"As I proceed to find silver line in a stalagmite"
Good morning fellow Fiasco fans. I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!
While I continue to work on this WAVE essay, I thought I would treat everyone to some mini-analysis on the other albums that didn't win the poll. The next few threads will take a deep dive into the Pharoah Height 2/30 mixtape, my second favorite Lupe project after Tetsuo & Youth.
Pharoah Height 2/30 is a dense project that is largely inaccessible from a lyrical standpoint. Each song is coded in typical Lupe fashion, but even I must admit that the amount of decoding necessary for this project is on another level. From the structure of the song titles, to the multiple overlapping metanarratives throughout the project, Lupe takes the concept of "pyramid schemes" very seriously. Decoding this album is the equivalent of traversing a Dan Brown novel. You feel like you are solving deep mysteries that uncover the darker elements of modern society.
No other track on the album exemplifies this feeling more than Kings, the fourth track on the project and the most lyrically dense offering that Lupe gives us. Kings is a song that samples The Weeknd's song 'King of the Fall", and the beat is very haunting and melodic, perfect for the atmosophere that Lupe is trying to create.
From a surface level standpoint, the song is a critique of power, particularly exploring the question of what it looks like to be a King within a structure that consistently destroys powerful people. A future thread will take a deeper dive into this, but for now as yourself whether the desire to gain power is itself part of the pyramid scheme? That is a central question in this song, and one that tells us a lot about Lupe's feelings regarding power, whether in general society, or on a more micro level, hip-hop culture.
That said, I wanted to take a look at a particular set of bars in the song.
The lyrics in question:
"Myth be told, 60 souls perished in the parish bill
Wrote a pair of wills on 50 scrolls with a pair of quills
Answered the question 'Americause?' Amerikills
Been living inside in envelopes with a pair of sills
Tall man like terror bills downfall from a pair of stilts wearin heels, that's high
As I proceed to find silver line in a stalagmite"
I've been listening to this song for years, but only recently did I beging to meditate on that last line. Lupe is making a very direct reference to the natural world, and that series of bars preceeding it tells a very haunting story that needs to be treated with caution.
First, what is a stalagmite?
Stalagmites are upward growing mounds made of calcite that are deposited from dripping water. You tend to see these natural structures in caves, looking like large pointy structures attempting to reach out of the ground towards their stalactite cousins on the ceiling. The process is pretty elegant, with the water percolating through the limestone rock on the ceiling of a cave, which dissolves calcium carbonate along the way. The water, now with the minerals, drips to the floor, some water will evaporate, and some water will outgas carbon dioxide. Both of these processes reduce the water's ability to hold dissolved minerals, so the calcium carbonate will precipitate out, and deposit a thin ring shaped layer where the drop landed. Over thousands of years this process creates stalagmites.
This is such an elegant natural process, because the processes that create stalactites eventually contribute to the processes that create stalagmites. Add a little gravity and you get a whole new meaning behind "as above, so below".
What Lupe is doing with this process is different, and a bit darker, and the story is hidden in the lyrics leading up to that line. This is a very dense set of bars, so we will take it line by line.
"Myth be told, 60 souls perished in the parish bill"
First off, Genius has this section completely wrong, and it's a bit frustrating to see how often this happens. A Parish Bill can refer to a local law specifically dealing with church properties or assets, so the immediate impulse may be to find a church incident where 60 people were killed. Genius refers to a 2013 incident in a Pakistan church where 60 people were killed by a suicide bomber. While tragic, that does not seem to be what Lupe is referencing.
While the church reference makes sense on the surface, a Parish also refers to the primary local governmental subdivision of the state. Think of it like a district, but specifically for Louisiana. They are the only state in the country that has "parishes" instead of districts. Given this new context, we can now look at the "Parish Bill" as something related to Louisiana, and there was a massacre in 1887 that better fits the theme being presented.
The Thibodaux massacre came about due to racist legislation passed by white Democrats against black plantation workers in 4 parishes. A three week strike resulted in white supremacists committing acts of violence against these workers, killing as many as 60 black people. Racial violence is a large part of America's past, but many of these stories have unfortunately been relegated to "myth" hence the "myth be told" at the beginning of the line. It's a dark twist on the common "truth be told" saying in modern English parlance.
"Wrote a pair of wills on 50 scrolls with a pair of quills"
This line is a bit easier to digest, but we should still treat it with care. Wills are both foundational legal documents as well as "last will and testaments". In this case, the pair of wills refers to the declaration of independence and the constitution, two documents that the founders of America wrote as a declaration of intent and posthumous document, something that would ultimately outlive them.
50 scrolls are the founding documents of the 50 states, signed with a pair of quills. I should also note that there is dialectic tension between the pair of wills, with the Declaration of Independence carrying a message of universal equality and the Constitution explicitly defending slavery. This is a direct connection to the Thibodaux massacre decoding in the previous line.
"Answered the question 'Americause?' Amerikills"
This is such clever phonetic manipulation to make a subtle, yet strong political statement about history. The previous two lines are basically telling the story of America, which began in contradictory tension, without a clear rendering of principles protecting the equality of all people, and because (or Americause) of which, leads to death.
What is the cause of America? America killing. Manifest destiny left a trail of tears and blood, and much destruction.
"Been living inside in envelopes with a pair of sills
Tall man like terror bills downfall from a pair of stilts wearin heels, that's high"
These lines need to be taken together, because they are all telling the same narrative. First, let's talk about the "pair of sills". A sill has a double meaning, one in architecture, and another in geology. An architectural sill is a horizontal component at the base of a window, door, or wall that protects against water infiltration. In this sense, a sill can also be a phonetic disguise for the word seal, which makes sense given the envelope reference in the bar, but more on that in a bit.
A geological sill is a horizontal sheet of igneous rock formed between older rock layers. Given the stalagmite reference at the end of this sequence, this connection is needed. Now with the table set, let's fully decode these bars.
How can one live inside envelopes? This would be so confusing for anyone, but if you work in any building related fields, you will recognize this bar immediately. The physical separation between the outside (or unconditioned) environment and the inside (or conditioned) environment is called the "building envelope". I work in facilities management, so this bar was an immediate lightbulb, but it took me a moment to get the rest.
Who is this tall man? Well, this tall man is described as wearing a "pair" or stilts while "wearin heels". Stilts on heels is pretty high.
This tall man fell, and the downfall led to "terror bills". If the terror bills are anything like the parish bills, then we should expect much violence. In this case, these terror bills are the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, where two really tall towers representing the centerpiece of US financial power, faced their "downfall". Two building envelopes, with a pair of "seals", looking like a tall man wearing a pair of stilts with heels, came down, and in the wake, terror bills were passed.
"As I proceed to find silver line in a stalagmite"
Given what we know, I almost want to leave this line as an open question, to see who can parse the meaning from it. That said, I can't help myself but to completely give up the game. If Lupe is finding silver line (or a "silver lining") in a stalagmite, he is choosing to see what is built in the face of destructuon. America has led to a lot of destruction, but things have been built from the components of that destruction, similar to the components of falling cave minerals creating naturally occurring structures over long periods of time. Chaos leads to order which leads to chaos.
There are even deeper layers to these bars, and I may explore them in a future installment, but for today we will go that deep. I hope this leaves you with many things to think about. For me, this line makes an incredibly profound statement, that bridges social and ecological philosophy. To find it in rap lyrics is just another example of hip-hop's full potential being realized and yet another reason why it is wonderful to be a Lupe stan.
Enjoy!