Have you ever cooked half a brick in an air fryer? The question, posed by the Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn on the song "Michael Irvin," from his 2019 mixtape Flygod Is an Awesome God 2, is just one of many such hypotheticals scattered across his discography. Gunn is a hip-hop embellisher if ever there was one, who delights in turning majestic soul beats into canvases for his ostentatious depictions of go-getter life. A shrill and exasperated presence on mic, he represents a bars-first variety of rap that revels in extremity as a window into an identifiable yet distant experience. The logical response to the "Michael Irvin" bar is, "What?" Why would someone even ask that? But embedded in his question is a deeper answer, a quiet insight about rap's relationship with accuracy.
Lately on social media, it's been on trend to point out the inaccessibility of Westside Gunn's claims to the everyday listener. In TikTok videos and X posts, users present themselves as jokingly baffled at the notion of air-fried dope, finding a niche community in how far the world of Gunn's songs feels from their own. "When Westside Gunn says 'you ever?' the answer is always no not once in my entire life have I done that," reads one, while another imagines a confession-based party game with Gunn and Kendrick Lamar as completely unwinnable. It isn't that the scenarios are far-fetched; they're absurd in a way that is stunning, declared so matter-of-factly as if to be obvious. The juxtaposition of something unreasonable presented as routine creates a satisfying cognitive dissonance. "You ever shot somebody you love 'cause they violated?" Gunn asks on "It's Possible," before pushing things even further: "Pistol in your mouth like a Now and Later." In the tossed-off rhetoricals he presents, and the obvious answer — no — you can hear a counterpoint to faithful interpretations of street rap that treat lyrics as gospel and not performance. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't real, merely that they aren't conditional.
Gunn and the cohorts of his independent Griselda label are hustler rappers, a lineage established by New Yorkers like Biggie, Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah and revitalized in the 2010s by Roc Marciano. In the latter's wake, newer disciples have leaned more heavily into exaggeration, like the amateur wrestler and culinarian Action Bronson, who took things in an almost whimsical direction. On the other hand, rappers like Rick Ross and 2 Chainz have turned hustle into sport, divorcing it from its stark, lunch-pail connotations — Ross by playing up extravagance while blurring the importance of backstory, 2 Chainz by reeling off flex after flex as giddy punchlines. Over time, the characters have grown more outlandish, the boasts more extreme and fantastic. Gunn is the final form of this thought experiment: gritty, lavish and impractical all at once.
The writer Zito Madu made a case for dubbing the strain from which Gunn comes "surreal rap," noting its distance from the swaggering of someone like Jay-Z. "Surreal rap doesn't even try to get close to reality. The point is to go so outside what's believable and come to a new place that the ridiculousness of it is what's exciting." Gunn would likely disagree to some extent. "Rich off drug dealin' actually," he raps on the recent "Outlander," from his Valentine's Day release, 12. It's safe to say that for him and those of his ilk, what is believable and what is ridiculous aren't mutually exclusive, and that existing in that grey area challenges a binary way of thinking about hip-hop authenticity. Gunn's street CV is well-documented. His raps aren't a world away from reality. But they also, prudently, aren't beholden to it. So when he raps, "You ever robbed 10 bricks and sold 10 bricks all in a day?", at least half the point is that you haven't, which nudges the listener toward a touchier question: What kind of person experiences something like that?
There is a temptation to think of authenticity as equivalent to autobiography. Outside of the courts, where lyrics have sometimes been positioned as confessions of actual criminal acts, rap fans have often lionized "realness" as the great differentiator between the true hood griots and the pretenders. It is part of the appeal of a rapper like the late King Von, whose verses internet sleuths spent years trying to connect to actual violence he allegedly perpetrated, or Lil Durk, who, after being embroiled in a murder-for-hire scheme in retaliation for Von's death last year, is now seeing his lyrics weaponized in a similar way. Setting aside the obviously sinister precedent of treating lyrics as evidence, there's no denying that proximity to ground level is part of the draw with a lot of hip-hop. Street cred is supposed to lend the music gravity and urgency, adding the heightened sensations of recollection. The thing lost in translation is that memory — be it of a thing you've seen or done — can be a jumping-off point for invention. Something can be both not real and valid, imagined but honest.
Most rap is surreal in some sense, constantly playing with incongruity in various ways, and hustler rappers in particular have learned to make even the most mundane and disturbing interactions seem extraordinary. (I still think about the Jersey rapper RetcH describing a fiend experiencing a crack high as "human origami.") Some of that is out of necessity — point of view is one of the keys to differentiating one hustle from all the others — but it is more broadly a basis for bringing flair to scenes of insidious circumstances, transforming them into something flamboyant. As a result, those scenes aren't limited by reality, which can constrict the interpretations they allow.
Gunn's work can be seen as a convincing argument against taking lyrics at face value. Though rap can be a lens into what is happening on the streets, as both the news of the ghetto and first-person journaling, it is art first, perspective-driven but story-forward. Those stories can be based on lived experience without aspiring to historical accuracy. The power in the music made by Gunn and his contemporaries is its ability to test the relationship between what is real and what is true, in an extreme enough way as to unsettle the listener. His songs are presented as nonfictional dramatic monologues, and yet it is hard to imagine them ever being used effectively against him in court. They seem to take place in a replica of our world, one slightly askew. It doesn't hurt that he sounds a bit like a comic-book supervillain: His rapping voice is somewhere in the ballpark of Tommy DeVito off a helium tank, and he rattles off onomatopoeia ad-libs like a one-man effects team. Each verse both affirms his past and conceptualizes his present.
Some lines are plausible but farcical. "I roll your body in a Murakami rug." "Cobra clutch, even my clone wore Dior for months." "My shooter hopped out the Flying Spur in a hijab." The point is not realism or surrealism; it's tragicomedy, not necessarily irrational or paradoxical but so zany as to be a bit off somehow. Other lyrics are specifically about creating an illusion. There is, of course, tried and true rap mafioso hyperbole: On Still Praying's "Beef Bar," he's doing drive-bys out the Jag with dealer tags, vacuum sealing dope in villas, flying on a jet ski in Athens, Greece. In such cases, it's the magnitude of it all that feels preposterous, selling credibility itself as fantasy. But then there are bars that exist only for color, to warp a familiar, dark situation so that it's recognizable but unusual. "Fiend said I look like Dr. Sebi when he shot up." "I done fell asleep, head on a triple beam." "Bullets feel like a pinball machine inside of you." They read like jokes, but that's kind of the point. You know what they say lies inside those.
Which brings us back to the question at hand: Have you ever cooked half a brick in an air fryer? The thing that works about it is that it could happen — but also, why would it? There are layers of nuance at play: Beneath the obvious absurdity and strangeness of the challenge is the struggle prerequisite to making such a decision. The question is as grim as it is silly, marking both a desperation and an ingenuity that speaks not just to Gunn himself as a character but the hustler's spirit. It's the particular cocktail of harebrained and severe, genuine and mind-boggling, that forces you to see dope dealing in less absolute terms. You'll probably never cook half a brick in an air fryer, and maybe Westside Gunn hasn't either, but what matters is the possibility.
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