The Patient Rise of Griselda

With the announcement this week of WESTSIDEDOOM, a collaborative EP from Westside Gunn and MF DOOM, the stock of Griselda Records continues to rise. Earlier this year, Conway and Westside Gunn – the highest profile members of Griselda (who happen to be brothers) – signed a distribution deal to Shady Records, Eminem and Paul Rosenberg’s label. In 2017, the two brothers from Buffalo, NY., are finally beginning to reap the rewards of years of hard work. It’s no surprise then that Griselda Records happens to share a name with the classical folklore tale of Griselda, made famous by Boccaccio and later Petrarch and Chaucer, titans of medieval literature.

In the traditional telling of the story, a young woman, Griselda, marries an important aristocratic man named Gaultieri, who cruelly tests her patience and obedience by subjecting her to an increasingly malicious series of lies. Gaultieri tests Griselda by declaring that she must give up her two children, who are to be put to death. Griselda gives up both of them without protest, but instead of murdering them, Gualtieri secretly sends them away to Bologna to be raised. Deciding this is not enough, Gaultieri raises the stakes higher, and declares to Griselda that he has been granted a papal dispensation to divorce her and marry a better woman. Once again, Griselda is obedient to his demands and returns to live with her father. Years later, Gualtieri chooses to remarry and demands Griselda to be a servant at his wedding. At the wedding he introduces her to a twelve year old, whom he claims is his wife to be, but who is actually their daughter. Griselda wishes them both happiness in their future, and at this final act of obedience, Gualtieri reveals that this fake bride is in fact Griselda’s child, and that she will be allowed to return to her place as mother and wife. If it somehow wasn’t blindingly clear, the story is disgustingly misogynistic, emphasising some of the worst aspects of patriarchal relations and male expectations of women. In Chaucer’s retelling in The Clerk’s Tale, although the story remains the same, the purpose behind the tale is subverted slightly from its patriarchal tradition. Chaucer writes:

“This storie is send nat for that wyves sholde
Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,
For it were inportable, though they wolde,
But for that every wight, in his degree,
Sholde be constant in adversitee
As was Grisilde”

In essence, Chaucer commands the reader not to use the tale as a manual to follow, for to do so is frankly impossible, but that we should take from Griselda her strength, her constancy, in the face of adversity. Although, once again, this is not a particularly progressive message considering the immense emotional labour women in society are already placed under and the potential impact on mental health, it does poke at some related themes present in the music of Conway and Westside Gunn.

On ‘The Cow’, Conway reveals some of his own strength in the face of adversity. In a particularly moving verse from the Buffalo emcee, Conway remembers a late friend (Machine Gun Black) – “ask my baby momma how much I cried when Machine Gun died”. This is a move away from the usual blank face, cold bars that define their gritty aesthetic, a peek behind the curtain of unwavering emotional strength. Further on, Conway details his response to getting shot in the face – “You know what’s funny, I wanted to quit/ After I got shot in my head I seen my face like I’m done with this shit/ Trying to spit my verses and mumbling and shit/Face twisted up looking ugly and shit”. In a live performance earlier this year, Conway breaks down on stage at multiple points, overcome with emotion, it’s a poignant and painful reminder of the dangers of building up a Griselda persona.
This shedding back from the Griselda persona is rare for the two emcees though, who have built their reputation on the types of grimy, raw street raps that dominated the New York rap game in the mid-90s, and which have seen a renaissance of sorts in recent years with similar artists Ka, Roc Marciano and Your Old Droog. On ‘Mr. T’, Westside raps, “I’ma be fly forever if the stove work” and “If shit slow up, I’ma look prettier in the mask”, both times a pseudo-glorification of the street-drug dealer lifestyle is enacted. At other times the two emcees gloss over tragedies and tribulations with the bluntness of Griselda. “Empty out the Kel-Tec/ Til ain’t a shell left/ Bullets burn/ I can smell flesh/ I can smell death”. The opening bars to ‘1000 corpses’, where the horrorcore influence is clear, are phenomenal in crafting the image of a heartless killer, where the violence is so tangible that the listener can almost smell it too. A throwaway line on ‘Dunks’, Westside raps, “Learn your lesson, my man got 81 stressing”. This is not a plea for sympathy or a polemic on the state of the prison industrial complex, instead it’s a snippet of a story inside a story. An entire life tragically thrown away, that survives on in one line of a song, and yet Westside does not allow his icy mask to slip once.

If Griselda were named after the European folk tale, it’s an ingenious piece of aesthetic design, as the themes of that story seep into every aspect of their work. That patient, somewhat emotionally blunted approach to their lyricism, where the aesthetics of a drug deal or a murder or a car they drive define the whole song, bleeds out into everything they touch. Westside and Conway flow over beats in a manner that can, once again, best be described as patient. There’s no rushing to fit words into the beat count, every bar feels measured to mathematic precision, every word feels as though it has been painstakingly pondered over to paint the picture the song demands. Ironically, there has been little patience in the seemingly endless content they produce. Yet, within this irony exists the seed of another irony, they are patiently impatient, they are almost paradoxical in their output. It feels as though the two emcees could spend weeks writing a single verse, and yet for the past few years they have produced a whole stream of projects, mixtapes, features and singles. Conway’s debut label release, G.O.A.T, has been anticipated for some time, and yet it is not as though the rapper has been lacking in output. He has released projects with Prodigy, featured extensively on Benny and Westside’s works, and released his own mixtapes, including Reject on Steroids earlier this year. Still we clamour for more, we the listener become almost like Gualtieri, pressuring Griselda’s patience for more and more, testing the depth and range of their ability to see if it has a breaking point. So far, and with signs of the record label only ever-improving, Griselda hold strong. In rising in the rap game Griselda have been patient, not clamouring for commercial success, but ensuring a steady critical and professional acclaim that has seen their stock rise over the last few years. As they continue to reap the rewards of their hard work, it is now our turn to be patient towards their output as they continue to climb towards the top of the rap game.