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[Dave Van Ronk]
(originally published in Living Blues magazine, 2004)
Blues fans would seem to have a natural affinity with rap. After all,
while fans of the Beatles or Beethoven can complain that it’s
just some guy talking over a repetitive, monotonous rhythm, we consider
John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” a classic. As for
the content, it is true that a lot of rap is violent and misogynist,
but we have heard Robert Johnson singing, “I’m gonna beat
my woman till I’m satisfied,” and have learned to appreciate
his strengths despite this. A lot of modern gangsta lyrics might be
dismissed as over-the-top boasts about how tough the rapper is, but
how different are they from “Hoochie Coochie Man”? Indeed,
as many historians have pointed out, there are examples of rap in the
work of artists as varied as the Memphis Jug Band, the Golden Gate Quartet,
and Bo Diddley -- and that’s not to mention all the versions of
“toasts” like “The Signifying Monkey.”
And yet, a lot of blues fans and artists have gone on record
attacking rap. Some have undoubtedly thought their arguments through
in detail, but all too many just come off as knee-jerk conservatives,
dismissing hip-hop without ever having stopped to listen and give the
style a fair chance. Obviously, everyone is free to support or dis whatever
music they want -- but they risk sounding as absurd as those who once
dismissed urban electric bands as “the blues in decadence . .
. a picture of a violent and decadent society.” (Alan Lomax, in
1959.) Is dismissing Dr. Dre in 2004 really all that different from
dismissing Magic Sam in 1960 or Jimi Hendrix in 1970?
For people who want to think a little more deeply about this subject,
a new box setfrom Hip-O Records provides a good opportunity to survey
the breadth of the scene and its evolution over the last 25 years. Called
simply The Hip Hop Box, it traces the style from 1979’s “Rapper’s
Delight” up to modern stars like 50 Cent, 2Pac, and a Dr. Dre-Snoop
Dogg duet -- though the latter artists are represented by album tracks
rather than their hits, and are not shown at their best. Some major
figures are missing, most obviously LL Cool J, Jay-Z, and the rowdily
groundbreaking NWA, but this is the best overview currently available.
And if anyone thinks they could assemble an equally exciting 50-track
selection from the last quarter-century of blues recordings -- well,
I’d love to hear it, but I’m not holding my breath.
Because, looked at in a lot of ways, this is the living blues. There
is a direct, obvious line that runs from Robert Johnson or Tampa Red
through Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, on to James Brown, Kurtis
Blow and Ice Cube. And though there are certainly ways in which Bo or
Muddy are more like Mr. Red than like Mr. Cube, in a lot of ways they
would sound more at home in NWA than in the Hokum Boys. Both had a tough,
electric, urban style that pointed the way towards what has come since.
In fact, although he has recently been quoted as opposing the rap scene,
I saw Bo give a show in the 1980s that included quite a bit of hip-hop
styling, and he sounded like he’d been rapping all his life. Which
he had, by any sensible definition -- what else was “Who Do You
Love” but an early example of what we now call rap?
It is true that hip-hop has not produced anything to equal the haunting
soulfulness of, say, Skip James -- but if we are going to make that
our standard, what music has in the last thirty years? Certainly not
blues. There are still some excellent musicians working in the blues
idiom, and I’ve seen some fine live shows in the last year, but
pretty much all my desert island blues discs were recorded back when
the style was still fresh and the audience was young, hip, and coming
from the same communities as the performers. And I’m not just
talking about black people -- Hank Williams used the blues idiom to
speak for his time and place as much as Robert Johnson did. But how
much blues in the year 2004 is about the neighborhoods where the singers
live, as they are today? How many blues lyrics reflect the way the singers
talk when they are not onstage? How many have space for cell phones
and computers, except as joke lines in novelty numbers?
The new recordings that get filed as “blues” are mostly
nostalgic recreations of past sounds, some fine, some lousy, but almost
none reflecting either the musical or societal changes of the last few
decades. There are exceptions, of course. Both Corey Harris and Chris
Thomas King have experimented with blues-hip-hop fusions -- not to mention
the Fat Possum remixes of R.L. Burnside -- but while these experiments
were interesting to some broadminded blues fans, they did not excite
any attention in the rap world, for a very good reason: Hip-hop is not
easy music to do, and the top people are working at a level that is
very hard to reach.
For me, that was the revelation of The Hip Hop Box. To readers under
thirty, the brilliance of hip-hop production is probably old news, but
for most of us older blues fans, the beats were always a stumbling block.
We could hear that rappers were descended from bluesmen (and, far more
rarely, blueswomen), but the sampled disco tracks and mechanical rhythm
machines had a sterility that seemed like the antithesis of everything
we loved about blues. Even though I was never one of the “sampling
isn’t music” crew, I could not work up much enthusiasm for
Grandmaster Flash’s background for “The Message,”
much as I loved Melle Mel’s streetwise lyrics. But that was then
. . . Listening to the evolution of hip-hop, it is clear that the Flash
style was outmoded within a couple of years, and the variety of sounds
and approaches in the next two decades is much more exciting than any
other musical developments over the same period. By the time you get
to the early 1990s, sampling is just one component of a very varied
sonic tapestry, and while some sounds are still borrowed, the turntable
masters are working alongside musicians playing more traditional instruments.
More to the point, producers like Timbaland have styles as distinctive
as Son House’s guitar riffs.
Do those styles have the intimacy of House’s work, or its subtlety,
soul, or power? I suppose it depends on your taste, ears, and experience.
I am a prewar blues nut, and nothing will ever hit me with the force
of a lone voice and acoustic guitar. But once one accepts that records
are going to be made in studios, with tracks recorded separately and
mixed by the producer rather than balanced live by a group of musicians
reacting to each other and sorting out their dynamics in the moment,
in front of a single microphone, it is hard to argue for the purity
of the production process at Rounder, Malaco, or Alligator over Timbaland’s
or Dr. Dre’s. And when it comes to variety, originality, timeliness,
and shear excitement, the hip-hoppers are so far out ahead that they
shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence.
So, if the music is so great and has such a close relationship to blues,
why do so many blues fans still find it annoying or inaccessible? Part
of the reason, of course, is cultural. Embracing older black music is
always easier for white outsiders than embracing the music of the present-day
urban ghettos. But that is too simple an answer -- after all, white
buyers account for the majority of rap sales, and there are plenty of
black people who find rap obnoxious. (In any case, this is too big a
discussion for a brief music article.)
For many of us, the barrier really is one of ignorance. Until I listened
through the Hip Hop Box, I had never taken the time to trace the development
of the genre, or to sort out which artists appealed to me personally.
As on almost any overarching anthology, I heard plenty of tracks that
left me cold -- it has often been pointed out that ninety percent of
every art form is shit, and hip-hop is no different -- but I also found
plenty to excite me, and was often surprised by what caught my ear.
For example, by the early 1990s groups like Arrested Development were
making socially conscious cuts like “Tennessee,” which uses
live musicians, melodic choruses, and gospel harmonies along with the
mixing and rap. It’s a strong track, and I appreciate both its
musicianship and its message. And yet, it just doesn’t hit me
with the visceral exuberance of Naughty By Nature’s cheating anthem
“O.P.P.” The comparison is kind of unfair, like putting
Gil Scott-Heron back to back with Wilson Pickett, or Josh White next
to Louis Jordan -- but that is what boxes like this are all about. They
give you a chance to sort out what works for you, what bores you, and
what makes you sit up and take notice.
For any longtime blues fan, hip-hop should not be a major stretch. After
all, it is coming from the same kind of communities and artists who
produced our favorite records. As John Jackson, the acoustic guitarist
from northern Virginia told me years ago, “I don't play soul or
disco or rap music or nothing like that, but I don't have anything against
it; it just didn't come along when I did.” If Robert Johnson had
been born in 1975, can anyone honestly argue that he would not have
been caught up in the humor and passion of Straight Outta Compton?
His descendants in the Mississippi Delta of the late 1980s responded
to LA’s gangsta rappers just as he did to the promise of “Sweet
Home Chicago.” If the words were less optimistic and the backing
more aggressively urban, that is the truth of the times.
We need to remember that when it started in the early 1970s, Living
Blues was intended as an antidote to the practice of previous blues
magazines, which all looked nostalgically backward. Its mandate was
to focus not on the glories of rural, acoustic players, but on the loud,
electric bands that were then filling clubs on Chicago’s South
and West Sides. Today, Magic Sam’s LPs are as far in the past
as Mississippi John Hurt’s 78s were back then. As a magazine that
has always insisted that blues is not only great music but a vibrant
expression of African-American culture, maybe it is time for us to take
stock of the changing times and refocus once again on what is happening
around us.
©2004 Elijah Wald (originally published in Living
Blues)
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