To Paper Boi, and to hip hop artists in general, hip hop is an existential question of identity.   Photo courtesy of GUY D’ALEMA/FX

This article is adapted from an essay written for Professor Sean Nye's course, "Hip-hop Music and Culture," at the University of Southern California.

Paper Boi, the cog against the machine. Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-2022), the FX series that has been described as an “experimental comedy,” is the earth to the fictional rapper’s sun. It is his apparent rise to stardom in the ATL that even propels Earn, the supposed main character (played by Glover), into the show’s A-plot in the first place. But not once do we see or hear Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) actually in the studio, or on a stage — or anywhere, for that matter — laying down that catchy verse: “Paper Boi, Paper Boi / All about that paper, boy.” Instead, that creative process is shucked to the periphery in favor of centering the man behind the rapper, Alfred Miles, and his suffering from “success.” It’s easy enough to chalk it up to a creative decision. Stephen Glover, Donald’s brother and one of Atlanta’s showrunners, said as much in an interview with The Fader: “We didn’t want to have to force Brian to rap. We felt that forcing him to rap would be weird. Maybe he’s not a good rapper, then what would we do?” (Kochhar) And for better or worse, we never find out. 

Even supposing it was only a matter of logistics, what does it mean when a rapper at the heart of a show never actually raps? Pitchfork, reviewing the second season of Atlanta in 2018, called that “erasure” the show’s “sharpest joke.” But we, confining ourselves to the first season, may reach a different conclusion entirely. The omission, though still an erasure, allows Al to flourish into something rarely allowed for Black men in media: a complex, full-fledged human being. And in doing so, by rejecting the rapper’s rap music in a show about the Atlanta rap scene, what emerges is a vision of hip hop itself.

Suppose, as a thought experiment, that there existed a scene where Paper Boi was in the studio, recording the eponymous single that follows him throughout the season. One could imagine, for example, such a scene opening the first act after the pilot’s cold open — where Paper Boi shoots a man in the chest after an altercation — and title card showing the sprawl of Atlanta. (Certainly, the decision to have “No Hook” by OJ Da Juiceman — a track about dealing drugs, by a rapper who just last week was arrested on drug trafficking charges — playing under the title sequence would only help build that image.) Those scenes, back to back to back with no other context, would together build toward the classic rags-to-riches formula, compelling the audience to root for this artist on the come-up. And, as notes The New Yorker’s Carrie Battan, that was exactly what viewers were expecting in the days before Atlanta first premiered on FX: “In the show’s early days, there was a frenzied sensation that Paper Boi … was on the brink of hip-hop celebrity, and that ‘Atlanta’ would be a show that mapped one rapper’s electrifyingly simple and satisfying rise to fame,” Battan writes. 

Yet what made Atlanta the phenomenon it became is exactly how its creators subverted that expectation. Paper Boi is devoid of any of the archetypal characteristics of hip hop stardom; for that matter, he rejects them. He hates the appearance of it all, he hates the exploitative media (especially that pesky, N-word-flinging social media pundit Zan), he hates his own music, and he just accepts that there’s no money in the rap game. And least of all, he has no desire to “play the asshole,” as an entertainment reporter advises him in Episode 5, after a tense basketball game for charity opposite Black Justin Bieber. At some points, he does try to chase the street cred and the girls, but of course, those are only given if you play the game. And indeed, we see counterexamples of those who do play the game: Black Justin Bieber plays the game, the Atlanta Hawks player Marcus Miles plays the game, Zan plays the game. They comprise “the industry,” or at least Atlanta’s satirized version of it; and Paper Boi, as well as we the viewer through him — positioned in the outskirts of the industry — realize just how superficial it all is. “This rap shit is all about appearances,” Paper Boi practically spits in Episode 10. And that “rap shit” doesn’t fly with him; as Justin Charity writes for The Ringer, “He’s not desperate to blow up. He’s desperate to make a living.” And so it is that his rap doesn’t appear at all.

In its absence, Atlanta becomes hip hop. That is neither a necessarily original statement — the same piece from The Ringer makes that exact claim in passing (“Atlanta isn’t a show about hip-hop. Atlanta is hip-hop,” Charity writes) — nor wildly exaggerated grandstanding about the series and its significance. The American sociologist Tricia Rose, in “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” offers a framework for defining hip hop: “Hip hop culture emerged as a source for youth of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished along with large sectors of its built environment,” Rose writes. In other words, hip hop was the only way forward in a society that made less and less space for the youth in question, many being of color. It is that same concept that Paper Boi attempts to explain to Zan in Episode 4. “I scare people at ATMs, boy,” Paper Boi says. “So I have to rap. I mean, that’s what rap is — making the best out of a bad situation, brother.” To which Zan only responds, “You’re exploiting your situation to make rap, and I’m exploiting you exploiting that.” But what Zan will perhaps never understand is that, to Paper Boi, and to hip hop artists in general, hip hop is an existential question of identity. Creating rap music in the process, and offering it up as content to be consumed, certainly helps financially, but that isn’t the end-all-be-all of hip hop. 

What is at the core of hip hop, Rose argues, is “a never-ending battle for status, prestige, and group adoration, always in formation, always contested, and never fully achieved.” And not just any prestige, either; it is a particular “prestige from below” that artists aspire to, “in the face of limited access to legitimate forms of status attainment.” We see in Paper Boi’s almost every move — his very essence — his desire to aspire for that “prestige from below.” In Episode 1, when Earn gets “Paper Boi” (the track) to play on the radio, Paper Boi hollers at a woman passing by, saying “Hey girl! This is me on the radio.” (“So what, bitch?” comes the response.) When that same episode circles back to the moment of the cold open, when a man smashes his car’s side-view mirror and prompts an altercation, Paper Boi is willing to settle things peacefully until the man says his “Postal” mixtape is “garbage.” That yearning for validation reaches its climax — at least within the first season — in Episode 8, when Marcus Miles, the fictional Atlanta Hawks player, upstages Paper Boi at a club where he’d been paid to appear, and where he’d hoped to enjoy a night flush with fans and girls flocking him.

In the rare moments Paper Boi does receive that adoration, it’s usually for his violent altercations — much to his chagrin. In Episode 2, a Black police officer catches up to him as he’s bailed out of jail (for the earlier cold-open altercation), clearly ecstatic about being on the law-enforcement side of the violent rap scene. (“You listen to Gucci Mane? I locked that n— up!” the officer tells Paper Boi, grinning ear to ear.) Later, at a chicken shop, a worker recognizes Paper Boi and fixes up lemon pepper wet wings — an Atlanta/Miami special — for him. “I heard about that shootout you had on Twitter,” he says. “You one of the last real rappers, man. … It’s good to see a rapper that would just blow a n— brains out.” Already disconcerted by that label, he then encounters kids playing with toy guns — “just like Paper Boi, girl,” one of them says, mimicking shooting down another. (No doubt that scene was even more jarring when the episode first aired, in 2016, some two years after police shot dead a 12-year-old Tamir Rice.)

Indeed, that glorification of violence has been a growing trend, as Rose writes in a separate text, “The Hip-Hop Wars,” ever since the industry “got the hang of promoting rap music.” Where, in the past, “street crime had become a ‘line of work’ in the context of chronic black joblessness” — and indeed that is the case with Paper Boi and his small-time drug dealing — what used to be “the occasional featuring of complicated gangstas, hustlers, and hoes gave way to a tidal wave of far more simplistic, disproportionately celebratory, and destructive renderings of those characters.” Rose also argues, across several pages, that this maligned version of hip hop has so ingrained itself in the current generation — no other genre has had such a fervent base as the “hip hop generation,” who “live and breathe hip hop every day,” she notes — that self-critique of the genre and its participants has become near impossible, barring a restructuring of the very conversation around hip hop. In its first season alone, Atlanta kickstarts that restructuring, and all in the simple act of sidelining the rap of a rapper — the problematic caricatural facade — and, in doing so, forcing the viewer to confront reality as it is, for Black artists, for Black people. ■