I don't know how to start this shit, Nasir Jones voice. I hope everyone got a chance to read Claire Dederer's What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?, which was included in last week's Good Word. It's a wonderful exploration of how to reconcile enthusiasm for a work in a vacuum with the unavoidable monstrosity of its creator, and more broadly a re-assurance of the primacy of one's personal, private feelings over canonical or correct tastes. Prior to a strange digression about the necessity of monstrosity in creative enterprise, its framed mostly by Dederer's grappling with the filmography of Woody Allen, something of a poster child for despicable genius. He is, as I understand, inextricable from his work, which is in turn inextricable from the massively important developmental years of the current critic class, making him a prime candidate for hand-wringing about justification and redemption, even as we know all the while that it's impossible.

Kodak Black doesn't usually get the same consideration. There are lots of reasons that this is perfectly fine - Kodak, if you haven’t heard, is almost certainly a rapist, and I don’t begrudge anyone getting off the train for good at that stop (while he’s currently awaiting trial, I don’t think anyone even bothers with alleged anymore). Individually, that’s a totally valid position. Critically, however, it’s completely irresponsible. In addition to the aforementioned charges, Kodak Black might be the most popular young rapper in the country. In 2017, he had at least six songs that hit 50 million plays on YouTube, most doubling or even tripling that. Even in a year that was defined by the sudden and often inexplicable online rise of incredibly young rappers, Kodak was an anomaly - seamlessly transitioning from online to in-the-flesh popularity and showing the staying power (months, to say nothing of weeks) that eluded many of the year’s momentary stars. Despite - and in many cases, because of - his legal troubles, there are thousands, probably millions of kids to whom he’s the biggest rapper in the world. To abdicate the responsibility of investigating that critically is absolutely insane.

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As it happens, Kodak Black played a show in Denver last night. I didn’t go, but I passed the venue as I was walking home from work and couldn’t help but notice that the line stretched several blocks about two hours before the doors opened. I dropped my stuff off at home and came back to talk to some of the people in line.

At the very front were Mateo, Camila, and Diego, all about 16 or 17. They’d been waiting since 1:30pm, a fact which they didn’t seem to find particularly remarkable. I asked about their favorite song (Tunnel Vision, unanimously) and what they hoped to get from the concert (Mateo: see him, touch him, have him take my phone for Snapchat). I asked what they liked about him (his swag, his style, that he doesn’t really work with anybody else), and if they were concerned about the charges against him. It got quiet for a second. Not unless it kept him from being able to come here, said Camila. I asked if they'd heard of The Fader: I don't know what that is.

At the end of the line, I found another group: Daniel, Isabella, and Lucy (if you’re wondering, a largely Latinx crowd is pretty standard for younger-audience rap shows in Denver). They’d driven five hours from Kansas, a trip that Isabella apparently makes somewhat often - most recently for The 1975, and before that One Direction. This particular trip, however, had been at Lucy’s behest. She said that she liked everything about Kodak, and that she wasn’t too worried about his charges because he’d already done his time. With a little more prompting, she elaborated: His music just makes me happy. Even if he’s done bad stuff his music has a good message overall. I asked if there was a particular line that she liked, and she immediately recited I don't like no interviews, see y'all don't speak my language / We can't hold no conversation, you don't know what I'm sayin', from Misunderstood. An apt end to the questioning.

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I’d like to return to the Dederer essay for a moment. She posits that part of our fascination with monsters comes from the simultaneous recognition and deflection of our own monstrosity. Were I to propose a grand unified theory of Kodak Black fandom, I would start here, with one major difference: I don’t think that it’s our shared monstrosity but the common ground outside of it that makes our relationship with artistic monsters so hard to shake. Dederer mentions Annie Hall bringing about a sense of belonging to humanity, and ultimately that’s a question of representation - a major work of art can validate and ease your unspoken struggles simply by acknowledging them. Thinking back to myself at 16, it’s hardly a surprise that teenagers finding this sort of meaning in Kodak’s work would prioritize that feeling over the (presumably) more abstract concern of his criminal record.

And what of adults, who should know better? Well, shit. While the value of finding one’s own troubles in another’s music is by no means exclusive to teenagers, it’s basically impossible to justify an uncritical stance as a fan of Kodak Black. There are Kodak songs going back to 2014 (actually, 2009) that I refuse to swear off, which is purely selfish. For God's sake, the man has rapped about eating peanut butter and bologna sandwiches (the defining meal of my childhood). Better, truly, to endure the resultant guilt than to never hear Real N***a Files again. I think about this a lot - what insulates me from the under-no-circumstances response that is instinctive for many, and what it means to continue listening to Kodak’s music in the face of people I know choosing explicitly not to. It’s brought me to a real crisis of authenticity; the prioritization of music originating from those who have no other representation in media - say, a first generation Haitian-American from Golden Acres - has been paramount to the way in which I consume and think about rap and music in general for years. This will always involve a degree of moral bargaining; there are numerous works of art whose great value is only unlocked through consideration within their own moral terms. Kodak’s actions are not a part of that. But they’re undoubtedly a part of what authenticity often signifies; a dirty underbelly of human experience which the listener is lucky to have avoided, and of which the artist is our reliable, unaccountable reporter. Records like Pride, by-and-large, do not come from good people. I have no idea how to navigate that.

But that’s my upside-down cross tattoo to bear. The argument of this essay - the only portion that I would feel comfortable insisting upon - is that Kodak Black requires consideration. Not necessarily the man himself, for whom a redemption is out of the question, but the phenomenon. No conversation about the role of the critic has ever been good, and so I’ll keep it short: works of art that compel millions require critical investigation. Under any circumstances, refusing to examine a rapper who for many defines the genre is ignorant; to do so in light of a well-documented and concerning cultural phenomenon in which artists are finding their careers buoyed by allegations of sexual violence (it’s increasingly ubiquitous in a scene that happens to include virtually all of 2017’s biggest breakout rappers - 1, 2, 3) is dangerous.

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Three more important things that didn't make it into the body of the essay, and then I'm only gonna write about good things for the rest of the year:

1. Fuck The Fader. Sometime around the middle of the year, the editorial staff chose not to cover certain artists out of a concern that generating clicks on their behalf would equal complicity for their crimes - by the letter, an admirable and perfectly valid position. Yet amid ample evidence that very public legal issues were about the best thing that could happen to a rapper's career this year, they continued publishing news about Kodak Black - no music, just updates on legal proceedings (in case it wasn't clear, the mechanisms of Kodak's popularity are entirely external to whatever coverage he gets in The Fader and similar publications). What a cynical, utterly empty stand to take. This sort of thing has to be all or nothing (and again, nothing would be completely fine!) - it's utterly disgusting to make a proclamation like that and undercut it by continuing to sell ad space on news about the subject's ongoing issues.

2. Massive shout to Meaghan Garvey and Craig Jenkins, the only two critics that have given this thing any serious thought at all (that's not entirely true, but I believe they're the only ones to have put a byline behind it).

3. If you'd like to share a different take on this - especially if you're a woman - please, please shoot me an email. It can be an essay or half a sentence; I can work with you to edit it or you can send it to me for publication as-is. I don't intend to write on the subject again, and I don't want to give the impression that this is an authoritative account if I've said something you can't agree with.