Big vs Lil

BY Mel Campbell

Hip-hop is really big. It’s huge. Colossal black SUVs aglisten with chrome. The cult of the booty. Fur coats and puffa jackets that make you look twice your actual size. Thick gold rope chains and pinky rings with diamonds the size of your eyeball. (“Feels like a midget is hanging from my necklace.”) Basketball jerseys that come down to the knees.

Hyperbole is one of the best – and most ridiculous – things about hip-hop. In part, it’s a ghetto philosophy. If you’ve grown up in poverty, you don’t just want enough – you want the biggest things that dreams can conjure and money can buy. And from its origins in Jamaican dancehall toasting, rap has fostered a culture of boasting: projecting yourself as the biggest and the best. In your rhymes, you big yourself up. And your crew is your massive.

So it makes sense that bigness infiltrates the names rap stars give themselves. Big Daddy Kane was a pioneer of the pimped-out antics that dominate MTV and BET. Other Big stars are large in the physical sense. Big Pun. The Notorious B.I.G. Elsewhere in music culture, fat guys are considered weak, repulsive and laughable. In hip-hop, they’re imperious and powerful. They have bulk. They have presence. They’re not fat; they’re phat.

Perhaps obesity is also just a bodily manifestation of the conspicuous consumption that permeates hip-hop culture. ‘Living large’ means living in exhilarating luxury. XXL magazine, the biggest circulating hip-hop press, evokes a life lived extra large.

But hip-hop also operates at the other extreme of size: littleness. Most Lil rappers are teen prodigies whose personas play on their precocious rhyme-busting abilities. Kiddie rap is a well-worn genre, pioneered in the 80s by the Fresh Prince. Lil Wayne’s trademark is precisely that he doesn’t rap about ‘teen issues’ such as puppy love or his parents’ lack of empathy.

Of course, even little rappers have to grow up sometime. Recently we’ve seen a rash of them trying to throw off the Lil as if it were a once-dear but now-embarrassing security blanket. Trouble is, the connotations are far more enduring. Remember a few years ago when Charlie Sheen tried to call himself Charles?

But let’s not pigeonhole Lil as a tag for babies. There’s a ‘little’ more to it.

At four foot eleven, Lil Kim actually is tiny. But she wears her nickname as a souvenir of the way she got her start. It came from her mentor Biggie Smalls, a rapper who ought to know something about size. This is hip-hop generationalism in action. Lil Bow Wow started his career as Kid Gangsta before impressing Snoop Dogg, who renamed the teenage rapper in his own image. (Nate Dogg is Snoop’s cousin.) Likewise, Lil Romeo (Percy Romeo Miller Jr) is the son of rapper and producer Master P (Percy Robert Miller).

Naturally, no discussion of size in hip-hop would be complete without Lil Jon, the self-styled King of Crunk, indicator of windows and walls, and shouter of such bon mots as “What?” “Yeah!” and “Okaaaay!” With his omnipresent sunglasses, braids, metallic teeth and ‘pimp cup’ overflowing with ‘crunk juice’, Jonathan Smith is one of hip-hop’s most recognisable and over-the-top personalities. But where other rap stars court publicity and hog the limelight, Lil Jon adopts a ‘small target’ strategy. My extensive research has failed to uncover what is so little about him. Lil Bo and Big Sam, the other members of his crew the East Side Boyz, are both around the same size (large). They are a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

Don’t go looking for size-related clues in his music, either. Unlike, say, Eminem, Lil Jon’s oeuvre isn’t especially autobiographical, speaking instead to more general themes like skeet, niggaz and letting your shawty freak a lil’ sumt. And although he appeared in a Korn video, you won’t see him starring in a blockbuster movie about his rough and tumble beginnings. Not unless the movie is about growing up in a middle-class family in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lil Jon’s wedding in November 2004 was extraordinary for its secrecy. No photos were made public, and Lil Jon’s publicist did not release any details of the ceremony. Perhaps most oddly, the bride’s name was “withheld to protect her privacy”. So we don’t even know whom he married or how he met her. As the groom himself might say: What?

It speaks volumes about the extreme power of Lil Jon’s littleness that he’s one of only four celebrities to have thwarted an attempted punking from Ashton Kutcher. Boarding a plane for Las Vegas, Lil Jon encountered several actors posing as customs agents who tried to tell him he was actually headed for Ecuador. Trouble was, Lil Jon recognised the ‘agents’ as Punk’d cast members. You’d think more celebrities would be this smart. Actually, maybe not.

In a later interview, Lil Jon quipped, “You can’t punk the King of Crunk.” Why? I’ll tell you why. Because he’s little. He’s so damn little that he slips right under the radar. Seems that in hip-hop, size matters. So live large, people. But keep it small.