Deciphering Jourden’s “The $triker”
On a single that opens with a cry for help on a Brooklyn corner, the rapper narrates her own drugging and knife-in-the-back escape, then spends four spoken lines admitting she only imagined it.
Before the stranger arrives, “The $triker” dedicates the first verse to what the narrator is not. Not a life as a painter—ending she already know to be grim—and definitely not one of the bragging art students at Pratt, a block away—Jourden would “prefer not to join them,” anyway. Outside Kum Kau, corner of Washington and Myrtle, the self-portrait is completed before the stranger has arrived at all.
Approaching the striker, she’s already taken on the role. “With a spunk only a jackoff could decipher,” the narrator bets her voice has the “velocity to crack open a can of worms.” At the same time, she concedes that her facade needs work—the “guise” must “disguise the fear that I was holding.” A little lie to begin the interaction: requesting a pass. “What’s the rush for hell, angel?” he asks, and the implied danger in his voice passes over in his laugh. The reason why the narrator is there begins to slip out of her mind, “Surreal like Dal, the clock it melted fast.”
In the second verse, the switch is instant. From “We got to talking, then got to walking, he got to sparking/The smoke, it hit me, I got to coughing,” we go from conversation to the first bad clue, a jump signaled by the repetition of a single rhyme. Her clue is a borrowed hook. When he “passed the dutchie, pon the left hand side,” the patois seamlessly incorporates “Pass the Dutchie” into the very moment that things begin to go sour, when the spliff “ja made me crazy na bomboclat.” Her feet give out, they “betrayed me like I stole somebody’s shoes,” and for what the narrator cannot envision on her own, she uses “Get Out,” screaming soundlessly in the sunken place.
“Ring ding dong” and “Ready for your lessons and your medicine” are instructions with concrete implications. The medicine is in the room. The narrator wakes up “connected to an intravenous drip and strapped up like a loon,” spitting out the strap with the certainty it will “take Jesus Christ to resurrect me out this tomb.” Panicked, her bargain rhymes grow tighter as her situation escalates. “I promise Jesus,” she claims, “I’ll be the bestest and the goodest girl that you ever had”—a nun, an organizer of charitable works, anyone but “the girl who got killed up in the slums.” The escape, however, lies with her. When the captor “busted through the door like The Flash,” she saw an opportunity to grab, ducks his charge, stabs him in the back, and speeds out.
The final spoken outro ties it together: “I just wanna think about the instance/Of what would actually happen, you know/If I did go and take it there that one night.” The knife and the locked room had been merely a situation she had been working through. With the abduction withdrawn, she returns to her starting point, on the corner outside Kum Kau, figuring out how bad things could have been that night.