It is very well known that 50 Cent got shot nine or so times and
survived. The story has been told again and again because it gives him
street cred in the otherwise glamorous business of pop rap. He is the
real deal for real, for real. He is not just rapping about being a
gangsta—nigga, he is a gangsta. Cage, the Brooklyn-based rapper
who got his start back in the mid ’90s, also has a story that is told
again and again. His story, however, has nothing to do with blazing
guns and bullets, but with mental health. Cage apparently spent some
time in a mental hospital, consuming antipsychotic drugs and dealing
with heavy, suicidal feelings. This story has its value not in the
gangsta world of pop rap but in the cerebral world of indie or
underground rap.
The story of Cage’s struggle with mental illness and abusive parents
shaped the content and mood of his second full-length album, Hell’s
Winter, which was released in 2005 by his current label, Definitive
Jux. However, his first full-length album, Movies for the Blind,
was shaped by hedonistic and self-destructive drives. He rapped about
lots of sex (“They try to kill me through my dick with these hos too
much”), lots of drugs (“Had a PCP overdose, and I still smoke”), and
lots of horror gore (“My whole career been a upstream kayak through
blood”). But those shocking images and themes did not capture or match
the true spirit of the underground, which is more about the
mental—be it the metaphysics of Scienz of Life, the futurism of
Cannibal Ox, the surrealism of MF Doom, or the skills for skills’ sake
(hiphop’s version of ”l’art pour l’art”) of Eyedea &
Abilities.
To establish a place in the indie realm, Cage’s Hell’s Winter went into the depths of his mind, rapping about his father, drug
addiction, his cruel stepfather, and his frequently beaten mother. This
is why the story of his hospitalization and treatments increased in
value. He was not simply rapping about being mental, he was mental for
real, for real. His latest album, Depart from Me, goes even
further into the mazes of his self.
There is another good reason why Cage made the transition from shock
rap to “heavy mental”—it gave him greater distinction (or
distance) from the massive shadow of Slim Shady. Rapping about drugs,
sex, and gore made Cage sound too much like Eminem—a rapper he
accused of stealing his style and themes back in 1997. Indeed, because
both have working-class roots and because both developed a successful
way to rap without using black-American accents, inflections, and
intonations, Cage and Eminem are constantly compared. And it seems to
always come down to this: Those who support one tend to hate the other.
There is no middle ground in this matter. Either you love Cage and hate
Slim or vice versa. And those who hate one of these two will invariably
compare him to the Insane Clown Posse, the universal standard of bad
white hiphop.
To bring an end to their common ground, Cage went to where Eminem
would never go: the mental. Sex, drugs, and gore play a small part in
Hell’s Winter and an even smaller part in Depart from Me,
which opens, on “Nothing Left to Say,” with Cage reciting (rather than
rapping) poetry. Much of the energy on this album is spent describing
his demons and his complete lack of psychological balance. In one
track, “Katie’s Song,” Cage sings that there is more to life than
“being in a club and getting drunk with one of us throwing up, and
waking up like we’re in love.” The distance between “Katie’s Song” and
the debauchery on Movies for the Blind is enormous. To compare
Cage and Slim today would be ridiculous.
Sadly, Cage’s journey into the labyrinth of the self has also
resulted in his increasing break with the essence of hiphop, which is
the production of music from previously recorded music. Cage is
abandoning that defining element and turning more and more to the
production of music by instruments—the rock model. He is not the
first to make this turn. Mos Def did it, as well as RJD2, and K’naan,
and so forth. When rappers want to try something new, they have the bad
habit of turning to something old—live instruments. This,
however, is a bad solution as it represents a step in the wrong
direction. Hiphop is ahead of rock, and so to do something more than
what hiphop already is means one must go further or deeper into its
essential mode of production. Hopefully, Cage will return to hiphop and
look ahead, and not behind, for inspiration. 
