Lolita the Rapper

The rapper Twista has a new song out, entitled “Wetter.” It’s a chart topper and thus a perennial audio fixture in radios across the nation. That certainly, I regretfully assure you, does not exclude our wing and the dozens of homemade speakers housed herein.

The chorus of the song features the voice of innocence itself, ensconced in what must be the doe-est of doe-eyed young sirens. In a thirsty coo, she sings, “can you be my daddy, my daddy, my daddy? Cuz I need a daddy, a daddy, a daddy!”

Day in and day out, for the past month, I’ve heard this ripple out of a dozen nearby radios. Finally, yesterday, I realized something…Namely in a stunning, trans-genre resurrection; Nabokov’s Lolita has been reborn as a singer!

Seriously, is it not the very same dynamic: a rap song by a relatively grizzled old rapper, about explicit sex with the refrain cooed by what must be the youngest sounding, pleading soprano voice I’ve ever heard.

Yet paradoxically, Nabokov’s Lolita is rejected out of hand by many of the style-deaf, pseudo-intellectuals here in prison (and caused quite an uproar out there in the “free” world way back when), at the same time that the song “Wetter” again plays on their radios.

Contradictions, however, cannot exist, so the answer to this riddle must then lie in the distinction between the genres, the cultures or both.