To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
white people. With his murals, Rivera fashioned a vision of the outsized humanity pulsing within the common Mexican laborer. To cut to the quick, what the world needs now is a rapper who can do for the common man and woman verbally what Diego Rivera was able to do with a paint brush and a blank wall.
GROWN FOLK BUSINESS
I pointed out earlier that the “Baaad Nigger” of the blues tradition was reincarnated as the “Real Nigga” of hip hop lore. The blues trickster, on the other hand, descends in hip hop to the playa-pimp, a character who occupies the improvised crossroads of the street corner. He contains the contradiction of male violence while coiffed and primped to the feminine extremes and uses his verbal cunning to literally persuade his stable to do tricks. But the similarity between the two genres on the level of character and archetype does not end with men. Look closely and you find the tradition of the blues woman remixed and replayed in the work of the MC; women whose births were separated by the better part of a century, but who whose work nonetheless bears a family resemblance.
Blues articulated that feeling of running up against the jagged and splintered realities of life, and the specific twists that those realities held for women who were hemmed in by both their race and their gender. Whether in the boll-weevil stricken soils of the South or the stone and steel depots that the Great Migration had delivered them to, the blues woman spoke of life distilled to the polarities of pain and pleasure, worry, and bravado: The rent note that comes due and the shiftless man with nothing to put toward it. The respite of sexual release and the jealous drive to hold onto what is yours. The major concerns with one’s material needs and ones sexuality that find themselves entwined within the music.
The historian Darlene Clark Hine, explained that phenomenon when she wrote women who migrated north and became occasional prostitutes “were extracting value from the only thing society allowed them to sell.” Sara Brooks, a black domestic who migrated from Alabama to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1930s, pointed to this reality when she said that some women “meet a man and if he promises them four or five dollars to go to bed, they’s grab it. That’s called sellin’ your own body, and I wasn’t raised like that.” But as Hine argued, “As long as they occupied an enforced subordinate position within American society, this ‘sellin’ your own body,’ was, I submit, Rape.”
James Baldwin spoke the truth when he said that “Mama has to feed her children and on one level, she really cannot afford to care how she does it.” And it was equally true that this self-perpetuating circumstance played into the prevailing ideas that weighed on black women in the first place. The historian Deborah White spoke of that body of myths, sown in the soil of slavery, to justify the sexual exploitation of black women:
One of the most prevalent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by libido, a Jezebel character. In every way, Jezebel was the counter-image of the nineteenth century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh.
A loose woman, a sharp-tongue, and a temptress of the type that caused bureaucrats, respectable race folk, and sociologists to wring their hands for an entire century. So it is up against the backdrop of this skewed vision of reality that blues provided women with an arena in which they could articulate life as they saw, experienced, and understood it. The music allowed black women to flip the script and speak of pleasure on their own terms. Such concerns had to be placed in the foreground before Mary Dixon could record a song like “All Around Mama,” where the vocalist explains the talents and shortcomings of her past lovers.
I met a man, he was a jockey Did the things he should Always ready, that’s the reason He could ride so good.
Dixon could have compared notes with Lil’ Kim, whose “How Many Licks?” contrasts the coital skills of men of different races:
Had a Puerto Rican Papi, used to be a deacon But now he be sucking me off on the weekend.
Blues was the only forum in 1939 in which Ida Cox could’ve thrown down the gauntlet as she did in “One Hour Mama,” a bold-print statement of her sexual prerequisites:
I don’t want no imitation My requirements ain’t no joke ’cause I’ve got pure indignation for a guy what’s lost his stroke.
Lest there be any confusion, the chorus added:
I’m a one hour mama So no one minute papa Ain’t the kind of man for me.
In Shakespearean terms, there is no new thing beneath the sun; but in this context that observation could be stretched to include between the sheets. “One Minute Man,” the 2001 collaboration between Missy Elliott and Trina, expressed a sentiment virtually identical to what Ida Cox had put down sixty-two years earlier.
I see you talk a good game and you play hard But if I put this thing on you, can you stay hard? If not, you better keep your day job.
And here the chorus announces in identical fashion:
I don’t want, I don’t need I can’t stand no minute man.
The poet and blues critic Larry Neal argued that the “disproportionate” concern with the sex act in the blues was a product of commercial influences on the genre—that its discussion of sex grew in direct proportion to the size of the audience willing to pay for that content and record companies’ demands for more of the same. That statement explains the hypersexuality that came to be a standard feature of commercially supported female hip hop artists in the mid 1990s. The difference being that within blues, sexuality was generally couched in clever, if thin, metaphors. Hip hop allowed for women to state in unambiguous adjectives the realities of sex. Missy Elliott, for instance, leaves no room for the misconception that she is referring to anything feline when she sings “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now.”
Sexually suggestive lyricism was not the level on which blues women and female rappers share a thematic relationship. The earliest critics of hip hop decried the violence associated with the music and articulated with in it lyrics. But hip hop’s threats to bodily harm—particularly those issued by women artists—echo the traditions of its ancestor music. The murder of an unfaithful lover is the blues staple. Skip James’ threat that
If I send for my baby and she don’t come If I send for my baby and she don’t come All the doctors in Wisconsin, they won’t help her none
was not an isolated sentiment. But for every man with a blood grudge against his woman, there was a woman singing:
Someone stole my man So I’m going looking for him With a .44 in my hand.
In “Carbolic Acid Blues,” recorded in 1928, we witness the common theme of violence between rivals for a man’s affections.
I told her I loved her man, grave will be her restin’ place I told her I loved her man, grave will be her restin’ place She looked at me with burnin’ eyes, threw carbolic acid in my face.
Those same sentiments were present within hip hop, dating as far back as the 1980s pop confections like Salt-N-Pepa’s “I’ll Take Your Man.” This is not to say that the later artists were derivative or dependent upon blues for material—in most instances, the parallels were unspoken and unplanned. Rather, the point is that hip hop exists as a kindred part of the tradition that also informed the blues and that the women within both genres are, on some level, responding to dynamics that have transcended the years that separate them. The obvious distinction, however, is that female artists were far more widely recognized and influential within the blues than they were in hip hop. Ma Rainey’s title of the “Mother of the Blues” may have come into existence as a handle conjured up in the marketing department at Paramount Records, but it wasn’t inaccurate. Hip hop, like the Christian Trinity, has bestowed the title of “Father” upon Kool Herc, but there is no mention of the maternal role. That is to say that three decades after its creation, the “Mother of Hip Hop” is a vacant post.