist dystopia, a distortion of the American Dream, as massive inequality and sprawling trade come together to make ‘spectacular aspiration’ the only game-plan with half a chance of success. Growing up in this hostile environment has given Future a very definite idea of what ‘the real world’ is like: it is one that demands relentless pursuit of infinite capital needs. In such a cold world, a man like Future is going to provide a compelling role model: when he comes out the gates saying ‘I walk on Jimmy’s, I smoke on loud/ got that perfect attendance bring that work to your town/ I made myself a boss’, he’s laying down the gauntlet. He’s saying ‘i put the work in, i’ve got nice clothes, and I know how to relax’. By parodying the traditional career trajectory (his ‘perfect attendance’ is more to do with turning up the studio and drug deals than it is class) and walking ‘on’ Jimmy’s, Future inflates his sense of self by disrespecting the objects around him; nothing means anything to him, but he’ll still bring the ‘work’ to ‘your’ town; he’s entrepreneurial, industrious, and outside of normal culture. Future leans on his don’t-give-a-fuckness to justify his enjoyment of life. The harder he leans on it, however, the less plausible it seems. In ‘Same Damn Time’, a song all about all the different things which are typically done separately but that Future, in his opulence, decides to do at the same time, the cracks begin to show. This is the first verse:

‘Gucci made in Italy/ Bally belt I’m killing shit/ The way I’m rocking Jimmy Choo/ tha word got out I’m dealing it/ I fuck her she a immigrant/ don’t touch her she ain’t got benefits/ Bussing down them Benjamin’s/ fuck it up my Louie kicks/ Dats tha way I’m kicking it/ Ferragamo cover me/ Puerto Rican Japanese/ we laid up at the double tree/ Yellow ice a bumble bee/ pinky ring a quarter key/ iPhone a metro/ twerking off tha whole thing/ My earring a jelly bean/ gangsta lean an Irene/ Red eyes no visine/ I’m loc’d out on tha drink/ Horseshoes on my jeans/ Robin jeans wit tha Wings/ Yellow bone on my team/ trafficking them Yao Mings/ Space boots wit tha spikes/ go to AZ on a flight/ Mail a hundred overnight/ yea yea yea yea’

Ok so ffs is all I have to say. I get so gassed hearing this because its so fucking nihilistic: he’s just happy to be getting all the shit he’s getting and living a hedonistic life. However, I can’t help but feel the emptiness and exploitation in here: not just of the ‘immigrant’ he won’t fuck because she hasn’t got ‘benefits’, but of Future himself, reduced to reeling off a dispassionate list of things he’s bought. If his energy is intoxicating, the objects he is forced to apply it to certainly aren’t. When he sings ‘Drinking on that active and it’s tasting like some bubble gum/ Thumbing through a check born on a jet’ he is showing us that he hasn’t had the opportunity to grow up: a child born in to a world too fast for him, sipping on cough syrup who’s calming effects and bubblegum taste remind him, somehow, of home… That Future recognises this emptiness is indicated by his attitude to escape. Future loves the ‘space boots with the spikes’, calls himself Pluto, and otherwise uses space as a motif. He switches up the rockstar imagery with alien imagery. To me, this is a natural progression: having catapulted our celebrities into the stars, it is no wonder they struggle to feel human. Hopefully, you have now seen the pattern: Future suffers through the grind and rewards himself with opulence, and justifies staying in this pattern by claiming that there is no alternative: he sees the world as it really is, and bases his philosophy off that. There’s nothing wrong with that except that it accepts the world is unchangeable, and accepting the world as unchangeable starts to hurt Future.

P2: Change the world or become toxic

Future’s philosophy may be positive if we accept it to be the case that hope simply is gone, that the current state of affairs is the only real possible state of affairs, and that getting on with life has to be a matter of taking it at its own game, rather than trying to change the game ourselves. As discussed many times before, this is Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism. Whilst it affords individual power, it does so at the expense of allowing any sort of proper critique of the system: it says ‘none of it matters, just get in there, get what you need and get out and don’t worry about anyone else, cos they sure as shit aren’t worrying about you’. I think this is an attitude that has been fostered over the last 40 years, and is linked to capitalist realism, but I think it is an attitude the inconsistency of which is pretty easy to demonstrate. So that’s what we’ll do. The fact that Future’s dreams are unsatisfiable, and that he is not as satisfied as he claims to be, comes out in Ball Forever. Ball Forever riffs on disposability to demonstrate that the things which Future is lusting after are permanently inaccessible, that he will always be chasing something just beyond his reach. There’s nothing inherently wrong with chasing an unsatisfiable goal; as that old adage goes, the lion enjoys the hunt, not the kill, so in that sense the lion is always chasing something uncatchable. However, Ball Forever fits in to a theme memorialised for me by TK Maxx’s ‘infinite stocking’ christmas ad a couple years back; if you make kids desire something that is conceptually unattainable, their habits of consumption will become similarly void-like. If we were lions, it’d be like living in a society constantly reminding you to go out and hunt, that the hunt was the most important thing in the world; sometimes lions need to chill too. Whatever the case, Future is happy to chase this thing forever, to stay in this cycle of grind/consume, and this is so because he is happy to treat things as disposable: he is so successful that it really doesn’t matter. As far as personal philosophies go, you could do a lot worse than Future: if you really can’t attach meaning to anything, and if consuming those things gives you pleasure, then its your absolute prerogative to jugg and enjoy it. Moreover, if that’s the only way-to-be that really accords with reality, then we should all just accept this picture of the world and get on with it. However, Future’s philosophy forces him to treat one thing as disposable that, perhaps, he is unable to: other people. The way he treats other people seems to make him fairly unhappy, a sadness which has developed over his career. This suggests that his philosophy is inconsistent, but because he can only achieve success and status through following it, he has to ignore the contradictory consequences of it, at the expense of his own health and happiness, which he goes on to correct for through drugs. By treating the external world as unchangeable, then, people like Future toxify themselves through their interaction with it. Just listen to Codeine Crazy or Throwaway and tell me he doesn’t regret some of his decisions. On Streetz Calling he’s still cool; he doesn’t care, he hasn’t lost anything, he’s just living without consequence. The fact that consequence comes, I think, is all that is needed to show the unsustainability of this mindset.

P3: The Summary

By taking the world as a datum of reality to-be-accepted, Future allows for a positive philosophy of ‘getting on with it’. However, this also forces him to ignore his own feelings, leading him into inconsistency. This suggests to me that our picture of the world as-it-is tells us which philosophies we are able to take as ‘realistic’ and which are deemed ‘idealistic’. The fact that Future’s philosophy seems realistic rather than nihilistic should strike us as troubling. In sum, Future’s philosophy is a good way to deal with the world as-it-is, but it’s toxicity suggests that we need to devote a good amount of time to making the world not-like-this as well.