More Black Superheroes: Westside Boogie and the Dismantling of Invincible Blackness

Westside Boogie and the Dismantling of Invincible Blackness; How one Compton rapper’s album rewrites the narrative of Black fatherhood, mental health, and what we celebrate during Black History Month

There’s a particular kind of violence in being asked to save the world when you’re still trying to save yourself. Westside Boogie understands this intimately. His 2024 album No More Black Superheroes functions as both confession and manifesto, a 12-track meditation on what happens when Black men, particularly Black fathers, refuse the cape society insists they wear. In an era where Black History Month often lionizes superhuman resilience, Boogie offers something more subversive: permission to be ordinarily, messily human.

The album’s title alone indicates an entire cultural mythology. For generations, Black masculinity has existed in a false binary either the absent father or the bulletproof provider, the deadbeat or the deity, failure or fortress. Psychologist Dr. William Cross’s theory of nigrescence describes this burden as “imposed reference group orientation,” where Black identity becomes refracted through white supremacist expectations. Black men don’t just carry their own stories; they carry the weight of representation itself. On “LOLSMH pt.2,” Boogie raps with the exhaustion of someone who’s discovered that being “strong” often means suffering in silence: “They want me to be everything I’m not equipped to be.” This isn’t just personal struggle, it's structural suffocation dressed up as aspiration.

Dr. Joy DeGruy’s concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome illuminates how these expectations compound across generations. The superhero mythology isn’t benign; it’s a coping mechanism calcified into cultural norm. During chattel slavery, emotional stoicism became a survival strategy. In Jim Crow America, vulnerability could get you killed. By the crack epidemic and mass incarceration era, Black fathers who stayed became mythologized precisely because the system worked so efficiently to remove them. Boogie inherited this history, and on tracks like “PROUD OF ME NOW,” he excavates the father-son wound with surgical precision. The song isn't to blame! it mourns. It asks: what does a man teach his son about manhood when he’s still learning to be whole himself?

This is where Boogie’s project transcends autobiography and becomes public health intervention. According to the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, Black men are 20% more likely to report serious psychological distress than white men, yet half as likely to seek treatment. The superhero complex isn’t just metaphor it’s a mental health crisis with a body count. On “STUCK,” Boogie describes the paralysis of depression with the clarity of someone who’s lived inside it: “Same thoughts, different day, I’m stuck.” But he doesn’t perform recovery. He doesn’t offer redemption arcs or tidy resolutions. Instead, he models something revolutionary: the honesty of still struggling.

Black feminist scholar bell hooks wrote extensively about how patriarchy damages Black men by demanding they abandon emotional complexity. In The Will to Change, she argues that men’s liberation requires rejecting the very definitions of manhood that promise power. Boogie’s album operationalizes this theory in Compton vernacular. On “WINDOWS DOWN,” he raps about therapy, about breaking down in front of his daughter, about the terror of replicating trauma. These admissions aren’t confessional rap as spectacle they’re modeling. When a Black father admits he doesn’t have all the answers, when he names his anxiety and his fear, he doesn’t diminish his manhood. He expands the definition of what Black fatherhood can hold.

The album’s sonic architecture reinforces this vulnerability. Producer credits include Boi-1da, Jahaan Sweet, and DJ Dahi architects of West Coast introspection who understand that minimalism can hit harder than bombast. Tracks frequently strip down to sparse drums and melancholic piano, forcing Boogie’s voice to carry the emotional weight without sonic armor. This production choice mirrors the thematic work: less performance, more presence. In “CAN’T EVEN LIE,” the beat almost disappears during the second verse, leaving Boogie’s voice nearly a cappella as he admits to imposter syndrome. The vulnerability isn’t background it’s the entire point.

What does it mean to be strong?

Sociologist Michael Kimmel’s work on masculinity illuminates what Boogie is actually dismantling. In Guyland, Kimmel describes the “Guy Code” , the unwritten rules that police male behavior through shame and exclusion. Black men navigate these rules while simultaneously managing what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “double consciousness” seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that rarely extends full humanity. Boogie’s refusal of the superhero narrative is therefore doubly transgressive. He’s rejecting both toxic masculinity’s emotional straightjacket and respectability politics’ demand that Black pain stay dignified and digestible.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel’s work on masculinity illuminates what Boogie is actually dismantling. In Guyland, Kimmel describes the “Guy Code” , the unwritten rules that police male behavior through shame and exclusion. Black men navigate these rules while simultaneously managing what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “double consciousness” seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that rarely extends full humanity. Boogie’s refusal of the superhero narrative is therefore doubly transgressive. He’s rejecting both toxic masculinity’s emotional straightjacket and respectability politics’ demand that Black pain stay dignified and digestible.

“MOMMA KNOWS” crystallizes this resistance. The track centers maternal witnessing the mothers, partners, and daughters who’ve watched Black men crumble under the weight of unspoken expectations. Boogie doesn’t position women as saviors or as problems to solve. Instead, he acknowledges them as the ones who’ve seen him whole, broken and healing, failing and trying. This isn’t the tired “behind every strong man” narrative. It’s an admission that strength itself is the wrong metric. His daughter appears throughout the album not as motivation for traditional success, but as the reason he’s choosing the harder work of emotional honesty. The inheritance he wants to pass down isn’t money or status it’s the permission to hurt and heal out loud.

This Black History Month, we’re at an inflection point. We can continue celebrating Black excellence as superhuman achievement, or we can expand our definition of what deserves commemoration. Boogie’s album suggests that the most radical thing a Black father can do in 2026 is admit he’s human! anxious, depressed, uncertain, and still showing up. Not as a provider-deity, but as a person. Not invulnerable, but present.

More Black Superheroes don't offer easy answers because none exist. But it does something more important: it creates permission. Permission to struggle publicly. Permission to seek help. Permission to redefine Black fatherhood as emotional labor, not just financial provision. In retiring the cape, Boogie doesn’t diminish Black manhood—he finally allows it to breathe.

The revolution won’t be a man who saves everyone. It’ll be a man who finally admits he needs saving too.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​