Motherfuckerdom

“Let me tell you, when I stopped pimpin’, I was real negative about quitting,” Rosebudd says. “I thought I was giving up being a motherfucker. Now to a hustler, being a motherfucker is what you strive for. So when someone says ‘Rosebudd’s a motherfucker,’ that’s the highest compliment you can get because they’ve run out of adjectives. I was depressed until I realized that I was not stopping being a motherfucker, I was stopping pimpin’. I just had to become a motherfucker in another arena.” The other arena in which Rosebudd, aka John Dickson, is aiming for motherfuckerdom is writing.

In a culture dependent upon oral traditions going back to the griots—tribal historians and genealogists—of Western Africa, the heroes of the toast were often the ultimate bad mammyjammers, the archetypes of motherfuckerdom.

Take Watch the Throne, on which two grandiose motherfuckers explore the theme of grandiose-motherfuckerdom from vastly different perspectives, stacking dubstep on top of opera on top of Otis Redding, triumphalism on top of sorrow on top of more triumphalism, striving for a sound as vast and strange as the world they've come to inhabit.