Living With Ghosts
What Three 6 Mafia's Memphis classic taught me about facing evil
Bear with me. I need to do some setup before I get to the music.
Last week, Annaleigh, Oliver, and I took some time off to visit Memphis, a city I hadn’t truly visited in seven years. In light of recent events, and because it should be a requirement for anyone learning America’s history, we visited the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. For a few hours, we experienced in horrific detail the injustices black people have suffered for 400 years in America and the brave, defiant efforts of those who have sought to undo them. For those who don’t know, the museum is built around the motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was tragically assassinated during his 1968 visit to affirm Memphian sanitation workers’ fight to say, “I am a man.”
I felt haunted in those hallways. As a white man, I felt the uncomfortable chill from the ghosts of past evils done by people who look like me. I was convicted, frustrated, angry, depressed to see the things that haven’t changed in the last 50 years. And yet, every museum employee I encountered had a smile on their face. Not one of those fake smiles you give because you’re in the service industry and you want happy customers. No, the people I encountered offered genuine smiles, the kind you can see even when obscured by a COVID mask because it shines out of their eyes. I came away thinking for days, “How can anyone smile like that in a place as dark as this?”
A few blocks over, barely out of sight of the Lorraine Motel’s balcony, lies the blues-soaked strip of Beale Street. And again, I had the thought as we walked down, “How can people sing and eat and dance in the direct shadow of the ghost of hellish evil?” What Memphis showed me last week, however, is that the music, the dance, the food, all of it is born from a place of reckoning with the ghosts of the past. The blues don’t anxiously avoid darkness and hope it goes away. They allow the performer and the listener to co-exist with their troubles instead of whitewashing them.
I realized this is the tradition of Memphis: to preserve the pain and harness it as fuel to build something new. Of course, take my opinion with a grain of salt as I’ve spent just two weeks there in my lifetime. But it seems everywhere I turned, I saw this ethos applied. And in 1995, it was a group of North Memphian rappers who would delve into the horrific depths of their city’s street life and find the nerve to laugh in the face of danger.
While southern hip-hop was just beginning to find its voice, Three 6 Mafia released Mystic Stylez, an album that would pioneer the horrorcore subgenre and would solidify some of the South’s defining musical features, from slowed-down (Screwed) beats to triplet flows. The sound is sinister, featuring piercing orchestral strings and murky beats that sound like they’re buried in the banks of the Mississippi. Of course, the low budget production only adds to the creepy ambiance of the album.
The blues legend B.B. King defined his own genre as “an expression of anger against shame and humiliation,” and if that’s true, then Three 6 Mafia rapped the blues. Impacted by the violent evil of the world around them, a world affected by years of segregation, poverty, gang violence, and injustice, Three 6 Mafia wrote murder ballads, explicit depictions of the darkness haunting them from the shadows of their city.
On “Back Against da Wall,” Lord Infamous raps about his dire situation and vows to take action, “Although the way you live is how you must die / The Scarecrow will try his best to take your life cause I know you will try to take mine / I do unto others before they do unto me.” It’s a heartbreaking philosophy, and even though Three 6 Mafia’s music is more shocking and provocative than autobiographical, there is a sense that they are documenting the attitudes, fears, and emotions they and those around them experience. And as the chorus says, “When a gun is to your head there's nothing left to be said in the ghetto.”
It’s exactly because of these attitudes, fears, and emotions that groups like Three 6 Mafia are formed—to escape toward something better through resilience. Instead of hide the ghosts that strike fear into their hearts, Three 6 Mafia harnessed them to create an art form that would inspire many more similarly-minded artists on their way to stardom. They dared to not just dance, but to “Tear da Club Up” because of their circumstances, not in spite of them.
When I’m faced with the ghosts of fears and anxieties—the kind that creep into my thoughts late at night and try to captivate my attention—my inclination is to try to drown it out, to build over it with something different and better, to take a flashlight and send a distress signal out into the darkness. But what Three 6 Mafia have done, what Memphis showed me last week, is that taking that flashlight and pointing it straight at those ghosts is a crippling blow. Naming the haunting evils of this world is an important step in rendering them powerless. And when evil is rendered powerless, how can anyone not smile, laugh, and sing (or rap) in its face?