Читать книгу To the Break of Dawn - William Jelani Cobb - Страница 6

It begins with the words: mic check. The MC counts it off, one, two, one, two, before running down his pedigree: I go by the name of the one MC Lingo of the mighty Black Ops and we came here tonight to get y’all open … In the MC’s ritual, the next task is the demographic survey—Is Brooklyn in the house?—even though he knows the answer; always knew the answer ’cause the answer is always the same. Brooklyn is as ubiquitous as bad luck. There’s a cat behind him on the ones and twos; his head cocked to the left, headphones cradled between ear and shoulder. He has the fingertips of his left hand resting on a 12” instrumental, the right on the cross-fader. His MC gets four bars to drop it a capella, after that he comes behind him with Michael Viner’s Apache. A measure beforehand, he’ll idle with some prelim scratches to let the crowd know what’s coming next. And if his boy got skills enough, if the verbal game is tight enough, that right there will be the kinetic moment, that blessed split-second when beat meets rhyme. The essence of hip hop. Come incorrectly, though, and the heads in attendance will let you know that too. In hip hop, subtlety is considered a character flaw. In hip hop, it is a moral wrong to allow a wack MC to exist unaware of his own wackness. The DJ hits with the track, the MC wraps his tongue around a labyrinth of syllables, and don’t have to chase his breath. We came here tonight to get y’all open … He knows when it’s done correctly because the heads start to nod in affirmation.

ORIGINS OF THE BOOM BAP

For those still concerned with the terms laid down by Webster, art is defined as this: 1. Conscious arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movement, or other elements in a way that affects the aesthetic sense: 2. A specific skill in adept performance, held to require the exercise of intuitive faculties: 3. Production of the beautiful. The MC, despite the grumblings of various antique-aged gripers, is a modern incarnation of the black verbal artist, whose lineage runs way back to the black preacher, the bluesman, and the boulevard griot. Some critics, detractors, and, in the tongue of the boulevard, haters, would have it that hip hop fell from the sky—untouched by any preceding black art form. We’re to believe that the backward sex politics, the materialism, the violence that characterize some hip hop are unique products of post-civil rights black culture and that the art—if it can even be called that—bears no resemblance to the now-classic forms of jazz and blues. We hear such nonsensical claims from artists like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, who, as jazz and blues heads, know better—or really ought to.

Their music began in the gutter. The sounds rumbled up from the terrorized Delta topsoil and the people the color of it, the music of the bayou ho’ houses now gone Lincoln-Center respectable. Rock and roll, now enshrined as a sacrament of the boomer generation, derived its name from the black street-corner terminology for sex. And hip hop grows from that same seed, germinating in those same urinated alleys, only nine hundred miles further north. The hood, the barrio, the broken precincts of the city breathed life into hip hop in the 1970s, but from top to bottom, the music was in communion with older principles not only in terms of its politics, but also its aesthetics.

For the unschooled, the concept that hip hop even has an aesthetic is alien; that there is a sonic distinction between the great MC and his wack counterpart is lost on most of the consuming public and the genre’s detractors alike. Because hip hop is discussed most often on the level of commerce and politics, but rarely on the level of art, it’s easy to miss the fact that the form has its own aesthetic, its own standards and measures—this aesthetic is idiosyncratic and unique, but is also built on earlier forms. At its core, hip hop’s aesthetic contains three components: music, or “beats,” lyrics, and “flow”—or the specific way in which beats and lyrics are combined.

The heart of the art of hip hop is how the MC does what he does—the specific catalog of trade trickery he uses to get his people open. And just as the MC is at the center of hip hop, his tools—verbal craft, articulation, improvisation—are at the center of black cultures. The pedigree runs deep. It connects that dreadlocked, mic-gripping orator to the tradition of black verbal gamesmanship that starts with the black preacher, whom Du Bois reckoned with in Souls of Black Folk as “the most unique personality created by the Negro on American soil.” Zora Neale Hurston identified the preacher as the first black artist in America, the poet who made helped make the absurd world intelligible.

Our preachers are talented men even though many of them are barely literate. The masses do not read literature, do not visit theaters, nor museums of the fine arts. The preacher must satisfy their beauty-hunger himself. He must be a poet and an actor and possess a body and a voice … It is not admitted as such by our “classes.” Only James Weldon Johnson and I give it praise. It is utterly scorned by the “Niggerati.” But the truth is, the greatest poets among us are in our pulpits and the greatest poetry has come out of them. It is merely not set down. It passes from mouth to mouth as in the days of Homer.

James Baldwin, boy preacher emeritus, copped his long, elegant, multi-claused sentence style from the oracular rhythms of the black church and broke this down for all posterity when he said:

The Black preacher, since the church was the only Civilized institution that we were permitted—separately—to enter, was our first warrior, terrorist, or guerrilla. He said that freedom was real—that we were real. He told us that trouble don’t last always. He told us that our children and elders were sacred, when the Civilized were spitting on them and hacking them to pieces, in the name of God and in order to keep on making money.

Recognize that the African, stolen and shackled, scorned and rejected, was dropped into a textual culture from an oral tradition where articulation was paramount. Circumstance and eight weeks on the Atlantic had placed the inheritors of highly inflective West African tongues into an environment of linguistic hostility. Not only were their indigenous languages derided and outlawed, but the very nature of the creole English they spoke was cited as a mark of inferiority. And it is unspeakably difficult to be a poet in a language that is hostile to your existence. Even more, one can only speculate at the vast ideas and shades of meaning that the newly enslaved could find no way to express in the slave-master’s vocabulary. The old maxim teaches that “art is a technique of communication,” but the converse also holds true. It was for this reason that the black preacher, the only individual granted even limited vocal carte blanche, would emerge also as the ancestral black artist.

And given that relationship to the spoken word, literacy could easily be secondary in the preacher’s art. Articulation in a foreign tongue—one that was learned in bondage and taught solely as a means of conveying orders—is in and of itself a form of mastery. A slave exists to obey commands, but only a human commands language. American law and American deed defined the African as a non-entity, the extension of the master’s will and possessor of nothing, but an articulator owns language—and a share (however small) of the ideas that those arrayed syllables represent. It was no coincidence that a slave holy man’s apocalyptic vision of black angels slaying white angels in the sky prefaced the uprising that planted fear in the slaveholding soul. Nat Turner. August 21, 1831. Fifty-seven of them—man, woman, and infant—left dead in his wake. A sermon of sorts.

The African, enslaved in a land of strange deeds and customs and shackled into a new language, made speech into a metaphor for identity. If English vocabulary was mandatory, its grammatical roots were to remain West African and the lexicon spiced with the unforgotten words from home. The evolution of that creole may chart the evolving new world identity, but the issue at hand is how that ebonic fusion came to be used. The well-spoken word, in ways both subtle and vast, undermined the decree that the African was to possess nothing and thus preceded physical freedom. So, straight up: the preacher’s central task was to open his mouth and rip it the best way he saw fit as a confirmation of the collective existence. The verbal strategy, the specific catalog of trade trickery employed by the preacher, laid down the parameters for his vocal heirs four hundred years down the line.

Listen for a minute and it becomes clear that the rapper is evaluated by many of the same criteria as the preacher: use of voice, timbre, timing, reference, and sub-reference. The preacher uses amen as a verbal stopgap the same way the old-school rapper used catch-phrases like “Yes, yes, y’all” or “It don’t stop,” etc. The preacher earns his or her keep by the call and the response; the rapper lives and dies by his skill at getting the crowd open. Generations of black secular singers have claimed the church as their first training ground, but what has gone unrecognized is that the rapper is their counterpart—the secular preacher, the sanctified exhorter whose skills have passed by cultural osmosis from the pulpit to the boulevard.

This is not to say that early MCs copped their styles directly from the local South Bronx preacher in the way that soul singers fell back on what they learned in choir practice. A host of verbal intermediaries exist between the preacher and the MC. But when you cut through all the begats, the preacher and the MC retain their family resemblance. Example: Melle Mel’s percussive rah at the end of his verses is only degrees removed from the preacher’s percussive huh—employed as an oral semicolon or period in the sermon. Or check Nelly’s flow on the confectionery “Hot in Herre,” Snoop Dogg’s trademark drawled-out vowels, or Bone Thugs’ fluid mic vocalism and their common, deliberately sing-songy cadences, which immediately recall the Baptist tradition of hooping—tap dancing on the perimeter between speech and song in a sermon.

The Reverend C.L. Franklin pointed out that the best hoopers were preachers who could also sing well—this from a man whose daughter Aretha would become the greatest soul singer of all time. The best MCs do not necessarily sing well, but absolutely possess a singer’s understanding of time, nuance, and interpretation. Hooping—accompanied often by fragmentary organ riffs, or samples—is essentially a form of unrhymed rapping. Utilizing timing, meter, and inflection, it’s the sermonic equivalent of the blank verse in Shakespeare’s plays—rhymeless poetry presented in a prose format.

History is like viewing of a movie for the second time and gaining a vast new world of insights into the plot. Those who make history may or may not be wise to the full dimensions of their accomplishments because their lifetime is only the first screening. From the gate, the ancestral b-boys created a new musical history—even as they drew upon art that was already in existence as a resource for the art that they would create. In short, this “new” musical history was not and could not have been a clean break from the old one. MCing may have begun as a musical ad campaign for the deejay who ran the show, but the fundamental concept of pairing the rhymed verse with the hypnotism of bared percussion had been laid down way before that.

Of those multiple millions of Africans snatched from their indigenous contexts by the transatlantic slave trade, only some 6 percent arrived on the shores that would become the United States. Meaning that 94 percent of that displaced humanity found themselves immersed in the agricultural brutalities of Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, Trinidad, Barbados, Surinam, Columbia, Haiti—the scattered localities of common bondage. Those same language dynamics played themselves out in each of these places, creating a network of African-derived patois and political implications for the spoken word—which explains in extreme shorthand how dancehall and hip hop could come into existence as cousin cultures.

The African American and Caribbean American teenagers who found themselves building a new culture up in the South Bronx in 1974 shared four centuries of collective history that gave context to the art they created. They had come from the same boat, having merely departed at different stops. Nor was the fact that so many of the early b-boys were of Caribbean descent coincidental. The cornerstone deejays Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa are both of Jamaican descent and Grandmaster Flash is of Barbadian ancestry. Nor is it coincidental that the Caribbean had long established its parallel tradition of “dub poetry” or syncopated rhyme verse accompanied by percussion. Listen to the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson or Mutubaruka and the imprint of this tradition on hip hop becomes undeniable.

You could trace hip hop’s roots back to scat, which gave literal expression to the concept that a sound could carry meaning irrespective of its relationship to formal language. You find hip hop in the poetry of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, the black bards who went from the Negritude literary movement they founded to formal leadership of their people in Senegal and Martinique. Hip hop’s ancestry is James Weldon Johnson, the first black president of the NAACP, writing the lyrics for the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” It is Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, the two colossal opponents of colonialism in Africa, both articulating the cause of the dispossessed in poetic verse. And Amiri Baraka’s leadership in the Black Power political campaigns of Newark in 1972. The point is this: the art is the politic.

The relationship between the preacher and the rapper is one of both form and content. Think about that for a minute and you can damn-near write a sermon based on Mos Def’s jewel “New World Water.” It’s impossible to ignore the prominence of water as a primary motif in black spiritual culture—from the debilitated Gospel pleas to be “washed white as snow” to the rebellion-coded double entendre “wade in the water,” which referenced both baptism and escape routes from slavery. En route to issuing an injunction against the waste of natural resources, Mos Def drops the observation that “Fools done upset/the old man river/made him carry slave ships/and fed him dead niggers”—a line that echoes Amiri Baraka’s reminder that “there is a railroad made from human bones at the bottom of the Atlantic.” The water of the alleged new world was precisely what divided Jamestown from Benin, Santo Domingo from Oyo, Sao Paolo from Kannem Borno. And that same water is the eternal resting ground of black millions lost to the middle passage. Waters being fed dead Africans—cruel irony for descendants of cultures who understood that all life derived from and began in water, centuries before Western empirical intellect was made wise to that fact. Black folklore tells us of people who could walk on water—Africans who surveyed the new world real estate and opted to take the long haul back home by foot.

To the enslaved, though, to the African landlocked into American servitude, the waters rippled differently. For them, the spirituals’ reference to “Crossing the River Jordan” functioned as a triple entendre: biblical allusion, figurative expression of crossing the meridian between North and South, and as literal direction toward an escape route. Forbidden to seek communion and connection with water-associated Orisha, Yemoja, Olucun, or Oshun, baptism was left to function as spiritual substitute—and became a factor in the Baptists’ early success in recruiting black congregants.

Public Enemy made this link explicit with the preamble to the sonic anarchy of “Rebel without a Pause” by sampling Jesse Jackson preaching Brothers and Sisters, I don’t know what this world is coming to … then comes an explosion of baritone and brimstone. And by the time you hear Chuck-D’s “Up you mighty race” lyrical polemics, the point has been made: the rapper is finishing Jesse’s sentence, literally picking up where the preacher left off. You could riff on the line of reasoning with the explicit biblical reference that Lauryn Hill brought to the table with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or the rough-hewn, avenue Christianity espoused by the late Notorious B.I.G., but the point is that the MC exists inside a broader, older vocal tradition. For the rappers gone sacred—Run and Mase, now turned Reverends Run and Mase—trading in throwback jerseys for pastoral robes mirrors a pivot that soul singers have been making for decades. And in so doing they’ve essentially put in for a transfer from one branch of black verbal art to its ancestral root. DMX’s gravelly preacher-voice recalls the old traditions, from back in the times when men of God were still called exhorters. His debut It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a seminar on the asphalt theology of the millennial street hood. No question, the rapper had turned exhorter when he offered an a capella prayer as the sixteenth track on his debut release:

You give me word and only ask that I interpret And You give me eyes that I might recognize the serpent

There is an apocryphal tale that tells of DMX buying a Brooklyn church out of its back-tax debt, offering a blessing to the house of the Lord. The truth or falseness of the story is secondary: what matters is that the story was credible enough to be relayed. The MC replicates and remixes the craft of preaching, jacking one set of oratory tactics for application in the world of sin and concrete. To cut to the quick, there is more than a set of initials connecting C.L. Franklin to CL Smooth.

THE TRICKSTER BLUES

We listen to the MC and we hear the echo of the old-time revival exhorters, but at the same time, the rapper is linked to a whole other side of the black aesthetic tradition—having copped key elements of the blues craft. Blues is at the corner of all American popular musics, but hip hop in particular descended from the blues tradition of orality. If the blues is the sound of a post-slave people in the social vacuum of the American South and the tale of that people on their way north, then encoded within hip hop of the story of what happened once they arrived.

On one level, the bluesman paved the way for the rapper in that the blues brought calm recognition to the concept of human evil as a consequence of human existence. The blank-faced, cinema verité street narration of the gangsta rapper could not have come into existence without the blues and its understanding of morality. Here we have no sacred, no secular because the bluesman grapples with a far older concept—that there is ultimately neither. The world simply is, period. Eons before postmodern literary critics were wise to this, blues people recognized that the world could be read as text, that the dirt road was a metaphor and the juke joint a temple to the prayers of the flesh. In short, that life could be its own holy book.

Gallons of ink have been spilled in attempts to define what the blues is—and what it ain’t for that matter. Literary bluesman and musician Ralph Ellison put it this way:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal existence alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Caught in the existential staredown with abject circumstance, the blues artist pulls the only weapon available: a sharpened sense of irony, the simultaneous reckoning with the bitter and the sweet, the last-ditch laughter that staves off tears. That confrontation with the absurd contradictions of his own existence—the descendant of allegedly lazy people who were brought to another continent in order to work, member of an unclean race whose primary employment is in cleaning homes—was grist for the blues’ hallmark irony, what we might call the trickster consciousness.

The trickster’s ironic sensibility is a defining feature of the blues, where the hero is the down-and-out player who nevertheless carries an ace—or a razor, depending on the situation—tucked up his sleeve. This is apparent on the version of “Red House” recorded by Jimi Hendrix:

There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay Lord, there’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay I ain’t been home to see my baby, in 99 and one half days.

Wait a minute, somethin’s wrong, this key don’t fit the door Wait a minute somethin’s wrong here, this key don’t unlock the door I got a bad, bad feelin’ my baby don’t live here no more.

I guess I’ll go back over yonder, way over the hill I guess I’ll go back over yonder, way up over that hill ’cause if my baby don’t love me no more, I know her sister will.

Being down don’t mean the same thing as being out and right here we see that getting left by one’s woman ain’t the same thing as being left without a woman. Albert King gave light to the same theme with the version of “Born Under a Bad Sign” he recorded in 1967. He sang:

Born under a bad sign I been down ever since the day I could crawl And if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

Still, he ends up with the admission that “when I die a big-leg woman will carry me to my grave.” High-octane spirits and well-curved women might well be the death of him, but if he’s going out like that, he plans to shuffle off the mortal plane with the finest pallbearer you ever seen. And the loudly unstated point is that his cadaver is leaving with a finer woman than his peers got—and they still alive.

History spotlights violent resisters of slavery like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nat Turner, and Zumbi dos Palmares, but the average slave, physically outnumbered or at least outgunned, could not always rely upon brute force resistance. Deception, Du Bois points out in Souls of Black Folk, is the natural defense of the weak against the strong. And deception is the primary weapon in the arsenal of the trickster. The trickster in most folklore traditions is not particularly strong physically but manages to outdo his foes with cunning and double-edged wit. Given the nature of the black relationship to the Western world, it makes sense that trickster tales are one of the folklore traditions that survived the middle passage and took root throughout the Diaspora in the form of Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and the Signifyin’ Monkey. Among the Dogon of Mali, the trickster holds a primary cosmological significance:

The Dogon imagination [uses] humor as an image of the creative necessity of disorder … laughter itself becomes a reversal of order for the revelation of deeper order, an abolition of time for the capture of time … Turns the world upside down so that it can proceed right side up.

Among the Yoruba, the trickster orisha Elegba is the master of the crossroads and fate. He is traditionally depicted as a child or an old man. Elegba opens and closes doors. Now look at the crossroads as they appear in blues as one of the most consistent references and double entendres in the form. For the blues artist, the itinerant bard of the newly dilated black world, the crossroads represent decision-making—a particularly important reference given the fact that the essence of slavery is the absence of mobility and the inability to make one’s own decisions. The crossroads is both geographic and metaphorical, an echo of the old trickster ways.

Westerners have conflated Elegba the trickster with their concept of the devil in the raw attempt to impose a good versus evil dichotomy on vastly more complex ways of understanding the world. To the wise, though, the trickster is neither good, nor evil, he simply is. The trickster’s place in the blues, plus the secular emphasis of the form, gave rise to the epithet “devil music.” Never mind the fact that it was in the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the “devil” in exchange for mastery of his instrument. But the blues did not create the trickster—they simply gave him a new venue. The trickster ideal was in place in the pre-blues world of the slave. Bear in mind the old tale of the white woman who leaves the big house to inform her slaves that the terrible news they’ve heard is true—the North has, in fact, won the war. Slavery is over, she says, but if they’re willing to stay on, they can create a world that is “just the same as it always was.” Her slaves line up and dutifully inform her of how good a mistress she’s been and how glad they’d be to remain in her service. The belle goes to bed with a light heart only to awake and find that there is not a single ex-slave in sight for miles. The world had, in fact, been turned upside down for centuries and the Janus-faced slave-trickster knew that deception and flight was the means of turning it right side up.

The blues artist must be willing to reckon with human frailty, the dead-broke, woman-gone existential zero-ness that has to be admitted before it can be transcended. In short, one must recognize one’s frailty before it can be used to your advantage. But if the blues exist for the express purpose of alchemizing beauty from pain, hip hop is more often about swaggering in the face of it. Denying that pain is an element of its reality. Hip hop is that boxer who gets caught flush by the unseen right hand and then tells his antagonist that it didn’t hurt—and the fact is, of course, that if it really didn’t hurt he wouldn’t feel the need to make that statement. With the exception of Mos Def’s comic “Ms. Fat Booty” and Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” the number of hip hop songs dealing substantively with a man whose woman has left could probably be counted on one hand. And even Jay-Z’s effort tempered by his refrain “I can’t see ’em coming out my eyes/So I gotta make this song cry.” Now compare that to the soreness of the soul expressed in Ishman Bracey’s “Trouble-Hearted Blues,” where he laments

I don’t believe I’m sinking Believe what a hole I’m in You don’t believe I loved you think what a fool I been.

Or Joe Pullum’s 1934 lamentation in “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard?” that

I woke up this morning couldn’t even get out my bed I was just thinking about that black woman And it almost killed me dead.

At the heart of hip hop’s denial of the pain—a pain that is so openly voiced in the blues—is a different relationship to irony within the two musics. The trickster’s ironic approach to life and power relations had resonance to the enslaved for obvious reasons: the trickster appears to be happy and harmless, traffics in deception, and disarms with a smile. The average rapper, though, would rather get shot than smile in public.

Hip hop doesn’t place as high a premium on irony as its ancestral forms, particularly blues—even as it relies upon blues and the surrounding blues folklore for much of its material. This is not to say that hip hop is completely anti-ironic, simply that irony is not at the center of the hip hop ethos. That said, hip hop has precious little room for acknowledging pain in order to ultimately transcend it.

That absence of irony is why on nearly every album cover the rapper holds a murderer’s grit on his face. Even comedic rappers tend to look serious as hell, half-glaring up from an oblique angle, as if smiling is a violation of a sacred MC credo. Irony is at the center of blues, however—it is, at its root, a music about existential despair that is deeply opposed to resignation or defeat. It’s been pointed out more than once that blues was created just after slavery by the most oppressed segment of American society, but rarely do you encounter explicit discussion of race or racism within the lyrics—save brilliant queries like “What did I do to get so black and blue?” Blues grapples with the individual tragedy in full public view, an aesthetic habit that’s absent from all but the most significant hip hop.

HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN’

Fruit may not fall far from the tree, but it does, nonetheless, fall. While blues obsesses over the theme of mobility, hip hop is as local as a zip code. The constant blues references to crossroads, trains, and railroad tracks rise from the itinerant life at the turn of the century. Between 1920 and 1942, at least 293 blues songs about trains or railroads were recorded. This is the music of black wanderers exercising the newly granted right of mobility. And thus we encounter titles like “Goin’ Away Blues,” “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” “Crossroads Blues,” and “Further On Up the Road.” The blues tell us that

When a woman gets the blues She hangs her head and cries When a man gets the blues Lord, he grabs a train and rides.

In hip hop, though, there are no references to highways or trains; railroads have been replaced by another central reference: the City. Or more specifically, the fractured territories known collectively as the Ghetto. Innumerable hip hop songs reference the term: Naughty By Nature’s “Ghetto Bastard,” Rakim Allah’s “In the Ghetto” Nas’s “Ghetto Prisoners,” Talib Kweli’s “Ghetto Afterlife,” Lauryn Hill’s “Every Ghetto, Every City,” Dr. Dre’s “The World Is a Ghetto,” all allude to a socio-economic blind alley, a terrain defined by the lack of mobility of its residents. Scarface—formerly of the ensemble the Geto Boys—underscores this point on the single “On My Block,” where he rhymes, “It’s like the rest of the world don’t exist/we stay confined to same spot we been livin’ in.” Jean Grae riffed on this same theme on “Block Party,” imploring heads to “Get out your house/Get off your block/See something, do something.” It’s no coincidence that Atlanta’s dope markets are known as the Traps. So when ATL-based MC T.I. titled his debut release Trap Music he was signifying on a level that even he might not have been hip to. The descendants of those early century itinerants now find themselves trapped in urban stasis one hundred years and one Great Migration later. Thus the relationship between blues and hip hop is the relationship between journeys and destinations.

The City is the unnamed protagonist of every hip hop song created. Up out of Hazlehurst and Bessemer, Sumpter, Natchez, Mulberry, and Sanford—two million deep—to lands where you couldn’t hear crickets or raise no hogs. In Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois fretted, thirty-four years past slavery, that the City would bring black ruination. A century later, Talib Kweli echoed the sage’s observation on “Respiration”:

Look in the sky for God What you see besides the smog Is broken dreams Flying away on the wings of the obscene Thoughts people put in the air Places where you could get murdered over a glare Where everything is fair.

Hip hop is blues filtered through a century of experience and a thousand miles of asphalt. The City has its own crude dialectics: the mark is to the con as day is to night, the playa is to the lame as east is to west. The City is stone-hewn horizons and temples to vast acquisition. Industrial grit. Vice ecology. Iron arteries. Infinite anonymity and high velocity language. Remixed ritual: malt liquor libation and dice divination. Check out Nas and the cover to his blistering debut Illmatic. The image of the rap artist as a young man is superimposed over the legendary Queensbridge Houses—as if he literally has the projects on his mind. The Bridge: the public housing development that cradled Nas and a starting lineup of MCs and producers like MC Shan and Marley Marl. To the MC, shouting out the ’hood, the specific locale and its denizens is a prerequisite. The perspective of the wanderer has given way to the view of the stationary neighborhood rep, one for whom the hood is the universe and the universe is five blocks wide. DJ Quik broke this down with his early-90s assessment that the whole world was “just like Compton.” In the blood-feud filled arena of hip hop, where fratricide has become a cliché, a brother has to claim his soil—because who else is gonna preserve one’s legend? It would be inconceivable that Mississippi John Hurt would shout down at his Chicago blues counterpart on the basis of geography, but even in the current era of hip hop détente, east is east, west is west, and never shall the listener get that fact twisted.

On another level, the blues relationship to lyricism is distinct from that of hip hop—and most of its pop music descendants. Classic blues were most often collectively authored and speak with the authority of a Negro quorum; hip hop, on the other hand, is obsessed with proprietary concerns. And thus the biter’s place of infamy has remained virtually unchanged since hip hop’s inception. The biter—a mimic, a knockoff, a counterfeiter of rhyme styles—dwells in the sub-basement of hip hop regard, equaled only by the “rapper” who ain’t write his own rhymes. This concern with rhyme larceny and boulevard copyright comes not only as a result of the social and psychological changes in black America since the inception of the blues, but also from a simpler issue: the different instrumentalization of the two musics.

Hip hop has intentionally not produced the equivalent of blues standards like “Stagger Lee” or “C. C. Ryder,” because hip hop has no room for “standards” in the traditional sense. The collectively or anonymously authored song in blues is given an individual fingerprint by the artist performing it. And if performance is an ongoing aesthetic experiment, the standard functions as a lyrical or musical constant, the singer’s interpretation is the variable—along with the nuance of the music backing him. This duality of sameness and difference is fueled by the fact the blues vocalist—who is often also an instrumentalist—controls elements of tempo, chord progression, and detail in the performance of the song, even if the crowd already knows what the lyrics will say. Even as the blues chords are made recognizable by flatted or “blue” notes, the arrangement itself is scarcely redundant. Blues lyrics may change over time, but only in the way that all oral literature is revised according to the failings or embellishments of individual memory. So the blues musician can sing the same lyrics a hundred times while never singing the same song twice.

In the arena of hip hop, the instrumentalist and lyricist are completely distinct; rappers don’t spin records, DJs don’t rap—and even if they did, no one could excel at both simultaneously. The rapper as an artist owes his existence to the fact that DJs couldn’t flow verbally while spinning records. On the basic level, a Master of Ceremonies is simply a host; in the beginning, the MC was the entertainer charged with keeping the crowd amped for the real performer—the DJ. The earliest of hip hop turn-tablists built their reps by their ability to shoot game over the mic, incite crowd participation, and shout out simple couplets. In short, order, though, DJs like Grand Master Flash, Grand Master Caz, and Kool Herc began outsourcing their rap to hired vocalists, or as they came to be called in the trade, rappers. Flash charted this development precisely:

I was like totally wack on the mic. I knew that I was not going to be an MC, so I had to find someone able to put a vocal entertainment on top of [my] rearrangement of the music. After so many people tried, the only person that really passed the test—and I think he was one of my lifesavers, with his technique—was Keith Wiggins, who, God rest his soul, has passed. His name was Cowboy. Cowboy found a way to allow me to do my thing and have the people really, really rocking, you know? So we were the perfect combination for some time.

The MC has far less control over what is happening musically than any other vocalist and thus his only resort in creating something new is in the uniqueness of his flow and lyrical content. Otherwise, four rappers reciting the same lyrics over the same track will sound distinct from each other, but qualitatively far more similar to each other than four jazz musicians playing the same arrangement or four blues singers with the same song. But hip hop does possess a canon of standards: the instrumentals and beats.

In early hip hop we witness black music stripped down to its most fundamental and ancient elements: vocals and percussion. Early critics of the music—some of them black—disregarded hip hop for its allegedly elementary approach to music, where harmony was often an afterthought. But that kind of perspective missed the point entirely—the sound was elemental, not elementary. And the only thing required for the rapper to break it down was a percussive statement whether it be programmed into an electronic beatbox or improvised by a human beat-box. Critics who missed that point found themselves re-mouthing aged platitudes. As Baraka observed in Blues People:

The most apparent survivals of African music in Afro-American music are its rhythms: not only the seeming emphasis in the African music on rhythmic rather than melodic or harmonic qualities, but also the use of polyphonic or contrapuntal effects. Because of this seeming neglect of harmony and melody, Westerners thought the music “primitive.” It did not occur to them that Africans might have looked askance at a music as vapid rhythmically as the West’s.

Here is the drum—the one instrument expressly forbidden by the antebellum slavocracy—now reinstated as literally the only instrument needed for hip hop. Here is the Gospel of Sly Stone: all we need is a drummer. Rappers from time immemorial have been ripping mics to disassembled snippets or instrumentals of “Apache,” “Big Beat,” “Good Times,” or “Impeach the President.” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” has been stripped apart like a six series Benz in the neighborhood chop shop and farmed out to a dozens of would-be producers, but the number of rappers to freestyle over that particular instrumental tilts toward the multiple thousands. In hip hop, the constant is the beat, the variable is both the lyricist’s flow and his ability to conjure up a completely different array of themes and punchlines to accompany that beat. Where the singer of blues standards wants to keep the same lyrics as a means of establishing his unique stylings, the rapper wants to do just the opposite—and thus is mandated to eternally dis the biter of rhymes.

In both hip hop and blues we encounter the vocalist as the alter ego of the artist complete with the adoption of a nom de mic—the kind of artistic pseudonym that has its roots in the blues tradition. Nobody’s mama named their boy Redman, Jay-Z, or Biggie, but neither did anyone come into this world with a tag like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, or Leadbelly. But there is a distinction even inside this parallel. The two musics have different relationships to the characters they create; the blues musician can sing about evil, but is not necessarily expected to live that way. His use of the first person is as a metaphor for the collective or as a storytelling technique equal to the novel written from the perspective of the protagonist.

Among the zero-sum hustlers of hip hop inc., the credo of “keeping it real” reigns supreme and gives birth to the ever-present contempt for the rapper ain’t live it the way he spoke it. “Real” is to the rap industry as “All-Natural” is to fast food supplier, as “New and Improved” is to the ad agency, as “I Solemnly Swear” is to the politician. Witness Jay-Z’s assault upon his cross-borough nemesis Nas on “The Takeover”:

Nigga, you ain’t live it you witnessed it from your folks’ pad scribbled in your notepad created your life.

But hip hop’s numb insistence upon “reality” misses the fact that the artist’s task is to understand and interpret the whole world—even those realities that are not his or her own. The demand that there be minimal space between word and deed is ultimately equivalent to demanding that De Niro remain in character as young Don Corleone into the infinite future. Talib Kweli was wise to this angle as well, but few in the mass of MCs were prepared to wrestle with what he put down on “Respiration”:

It’s a paradox we call reality So keeping it real will make you a casualty Of abnormal normality.

But abnormal or not, the rapper, unlike the blues artist, is pressured to adapt (or adopt) his fictive persona in real life. The rapper is judged by a different standard—the ability to live up to his own verbal badness. To get down to the roots, hip hop has come to understand itself in the most literal of terms.

Hip hop is clearly indebted to the blues in terms of its reigning iconography. In hip hop we have the reconstituted trickster—in the absence of the his ironic worldview, or what we might say is the trickster sans tricksterism. Even as the music allows room for tricksterish characters like Ol’ Dirty Bastard—alias Big Baby Jesus, alias Dirt McGirt—Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000, and Flavor Flav, its perspective is most often materialist and as literal as a fundamentalist. The trickster is secondary in hip hop; in this arena the boulevard ’hood—at least since the inception of Tupac’s ghetto ontology “thug life”—has reigned supreme. And the lauded Thug Icon is nothing if not the remix version of the blues’ Baaad Nigger archetype. Whereas the Baaad Nigger and the trickster exist as parallel types in the blues, the thug alone has become the patron deity of hip hop: St. Roughneck. Faced with the asphalt bleakness of this world, stripped of the existentialist irony that we see in blues, the result is a perspective that despises weakness, the weak, and everything associated with them.

Whatever else it might be, hip hop is not generally a music of sympathy for the dispossessed. This is a genre that has come to be dominated by a brand of boulevard Darwinism. And on this last point, all distinctions of style, region, and flavor start breaking down. Look close enough at the righteous rage prophets Public Enemy and the Ghericurled gangsta villainy of NWA, circa Straight Outta Compton, and what you get is two contrasting images of the same thing: the cult of the Indestructible Nigga. For all their moral indignation and pro-black advocacy, the closest P.E. came to crafting a song sympathetic to the lost and the least was “She Watch Channel Zero”—a moralistic screed about an underachieving soap opera-addicted woman that could’ve found favor with the Republican National Committee. And in the NWA universe, weakness or loss was a moral felony. The hustler’s way is to despise the very addicts he helps to create, and in hip hop the hustler’s ethic has come to reign supreme. The damage done by this ethic is widespread, but perhaps nowhere as devastating as in rap’s treatment of women. There is, for example, no parallel infamy in popular music to hip hop’s so-called bitch-nigga—a category that combines the two worst race and gender epithets into a toxic new whole.

I got more riches than you More bitches than you Only thing I don’t got Is more stitches than you —Big L

The above is just one of innumerable such sentiments, issued almost automatically, almost without thought, from the mouths of way too many rappers. This reality is what made songs like Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Nas’ “Black Girl Lost,” and De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled a Pistol On Santa” truly exceptional. In each case, the artist stepped outside the conventions of hip hop to pen sympathetic narratives about the sexual exploitation of young women.

To reckon with these sad elements is to reckon, by necessity, with the fractured history of black manhood, and the tentatively constructed ideals of black masculinity in America. Out here, on the wasted and wind-blown plains of human conflict, the concept of being both black and a man is and ever was dealt with as a breathing contradiction in terms. And if, for a moment, the Fifteenth Amendment attempted to reconcile that adjective with its noun, the tax on black male suffrage was to be black male life itself. Roughly 3,500 lynchings took place between the passage of the amendment, in 1870, and 1920; the victims were overwhelmingly black men who had been targeted for the South’s blood rituals. It was no coincidence that the lynched black body was literally disassembled and distributed to the gleeful white masses—with the penis reserved as the prize token: recreational terrorism.

Georgia, 1899. Sam Hose shrieked at the sight of the knife and quietly urged his tormentors to kill him swiftly. This was plea none was inclined to heed … The torture of the victim last almost half an hour. It began when a man stepped forward and very matter-of-factly sliced off his ears. Then several men grabbed Hose’s arms and held them forward so his fingers could be severed one by one and shown to the crowd. Finally a blade was passed between his thighs, Hose cried in agony, and a moment later his genitals were held aloft. Three men lifted a large can of kerosene and dumped its contents over Sam Hose’s head, and the pyre was set ablaze.

Denial, as the saying goes, is a long river, but it is also the psychological irony that made daily life possible in the buckwild frontier of Racial America. And out of this tendency arises the long tradition of boast, hyperbole, and signifying. What we have is a culture that arising in the context of two centuries of terrorism that habitually, ritually—desperately—rephrases reality, flips the script, and declares the black men indestructible despite all evidence to the contrary. A coping mechanism raised to the level of aesthetic statement. The sages say that a boast is best taken at its opposite face value: the shouted claims of omnipotence, they tell us, serve to highlight one’s own fragility. Yet it is equally true that no exploited class of humanity can survive while remaining focused on their own collective impotence.

I was born in the backwoods, for a pet I raised a bear I got two sets of jawbone teeth and an extra layer of hair When I was three, my crib was a barrel of knives A rattlesnake bit me and crawled off and died.

—Stagolee, ca. 1896

I tussled with an alligator, rassled with a whale handcuffed lighting and threw thunder in jail. I murdered a rock, and hospitalized a brick I’m so mean I make medicine sick.

—Muhammad Ali, 1963

Verbal assassin, my architect pleases When I was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus … I melt mics til the sound wave’s over Before stepping to me, you’d better step to Jehovah.

—Nas, 1994

These are lies. But our lies ultimately reveal as much as our truths. And without these lies, it would be impossible to have this specific truth:

Jacksonville, Fla. Jack Trice fought fifteen white men at 3 A.M. on the 12th, killing James Hughes and Edward Sanchez, fatally wounding Henry Daniels and dangerously wounding Albert Bruffum. The battle occurred at Trice’s humble home to prevent his 14 year-old son from being “regulated”—brutally beaten and perhaps killed by the whites. On the afternoon of May 11th, Trice’s son and the son of Town Marshall Hughes of Palmetto fought, the white boy being badly beaten. Marshall Hughes was greatly enraged and he and 14 other white men went to Trice’s house to regulate his little boy. The whites demanded that the boy be sent out. Trice refused and they began firing. Trice returned the fire, his first bullet killing Marshall Hughes. Edward Sanchez tried to burn the house, but was shot through the brain by Trice. Then the whites tried to batter in the door with a log, which resulted in Henry Daniels getting a bullet in the stomach that will kill him. The “regulators” then ran. —Cleveland Gazette, May 30, 1896.

The hope is to make one’s claims to bad-motherfuckerdom a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Self-praise, as the maxim tells us, is a half compliment. But on another level, it was insurrectionary for black boys to hail themselves in song and story and right down to names they adopted: Grand Master Flash, Grand Wizard Theodore, the Grand Incredible DJ Scott La Rock. Literal self-aggrandizement. Walter Mosley once pointed out that within the black tradition, heroism is defined simply as survival against great odds—and on another level, the mere attempt to survive when one is always outnumbered, always outgunned. The boxer can scarcely afford to admit to his opponent that his unseen shot hurt him all the way down to the chromosomes. Thus: the overblown self-praise that is the cornerstone of hip hop indicates the scar tissue of black male powerlessness—and at the same time it testifies to the unrelenting will to survive in the midst of a deck loaded with wild jokers and stacked way against you. Call this Stagoleeism.

But hip hop has no room for the antiheroic, no sympathy for the weak, no blues-like tales of the man lamenting the fact that he sent his son out to face the regulators. The one who ain’t have no choice as he saw it: surrounded on all sides, no way to protect your boy without sacrificing your pregnant woman and the two young daughters. Jack Trice and his boy escaped that night in 1896, but a new mob found his elderly mother and burned her house to the ground. The lines between hero and coward, thug and bitch-nigga become blurred when choosing among rival worst-case scenarios. The truth is that some men are larger than life, but life looms large over very many more. When you boil away the excess, the hero might just be the coward with a better plan B.

The two most identifiable American folk heroes are the cowboy and the gangster, men who conquered the frontiers of sod and concrete, replaying the age-old conflict of man versus nature and at the same time, man versus human nature. In hip hop, so-called Gangsta Rap is an echo of the folklore tradition of lionizing the outlaw, the robber of banks, and stealer of men’s lives—a tradition that gets its start in black music with the blues. Within blues and hip hop, the outlaw has a distinct hue—his crimes are the inevitable product of a system that has made slaves of human beings and left babies to inherit despair. The bluesman may ask, “What did I do to get so black and blue?” but that same sentiment is being echoed by Tupac Shakur’s line that “I was given this world/I didn’t make it.”

The critic Robert Warshow has written that the gangster is an American catharsis figure. In a society where official power requires a state-sponsored public optimism in order to preserve the perception of order, the gangster’s monochromatic world, with its pessimistic symbols and the inevitably bloody demise of the protagonist, is subversive—in a way that is most useful to those in power:

I watch a gangster flick and cheer for the bad guy And turn if off before the end because the bad guy dies.

—50 Cent

In the case of hip hop, the gangster has become the means by which the lives of the marginal, the lesser, the weak have been transformed into entertainment.

It is this gangster ethos that makes gems of sympathetic rendering like Talib Kweli’s “Get By” or the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where’s the Love?” so hard to come by in hip hop. The unanswered question is whether or not hip hop as a genre, as an approach to life, will persuasively deal with human weakness and the ways in which the “weak,” the marginalized, and exploited are able to flip the script and instill their lives with meaning. This is the message implicit not only within the musical expression of blues, but also to the blues-contemporary phenomenon of social realism—the aesthetic philosophy underpinning the work of Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Richard Wright in the 1930s. With The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck delivered a reckoning with the humanity of heretofore disposable white people. With his murals, Rivera fashioned a vision of the outsized humanity pulsing within the common Mexican laborer. To cut to the quick, what the world needs now is a rapper who can do for the common man and woman verbally what Diego Rivera was able to do with a paint brush and a blank wall.

GROWN FOLK BUSINESS

I pointed out earlier that the “Baaad Nigger” of the blues tradition was reincarnated as the “Real Nigga” of hip hop lore. The blues trickster, on the other hand, descends in hip hop to the playa-pimp, a character who occupies the improvised crossroads of the street corner. He contains the contradiction of male violence while coiffed and primped to the feminine extremes and uses his verbal cunning to literally persuade his stable to do tricks. But the similarity between the two genres on the level of character and archetype does not end with men. Look closely and you find the tradition of the blues woman remixed and replayed in the work of the MC; women whose births were separated by the better part of a century, but who whose work nonetheless bears a family resemblance.

Blues articulated that feeling of running up against the jagged and splintered realities of life, and the specific twists that those realities held for women who were hemmed in by both their race and their gender. Whether in the boll-weevil stricken soils of the South or the stone and steel depots that the Great Migration had delivered them to, the blues woman spoke of life distilled to the polarities of pain and pleasure, worry, and bravado: The rent note that comes due and the shiftless man with nothing to put toward it. The respite of sexual release and the jealous drive to hold onto what is yours. The major concerns with one’s material needs and ones sexuality that find themselves entwined within the music.

The historian Darlene Clark Hine, explained that phenomenon when she wrote women who migrated north and became occasional prostitutes “were extracting value from the only thing society allowed them to sell.” Sara Brooks, a black domestic who migrated from Alabama to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1930s, pointed to this reality when she said that some women “meet a man and if he promises them four or five dollars to go to bed, they’s grab it. That’s called sellin’ your own body, and I wasn’t raised like that.” But as Hine argued, “As long as they occupied an enforced subordinate position within American society, this ‘sellin’ your own body,’ was, I submit, Rape.”

James Baldwin spoke the truth when he said that “Mama has to feed her children and on one level, she really cannot afford to care how she does it.” And it was equally true that this self-perpetuating circumstance played into the prevailing ideas that weighed on black women in the first place. The historian Deborah White spoke of that body of myths, sown in the soil of slavery, to justify the sexual exploitation of black women:

One of the most prevalent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by libido, a Jezebel character. In every way, Jezebel was the counter-image of the nineteenth century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh.

A loose woman, a sharp-tongue, and a temptress of the type that caused bureaucrats, respectable race folk, and sociologists to wring their hands for an entire century. So it is up against the backdrop of this skewed vision of reality that blues provided women with an arena in which they could articulate life as they saw, experienced, and understood it. The music allowed black women to flip the script and speak of pleasure on their own terms. Such concerns had to be placed in the foreground before Mary Dixon could record a song like “All Around Mama,” where the vocalist explains the talents and shortcomings of her past lovers.

I met a man, he was a jockey Did the things he should Always ready, that’s the reason He could ride so good.

Dixon could have compared notes with Lil’ Kim, whose “How Many Licks?” contrasts the coital skills of men of different races:

Had a Puerto Rican Papi, used to be a deacon But now he be sucking me off on the weekend.

Blues was the only forum in 1939 in which Ida Cox could’ve thrown down the gauntlet as she did in “One Hour Mama,” a bold-print statement of her sexual prerequisites:

I don’t want no imitation My requirements ain’t no joke ’cause I’ve got pure indignation for a guy what’s lost his stroke.

Lest there be any confusion, the chorus added:

I’m a one hour mama So no one minute papa Ain’t the kind of man for me.

In Shakespearean terms, there is no new thing beneath the sun; but in this context that observation could be stretched to include between the sheets. “One Minute Man,” the 2001 collaboration between Missy Elliott and Trina, expressed a sentiment virtually identical to what Ida Cox had put down sixty-two years earlier.

I see you talk a good game and you play hard But if I put this thing on you, can you stay hard? If not, you better keep your day job.

And here the chorus announces in identical fashion:

I don’t want, I don’t need I can’t stand no minute man.

The poet and blues critic Larry Neal argued that the “disproportionate” concern with the sex act in the blues was a product of commercial influences on the genre—that its discussion of sex grew in direct proportion to the size of the audience willing to pay for that content and record companies’ demands for more of the same. That statement explains the hypersexuality that came to be a standard feature of commercially supported female hip hop artists in the mid 1990s. The difference being that within blues, sexuality was generally couched in clever, if thin, metaphors. Hip hop allowed for women to state in unambiguous adjectives the realities of sex. Missy Elliott, for instance, leaves no room for the misconception that she is referring to anything feline when she sings “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now.”

Sexually suggestive lyricism was not the level on which blues women and female rappers share a thematic relationship. The earliest critics of hip hop decried the violence associated with the music and articulated with in it lyrics. But hip hop’s threats to bodily harm—particularly those issued by women artists—echo the traditions of its ancestor music. The murder of an unfaithful lover is the blues staple. Skip James’ threat that

If I send for my baby and she don’t come If I send for my baby and she don’t come All the doctors in Wisconsin, they won’t help her none

was not an isolated sentiment. But for every man with a blood grudge against his woman, there was a woman singing:

Someone stole my man So I’m going looking for him With a .44 in my hand.

In “Carbolic Acid Blues,” recorded in 1928, we witness the common theme of violence between rivals for a man’s affections.

I told her I loved her man, grave will be her restin’ place I told her I loved her man, grave will be her restin’ place She looked at me with burnin’ eyes, threw carbolic acid in my face.

Those same sentiments were present within hip hop, dating as far back as the 1980s pop confections like Salt-N-Pepa’s “I’ll Take Your Man.” This is not to say that the later artists were derivative or dependent upon blues for material—in most instances, the parallels were unspoken and unplanned. Rather, the point is that hip hop exists as a kindred part of the tradition that also informed the blues and that the women within both genres are, on some level, responding to dynamics that have transcended the years that separate them. The obvious distinction, however, is that female artists were far more widely recognized and influential within the blues than they were in hip hop. Ma Rainey’s title of the “Mother of the Blues” may have come into existence as a handle conjured up in the marketing department at Paramount Records, but it wasn’t inaccurate. Hip hop, like the Christian Trinity, has bestowed the title of “Father” upon Kool Herc, but there is no mention of the maternal role. That is to say that three decades after its creation, the “Mother of Hip Hop” is a vacant post.