Category: Music

By X. Malcolm. Trigger Warning! Not for snowflakes. Second in a series on the degeneration of black music. Part I here.

In part I, I summarised the elements of the rap genre as I see them, in particular how it seems to be influenced by Malcolm X’s brand of identity politics. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else?

In trying to assess the genre, I shall ignore the first two, namely repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield, and the use of speech rather than song. One is simply a musical style: nuanced repetition is the stock in trade of composers such as Philip Glass, and speech song or Sprechgesang is a technique long practised in the classical tradition and a significant part of the canon. This is style, it could reasonably be argued that style is a matter of taste, and I shall not quarrel with taste.

The third and the fourth are peculiar to rap. One is an aggressive style of delivery in the language of the streets, the other is broadly anchored in the politics of Malcolm X. I say ‘broadly’, for if a  position is a political ideology, then it must as such possess  some form of internal consistency or coherence. The assumptions behind it do not have to be true, but they must be consistent. If we say that the agenda of black politics should be set by radical organizations that advocate armed self-defence against the police, this is a version of the just war doctrine, which sees violence as sometimes morally justified under certain circumstances, and it is perfectly consistent.

The problem with rap is the lack of such internal consistency.

Take money. Most ideologies have a view on it, e.g. love of it is the root of all evil. Now the wealth that rappers have made from their craft is legendary. The net worth of Jay Z is currently estimated at $600m, of Dr Dre at $750m. This equals long-established performers like Madonna $800m, McCartney $660m. Their wealth is ostentatious: the typical rapper’s mansion might be worth $20m, 25,000 sq ft, with 15 bathrooms, perhaps a theatre or helipad, in one case a private night club. Is that wrong? No, it is patronising to criticise members of a poor and oppressed class for escaping poverty and oppression. ‘Middle finger to you hatin’ niggas, That hate to see a nigga do his thing’.

But the rap is all boast and braggadocio. The first commercially successful rap single was full of it. ‘Hear me talkin’ ‘bout chequebook credit cards mo’ money than a sucker could ever spend.’ NWA waxed philosophical. ‘Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money . . . Fuck bitches, get money, Fuck niggas, get money’. To brag about wealth is hardly a position, and such ostentation is not the basis of any political philosophy, and it does not address systemic racial and socio-economic oppression. Nor is this ‘oppressed people’s music’.

Take violence. Rap lyrics, and especially so-called gangsta rap, is famous for it.

For every one of those fuckin’ police, I’d like to take a pig out here in this parkin’ lot and shoot ‘em in their mothafuckin’ face.

Cop Killer, fuck police brutality!

Cop Killer, I know your family’s grievin’ … Fuck ‘Em!

So they complain about the police, and seek redress for the injustice, but what are they doing to attract this unwelcome attention from the law in the first place? Well, only some dope-dealin’, some gang-bangin’, takin’ niggas out with a flurry of buck shots etc. Where is the consistency? Unfairness requires a presumption of innocence. Again, NWA complain about the police searching cars, ‘thinking every nigger is selling narcotas’, yet other black artists openly boast of the practice. ‘I was only 17, had the neighborhood hooked / Had ‘em stealing out they crib ‘cause my crack taste like ribs’.

They may say they document the violence of street life, yet the words celebrate it. Famously ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur: ‘Killing ain’t fair but somebody got to do it, You’d better back the fuck up before you get smacked the fuck up .. Takin’ a life or two, that’s what the hell I do, You don’t like how I’m livin’? Well, fuck you!’ Famously, Shakur was murdered only three months after its release.

It has too often been real. In 1991, Dr. Dre attacked presenter Dee Barnes, slamming her face and body against a wall. Dre commented ‘[if] somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. .. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.’ In 1993, Snoop Dogg’s bodyguard shot and killed a member of a rival gang, although he was later acquitted on grounds of self defence. After becoming annoyed by his persistent questions, producer Suge Knight dragged a journalist across the room and shoved his head over a tank of piranhas: ‘How about if my fish eat your fucking face?’ See also this rap sheet.

In their defence of rap, the liberal left have naturally avoided this aspect of the genre. Theresa Martinez (‘Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance.’ Sociological Perspectives 40: 2, 265-86) has claimed it as a form of ‘oppositional culture’ promoting ‘resistance, empowerment, and social critique’. But as Sikivu Hutchinson has complained, this passes over how gang rape, pimping and the murder of prostitutes are ‘chronicled, glorified and paid homage to’ as the spoils of street life. ‘Black female survivors suffer on the margins in a culture that still essentially deems them “unrapeable”’. Nor is there anything liberal about some rappers’ views on gay rights. Try this. ‘Won’t play basketball cause your nails ain’t dry’. ‘I ain’t into faggots,’ added 50 Cent, ‘I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are,’ although he claimed ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ and that it was OK because on the street they ‘refer to gay people as faggots, as homos. It could be disrespectful, but that’s the facts.’

This is not a position.

As for the overall success of the genre, if it attempts to be serious, it needs to be serious. But rap, in becoming the court jester of black music, has also, with considerable irony, turned into the house negro. Of course, sometimes the fool gets to tell the truth, the truth that would be trouble in the mouth of another, but that is the problem of the fool: we can only take him seriously on the assumption we do not take him seriously. ‘Truth has a genuine power to please if it manages not to give offence, but this is something the gods have granted only to fools’.

Indeed, has the history of black music been about playing the fool? In Golliwogg’s Cakewalk (1908) Debussy not only ‘appropriates’ the rhythms of the negro minstrels, but also the music of the white German nationalist Wagner. Listen out at 1:09 for the opening theme of Tristan. Perhaps Debussy is having a snigger at the pompous high-culture aesthetic of Bayreuth, yet he must contrast it with the vulgar and comical cakewalk – which itself began as black people aping the manners of the white upper class of the American Golden Age: ‘the bumbling attempts of poor blacks to mimic the manners of whites’ (link).

The later American fascination with Harlem was part of a larger fascination with black culture that Nate Sloan believes was imported from France in 1900s, with artists like Picasso painting ‘African’ art, and Debussy writing ‘minstrel’ music. The project was sincerely intended as respectful of ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’ art, but it was a condescending form of respect. Berliner has complained about the ‘stereotypical representations of black as grands enfants – whether savage, servile or hypersexual’ which helped define the colonial and civilising ‘French self’. ‘Duke’ Ellington’s style of symphonic jazz began at the Cotton Club, open only to whites, where blacks were depicted as jungle savages or ‘darkies’ in the cotton-fields of the South. So the signature sound of probably the greatest black composer of the early twentieth century is located in a white primitivist fantasy. Sloan views this as Western ‘romantic re-imagining’ of non-Westerners as charmingly primitive and primal, but black writer Langston Hughes was more direct, speaking of the Club as ‘a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites’, and likening it to the entertainment provided at a zoo. 

Is rap any better? As I have argued, it is not a coherent political philosophy, but a form of entertainment. And do not forget that about 70% of people who buy the stuff are white. Spike Lee has argued that it is just a modern version of the Victorian minstrel performer. Lee grew up aspiring to be like the educated black men he saw reading books and going to college, when young black kids ‘didn't grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now’. Are the personas of the pimp, the pusher and the gangsta just another kind of blackface?

As for this gem, which I began with, I find no redeeming qualities whatever. It does not even pass as entertainment, except for disturbed adolescent boys. Aristotle pointed out long ago that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young. ‘For young persons will not, if they can help, endure anything which is not sweetened by pleasure, and music has a natural sweetness’. But this has no sweetness, nor does it seem capable of forming the character.

In summary, rap music is for the most part a form of entertainment. It has made a lot of black people wealthy, but that is precisely because it is entertainment, which needs no coherence or system or ideology, nor the kind of difficult writing or subtlety of thought that is less financially rewarding. Perversely, its ‘oppositional’ and separatist black identity politics has become absorbed into the mainstream culture of America, as another form of stereotype, and has even turned into a weird form of integration, namely the house negro as court jester. Just as Malcolm X complained there are ‘house negroes among us’, so Lee laments that ‘Minstrels are still with us today’. And that irony is still with us today, too. 

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 20^th 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.

Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul . . . when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued with the same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.ⁱ

Aristotle recognized that music communicates emotion, and that immoral music can shape our character for the worse. 

More here.

Rap sheets of rappers.