To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
Blues lyrics may change over time, but only in the way that all oral literature is revised according to the failings or embellishments of individual memory. So the blues musician can sing the same lyrics a hundred times while never singing the same song twice.
In the arena of hip hop, the instrumentalist and lyricist are completely distinct; rappers don’t spin records, DJs don’t rap—and even if they did, no one could excel at both simultaneously. The rapper as an artist owes his existence to the fact that DJs couldn’t flow verbally while spinning records. On the basic level, a Master of Ceremonies is simply a host; in the beginning, the MC was the entertainer charged with keeping the crowd amped for the real performer—the DJ. The earliest of hip hop turn-tablists built their reps by their ability to shoot game over the mic, incite crowd participation, and shout out simple couplets. In short, order, though, DJs like Grand Master Flash, Grand Master Caz, and Kool Herc began outsourcing their rap to hired vocalists, or as they came to be called in the trade, rappers. Flash charted this development precisely:
I was like totally wack on the mic. I knew that I was not going to be an MC, so I had to find someone able to put a vocal entertainment on top of [my] rearrangement of the music. After so many people tried, the only person that really passed the test—and I think he was one of my lifesavers, with his technique—was Keith Wiggins, who, God rest his soul, has passed. His name was Cowboy. Cowboy found a way to allow me to do my thing and have the people really, really rocking, you know? So we were the perfect combination for some time.
The MC has far less control over what is happening musically than any other vocalist and thus his only resort in creating something new is in the uniqueness of his flow and lyrical content. Otherwise, four rappers reciting the same lyrics over the same track will sound distinct from each other, but qualitatively far more similar to each other than four jazz musicians playing the same arrangement or four blues singers with the same song. But hip hop does possess a canon of standards: the instrumentals and beats.
In early hip hop we witness black music stripped down to its most fundamental and ancient elements: vocals and percussion. Early critics of the music—some of them black—disregarded hip hop for its allegedly elementary approach to music, where harmony was often an afterthought. But that kind of perspective missed the point entirely—the sound was elemental, not elementary. And the only thing required for the rapper to break it down was a percussive statement whether it be programmed into an electronic beatbox or improvised by a human beat-box. Critics who missed that point found themselves re-mouthing aged platitudes. As Baraka observed in Blues People:
The most apparent survivals of African music in Afro-American music are its rhythms: not only the seeming emphasis in the African music on rhythmic rather than melodic or harmonic qualities, but also the use of polyphonic or contrapuntal effects. Because of this seeming neglect of harmony and melody, Westerners thought the music “primitive.” It did not occur to them that Africans might have looked askance at a music as vapid rhythmically as the West’s.
Here is the drum—the one instrument expressly forbidden by the antebellum slavocracy—now reinstated as literally the only instrument needed for hip hop. Here is the Gospel of Sly Stone: all we need is a drummer. Rappers from time immemorial have been ripping mics to disassembled snippets or instrumentals of “Apache,” “Big Beat,” “Good Times,” or “Impeach the President.” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” has been stripped apart like a six series Benz in the neighborhood chop shop and farmed out to a dozens of would-be producers, but the number of rappers to freestyle over that particular instrumental tilts toward the multiple thousands. In hip hop, the constant is the beat, the variable is both the lyricist’s flow and his ability to conjure up a completely different array of themes and punchlines to accompany that beat. Where the singer of blues standards wants to keep the same lyrics as a means of establishing his unique stylings, the rapper wants to do just the opposite—and thus is mandated to eternally dis the biter of rhymes.
In both hip hop and blues we encounter the vocalist as the alter ego of the artist complete with the adoption of a nom de mic—the kind of artistic pseudonym that has its roots in the blues tradition. Nobody’s mama named their boy Redman, Jay-Z, or Biggie, but neither did anyone come into this world with a tag like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, or Leadbelly. But there is a distinction even inside this parallel. The two musics have different relationships to the characters they create; the blues musician can sing about evil, but is not necessarily expected to live that way. His use of the first person is as a metaphor for the collective or as a storytelling technique equal to the novel written from the perspective of the protagonist.
Among the zero-sum hustlers of hip hop inc., the credo of “keeping it real” reigns supreme and gives birth to the ever-present contempt for the rapper ain’t live it the way he spoke it. “Real” is to the rap industry as “All-Natural” is to fast food supplier, as “New and Improved” is to the ad agency, as “I Solemnly Swear” is to the politician. Witness Jay-Z’s assault upon his cross-borough nemesis Nas on “The Takeover”:
Nigga, you ain’t live it you witnessed it from your folks’ pad scribbled in your notepad created your life.
But hip hop’s numb insistence upon “reality” misses the fact that the artist’s task is to understand and interpret the whole world—even those realities that are not his or her own. The demand that there be minimal space between word and deed is ultimately equivalent to demanding that De Niro remain in character as young Don Corleone into the infinite future. Talib Kweli was wise to this angle as well, but few in the mass of MCs were prepared to wrestle with what he put down on “Respiration”:
It’s a paradox we call reality So keeping it real will make you a casualty Of abnormal normality.
But abnormal or not, the rapper, unlike the blues artist, is pressured to adapt (or adopt) his fictive persona in real life. The rapper is judged by a different standard—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the roots, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms.
Hip hop is clearly indebted to the blues in terms of its reigning iconography. In hip hop we have the reconstituted trickster—in the absence of the his ironic worldview, or what we might say is the trickster sans tricksterism. Even as the music allows room for tricksterish characters like Ol’ Dirty Bastard—alias Big Baby Jesus, alias Dirt McGirt—Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000, and Flavor Flav, its perspective is most often materialist and as literal as a fundamentalist. The trickster is secondary in hip hop; in this arena the boulevard ’hood—at least since the inception of Tupac’s ghetto ontology “thug life”—has reigned supreme. And the lauded Thug Icon is nothing if not the remix version of the blues’ Baaad Nigger archetype. Whereas the Baaad Nigger and the trickster exist as parallel types in the blues, the thug alone has become the patron deity of hip hop: St. Roughneck. Faced with the asphalt bleakness of this world, stripped of the existentialist irony that we see in blues, the result is a perspective that despises weakness, the weak, and everything associated with them.
Whatever else it might be, hip hop is not generally a music of sympathy for the dispossessed. This is a genre that has come to be dominated by a brand of boulevard Darwinism. And on this last point, all distinctions of style, region, and flavor start breaking down. Look close enough at the righteous rage prophets Public Enemy and the Ghericurled gangsta villainy of NWA, circa Straight Outta Compton, and what you get is two contrasting images of the same thing: the cult of the Indestructible Nigga. For all their moral indignation and pro-black advocacy, the closest P.E. came to crafting a song sympathetic to the lost and the least was “She Watch Channel Zero”—a moralistic screed about an underachieving soap opera-addicted woman that could’ve found favor with the Republican National Committee. And in the NWA universe, weakness or loss was a moral felony. The hustler’s way is to despise the very addicts he helps to create, and in hip hop the hustler’s ethic has come to reign supreme. The damage done by this ethic is widespread, but perhaps nowhere as devastating as in rap’s treatment of women. There is, for example, no parallel infamy in popular music to hip hop’s so-called bitch-nigga—a category that combines the two worst race and gender epithets into a toxic new whole.