Column: Pusha T slays these tropes

H ip hop isn’t my first language. As someone who is white and a woman, I never saw myself reflected in the scene.

But everything changed when I discovered Kanye West and realized the most politically irreverent and progressive artists of contemporary popular music are rappers. My initial distance from hip hop was the product of my own race and gender-based associations with the genre.

Recently, I’ve spent a great deal of time with the music of Pusha T. Pusha began rapping with his brother as Clipse in the early ’90s but achieved mainstream notoriety once he signed with Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music in 2010.

Pusha’s 2013 debut solo album, My Name Is My Name , concerns itself with issues of personal identity sifted through a racist and immoral culture. In “Who I Am,” Pusha creates a dichotomy between “they” and “I”: a flawed, outer perspective and the true, internal self. “They said be all you can be... I just want to sell dope forever, I just want to be who I am.”

My issue with “Who I Am” comes when pondering who I am.

There’s a reason Polonius from “Hamlet” seems insincere when he tells Laertes “to thine own self be true.” Amid the greatest work in Renaissance English, Shakespeare rejects worthless aphorisms and the idea of confidence in “who we are.”

Identities aren’t static. We might have values informing our self-worth, but “who we are” isn’t some tangible, easily labeled entity. This is why the best literature focuses on complex characters who are simultaneously intelligent and naive; kind and deceptive.

My interest in this topic stems from frustration with the self-description fallacy. Personal statements and interviews ask us to define ourselves. I love fast drums and loud guitars, black handbags and Coke Zero. Does that mean anything? How much of ourselves is the product of societal scripting?

Considering “Who I Am” in My Name Is My Name ’s larger context forces the listener to realize Pusha is critiquing “who he is” through whom he was built to be by a culture that devalues black men. As his name suggests, Pusha has a past in dealing. Is this all he can be? Of course not — he’s become a prophetic poet, but only after years of struggle, personal and public.

In “No Regrets,” Pusha asks “Nowadays I sell hope, what you rather I sell dope?” “Hold On” antagonizes the ruling class affecting life outcomes: “They praying for jail but I mastered the pen,” both the penitentiary and the tool he uses to write.

I find solace in rejecting another person’s ideal of who I should be. The cultural standards of “who we are” and “who we can be” are often nothing more than class, race and gender-based prescriptions. Identifying ourselves by what we study, the music we love and the friends we make is attributing our value to factors in flux. We can and should evolve through time, experience and knowledge.