By X. Malcolm
Bill suggested I wrote a post on how we get from gospel music such as Richard Smallwood’s uplifting Total Praise, to the uncompromising lowness of this gem (lyrics) by West Coast rappers 2 Live Crew? What is the bridge, if any, between ‘I will lift mine eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121) to ‘Put your lips on my dick, and suck my asshole too’?
I think the whole story would be a long story, and might not be the true story, which would include the engagement between high and low culture, the history of jazz and popular music in America in the twentieth century, and the troubled relationship between African and Western musical culture. That would be too much. But I will have a stab at part of the story, as follows.
The story of rap begins with two men, in my view. The first is uncontroversial: the music of James Brown has its roots in the late 40s and early 50s, when jazz, originally a popular genre, split into a high and a low form. The high was the ‘bop’ and ‘cool’ style which emerged in the mid-1940s: a musician’s music, played at an impossible tempo, with strange harmonic intervals. Opus de bop by Stan Getz (a white musician) gives you a good sense of the type. It was music to sit and listen too, as in a concert hall. It was highbrow, it was not dance, and it had little popular appeal.
The low form was Rhythm and Blues. It is generally agreed that the genre begins with ‘Flying Home’ by Lionel Hampton (1942). Here is a superb reconstruction by Spike Lee of how the number might have gone down at the Roseland Ballroom in the 1940s, in his film biography of Malcolm X. Listen out for the solo by Illinois Jacquet (0:53), the kind of honking tenor that became a staple of R&B, such as in Brown’s Chonnie Oh Chon (1957, Cleveland Lowe on tenor).
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Georgia, after meeting Bobby Byrd, who had formed a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters. Brown had wanted to be a preacher, fascinated by the power of the preacher over his audience, and by the flamboyance and pageantry of preachers like Sweet Daddy Grace of the United House of Prayer. Here he is playing the part in John Landis’ incomparable The Blues Brothers (1980). The hymn is ‘Let Us Go Back to the Old Landmark’, by W. Herbert Brewster. ‘Let us kneel in prayer in the old time way’. Here is a less breathless version by Clara Ward.
It is well known that Brown’s music had an influence on rap, although this was more because of the killer grooves of backing drummers such as Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks. Here is Starks explaining the art of the slippery beat and the ghost note, also Clyde. Beats such as Funky Drummer (1970) were the basis of nearly all rap beat, and Brown’s work is recognised as the most sampled in hip-hop. This is well-known, I shall pass over it for now. But his style of singing (or shouting, or speaking) was also important: what Smitherman calls the songified quality of the political raps of Stokely Carmichael and especially of the ‘preaching-lecturing’ of Martin Luther King. Listen to King’s famous speech on August 28 1963, where he takes off on a middle C, drops to a B then back to C then D and then takes a long flight ending in Isaiah 40:4 ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low’.
In using the semantics of tone, the voice is employed like a musical instrument with improvisation, riffs, and all kinds of playing between the notes. This rhythmic pattern becomes a kind of acoustical phonetic alphabet and gives black speech its songified or musical quality. (Talkin and Testifyin, The Language of Black America by Geneva Smitherman, 134—35)
King’s speech was at the March on Washington, when demonstrators such as Joan Baez sang negro spirituals like ‘We Shall Overcome’. (Baez is of Mexican extraction on her father's side and is a sort of vicariously oppressed person).
The second influence is Malcolm X, who did not like ‘We Shall Overcome’ at all. ‘Any time you live in the 20th century and you start walking around singing ‘We shall Overcome’, the government has failed us’. His ideology hung on two points: black separatism and black identity. The first was negative: complete separation of blacks from whites, a separate homeland for blacks, and none of this God’s children joining hands singing ‘free at last’, etc.
He thought MLK and other civil rights leaders were stooges of the white establishment, and his story of the field and the house negro is a sort of parable for their relation to the white power structure. The house Negro lived in the house, ‘close to his master’. He dressed like the master, ate the master’s food, and identified with the master. ‘So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself’, using the word ‘we’ to mean the master, and other house negroes. But the masses were the field negroes. ‘When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die’. Why were so many black people excited about a march on Washington, ‘run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive?’
He rejected the religious basis of Western culture, joining the Nation of Islam in the 1940s, and changing his surname to ‘X’ from his birth name which ‘the white slavemaster’ had imposed upon his forebears. He never spoke much about music, but he would have surely rejected the symphonic Western style of Smallwood’s introduction to the gospel song as the child of a house negro. Recall that the moment of Jake’s ultimate conversion is not prompted by black music, but by a short overlay written by Elmer Bernstein in the classical idiom. ‘At one moment I needed God to touch John Belushi’, said Landis. God touches man not in the African genre of dancing and shouting but through the harmonic complexity of the western tradition? According to Malcolm, when a black man is is bragging about being a Christian, ‘he's bragging that he's a white man, or he wants to be white .. in their songs and the things they sing in church, they show that they have a greater desire to be white than anything else’.
Unlike King he rejected nonviolent civil disobedience, saying that black people were entitled to defend themselves ‘in the face of the horrific assaults and murders that black people faced on a daily basis’. ‘Bleeding should be done equally on both sides’. At one time, he espoused a form of black racism, in a sort of Manichean worldview that viewed white people as devils, with black people as the original humans. ‘Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage.’
His positive ideas on black identity were less clear given, as he freely admitted, that black identity had been obliterated by slavery. ‘A people without history is like a tree without roots’. To be sure, there was the identity moulded by the idiom of jazz, but this had its origins in the ‘jungle’ music of the Cotton Club. The growling trumpet of Cootie Williams is distinctive of Ellington, but it is set to scantily clad light skinned African American girl dancers apparently transported from some jungle tribe. X sought a different identity, locating it the civilisation of Egypt.
Many of his ideas were taken up by the rappers in the 1980s. The first is easy to overlook. Malcolm complained that singing was the problem of black politics. ‘This is part of what’s wrong with you – you do too much singing’. Right. Songs are just bad poems. ‘Take the music away and what you’re left with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpy syllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors,’ claims poet Simon Armitage. Rap ended that. Speech introduces a different character to music. It commands your attention, invites you to consider its meaning. The rapper is not singing to you, he is telling you something, in the manner of an aggressively young black male.
Here are rappers Public Enemy with Too black, too strong, which is to say, black coffee is strong, but only becomes weak if it is ‘integrated’ with cream. Listen out for Clyde Stubblefield’s groove 1:07. Rapper KRS-One developed a sort of rap manifesto. Like Malcolm, he recognised that civil rights is not designed to solve the problem of racism, and that rap involves ‘rethinking what you think is normal, by rethinking society’. Rappers rejected the integration that was fundamental to the golden years of American popular music. Paul Robeson sang ‘Old Man River’, written by Jerome Kern. Billy Holiday sung ‘Strange Fruit’, written by Abel Meeropol. The embrace of violence is essential to the rap of the late 1980s, but I shall discuss this later.
Thus the elements of the genre as I see them are (1) a repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield (2) the use of speech rather than song, (3) the attitude of the genre, reflected in its aggressive style of delivery, and (4) the political position of the genre, particularly the ideas of Malcolm X. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else?
(Minor edits by BV)
Addendum by BV (12/11/17)
Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.
