Hip Hop Pondering

Ever since Jack Halberstrom championed Jay Z and Kanye, reinterpreting their selfish celebrations of success into blueprints for anti-capitalist resistance, I’ve been listening to hip-hop. Unable to accept that rappers so popular, and so uncompromising in their belief in capitalist values, could be subverted towards revolutionary ends, I’ve been looking for a voice that articulates cultural alienation over good beats.

And when I found it, I didn’t want to admit who it was.

I’ve been really unfair on Stanley Odd. Currently up for the Scottish Album of the Year, they are intelligent, thoughtful and relevant: their take on the independence question is wittily recast as a marriage break-up. There’s none of the wild paranoia that often dominates political rap (Wu Tang members babbling about conspiracies, or Chuck D taking it all personal) and they stay far away from the blatant misogyny that makes far too much US hip-hop a guilty pleasure.

Stanley Odd are measured and smart: rapping in their own accents, they pick up on a UK tradition that includes Roots Manuva – telling their truth, not being in thrall in the gangster bravado of the 1990s underground and throwing down beats that owe more to the melodic hooks of DJ Premier than the glitch and paste of J Dilla. It would be a just victory if they won the SAY: it’s a bold attempt to express a distinctive Caledonia hip-hop, drawing on the past while speaking to the present.

But it wasn’t them. They are too moderate, too sensible. They encourage voting. They see both sides of the argument, but separate them and turn their tracks into dialectical, reasoned debates. Their frustration at society isn’t dystopian: they see abuses in terms of corruption of the existing state, and aren’t revolutionary.

My complaints are entirely due to my growing up with Public Enemy and Wu Tang, A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. Although PE had plenty of obnoxious energy (Chuck D is going to have to explain Sophisticated Bitch, or Open Letter to the New York Post, which seems to shift responsibility for Flav’s wife-beating onto the newspapers who reported it), their vision of rap as a “CNN for the Black Nation” made for a fiery, confrontational dynamic.

From Public Enemy, I learnt that I didn’t want hip-hop to be reasonable.

J Dilla’s Donuts has been described as Dilla’s deathbed conversion: a series of short musical sketches (and made in hospital as he lay dying), it is a difficult, sophisticated album that jumps between raw bangers and contemplative loops. It is pervaded by a melancholy, chopping together fragments of Dilla’s massive catalogue and echoing the floating disorientation of Burial’s south London dubstep experiments.

Charged by the symbolism of its composition (it’s the Mozart Requiem of hip-hop) and the importance of Dilla’s career in defining hip-hop (his influence is beyond measure – it’s not even clear how many popular artists he produced), Donuts tentatively deals with redemption, the densely picked beats never quite breaking down into a clear message.

But it wasn’t him. Donuts is obviously a masterpiece, but the state of suspension it describes is hypnogogic, vague. It’s introverted, sporadically beautiful and then abrasive. It’s a puzzle, not a polemic.

The Wu Tang Clan has plenty of faults – not least flooding the market with different incarnations and unleashing Old Dirty Bastard on the world. ODB was a lyrical genius, hilarious and challenging but he didn’t live his life right. His early death ended up being a morality tale. Yet when they hit it – take C.R.E.A.M- they expressed a profound analysis of the way of the world. They didn’t hide their opinions in the creases of samples. The immediacy of their vision was never less than enthralling, and frequently terrifying.

The Wu Tang Clan taught me that I want word play and drama.

Apparently, Mykki Blanco began rapping as an art project. Naming an album The Illuminati Prince/ss stakes out the territory. Blanco is refreshingly queer: the raps match classic hip-hop arrogance with a sensibility more familiar to fans of ballroom vogue. Teenage Dream abuses Katy Perry and pictures Banco as a neophyte angel, and his lyrics bubble with imagery snatched from comic books and clubbing. 

Hip-hop’s history has a few issues with gay sexuality, and welding queer identity onto braggadocio escapes the thuggish heterosexuality that is numbingly normative.

It’s not Banco, either. The integration isn’t complete: gasps of breath between lines makes Banco’s flow stutter and the beats are simple electro work-outs, foregrounding Banco’s treated voice.  The

importance of what Banco represents outweighs the quality of the work in progress.

 De La Soul introduced the idea of otherness to me: that rap could represent self-deprecating aspiration. They might have despaired at the success of Three Feet High, and deliberately avoided pop cross-over on later albums, but one track, Trying, saw the magic threesome admit to frailty. Throughout their career, they spoke from the heart, reflecting honestly on their failures.

De La Soul revealed that hip-hop could be tentative and searching.

Kitty Pryde shares Banco’s X-Men reference points (Banco samples a chunk of the X-Men cartoon, she takes her name from one of them), and her lyrics dwell in the world of the teenage girl. It’s all about crushes, the naïve expectations of late childhood. It’s deeply uncomfortable listening – the music is stoned and languid, her voice floats on melodies that could have been ripped from clouddead’s debut. It’s slice of life stuff, willfully disconnected from ‘the street’ or political engagement. Juxtaposing youthful enthusiasm and almost obsessive desire, she evokes a soured sensuality, the blooming of an identity already tainted as it blossoms.

She isn’t the one. Pryde’s music is so self-contained, it doesn’t make any points beyond itself: hermetically sealed, she wanders through her fantasies without giving away their essential absurdity. The inevitable failure of her dreams is implied, but there’s no analysis, no context.

A Tribe Called Quest managed to do the jazz thing without overloading it with meaning. Guru did a series of albums that boasted their jazz credentials. ATCQ just got funky. Live double bass rolled through The Low End Theory, while their rappers weaved between each other like a classic jazz front line. They connected the present to history, saw the links between hip-hop and Miles Davies: while many acts were happy to cop a motif, ATCQ borrowed the style.

ATCQ clarified hip-hop’s relationship to the past, and recycled it into something both eternal and immediate.

Hip-hop’s pretty rich. All of these artists combine: there’s no need for the one voice to control them all. There’s the danger is Halberstrom’s postulation – by taking a single song as a blueprint, the subtle balances of the culture are ignored. Sure, Jay Z has blown up, Kanye’s got it all going on. Yet their No Church In The Wild is nothing outside of its context, and takes on an unnecessary importance if these other artists are abandoned.

The post-modern critique is dangerous if it fails to recognise that music does exist within a particular context. It is dangerous if it relies on pure audience response, stripping the meaning from the environment and re-aligning it on the whim of the listener.

So… my choice of the one voice is deferred. I daren’t admit who he is, and I excuse it by claiming that it needs context.