A slight change of plans here—I had wanted to talk about this recent Conor Friedersdorf piece about the lack of conservative rap critics as part of a three-part essay called “Paradoxes of Conservative Pop-Culture Studies,” but I realized that to really to do that, I would have to talk about rap more than a bit, indeed, enough to demand a Rock Songbook post or two. This means a momentary change of plans with the Songbook also, but I promise I will be getting back to 1960s Rock take on Love I left off in December soon.
Rap ain’t Rock. In my Rock Songbook posts I have had on occasion to talk about various pop music genres that aren’t rock but which are commonly conflated with it, contrasted with it, etc., as I did with the posts on disco, or with various ones distinguishing R+B and rock n’ roll from Rock. That’s what I’m up to here.
Now rap obviously shares with rock an emphasis on rebel attitude, and upon heroism—in that respect, Rock and rap are unlike all the sorts of pop music, such as disco, that are primarily focused on dance-floor fun, but this similarity must not be made too much of. The base music of rap, hip-hop, shares quite a bit with disco, indeed grew directly out of it, and the identity/rebel/heroism focus of rap is a very specific one—rock rages in a broadly indistinct or middle-class mode, often against modernity, but rap’s poetic world is “lumpen-proletarian,” and its archetypes and formulas are all about expressing certain notions of blackness and manliness.
But before I go any further, I want to confess a good deal of ignorance about rap, particularly from the mid-90s on, and yet… …to also indicate a certain degree of appreciation and knowledge.
Personally, I associate rap with the summer of 1989, the time I was in Northwest Pasadena serving in something called the Pasadena Youth Program, sponsored by some local churches and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Hip-hop had been entering just about every young person’s musical consciousness for the last several years, and major leaps forward in sampling ability and other techniques made a number of the acts of that time undeniably fresh sounding, even to those who had resisted the sheer spare-ness (i.e., lack of musician-involvement) of the really old school hip-hop. Public Enemy, De La Soul, N.W.A., etc., really were delivering tasty new sounds.
1989 was the same summer that Spike Lee’s race-relations film, DO THE RIGHT THING came out, I had just read Malcolm X’s Autobiography for a class, my IVCF chapter was more and more seeking to explore the implications of “multi-ethnicity” for campus ministry, and as a college radio DJ I had been exposed to more of the best rap than most white suburbanites—that is, a number of threads came together for me at that time to allow me to be a right-on-the-sidelines spectator of the rap youth culture phenomenon. This only intensified for the next few years, since the IVCF call for multi-ethnicity and urban renewal inspired my wife and I enough to orient our church-attendance, residence, and a good deal of our socializing too, around a multi-ethnic church in East San Diego. What is more, my standard work-schedule would soon be substitute teaching one day in an inner-city high-school, and the next in a suburban one.
Those experiences eventually had their frustrations, some aspects of which I’ll share below, but in 1989, not only was the music “fresh,” but so were my just-forming ideas for inner-city ministry, teaching, and life. My favorite rap songs, i.e., the best ones I’m familiar with, are from around that time:
1) EPMD, “You Gots to Chill” (one of the remix versions is also great)
2) Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe the Hype”
3) N.W.A., “Express Yourself”
3) De La Soul, “Say No Go”
4) Eric B. and Rakim, “Follow the Leader”
5) Roxanne Shante, “Go On Girl”
6) Boogie Down Productions, “The Bridge Is Over”
7) Digable Planets, “Where I’m From”
And of course, who doesn’t love Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines?”
What are y’alls favorite rap or hip-hop songs?
I’ve got no time for links today beyond the EPMD and Roxanne Shante, the latter of which always seemed neglected to me…but that shouldn’t stop you!
*************************************************************************
Hate to get into the downer stuff after posting a list like that, but I want to explain why I had lost interest by 1995. Music-wise, little seemed to be developing, but it was much more than that. It had something to do with the lingering aftertaste of the Rodney King riots, with how the gangsta-rap and porny-hip-hop styles seemed to be gaining more and more ground within the genres, and a great deal to do with witnessing up close, especially through my substitute teaching, how so many kids were getting sucked into crude and genuinely foul language patterns, and worse, into wanna-be or all-too-real gangsta-ism. Rap youth culture began to seem like a plague.
Indeed I had begun to actively detest the stars of the rap scene. I associated Dr. Dre with a particular black boy at my church becoming a pot-head after getting caught up in Dre’s The Chronic, and with the anguished prayers of church folk, mine also, for that boy. I associated Ice Cube with a horrifyingly ridiculous speech I heard in a classroom by some handsome full-of-himself black 12th-grader, about how Ice Cube was his hero because he had inspired him to avoid crack and gangs, as if it were some heroic thing for this guy who apparently had pretty middle-class parents to avoid falling into those, and as if Ice Cube had not in fact glamorized the gang life, overt misogyny, etc. The hip-hop that really took a stand against those sorts of sicknesses, such as you heard with De La Soul’s “Ghetto Thang,” and which did not footsy with the b.s. “reality-reporting” excuse, was losing the popularity contest. The critics might extol various consciousness-raising rappers, but the word on the street, the word I heard gaining ground in school-yard after school-yard, in rap after rap, alas, it would have to be Nigga.
De La Soul’s second album (late 1991?) seemed symbolic of the feeling in the air…and my recollection is it didn’t sound that great, either. But however grim things began to look by 1992, 93, etc., I can’t accept that as the fully-unveiled truth about rap; that is, I can’t talk about rap without fondly remembering a certain charge and hope one really could connect to it, indeed had to connect to it, in 1989.
And as for the music simply, you don’t take my word for it: here’s some excerpts from one of Friedersdorf’s non-conservative rap critics, reviewing an anthology of rap lyrics put together by Adam Bradley and Andrew Du Bois:
The first Run-D.M.C. album arrived in 1984, but within a few years the group’s sparse lyrical style came to seem old-fashioned; a generation of rappers had arrived with a trickier sense of swing. Hip-hop historians call this period the Golden Age (Bradley and DuBois date it from 1985 to 1992), and it produced the kinds of lyrical shifts that are easy to spot in print: extended similes and ambitious use of symbolism; an increased attention to character and ideology; unpredictable internal rhyme schemes; enjambment and uneven line lengths.
As the Golden Age ended, hip-hop’s formal revolution was giving way to a narrative revolution. So-called gangsta rappers downplayed wordplay (without, of course, forswearing it) so they could immerse listeners in their first-person stories of bad guys and good times. Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. created two of the genre’s most fully realized personae; when they were murdered, in 1996 and 1997, respectively, their deaths became part of their stories. …As the anthologizers blast through the nineties (“Rap Goes Mainstream”) and the aughts (“New Millennium Rap”), their excitement starts to wane. They assert that the increasing popularity of hip-hop presented a risk of “homogenization and stagnation,” without pausing to explain why this should be true (doesn’t novelty sell?), if indeed it was.
Well, well, well. “Their excitement starts to wane??!!” Sometime in the late 90s or early aughts?
I’m tickled because while I admit my own–deliberately chosen–rap ignorance, I really do believe, as thoroughly as Roxanne Shante did about her female-MC supremacy, that nobody has explained as thoroughly as yours truly why those five words really ought to serve as the motto of the rock story, and of the pop-music story generally, from the mid-90s on. Everyone vaguely whines about music being cooler back in the day, but only my Songbook, building on the work of Martha Bayles, begins to spell out the reasons why. But prosy me, I just can’t lay out my superhero status in my field in the vivid way Roxanne could lay out hers in hers—you gotta do some of the work yourself.
Critics and rappers, rappers and critics. So I’ll leave you with the question I’ll be exploring next: is there a real need for conservative rap critics?
February 18th, 2013 | 7:49 pm
Well I’m no rap critic, but what strikes me about the first (Ice Cube’s) part of Straight Outta Compton and It Was a Good Day is how they are written so that the (different kinds of) bluster are a cover for an abyss of constant terror.
February 18th, 2013 | 11:01 pm
I won’t venture an opinion as to whether what conservatism really needs is its own set of in-house rap critics. However, that idea, nutty as it may sound to some, sounds better to me than a lot of the strokes of genius coming from the Republican establishment these days. So, even if rap criticism is irrelevant, maybe it would be good idea to persuade Karl Rove that it is the new key to the political realignment in favor of the GOP that he’s been anticipating the last 20 years. It might keep him out of trouble.
February 19th, 2013 | 1:06 am
One point frequently made by non-conservative, quasi-marxist rap critics (I heard it, for instance, in some rap documentary the name of which I can’t recall) is that at some point rap ceased to be a popular party music (an “urban folk music”) that emerged on the streets and in the ‘hoods. At some point it came to be dominated by white corporate interests which found it to their advantage to sell a stereotypical image of young black violence and sexual prowess to a wider (read: white suburban) audience. Much money was to be made by selling white audiences a cartoon version of their own racism.
I am not persuaded by this argument, but it claims that as a result of such cooptation, mid to late ’90s rap came to lack “authenticity” the more it emphasized extreme (gangsta and pornographic) versions of the lives of black youth–versions which were not always truly reflective of reality, let alone reflective of the actual lives of the rappers making the music. Wasn’t Ice Cube attending ASU when he wrote his lyrics for NWA?
The Chris Rock movie, CB4, is pretty funny, and it plays out some of these themes. “Straight Outta Locash” is as good as any Spinal Tap song! In this light, I guess Jamie Kennedy’s movie, “Malibu’s Most Wanted” is a kind of inverse return of the repressed.
Similarly, Dr. Dre tried to reclaim the “authentic” territory of rap for himself when he unsubtly made this case in a video lampooning Eazy E. In the video, “Sleazy E” speaks with a white record executive who refers to him as “my boy,” while “Sleazy E” responds with “yeah boss!” The video contrasts this scene with scenes of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg hanging out with the regular folk at a party, and by implication making music on their own label Death Row. If able, Dr. Dre was going to be the one who himself was “engineerin’ the s**t that you’re hearin’,” as one of the playas put it in NWA’s “Parental Discretion Advised.”
So as this account has it, the structural racism found in society at large–a racism that is also allegedly institutionalized in the music business–is part of the reason (if not the main reason) for whatever degradation had occurred in the quality of rap over the years. The Golden Age died. 1989–the Annus Mirabilis of Three Feet High and Rising, Fear of a Black Planet, and Paul’s Boutique–was overcome by a racist and/or corporate capitalist reconquest. Or something like that.
No doubt record executives made much money, but this account seems to be lazily exculpatory of a growing coarseness and crassness in rap during the 1990s. It is unpersuasive to me in its reliance on easy explanations appealing to abstract forces (as real as those forces may be). If rap were as vital a “folk music” as it is claimed that it was, then there would have been some evidence of that vitality. I admit ignorance here, and it is true that De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest continued to make interesting music during this period. Perhaps there were other examples too after 1995 or so, but I don’t know of many.
I can say that even Nelly, supposedly one of the progenitors of the porno-rap scene with its attendant misogyny, had an catchy rap called “Utha Side,” which despite being about going to East St. Louis and all that that entails, showed a surprising degree of thoughtfulness, as well as a warning, about the cravenness of conforming to the blandishments of rap culture. Living in St. Louie for several years, I could kinda relate to this tune!
If there were to be a conservative rap criticism, it would need to make a case against the above case which has become part of the “dominant rap narrative.”
I agree that “White Lines” is great. Speaking of another kind of “whiteness,” what about the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique? For a strange variant on the white rapper front, last summer I saw Snoop Dogg perform House of Pain’s “Jump Around” to an ecstatic, though largely white, audience. Apart from the detestable (to my ears) Eminem, there was 3rd Base, the ridiculous song that REM did with KRS One, and even John Lydon’s “World Destruction” (with Afrika Bambaataa).
And for bravado as a cover for sheer terror that still shows some sensitivity, why not throw Houston’s Geto Boys’ “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me” into to the mix? There was the “feminist” rap of Queen Latifah, and also the “fun” rap by the likes of the Sugar Hill Gang, Young MC, Will Smith, Naughty By Nature, and Coolio. To this day, I continue to hear fine things said about Tupac’s and Biggie’s music, the Wu Tang Clan, DJ Screw, and also about more recent rappers like Jay Z, Mos Def, OutKast, Missy Elliot, Common, and Kanye West–but I really don’t know whereof I speak.
Then there’s also the whole French hip hop thing from the banliueus, a milieu depicted in the movie La Haine.
Like you, I’m generally ignorant of rap after the 1990s, and while I also had a minor fascination with late ’80s to mid ’90s rap (many in my cohort at the time simply thought I exhibited either bad taste or a base desire for “slumming”), I was never truly a rap enthusiast or rap rhapsode. Despite the examples I gave to the contrary, my attention to rap waned after the ’90s.
February 19th, 2013 | 9:50 am
Is there a maximum number of links allowed in a comment? I sure hope not…
I’ve always been more of a fan of the DJ rather than the MC, going back to DJ Jazzy Jeff, through to Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow, Kid Koala, etc. Also far more West Coast, and far more “underground” than main stream.
Would you have caught Souls of Mischief before losing interest? Gotta love Pharcyde from back when hip hop still had a sense of humor…
Personally I’d say this and
this are two of the greatest rap songs ever, though they’re “just” remixes…
Moving a bit later, we get to D-E-L, J5 was so awesome it deserves at least two links–nah make it three, which means of course we have to include Blackalicious–but why oh why isn’t Back to the Essence on youtube???, can’t not include Latyrx or this absolute mind-blower from Lyrics Born, and let’s wrap this thing up with LA Symphony rather than keeping on with Ugly Duckling, Dilated Peoples, etc.
[But there's really nothing that compares to the one-and-only Dr. Octagon. I don't even know what to say about it, so it must be offset by brackets and stuck here.]
Of course, all this stuff is like the distributism of hip-hop, sitting over in the corner and having no real impact. If you want someone to discuss the meaning of establishment hip hop, you’ll have to ask someone else.
February 19th, 2013 | 10:29 am
Post 1995, I think alot of the best rap was made by groups, not individuals; I like “Wu Tang Clan”, “Bone Thugz ‘n Harmony”, and “OutKast”
February 19th, 2013 | 10:44 am
One interesting thing to me about the rap scene is the rappers who “Find God” and try to incorporate their Christianity back into their music; it’s usually surprisingly successful. Kanye’s “Jesus Walks” on his first album was about that, late DMX is about that (see “Lord Gimme a Sign”; he includes Ray Lewis’ favorite Bible quote), and of course the leader of Run DMC is now “Rev” Run (Run DMC is rap from a different age though, of course)
February 19th, 2013 | 1:35 pm
I do wonder to what extent discussion of rap is influenced by whether we experience it as phenomenon of the Top 40 or whether we follow the work of particular artists in greater depth.
My experience of B.I.G. is primarily though Top 40 hits like Hypnotize where he creates a loathsome power fantasy in which the character he plays lacks even the sympathetic qualities of anti-heroes like Tony Montana. My take on B.I.G. was pretty hostile.
But I don’t think my I was seeing what there was in B.I.G.’s work that has extended his influence years after his death. So I figure there is more to his rapping that didn’t get radio play on the pop music stations.
February 19th, 2013 | 3:05 pm
I have a theory that Rap “music” is what Uncle Screwtape was portentiously referring to when he notes at the end of his Letter #22 that Hell has their best people working on displacing music with pure noise.
Here is the prescient passage:
“Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress.”
Sounds like Rap to me …
February 19th, 2013 | 3:58 pm
DJ Brian, thanks for the links! Super busy today, but that Jurassic 5 does sound quite good…gotta listen to it on some real speakers, though. John’s and CJ’s knowledge is also impressive…
John, to speak of at least something I know, the thing about Public Enemy’s Fear of A Black Planet is that it was one of those albums everyone was salivating for, thus sold millions, but…admit it…it just wasn’t that good.
As for the idea that what explains gangsta rap is “Much money was to be made by selling white audiences a cartoon version of their own racism,” well, there’s a good deal of truth to that, but not enough to avoid the really sad truth that “Much money was to be made by selling black audiences a cartoon version of their own self-hatred.”
And some self-hatred is pre-emptive meeting of others’ lowest expectations. Or to get still more twisted and complex, as Shelby Steele’s theory of black identity might put it, such “self-hatred” might be the strategic adoption of a certain black identity mask, a criminal version of what he calls the “challenger” mask, in such a thorough way that the mask takes over–the gangsta image one wanted to manipulate others with winds up eating its way into the real you.
In any case, IMO the mainstreaming among blacks of N-word use for self-referential purposes is the spiritual key, the word of words, to the disaster that gangsta rap became for blacks. More on such theories in another post, when I get into Martha Bayles’ take, but gotta run…
February 21st, 2013 | 4:24 pm
By the way, have you seen this blog post about 70s music and the writer’s “conservatives aesthetic” with regard to rock, Carl? http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2013/02/21/countercultural-conservatism/
I like what Danielle Charette has to say here… I also like her taste in music!
February 22nd, 2013 | 5:21 pm
[...] Carl's Rock Songbook #76: Rap and the Summer of '89 The base music of rap, hip-hop, shares quite a bit with disco, indeed grew directly out of it, and the identity/rebel/heroism focus of rap is a very specific one—rock rages in a broadly indistinct or middle-class mode, often against modernity, but rap … http://www.firstthings.com [...]
February 23rd, 2013 | 5:34 pm
[...] this post is a continuation of some observations about rap, but also, about the paradoxes of conservative pop-culture [...]
March 23rd, 2013 | 11:22 am
[...] were in place by that point. That is, as we saw in the previous post, critics admit that rap’s “golden age” was over by then, and what remained ahead were developments of refinement, diversification, or [...]
March 25th, 2013 | 3:59 pm
[...] rap, I’ve tried be somewhat complimentary before laying out the critiques, fair and balanced, appreciative of a few of the classics, [...]
March 25th, 2013 | 4:09 pm
[...] on rap, I’ve tried be somewhat complimentary before laying out the critiques, fair and balanced, appreciative of a few of the classics, [...]
March 27th, 2013 | 11:29 am
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