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If you're just listening to New York rapper Le1f's song "Wut" (and not paying close attention to the lyrics), the manic, bouncing track sounds pretty much like another shoo-in for year-end lists of best rap songs. It's infectious and dancey and it landed Le1f on the radar of everyone from Rolling Stone to Gawker to the International Business Times.
If you're watching the song's music video, though, you'd not only see Le1f speed-rapping through one verse fast enough to put Busta Rhymes or Twista to shame, you'd see him doing it from under a shock of purple hair, sitting on the knee of a mostly naked, oiled-down, Pikachu mask-wearing white guy. "This yuppie's talking blah blah, he wants to Bink my Jar-Jar," he raps with a hand on his hip and a grin. "He's twinked out / I'm like nuh-uh. I'm laughing at 'im like haha / I'm an emperor." Booty-popping ensues.
He sashays around in a pair of purple Daisy Dukes and he twirls the long ends of his hat like pigtails. Le1f is a rapper who is openly gay.
Perhaps predictably, since the video's release, hate tweets and comments have rolled in for Le1f. Less predictably came hate headlines. Two weeks before Le1f released the video for "Wut," R&B virtuoso Frank Ocean published a blog post that, in poignant detail, recounted the story of his first real love, a man. The story was welcomed by fans with mostly open arms but in a weird twist, Ocean's story also ended up as ammunition for Le1f's haters. "See What Frank Ocean Started?: Gay Rapper Le1f 'Wut' Music Video," read black culture blog Bossip's headline. "This Is What Happens When Rappers Start Admitting Their Gay? Hip-Hop Artist Le1f--Wut," said grammar-challenged World Star Hip Hop. Despite the fact that Ocean is not a rapper and gay hip-hop existed long before him, the Internet asked for the zillionth time whether homosexuality would ever be accepted in the genre--and again, nobody had any answers.
On a recent afternoon in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, Le1f, born Khalif Diouf (a Senegalese Wolof last name, pronounced "Joof"), pondered World Star Hip Hop's choice of words over a plate of spinach white pizza. Dressed in a simple black T-shirt and shorts, the 6'3"...