Jeru The Damaja Was Mad As Hell. In Wrath Of The Math, He Wasn't Going To Take It Anymore
The Pugilistic 90s MC Used His Platform To Take Aim At Everything Within And Beyond Hip Hop. It Was The Only Way To Save It
Tristan Young @talltristan
From a certain perspective, one could argue that Jeru The Damaja, for all of his bilious and ornery consternation, actually achieved exactly what he set out to do. To save hip hop, or at least argue its trajectory needed to be altered. Such a bold and intentionally nebulous statement is so shrouded in vagaries that the idea inherently defies any kind of acute definition. More saliently is the inherent racism in the notion that hip hop as a genre was in need of saving, something that other genres, for all their trivial and ignominious dalliances with painful evolutionary throes, were never accused of needing. What did it need saving from? How do we define the efficacy of such allegedly morally virtuous crusades? And just who the hell is Jeru The Damaja to make such a statement, to take such a glorious purpose on for himself? As decades of music critics have tip toed around the bigotry and racial animus that comes with parroting such a narrative over and over again, so too have they annotated figures within hip hop with messianic capability to steer a genre in a direction they never had any right to dictate in the first place.
Most of those who were burdened with such rarefied cause didn’t exactly want to play into the hagiographic narratives. Kendrick Lamar, for all of his tectonic influences in hip hop, was more interested in using it as a vector to explore race relations and work out personal trauma. Lupe Fiasco flirted with the idea of such status as it was speciously bestowed upon, but seemed more in need of help himself with reconciling the dichotomous aspects of his pathology, than what he could provide to the larger rap ecosystem. Jeru actually wanted the job though. No one was more upset with the state of hip hop in the 90s than him. No one was going to go to the lengths he was to do something about it. Even if doing so became a near self-immolating experience, one that curated an ever expanding enemies list, he was going to save hip hop. Did it matter that such a quixotic quest would be defined only by his own subjective metrics and virtues? Not one bit, not to him at least. In his eyes, he was mad as hell about things- therefore it must have been that he was on the right side of history. In some ways, ya.
Jeru’s- real name Kendrick Jeru Davis- quest was well documented in his debut LP The Sun Rises In The East Released in 1994, although it’s his second release, 1996’s Wrath Of The Math that has proven to be the more invective tirade over the years. Furthermore it’s on Wrath Of The Math where Jeru’s incubating vendettas calcified into full on beefs, expanding into not just fighting for the hearts and minds of those in his community with corresponding tastes, but for the soul of hip hop it self. Jeru felt that the genre, and those that bore allegiance to it had succumbed to full on manipulation, under siege by the standard bearers of the gangsta rap pantheon of the day. The picayune frivolity of rap stars and their obsessive pursuance of commerce yes, but more sinisterly the callous manipulation of the labels that funded their hedonism and curated their personas. This was a threat to rap and all those that consumed it, so thought Jeru. He did not mince words nor attempt sub textual approaches on the matter. The liner notes in Wrath Of The Math upon its release read, “this album was created to SAVE hip hop and the minds that listen to it”. Jeru was nothing if not blunt.
Indeed Jeru took no umbrage with the prodigious and combative hostility that had permeated rap, as he adopted such stylistic sentiments naturally and comfortably. Wrath Of The Math is a pummelling document of targeted animosity towards opportunistic hip hop provocateurs, purveyors of class warfare and race based pys-ops within America; even those that had criticized his own truculent tone in the past and present. Luckily to even out and render his at times venomous thesis a bit more palatable, Jeru recruited DJ Premier of Gang Starr to produce. Jeru’s jingoistic fever and Premier’s smooth alt jazz and borderline trip hip adjacent sensibilities may seem like an incongruous pairing, but through a mixture of sheer charismatic will and natural chemistry, a remarkably approachable and salient balance is achieved. Jeru first made a name for himself with the help of Gang Starr as a guest vocalist on I’m The Man from Gang Starr’s release Daily Operation released in 1992. They had been indelibly linked ever since and Premier also handled production responsibilities for Sun Rises In The East. Wrath Of The Math expresses the evolution of that the asynchronous relationship and yields some fascinating constructs.
Wrath Of The Math was recorded at D&D studios and released by Payday Records. At the time of its offering costal rivalries within the larger rap diaspora were flaring up due to the recent murder of Tupac. Tensions were boiling between the East and West coast factions of gangsta rap; various tertiary players within the duelling ecosystems integrated into a phalanx of solidarity among their peers but also vitriol towards their supposed adversaries. Jeru was axiomatically separate from any of these groupings. Viewing the parochial rivalries, ensconced in imagined grievances and artifice, Jeru wanted nothing to do with such tribalism. It was that tribalism that was an endemic symptom (but not the only one) of what assailed the rap genre- manipulation and coercion on the part of record labels that wanted to mold dangerous and unpredictable images of their stars. The eponymous opening track uses a sample from Miles Davis’ Will o’ The Wisp to build structures of imposing brassy and foreboding sounds, as if to shut out the rest, or hermetically seal him in to do his own thing. Does he ever. As such Jeru certainly carries something of a moral high ground with him, with all the caustic pretention that implies. He felt proudly alienated from the hip hop community, more than happy to accentuate and intensify new or existing beefs and rivalries with his peers, if only to articulate how foolish they were.
Beyond being a singular statement, Wrath Of The Math continues incidents and confrontations that date back to his debut release, indicating how much he enjoys pushing everyone else away in pursuit of his overly ambitious goals. Black Cowboys re-litigates antagonism between him and The Fugees that dates back to his first album. In the Fugees track Zealots, singer Pras takes umbrage with Jeru’s misogynistic tone on Sun Rises In The East track Da Bitchez, saying, “no matter who you damage, you’re still a false prophet”. Considering the double entendre of some of the wordplay and and the notion that Jeru referred to himself as a prophet of sorts on the regular, it’s impossible to miss who is being targeted here. In Black Cowboys, over a didactic back and forth of guitar chords and tightly curated record scratches, Jeru returns fire with, “I heard some MCs wanna bring it but a female is one of their strongest men”, referencing the primacy of Lauryn Hill in The Fugees. Is this an ironic rejoinder that inverts gender power structures thusly insinuating Pras’ ignorance on the subject? Or is Jeru indeed misogynisticaly dressing down his rivals with an innuendo that revolves around demeaning the worth and strength of women? His intent, beyond mere agitation, is a bit nebulous. Less so is Black Cowboys overall statement of the futility and inanity of hanging on to these beefs. Jeru likens all of this to the parables of the Hatfields and McCoys, two rival families in the 1800s whose sustained animosity brought ruin to both. Jeru is more plaintive but no less aggrieved in Scientifical Madness, shouting, “You demon motherfuckers talking, starting costal rivalries”. These rivalries are fruitless and distracting from the larger social responsibility everyone in the hip hop community has, although Jeru, by his own admission does enjoy perpetuating them.
Jeru’s discord with The Fugees is a mere subplot compared to the larger targets of his opprobrium on the album, something that becomes readily apparent as you dive deeper in. A great deal more of Jeru’s incendiary furor is directed towards the coastal hip hop bourgeoisie and intelligentsia- namely Puff Daddy, the highest profile member within Bad Boy Entertainment, as well as Suge Knight’s Death Row Records regime. Furiously perturbed by the luxuriated or gangster life theatrics that have had profound and prodigious effects on hip hop artists and fans alike, Jeru eagerly seeks to dismantle the and interrogate (sometimes rather literally) the verisimilitude of a hip hop life style that is equal parts superficially glamorous and seductively dangerous. Over a sly and surprisingly delicate piano and drum slide in Me Or The Papes Jeru muses with janky and acrobatically tight syntax, “But now they throw it, hoping that they’ll get drunk off Moet/ or Cristal, but that’s not my particular style and taste/ my name ain’t Puff and I ain’t got loot to waste.” Jeru circles back to the same derisive, proto sub-tweet in Ya Playin’ Yaself, bluntly claiming, “Don’t drink Cristal and I can’t stand Mo”. He continues in the same track taking aim at Suge Knight’s well documented larcenous tactics that involved threatening producers for cash kick backs in an expansive racketeering conspiracy that lasted years. While something of a grim if unspoken truth in the hip hop community, Jeru vehemently casts a disinfectant light on the reality of things, “And these record companies shake them down like mobsters”.
Blatant and subtle jabs decorate Wrath Of The Math in this style, however it’s One Day that evolves into a central, and rather inventive, tirade on the matter. In a tense and slightly surreal anecdote Jeru literally personifies the idea of hip hop into a fragile captive, taken hostage by malignant actors such as Puff Daddy and BBE contemporary Foxy Brown. Hip hop is cast as a victim of sectarian manipulation and in desperate need of saving- “we have hip hop hostage with guns to his throat”, reads Jeru on a ransom note. As the piano and kick drum lock into place to very specifically create an acute sense of momentum, Jeru builds on that urgency with a desperate and manic bid to save hip hop. He stalks the streets looking for any confederates of Death Row or Bad Boy, immutably assured that they are the ones responsible, ranting, “we’ll see if Puff knows what’s up cuz he’s the one getting him drunk and fucking his mind up”. The track escalates into a feverish noir detective mystery, tracing down clues from Foxy Brown, to Jay Black, to Suge Knight, all of them assailed by Jeru’s righteous derision for what he feels is their corruption of hip hop. While reasonable people can disagree on the efficacy and fruition of the tangential hip hop evolutions throughout the 90s, few said their piece with such assured potency and audacity in the way Jeru does here.
Malfeasant or bad faith actors within rap cannon at the time were merely symptomatic of larger institutional issues assailing not just hip hop, but those that consumed it. This was Jeru’s- largely correct- assessment of the state of affairs within the industry. It was his vehement assertion that if hip hop itself was relegated to a means of little more that vapid avarice or posturing jingoism, then a key vector for uplifting the African community would be corrupted and wasted. Jeru weaves in and out of anecdotes alternating between likely embellished and all too plausible to articulate the manners in which black Americans are culturally oppressed and the unique social responsibility hip hop has to address this. A key theme throughout Wrath Of The Math is that it’s not a lack of money that is keeping black citizens impoverished and in the ghetto, it’s a lack of education; it’s ignorance. In Ya Playin’ Yaself he is fierce in his correlation, “knowledge wisdom understanding like King Solomon’s wealth”. He suggests with –ahem- prophetic certitude, “this dignified bastard, hazardous to the health of America”, in The Frustrated N****, implying that educated black people will threaten the racist power structures within the nation. He looks at those structures holistically for the most part rather than pointing out specifically corrosive elements within the system. That being said, “fire burn Giuliani, Pataki, and Cuomo”, from Whatever might only be a line for the 90s if it didn’t feel so good hearing it 2021.
Jeru illustrates the connecting but maligned fibres between rap and the larger cultural infrastructure it operates within during the tracks Ya Playin Yaself and Invasion. In the former he highlights how the superficial emptiness in the rich and lavish lifestyle on display in much of hip hop is tacitly abandoning those in need, “All these so called players up in the rap game got brothers on the corner selling cooked cocaine”. In other words if these rappers are so rich and privileged, why aren’t they doing anything to help those who aren’t? In Invasion, Jeru focuses on the traumatizing realities of police brutality, especially in the light of the galling miscarriage of justice with the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots just a few years prior. Segueing from a manic and frenzied opening skit like something from a far darker version of The Pharcyde, a foggy haze of a beat with woozy and hypnotic rings slinks around a sharp drum arrangement while Jeru scornfully analyzes the manipulated state of black Americans consigned to a tragic fate. “A brainwashed state, the black man’s fate, in the ground or locked down up state”, he explains with a cynical assuredness. The government tricks black people into thinking they are intrinsically prone to a life of crime rather than it clearly being environmental factors, largely of the government’s design, that led to such a life. This is why economic and educational opportunities are intentionally kept from them, to keep this understanding from clarifying for them. Jeru believes he can cut through this pernicious obfuscation.
While a demoralizing survey of the stark and unforgiving reality many minority groups know and live is certainly an effective means to articulate the necessity in hip hop being purposed towards uplifting those minorities, Jeru employs more eccentric and theatrical means as well. On the endearingly peppy key board saunter of Tha Bullshit, Jeru inverts the script and imagines himself as a wealthy and blissfully ignorant hip hop glitterati. With a quick and simple anecdote that he inundates with the idea of this is all being bullshit, Jeru imagines how horrible it would be to be rich, superficial, and frivolous. “Everything I do is for a dollar fuck being civilized I got money in my eyes”, he hubristically barks in what ends up being a mirror universe style nightmare. To his credit, he does seem earnestly distressed at the idea of it once he wakes up. He wishes to be anathematized to the idea of such hollow gratification.
Jeru is more confrontational however on Revenge Of The Prophet Part 5, deploying similar rhetorical tactics as he did on One Day. He casts the very idea of ignorance not only as a real person to be combated but as someone who has the corrupt police under its employ. “Fighting ignorance everyday is getting weary, when I think I got him he pulls the slip on me”, insinuating the Sisyphean struggle against such a pernicious concept. Whereas One Day has an almost whimsical sense of adventure to it, here he is more dire and realistic about the severity of what he and his larger community are up against it. In response to the malignant effects of ignorance, cops, and manipulative technology, he responds, “But I managed to get one high powered thought off”. One can take this as an abstract allusion to resorting to violence, but considering he previously mentioned he lost his gun, a more literal interpretation is instructive. He suggests that the idea of developing and valuing his intellect is the best way out of poverty and is in line with the larger advocacy behind Wrath Of The Math. Revenge Of The Prophet is an exhausting experience lyrically speaking, but vital in articulating the enormity of Jeru’s ambition. Clearly the intellectual and social emancipation of his people and of hip hop is beyond the scope of a single record, but he isn’t the least bit deterred.
Considering Jeru’s combative lyrical style one might assume a similarly angular beat assortment throughout the album, but that’s largely not the case. Under DJ Premier’s production and sound design in Wrath Of The Math, there is instead a surreal and hazy aesthetic, cut through with prickling percussion but otherwise often free of sonic agitation. Premier’s design is casual and functional; clean and streamlined, to the point. There are moments of elegant instrumentals in tracks like One Day and Whatever, yet it still remains largely unobtrusive. The recurring scratch shuffle on Revenge Of The Prophet is peppy but unforceful with its low fi vinyl distortions and nearly euphoric samples. Scientifical Madness is characterised by a simple but hypnotically buoyant melodic cycle, although the lingering string section towards the end is appropriately destabilizing. A slightly mercurial and ponderous, if cautious piano binary in Me Or The Papes obliquely recalls the jazzier side of Gang Starr and is one of the strongest of the low key arrangements for it. Premier doesn’t let the vinyl manipulation get too improvisational or freeform, instead keeping it tightly reined in during Black Cowboy. Elsewhere, How I’m Living has a sanded down base synth and aerated vibration that seems strictly on leash. Throughout the album there is a great deal of ephemeral brass and anachronistic sound design that recalls some proto trip hop vibes, themselves known for their stark acuteness but down tempo pace.
Premier and Jeru’s intertwining yet dichotomous styles would have ample room to interact with and adapt to each other on Wrath Of The Math, and there are certainly moments when the former’s direction synchronizes with the manic temperament of the later. A more agitated and sharply edged through line adds a sense of danger to the already perilous Physical Stamina. Not Your Average N**** has a boldly manifested piano line, with bellowing base notes followed by the casually hollow rattle of prancing couplets. It adds a lot of textural fidelity and allows the song to pounce at a compellingly perpetual strut. There’s a sparkling levity in Tha Bullshit with high pitch keys that ring with a bit more playful personality than you would find elsewhere in the album. The most confidently extroverted beat of the bunch, the towering Ya Playin’ Yaself is far more rhythmically funky and with slickly baroque base contours that allows Jeru to slip into a melodic groove to a far greater extent than elsewhere in the album. While it can at times seem like Jeru and Premier are operating on their own bandwidths that alternate between parallel and tangential, their synergy here is excellent.
One of the stranger peculiarities of Wrath Of The Math is embedded right in the name, in that despite Jeru’s fiercely personal association with his rhetorical goals, a lot of his writing is oddly prescriptive. He at times speaks with a didactic and yes, mathematical approach to addressing the social ills that animate his project. “Feel the wrath of my mathematics”, says Jeru in Too Perverted, suggesting that perhaps he wants to weaponize the idea of education against those who would wield ignorance over his people. He talks about combining mathematics with strategy earlier on in Whatever, which appears to support this hypothesis. Jeru even likes himself to a surgeon, with all the precession and academia that implies in How I’m Living. Interestingly, in the titular Wrath of The Math he calmly asserts, “when the mental cannot be moved, there is no good or bad, there just is”, signalling his attempts to find a through line between this prescriptive mathematical language and a more spiritual mindset.
This in of itself was a niche trend within a lot of 90s hip hop; a preoccupation with eastern dimensions of spiritualism. In another time, where progressive definitions of cultural appropriations and stereotyping were not as well developed a lot of people would have thought of this as orientalism. While such a term has racist connotations that would leave it best not exhumed, it was in vogue back in the 90s to explain this interest, and Wrath of The Math shows this was certainly on Jeru’s mind. In Physical Stamina Jeru references the Fist Of Five Rings, a book by Miyamato Musashi about the philosophy of eastern martial arts and sword fighting. Jeru refers to himself in Whatever as the, “Gwan Jang Nim of underground emcees”, alluding to the term for a grand master in Korean martial arts. Even the album cover is adorned with Jeru dressed in a traditional gi. The video for Ya Playin Yaself is a slavish homage to old school kung fu films and truthfully is not without some decent choreography. Contemporary artists such as Wu Tang Clan were noteworthy adherents to this rhetoric and aesthetics, but far from the only ones. There was Channel Live, Razcals from Vancouver, KRS ONE, all of them dabbling in eastern culture for reasons that were never completely clear. Remember Shaq Fu? There at least seems to be something of a thematic alignment with Jeru’s altruistic pursuit of spreading knowledge. However, his somewhat surface level sampling of eastern culture and its take on spiritualism feels a little insincere at best and exploitive at worst.
While one could chalk such cultural failings up to the laboriously slow moving goal posts of progressivism over the past 25 years, it’s harder to excuse some of the language he uses in regards to women. Looking back on Da Bitchez from The Sun Rises In The East, the one that angered Pras, and some of Jeru’s commentary in this realm hardly seems like an isolated incident in tandem with Wrath Of The Math. With a name like Da Bitchez, something that could ostensibly be pulled from the satirical inanity of This Is Spinal Tap, and ya, The Fugees had a point. Jeru said in an interview, “I always had strong views about racism, white supremacy, and all of those things, I just didn’t know how to express it well enough”. Couple that with his attempts to highlight what he felt was the commodification of the individual within hip hop and you could perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt that he was merely inelegantly trying to articulate such reductive thinking. In practice, it reads as a number of lines and sentiments that have not aged well. He talks of grooming young women in Ya Playing Yaself, stumbling into terminology that at the time may not have had such portentous and abusive associations, but is near inexcusable in modern dialect. In the same track he falls into draconian stigma that women who express and control their own sexual autonomy are likely whores that cannot be respected. It’s here that his seemingly benevolent ambition of gifting people with the merits of education comes off as a little ham-fisted. In Too Perverted, which in this case is aptly named, he boasts, “I rip through mikes like when my dick strikes the hymen”; a line that wanders too eagerly into the language of sexual assault. It seems even Jeru is ignorant of a more enlightened path forward in this regard.
Of course he was a young man when he released Wrath Of The Math. Now living in Berlin, he- much more calmly- advocates for education reform to combat racism as well as hosts his own YouTube channel. “Society is designed so that music, especially the music of urban youth is destructive. It can be sexualized or appropriated”. His remarks are instructive here, in that he precisely fell into those very trappings even as he understood them. More importantly however, he was acutely aware that music isn’t just one, but the key factor in shaping the lives of impressionable youth and young adults. Even while we was a product of that process, the effects of it still metastasizing within him as he recorded Wrath Of The Math, he understood the power and responsibility he had as part of this ecosystem far better than most at the time. He welded that power at times in ways that were unruly and manic, but also illuminating and riveting. Rather than being pacifying however, that illumination weighed heavily on him, making him more and more aware of what he felt he had to do. It turned his younger self into a harsh, almost rueful idea of how to find a better way forward, at times obscuring the validity of the message. But if ignorance is bliss as he recalled, he was happy to have no part in either.