for those unfamiliar with the oeuvre of chicago-based 'drill rapper' mr. keith farrelle cozart, it's worth pointing out that a lot of his most significant work can be read as a sort of perverted bildungsroman — an autobiographical coming-of-age story, as keef (also known as 'sosa') authored most of it as a mere teenager — but the central attribute that differentiates opuses such as 'back from the dead 2' and 'finally rich' from your typical 'jane eyre's is their, simultaneously profound and completely quotidian, morbidity.

all the categorical clichés that permeate the mafioso rap genre and the 'gangsta' lifestyle (e.g., violence, sex, drug use/pushing, etc.) predictably appear in his lyrics, but with the added context that those aren't select habits chosen voluntarily by the 'almighty so', they are, instead, the very cultural milieu that circumscribes his surroundings. o'block-chiraq isn't strictly a zone of confinement, but an all-encompassing curtain that eradicates any hope beyond the boundaries of moral transgression. a rugged materialist landscape wherein 'True Religion' could only refer to a pair of jeans. the image portrayed is adequately dantesque (alighierian?), 'abandon all hope ye who enter here', or, more appropriately:

These bitches love Sosa (Ha), O End or no end (Yuh)
Fuckin' with them O boys (Ha), you gon' get fucked over (Bang-bang)

a parallel can be made with bataille's "l'histoire de l'oeil", which likewise takes the coming-of-age novel format and invigorates it to an orgiastic extreme, both content and style-wise. the amoral excursions it presents (ranging from such wholesome topics as urethral insertions to necrophilia) aren't characterized as adversarial 'points of contention' for the main figures that populate the narrative, but as the very textural fabric that shapes their youthful experiences. in that sense, the works of both cozart and bataille, while inhabiting disparate metaphysical layers, equally succeed in portraying nihilism as a fundamentally boyish trait.

but all jokes and goop-on-ya-grinch rigmarole aside, the skeleton key that unlocks Story of the Eye is approaching it as a gothic-tinged convulsive prose poem (one occupying the same stylistic tradition as, for example, baudelaire's 'paris spleen' or 'les chants de maldoror').

being familiar with bataille's philosophy certainly helps the reader develop an intellectual grip on it, but this is writing that's best engaged with on a visceral, predominantly sensorial level. it's absolutely not a 'chore to read' or 'libertine' (as another 'reviewer' here stated), but instead a burst of linguistic viscera and entrails that uses designated semantic symbols recursively with an entirely impressionistic objective, akin to how a classical composer would employ a leitmotif¹:

I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster’s crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity.

¹ (or how rappers use ad-libs. Bang Bang.)

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