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.
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