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Popular Culture Review
turn her mandate against her; just as his apologies give him invective license, the
implied domestic framework allows him to maintain the appearance of
obedience even as he undermines her maternal authority. This outraged infant’s
attitude toward his mother for what seems to be best (if simplistically) described
as life, raises the question of capital-L Life as a maternal gift and/or curse, and
from this perspective, the “skeletons in [the rapper’s] closet” become an image
morbidly reminiscent of aborted fetuses and the haunting shame their memory
might evoke.
The disruption of the “I-thou” pronoun structure of “Cleaning Out My
Closet” and the shifting roles of its referents resonate with the rhetorical
complications of the abortion debate, which include the impossibility of
“symmetrical oppositions” and “logical binary model[s] for ethical choices.”
The various manifestations of the poetic “I” and “you” in the song run the gamut
of roles in the judicial process. The rapper is at first a testifying plaintiff who
sets out to “expose” the “skeletons in [his] closet,” but he becomes a confessor
as well. In addition to setting up the confessional framework with the song’s title
and chorus, he acknowledges having “maybe made some mistakes” before
returning to an accusatory mode in the third verse. During these shifts, the
listener starts out simply as the rapper’s audience—the prefatory “Yo, yo”
stands in for the traditional apostrophic “O”—and then is forced into
identification with the rapper’s mother through the lines “Look at me now, I bet
you’re probably sick of me now/ Ain’t you mama? I’ma make you look so
ridiculous now,” which reveal the mother as a second object of address. The
conflation of these roles establishes the listener as both silent witness and
defendant, making him or her complicit with the mother’s past actions.
However, the rapper later enjoins the reader to identify with him, to “put
yourself in [his] position, just try to envision / Witnessing your mama popping
prescription pills in the kitchen,” a move that translates roughly to the classic
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury” appeal and distances the listener from the
maligned mother. Yet suddenly again, the rapper slides into invective against the
maternal, rapping, “it makes you sick to your stomach, doesn’t it? / Wasn’t it the
reason you made that CD for me MA?” The remainder of the “you”s in the song
address his mother, and after having identified with the rapper at his behest, the
verbal attack he launches feels all the more caustic to the listener.
At the end of this final verse, the rapper acts as judge, jury, and
executioner, as it were, damning his mother (and, implicitly through secondperson address, the listener as well) to hell before carrying out his own death
sentence as her ultimate punishment: “I am dead, dead to you as can be!” Of
course, this self-annihilation is a necessarily failed venture; by the very act of
addressing his mother, the rapper animates himself to her. Nevertheless, it
creates a violent and precarious moment that disrupts the oneness of the mother
and fetus in utero—where in Brooks’s poem the speaker addresses the baby to
preserve it and suspend the moment of its death, here the baby addresses the
mother to immobilize itself and suspend the moment of its birth. If, as Johnson