I really like Fabolous. Probably more than anyone you’ve ever met, I bet. He’s my platonic ideal, more or less, of what a rapper can be. He’s lyrical and thugged out, but he likes rocking over R&B and pop-oriented beats, too. I feel like not a lot of people strike that balance very well, but Fab sticks the landing. But really, I like dude because he’s a comedian, and I’ll take a laugh over basically any other subject matter in rap, period. He’s made two different comedy-themed songs with the Clipse (“Comedy Central” and “Joke’s On You”) for no reason at all. He’s generally funny, and even his murder rhymes are smiley face bars. The Soul Tape 2, a free mixtape he put out last year, is really good. It’s one of my favorite rap releases in the past year. “For the Love,” “We Get High,” “Life Is So Exciting,” and “BITE” have videos, if you’re curious. But the part of the album that sticks out the most for me is probably this one from “For the Love:”

You squares could never stop me, y’all try angles to play me
Two lines for you fuck boys; pause that, now play me

Far as I’m concerned, this is basically genius. It bends in on itself and is dense as heck. It works on a few levels, and it works perfectly on each level. I especially like the way “two lines” transforms into a pause button, which has two lines, then “play me” brings it back to triangles. It’s a reflection of the structure of the line before it. There’s a slang meaning for that second line, too. “Two lines” meaning deuces meaning BYE. A “fuck boy” is your everyday average punk, in this specific case haters who thought Fab didn’t have bars. “Pause that”–Fab has to say “pause that” because he said “fuck boys,” which sounds like “fuck boys,” and that sounds gay and so you need a no homo in there somewhere to even things out.

This is the thing that sucks about rap. Its highs and lows are all tangled up together, so even when I’m enjoying what I love most about the music, I’m still untangling it in the back of my head. While I understand the logic behind “no homo,” every time I hear it I stop in my tracks, because “no homo” represents the exact opposite of what rap is about. So much of what makes rap something I really, seriously love has to do with confidence, whether that means having the confidence to get on the mic and bare your soul or to lie and lie well about who you are and where you’re from, and that makes “no homo” one of the wackest, weakest thing you could possibly say.

You can’t be the biggest, baddest dude on campus and still be so afraid of just being confused for possibly being a gay dude for even a moment that you feel obligated to throw in disclaimers into conversation, just in case someone possibly takes your double entendre as anything other than a joke. That doesn’t track. It’s not confident. It’s an example of pure insecurity, I think. Even if you strip out the homophobia out of the equation entirely, it’s still an incredibly soft thing for a rapper to say. It’s about being afraid, and that’s it. I feel like a real man would just say what he wants to say and dare somebody to test him.

“No homo” and “pause” bum me out, basically, for the obvious reasons and thanks to the fact that they’re a huge speed bump in something I really enjoy. It’s a reminder that I’m listening to a person play a role or make stuff up out of whole cloth. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it pops my suspension of disbelief, because I guess that is a thing I have for music now. I stop believing in the song and can’t sink into it any more.

From a craft standpoint, it’s simply bad writing. It’s weird to sit down, come up with a line, be pleased in those lines, and then build in a disclaimer. No one has to say something that they feel could be misconstrued. It’s like backing yourself into a corner. On top of that, “no homo” isn’t flexible. Outside of a few cheap hits (“no promo,” “no pomo,” etc), you can’t really flip it and load it down with meaning. “Pause” can be flipped, “bitch” can mean a man, woman, dog, car, blunt, sucker, building, room, or u-turn, but “no homo” is pretty much always gonna mean “Nope, still not gay!”

“No homo” feels like a very uncreative part of an exceedingly creative art form, in part because I never really grew up around it or had it in my vocabulary. It’s not that I wasn’t homophobic or around homophobia—just the opposite, obviously—but that’s now how it was expressed around me or how I expressed it. “That’s gay” was one thing, but I didn’t know “no homo” as an ongoing thing until I was grown and had already started really listening to rap and figuring out what I was cool with and what I’m not. So it’s actually easy for me to point at it and reject it. “No homo” isn’t a part of me, so it’s nothing, but “suck my dick?” That’s harder to let go of.