DEFRAGILITY RAP
On Hester Valentine’s I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY
Opening new fields of permissibility means to go fragile until we destroy the fears that hold us back.
—Mattin, “Going Fragile” (2005)
And I dare any critic to call it noise…
—LL Cool J, “The Do Wop” (1987)
In 1994, Pharoahe Monch cited himself as the “assassinator of rap” on “The Extinction Agenda.” With I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY, the on-again/off-again, retired/rehired Hester Valentine assumes that murderous mantle. Hester is the assassinator of defrag rap, a “vigilante of rap,” as LL said on “The Do Wop” (1987). Canibus, cannibalizing opps, went at LL with the claim that LL didn’t have “the skills to eat a nigga’s ass” like him, but Hester might rewrite eating ass as assassinate, just for devious licks trickery. “So hungry I could eat somebody!” Hester exhorts on “luminum.” On the title track, he speaks to his refined palate: “The rap caviar is bland Kraft jollof sauce— / You wanna talk to me about taste?” He’s so hungry, starved really, so he surfeits himself with language. He’s crafty; Caliban with the red plague to rid you.
Transgressively oriented, I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY’s production routinely offers a “Whorle of Sound,” like something from Throbbing Gristle’s First Annual Report, though maybe accurater to go by the alternate bootleg name for their 1975 album: Final Muzak, for my Lisztomania level of listening to such defrag rap attackers [in the envelope sense of attack - decay - sustain - release] often feels like a Final Muzak, a be-all end-all Murda Muzik—an eschatological head nod nod off to the [cousin of] sleep. Peep game: the noisecor[ps]e of Hester’s production choices (including his own)—especially with frequent collaborator Outside House—oft reflect that transgression.
As he himself has said, Hester lands somewhere between SKECH185 and Blink-183 (yeah, his miscalculations land him in Warren G’s remedial class—and what?!). Hester raps like ODB with OCD sans SSRIs. He’s prone to hysterics [Hesterics] on the mic, rapping like Hester Prynne at the stocks, scarlet feverish. He fills the space between Throbbing Gristle and Swollen Members. He twists & shouts & screams & shouts live from the Death Factory, a letter opener shivved in his liver. Like the stutter of m-m-m-m-m-murder on TG’s “Very Friendly” (1979) and the stammer of b-b-b-b-b-but wait it gets worse on Onyx’s “Slam” (1993), Hester stunts on ’em, death-defyingly & death-invitingly. I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY is a COUM transmission “eking out the speakers,” as he says on “stonewall,” perhaps a pride anthem for PainKiller enthusiasts. A transmission that fucks up speaker cabinets when he’s stabbing it, as Jus said on “8 Steps to Perfection” (1996); like Rakim kicking a hole in the speaker, pulling the plug, then jetting.
The Don Demarco air horn blasts throughout I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY, as Hester has no shortage of ridiculously imagistic lines that warrant the response. “Sun rays like hazard tape in the sky,” he raps on the lower-cased title track. The air horn’s a razor-sharp leitmotif, much like Trent Reznor’s descending keys on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994). But Hester’s utilization of the air horn plays out diasporically, on loan from Jamaican dancehalls where selectors punctuated their wax platters. All told, Hester’s more willy-nilly with it. It’s like this…
Hester is the enfant terrible of underground hip-hop. He’s a dirty girl who hasn’t showered since Kurdt Kobain’s death. Hester’s a microphone molester | a gee whiz jester | the lead singer of Xiu Xiu when Jamie Stewart commits suicide by cop. Hester’s howllances [“howls” + “allowances”] begin when Dreamcrusher’s eyes roll to the back of their skull at a Trans Pecos nihilistic revolt. Hester: part-Andy Kaufman, part-Bob Kaufman. He’s the Money Store dom and sub characters combined, conjoined, hogtied together. I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY is the greatest human catastrophe since Adam got a hard-on. His sincere-turned-deconstructive version of “K___ M_” enters the echelon of covers par excellence alongside Hilary Duff’s “My Generation.” Like Meth on meth, Tical tickled pink, he sings a song of sixpence and a pocket full of rye. WHO THE FUCK WANNA DIE FOR THEIR CULTURE? Hester’s willing to, and he goes so far as to include an acapella of an early recording (“WORLD PREMIERE”)—back when only his mucous mouth1 and a smoke alarm chirp were cheering him on. Hester’s as rowdy & irreverent as ACT UP demonstrators at St. Patrick’s Cathedral shouting down Cardinal O’Connor, putting a kink in his zucchetto. While Nicki Minaj carries piss water for kkkristian nationalists, dropping keystyles on X cribbed from Black billionaires about how the “United Nations was a MAGA Flex” and she’s got “Trump on da text,” Hester proves the female Weezy she ain’t. I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY moves with the energy of Big Black’s Atomizer (1986). Hester is the “room splitter” with “atom difference” on “marionette.” His words are as sharp and jagged-edged as Steve Albini’s notched metal guitar picks, the band’s vroom and skinng militarized guitars. But where Albini articulated phantasies of strangling Odd Future on an airport shuttle, calling them “self-satisfied asshole scrubs” (which should be a Hester Valentine song title) who were “nxggxring everything in sight,” Hester crawls through Albini’s coronary artery until it clogs, cackling like the Clown Prince of Hip-Hop in a crouched position. At one point on the album, Hester calls out that never-meant-shit Elvis Presley: “I love banana pudding—the only thing I got in common with Elvis.” Hester’s got far more in common with Melt-Banana, though.
SSS
“To: From:” is a redo of LL’s “The Do Wop” (1987), a document of daily routine, but the differences between Hester’s day and LL’s are glaring. LL’s machismo is immediately undercut by Hester’s need to “reattach [his] dick in the morning,” a sort of King Missile detachable penis monologue scenario. Hester eschews the constraint of end-rhymes, frequently hiding the rhymes within the bar—decentering them—attaching, detaching, & reattaching our expectations:
I reattach my dick in the morning,
Unlatch a bevy of positive affirmations—all I can control is effort,
Molded smile I’m sporting,
Ten days alone—today I’m courting myself.
LL cleansed his aura when he “jumped in the shower [and] it was boiling hot.” He “stayed there a hour, ’cause [he] like[s] it a lot.” Hester has his “back to the shower head,” and he’s told that his position is “quirky.” “I laughed and agreed,” he raps, “now getting the back of my knees.” Atmosphere also redid “The Do Wop,” but Slug’s shower follows a formula, serves a function: “Dip to the bathroom, begin the triple S, / And wash the previous evening off me.” Slug’s seemingly skeeved by skeezers. Nonetheless, like Hester, his focus falls to his self:
Now out the shower, get dry, shove a Q-tip in my ear—
well, what do we have here?
It appears as if a piece of me has got motivation.
Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little morning masturbation.
Hester, though, he’s as quirky as Tupac in the tub with gold chains, linx, medallions, ingots—as quirky as Acid Bath serial killer cover art. He’s like Archimedes discovering buoyancy. “Style theft, eureka!” Hest says on “marionette.” He’s roomful of fumes bleach-clean.
LL’s order of operations are dramatically different from Hester’s. While Hester spends “ten days alone” before finally “courting [him]self,” LL rewinds Def Jam tapes and waits “for this freak to ring [his] bell at noon.”
12 o’clock came, left the door cracked,
the freak walked in, a mink on her back.
Slug can better relate to Hester’s loneliness. “My place has been a cave since she left me,” he raps. “Put my headphones on for this world I ignore.” LL “conversated with the skeezers” while Hester “jettison[s] text conversations.” As Hester solves the equation of “cancel[ing] the therapist appointment three times back to back,” LL’s looking at his Rollie and it’s about that time, “almost 7:30 and the show was at nine.” He will soon “stand at a jam with thousands of people screamin’ Touch my hand,” but that’s also “the very moment [LL] woke up from the dream.” Which is all to say, while LL was keeping it surreal, Hester Valentine was keeping it real real.
A WALKING STUDY IN DEMONOLOGY
Or maybe hyperreal. On “nosejob,” Hester begins an unraveling, a “threnody, string pulling” of the Self. Later, on “michael,” he talks of “open mouths [that] get sewn shut,” stitched up with the string he pulled and silencing screams and unwelcome sentiments like David Wojnarowicz in the AIDS-era “(Silence = Death)” photograph. Hester’s singing songs for his own, disowned dead body—dirges for latent urges—lamentations for a laminated self with skin like a plastic sheen. “The scars read as sheet music,” he says, tracking his tears like Smokey and the Miracles. He looks around, gauges the scene, and what he sees dismays:
Blackface clasped into place like Iron Man suit,
used the rap money to get the casino bussin’.
Open a black hole in the culture, sold a slice of life to McLovin—
denegrofied, raised hand, tilt my jaw, display spinning.
Is my new nose convincing?
He paints the portrait of a transracial nightmare—a landscape somewhere over the rainbow where whites can’t quit the minstrelsy repertoire: it’s here.
On “marionette,” Hester sheds the skin altogether, shrieking over devourful Outside House production: “Run out my motherfucking body!” The marionette becomes his proxy. He immediately puts it to work: “Fuck you with my new arms, / Hunan slurp, / Hester out the box like a coupon.” Only the vividest Frankensteinian, dysmorphic visions. Amputee fetish ish. Song as a means for incessant shaping & reshaping & misshapen & shithappens. Noodles hang out his gob like the spaghetti-faced Yellow King. He indulges and bulks with a “protein shake for breakfast—extra mixing,” a lethal amount of lead. Heaping scoopfuls of heavy metals for Hester’s heavy mental. He’s aiming to eat his way “into the Black bourgeois.” Cunning linguistics of cunnilingus like Kno and Deacon the Villain.
These songs delineate the subjugation of Hester’s own body—Foucault’s biopower merged with Black Moon’s powaful impak!—where his life is subjected to “precise controls and comprehensive regulations,” as Foucault (that turtlenecked sadomasochist) wrote. “Counting on nobody, just counting—algorithmic,” Hester raps—keeping a body count like Ice-T but with the Bowels of the Devil rumbling. “Hypertrophy founded,” he says, with “skin thick around it.” Cells swell to sell well, p-noid and roid raging in a more endearing way than a Carti concert ever could. Hester speaks gibberish wisdoms like the screech of “Leatherface,” and he rocks the fleshmask in the stockroom of an abandoned Spirit Halloween. “Fuck this new body,” he sings, propositioning & soliciting. “The flashlight don’t go deep enough,” Ying Yang Twin whispering, tunnel envisioning his form and void. “The fleshlight don’t go deep enough,” cavity searching synthetic inamoratas. Bedwetter blues (“vocals laid, enuresis”) and the mattress burning like you dropped a cigarette on it—no flame retardant; combustible-as-fuckable. As he dissects, vivisects even, he’s surgical with words & flesh: “Competition halved, / Gastric bypass, / Tightened gaps.” He pokes, prods, pricks, and replaces: “Sighs from my breast, / Seismic plate shift, / Shake shit, / Make ’em digest, / BMI ticked.” It’s a cleanse, colonoscopic observations, a creation myth, all in conglomerate. Barium enema to bear his soul. On “doesn’t need to be believed,” Hester’s body unbodies and rebodies and leaves a lyric booklet as a “dossier of doppelgangers” and cautions, “don’t confuse us.” Disidentifications, in a José Esteban Muñoz sense, comes to mind.
Such disidentifications can get dizzy. On “michael”—a track named for its bloomcycle producer—Hester labels himself a “delulu MC droppin’ all classics.” Delusional MCs, like Busta preaches, feel ideas are only delusional until they work. Thus, the need to defragment reality. Hester’s something like a sufferer of Walking Corpse Syndrome, deluded into thinking his organs have failed. His [dis]identities form a posse of putrefaction (fuck it: a faction of putrefaction), yet Hester’s jaw is still “yappin’.” He engages with that “bizarre rapping,” the best kind, that “shroom bar access.” These lyrics carry mycelian meanings. We feel his intent, or what he meant, or what he un-meant, “run through the blood like an embolism,” as he says on “stonewall.”
NA NA NA NA NA NA NANA
As a Walking Corpse, Hester feels what Snotnoze Saleem does on “Compost Heap”: “A shrill chill breezing through empty eye sockets.” On “doesn’t need to be believed,” Hester invites us to “unpeel the gossamer” and be in the perturbing presence of what’s “dead behind the eyes,” to felch aqueous humor. Why the eff not? He also asks that we masquerade in any number of celebrity skins (see: Ed Gein, Courtney Love).
Will Smith, let’s get jiggy,
Iggin’ me, they lamps on Iggy.
I’m reading his Iggy as Pop, as the sex-crazed shouts on “Fun House” (1970). Hester absorbs all influences—exhibits all [skin]fluences—his “résumé great, [his] CV ace.” If we desire to, we’re free to behold him “straight stroke of genius debilitate like CVAs.” His hypochondriac preoccupation with medical maladies (“my paralysis demon has Michael Jordan’s eyes, creepy face”) belies whatever fitness routine he rocks with. I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY grapples & spars & goes no holds barred like Tweedy Bird Loc. Hester Valentine walks that walk.
The hypermasculinity on I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY is diversionary, a misdirection, kayfabe. Hester goes fragile on the album in order to open new fields of permissibility—within him, within us. He’s brolic from the bottom, let’s say. Snotnoze Saleem’s on a similar groin-kick. On “Mumbo Jumbo,” Snotty commits on “one condition: please let me bottom.” “Load up the strap and hit the poppers,” he continues, “dressed up in drag pressed ’gainst the lockers.” Hester’s gym shit brings widdit the reminder that “gymnasium” = gymnos = naked training. New directions for nude erections. On “stonewall” (which was a riot), Hester hits “six sets of dips” that leave his “triceps in pain.” “You beg me to open up,” he says, and he does on WEEZY. “Prostrate,” he raps, exhausted of all his bars, “make me recite this prayer with you in my mouth.” Hester vacillates from fatigue to fury, from pituitary gland to spent prostate. “Too swole, too swole, smoked with the ice pack,” he gloats on “could neva take ova!” “They mad ’cause I eat better, see better, motherfucker: I breathe better,” he huffs from a cold water basin, Wim Hoffing.
WORKOUTS IN THE HEALTH SPA, MUSCLES GLOW
Even if the physicality Hester presents on WEEZY is performative, it punctuates his message and methodology on the mic. Not since Myka, Acey, and Ab Rude combined phorces to create Haiku D’Etat has poetics & violence so seamlessly coupled. Hester is the bloodiest [the goriest, the horniest…] valentine. “Punching the air how I dwindle writtens with punch-ins,” he raps from his gut on “nose job.” If ELUCID raised the issue of how “some talk like they never got punched in the face,” on “Tabula Rasa” (2021), then I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY provides that face-punch.
On “doesn’t need to be believed,” Hester emphasizes macho man savagery:
Man-time, I only stood on business
Shit was mandatory,
Mania my main inspiration.
But Hester also models hypermasculinity as heel turn. We find him positioned submissively on “stonewall”:
Fuck me on my back—I’ll give up the higher ground.
Lust buying time for the trust,
lower my guard to keep you around.
Hester Valentine struts, alternat[iv]ely, with agility & fragility [fr/agility]: homoerotic horseplay and humiliation rituals. Might catch Hest carrying a dominatrix’s Chanel calfskin handbag between gritted teeth. He’s got us wearing singlets as we approach the singularity, and he fully to the fullest (and foolest) embraces the soap operatics of pro wrestling. Ooh, baby, he likes it: Monday Night Raw. I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY spins a carousel of marks and smarks—an album of SmackDown! and the libidinous smack of impact play. Hester name-checks a steel cage of wrestlers: Mr. Kennedy; Cash Wheeler; Corey Graves; Scott Hall; Chyna; Colin Delaney; John Cena. And, of course, there’s Daniel Bryan [dis]gracing the album cover, shirt pulled askew, in all its plasticine Mattel glory. Hester’s wrestling mentions outdo Westside Gunn’s entire oeuvre. He shares signals with Dice Raw, who lewdly threatened to “shove a mic in your mouth like Ted DiBiase” on The Roots’ “Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’ New” (1999), and DOOM on “Great Day” (2004), where the metal face flashes like a leather gimp mask: “Prepare to get hurt and mangled like Kurt Angle, rookie year.” While GZA’s style “broke motherfucking backs like Ken Patera” on “Shadowboxing” (1995), Hester’s content with being “pretentious and angsty,” as he says on “Grow the Fuck Up” from Valenta (2024), “blow[ing] a kiss to the crowd like Christian Cage.”
PHALLACIES & BALLISTICS BLOWN
Guns proliferate on I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY—and why wouldn’t they? Hester brandishes & ravishes microphones and machine guns. “Machine gun Brötzmann spit, make sure your next release posthumous,” he raps, deeper & throatier than usual, on “This Is Content” from Valenta. Peter Brötzmann is to Defrag Rap what Bob James was to the Golden Age—a patron saint of buzzing, berserker noise channeling. Later in that same song—one whose rabid adlibs are as attractive as Hester’s thrustful vocals—Hester bleats, “Set the building on fire and sprayed everything runnin’, EVERYTHING RUNNIN’!” This is the Internet Age of shooters leaving meme manifestos on magazines and shell casings. “Blaow! Aim for the pelvis,” he advises on “in defense of feel!”
On “doesn’t need to be believed,” Hester’s painfully aware of the limitations and scope of his art. “Fuck rap,” he says, “ain’t mince words, / I’ll shoot half the underground like Duncecap.” He’s got his own dunce cap on for cappin’...to the Teacher (he’d have KRS-One in a headlock at the lectern, Eric Adams looking on stupidly). Whether it be amerikan history (“Scrambled like John Wilkes Booth to the booth, limping and maimed”) or hip-hop history (“Shot the club up like Shyne”), the [microphone = gun | gun = microphone] expression predominates. The equation raises questions of authenticity (“Rappers beating cases ’cause the guns is actually props”) and reckless behavior and endless handwringing (“Niggas emotional—don’t know who they firing at”).
“They gonna drop the gavel on my brother,” Hester raps on “michael,” “said the hammer his—closed in, hammer fist.” With a crazy level of narrative compression, Hester tells us of carceral power looking to fuck over innocents; a demonstration of How Not to Get Jerked. The fist image: one of sex & violence—something like Jeanne Dunning’s Untitled Hole (1993) where a closed fist and anal fistula are indistinguishable. Pucker factor rapping. Not much is pretty on the inside. Or the outside, for that matter. On “untitled joint,” Hester says “y’all torsos at the gun range,” and we see the Villa Rica Police Department using images and visages of Black men as targets for handgun training. Hester Valentine retaliates using the TEC-9 from Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 cover and an arsenal of BÄST’s garbage guns—a loafing, yet loaded, linkage betwixt ATF’s “Ravebashing” and Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 in sonic blastery—a studio suicide, 2025.
IN DEFENSE OF FEEL, OF FEELING, OF BEING FELT, OF FONDLE ’EM, OF FORNICATIONS
Such phallocentrism has Hester going illy with the illeism, so excessive in its unadulterated silliness. We can catalog the egocentrism:
“Size up with Hest” (“marionette”)
“Hester spin riddles wide” (“stonewall”)
“Chokehold, Hest pop out” (“could neva take ova!”)
“Hester your best bet whenever the beat drop” (“in defense of feel! THE A.I. PROJECT”)
“Hest like the vaudeville” (“in defense of feel! THE A.I. PROJECT”)
“Hester Valentine never rapped for endorsement” (“untitled joint”)
“Tope suicida, headfirst—this version of Hest give ’em no leeway” (“i am the female weezy”)
“The DNA wild Hest, but less wowed, chest out, a mild threat” (“doesn’t need to be believed”)
On “could neva take ova!,” Hester’s voice is ever in flux, fucking with us. “Dick like an oarfish,” he raps moments before affecting a Valley Girl vocal fry, gripping the mic with nitrile gloves. A phallocentric simile for simple minds, for it can’t all be serious, reminiscent of Zach Hill’s pink dick angling up from the lower-left corner of the No Love Deep Web cover. Hester, maybe then, not MC Ride, but MC Dick Ride, or even MC Decried—yes, MC Decried. ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER “blessed the mess [he] left preluding the doom death grips” on “untitled jawn,” a kind of “Beasts from the East” (1997) if all the rappers were bonnacons. “Bookin’ my tour,” Hester says though, “—the lube travel-size.” The glycerin glide of lubrication for his laminated self, a biologically inert accessory, facilitates how he might “fuck forever, slip in the pink, [and] fuck your future endeavors.” Pink’s the thing-thang-spring here. Hester’s scream on “I Love Pink”—the sunsprayed highlight of Valenta—striving for Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” (1977) status. HEEEEEAVING, he screams—some malformed model of Heaven—sounding like he’s feasting on a Farfisa organ and shards of glass from the Stooges’ shattered funhouse mirror. Hester is “on the soapbox screaming” over Outside House’s magnetic-cum-mortal coil production about how he “saw a man masturbating in the subway tunnel,” which “felt like an omen.” Or maybe the omen was the salmon pink of Earl’s solace (2015) cover, or Cam’ron’s pink mink and pink flip phone. The pink, as Departure recently rapped on Anatomical Feedback Loop, “puncture[s] hymens and vaginas in every suckling roughneck.” Or, as Hester put it on “Grow the Fuck Up”: I bullseye the binary.
Hester’s grown on I AM THE FEMALE WEEZY, moving from calm to calamitous at a moment’s notice, buffering between busted stitches and bittersweet serenity. He’s a revelator in the sense of revealing a sutured version of himself. “He sucked my dick in the staircase—I never seen him again,” he raps rebelliously without pause. “The world’s a big place, / I’d recognize those bunny ears a million miles away.” Role-playing as Gummo’s (1997) Bunny Boy pumped full of imaginary bullets, but Hester’s on the overpass and unmuted, spitting verses at the cars speeding below. His phallocentric lyrics release, and he’s got Irigaray and Cixous in his DMs. (They’re still alive and they—do—not—miss!) He feels their “nails down [his] spinal, scratched like vinyl wax.” He moans in the dawn, and sends forth blanket statements, edicts, Master=Diks. Hester knows every nook & cranny in New York City. “I never fucked Wayne,” he confesses on “untitled joint,” “I never fucked Drake,” but on Valenta—where this [de]fragiled agenda started—he clarified his gender abolitionist vision: “IDGAF If You Paint Your Nails You Still A Misogynist.” Amen. Awomen. A-plus.
“The thick snot of a poet,” someone once said.