To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
to enter this dialogue; it examines the aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic evolution of hip hop from its inception in the South Bronx to the present era of distinctly regional sub-divisions and styles. Back when I was a word-scribbling acolyte trying to make subject and verb agree, I was given the age-old advise to “write what you know.” And what I knew was hip hop. The first words I ever wrote seriously were rhymes—material for my stalled adolescent career as South Queens’s own MC Trate, the self-professed Freestyle King. My first conscious goal when I started writing essays was to sound on a page the way Chuck D sounded on a record. This book reflects my particular relationship to the art form. Although I’ve heard and dug hip hop in all its multi-regional diversity, I am, at my core, an old-school East Coast cat—a reality that the reader will likely note in these pages.
My sincerest hope is that this book remains true to the art form that first introduced me to creative genius. In the years since the movie Brown Sugar premiered, it has become cliché to ask When did you fall in love with hip hop? But the question still warrants a response. My answer is this: from the first second I heard the first rhyme delivered over the first break beat. I loved it from the time I was a heavy-lidded ten-year-old struggling to stay up to 2 A.M. to tape The Mr. Magic Show on WHBI to my present standing as a man just old enough to begin idealizing his youth. To cop a line from Common, I used to love her. And twenty-five years after that first blessed encounter, despite numberless frustrations with what she has become, I still do.
1
The Roots
It begins with the words: mic check. The MC counts it off, one, two, one, two, before running down his pedigree: I go by the name of the one MC Lingo of the mighty Black Ops and we came here tonight to get y’all open … In the MC’s ritual, the next task is the demographic survey—Is Brooklyn in the house?—even though he knows the answer; always knew the answer ’cause the answer is always the same. Brooklyn is as ubiquitous as bad luck. There’s a cat behind him on the ones and twos; his head cocked to the left, headphones cradled between ear and shoulder. He has the fingertips of his left hand resting on a 12” instrumental, the right on the cross-fader. His MC gets four bars to drop it a capella, after that he comes behind him with Michael Viner’s Apache. A measure beforehand, he’ll idle with some prelim scratches to let the crowd know what’s coming next. And if his boy got skills enough, if the verbal game is tight enough, that right there will be the kinetic moment, that blessed split-second when beat meets rhyme. The essence of hip hop. Come incorrectly, though, and the heads in attendance will let you know that too. In hip hop, subtlety is considered a character flaw. In hip hop, it is a moral wrong to allow a wack MC to exist unaware of his own wackness. The DJ hits with the track, the MC wraps his tongue around a labyrinth of syllables, and don’t have to chase his breath. We came here tonight to get y’all open … He knows when it’s done correctly because the heads start to nod in affirmation.
ORIGINS OF THE BOOM BAP
For those still concerned with the terms laid down by Webster, art is defined as this: 1. Conscious arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movement, or other elements in a way that affects the aesthetic sense: 2. A specific skill in adept performance, held to require the exercise of intuitive faculties: 3. Production of the beautiful. The MC, despite the grumblings of various antique-aged gripers, is a modern incarnation of the black verbal artist, whose lineage runs way back to the black preacher, the bluesman, and the boulevard griot. Some critics, detractors, and, in the tongue of the boulevard, haters, would have it that hip hop fell from the sky—untouched by any preceding black art form. We’re to believe that the backward sex politics, the materialism, the violence that characterize some hip hop are unique products of post-civil rights black culture and that the art—if it can even be called that—bears no resemblance to the now-classic forms of jazz and blues. We hear such nonsensical claims from artists like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, who, as jazz and blues heads, know better—or really ought to.
Their music began in the gutter. The sounds rumbled up from the terrorized Delta topsoil and the people the color of it, the music of the bayou ho’ houses now gone Lincoln-Center respectable. Rock and roll, now enshrined as a sacrament of the boomer generation, derived its name from the black street-corner terminology for sex. And hip hop grows from that same seed, germinating in those same urinated alleys, only nine hundred miles further north. The hood, the barrio, the broken precincts of the city breathed life into hip hop in the 1970s, but from top to bottom, the music was in communion with older principles not only in terms of its politics, but also its aesthetics.
For the unschooled, the concept that hip hop even has an aesthetic is alien; that there is a sonic distinction between the great MC and his wack counterpart is lost on most of the consuming public and the genre’s detractors alike. Because hip hop is discussed most often on the level of commerce and politics, but rarely on the level of art, it’s easy to miss the fact that the form has its own aesthetic, its own standards and measures—this aesthetic is idiosyncratic and unique, but is also built on earlier forms. At its core, hip hop’s aesthetic contains three components: music, or “beats,” lyrics, and “flow”—or the specific way in which beats and lyrics are combined.
The heart of the art of hip hop is how the MC does what he does—the specific catalog of trade trickery he uses to get his people open. And just as the MC is at the center of hip hop, his tools—verbal craft, articulation, improvisation—are at the center of black cultures. The pedigree runs deep. It connects that dreadlocked, mic-gripping orator to the tradition of black verbal gamesmanship that starts with the black preacher, whom Du Bois reckoned with in Souls of Black Folk as “the most unique personality created by the Negro on American soil.” Zora Neale Hurston identified the preacher as the first black artist in America, the poet who made helped make the absurd world intelligible.
Our preachers are talented men even though many of them are barely literate. The masses do not read literature, do not visit theaters, nor museums of the fine arts. The preacher must satisfy their beauty-hunger himself. He must be a poet and an actor and possess a body and a voice … It is not admitted as such by our “classes.” Only James Weldon Johnson and I give it praise. It is utterly scorned by the “Niggerati.” But the truth is, the greatest poets among us are in our pulpits and the greatest poetry has come out of them. It is merely not set down. It passes from mouth to mouth as in the days of Homer.
James Baldwin, boy preacher emeritus, copped his long, elegant, multi-claused sentence style from the oracular rhythms of the black church and broke this down for all posterity when he said:
The Black preacher, since the church was the only Civilized institution that we were permitted—separately—to enter, was our first warrior, terrorist, or guerrilla. He said that freedom was real—that we were real. He told us that trouble don’t last always. He told us that our children and elders were sacred, when the Civilized were spitting on them and hacking them to pieces, in the name of God and in order to keep on making money.
Recognize that the African, stolen and shackled, scorned and rejected, was dropped into a textual culture from an oral tradition where articulation was paramount. Circumstance and eight weeks on the Atlantic had placed the inheritors of highly inflective West African tongues into an environment of linguistic hostility. Not only were their indigenous languages derided and outlawed, but the very nature of the creole English they spoke was cited as a mark of inferiority. And it is unspeakably difficult to be a poet in a language that is hostile to your existence. Even more, one can only speculate at the vast ideas and shades of meaning that the newly enslaved could find no way to express in the slave-master’s vocabulary. The old maxim teaches that “art is a technique of communication,” but the converse also holds true. It was for this reason that the black preacher, the only individual granted even limited vocal carte blanche, would emerge also as the ancestral black artist.
And given that relationship to the spoken word, literacy could easily be secondary in the preacher’s art. Articulation in a foreign tongue—one that was learned in bondage and taught solely as a means of conveying orders—is in and of itself a form of mastery. A slave exists to obey commands, but only a human commands language. American law