Читать книгу To the Break of Dawn - William Jelani Cobb - Страница 7

As an MC you will study verbal magic

But watch what you say 'cause you'll attract it

Control the subconscious magnet

From pulling in havoc

“Who am I?”

The MC

Categorizing art is as simple as holding a fist full of water. In hip hop, the standard dichotomies (old school vs. new school, commercial vs. underground, etc.) are as hazy as a Harlem August. As the music through which a new generation announced its aesthetic sensibilities, hip hop is tied to a particular point in history, but even then it is divided into sub-generations of its own. The Benetton-swathed, antiseptically white-Adidas-wearing b-boy who came to the Latin Quarter or Union Square in 1986 to catch Rakim or the Ultra Magnetic MCs, had an experience that was distinct from that of the mock-neck sporting old head who had checked the Treacherous Three at the Disco Fever in 1978. Art respects no borders and time frames, but for our own concerns, hip hop can be divided into four overlapping eras: the Old School, 1974–1983, the Golden Age 1984–1992, the Modern Era, 1992–1997, and the Industrial Era, 1998–2005.

Implicit within each is an approach to the verbal arts that differed from that of both its precedent and successor. The casual observer and the closed-eared critic—of which there are many, if not most—misses the increased artistic complexity that characterized each evolving stage of the music. Where rappers began by stringing together relatively simple rhyming phrases, the art progressed to the employment of metaphor, simile, alliteration, internal rhyme—an entire catalog of techniques to assist in getting one's listening audience open.

The irony of history lies in the fact that time moves only forward, but can be best understood by looking backward. It fell to the Old School artists—Grandmasters Flash and Caz, Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, the Cold Crush Brothers, the Crash Crew, the Fantastic Five, Kurtis Blow, the Funky Four Plus One, Sequence, Fearless Four, Spoonie Gee, Busy Bee, the Treacherous Three—to part with the history of weary soul singers and the sequined sync-stepping songsters of the era that preceded them. It fell to them to collectively create hip hop music and see it through its transition from a predominantly live performance medium to its first commercial recordings and distribution.

That transition can't be overestimated; Go-Go music, which germinated from the roots of funk in the 1970s, was, for a variety of reasons, not vigorously pursued by major music industry labels. Consequently, it remained almost exclusively a regional phenomenon, based in Washington, D.C., as well as one that was experienced primarily through live performance. In sharp contrast, the early hip hop recordings that appeared on record labels like Sugar Hill and Enjoy paved the way for the music's expansion from local style to regional sound to national subculture and ultimately global movement. The history of popular music in this country is the history of neglected innovators. It was not in the stars, the cards, or the medium of prognostication of your choosing for these artists to reap the kinds of returns that put them in the CEO tax bracket.

In those earliest days, it might have been harder for the unheralded poet-MC coming of age in the South Bronx and Manhattan to have not heard the poetic offerings of the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, or the Watts Prophets. Formed in the aesthetic blast-furnace of the Black Arts Movement, the Last Poets had given new form and elevation to the verbal arts that had come down to them from the traditions of scat syncopation in jazz, the epic folk toasts of the Great Migration era, and the incandescent oratory of Malcolm X. (For the record, with his raspy voice, intellect, and charisma, Malcolm would've made for a serious rapper in another place and time—then again there's just as much argument to be made that he was the first great rapper.)

Give “Wake Up, Nigger” from the eponymous debut album a listen and it becomes clear that Last Poets Jalal Nurridin and Umar Bin Hassan are working as proto-rappers, playing many of the verbal techniques that would later become central to the MCs. Their self-titled debut album was released in 1970 and the 1971 follow up This Is Madness was released close enough to the beginnings of hip hop to have almost been a contemporary influence. Years later, when Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's incendiary single “The Message” had infused hip hop with overt political content, Kid Creole would see it as a direct extension of the Last Poets' tradition. “There was nothing in rap like that before except for maybe the Last Poets,” he pointed out.

Contrary to popular wisdom, history does not repeat itself—but it is prone to extended paraphrases. Early MCs made use of their aesthetic inheritance in the same way that the generation that created blues had fallen back upon the folklore and musical legacy bequeathed to them by the ancestors who had survived the ordeal of slavery. That said, the irony is that critics and writers generally recognized the influence of the Last Poets more than hip hop artists did themselves. This hazy connection to one's artistic genealogy is not specific to hip hop (try asking the average twenty-three-year-old rock musician about his artistic debt to Ike Turner) but the truth is that an entire generation of hip hop heads were introduced to the Last Poets classic “All Hail to the Late Great Black Man” via Notorious B.I.G.'s first single, “Party & Bullshit,” which had sampled a snippet from the track—for decidedly opposite political ends. (This wasn't the last time Big would hijack political anthems for his own boulevardian ends—he famously shackled a segment of Public Enemy's “Shut 'Em Down” to his own “Ten Crack Commandments.”) And truth told, the chanted syncopation of Stetsasonic's 1988 release “Freedom or Death,” was so deeply indebted to the Last Poets' stylings that the song could've passed as a lost studio session from the revolutionary bards.

A Tribe Called Quest's “Excursions” on The Low End Theory featured a rip from the Last Poets' “Time Is Running Out” as the hook. But it was not until Common's 2005 release “The Corner,” which featured the Last Poets chanting the hook, did you see major hip hop artists collaborating with their literal elder spokespersons. At the same time, the Last Poets occupied the ironic niche of being the most widely recognized of a whole array of artists who had been mining similar veins. While The Last Poets and This Is Madness pre-dated the beginnings of hip hop, Gil Scott-Heron's 1974 album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was released as the art form took its first breaths of South Bronx air. Primarily a jazz album, Revolution's claim to the hip hop pantheon was anchored in a title track that found Scott-Heron delivering verse over a hypnotic, funk-indebted bassline—an approach that was so distinct at that point as to warrant classic status. (That same bassline was later lifted and enlisted for Queen Latifah and KRS-One's collaboration “The Evil That Men Do.”) At the same time, the other poetic standard-bearers of that era, Amiri Baraka, the Watts Prophets among others, were working toward the creation of another verse form; specifically they sought ever blacker forms of self-expression—however that term could be defined.

The debt to that generation of artists was apparent as were the distinctions between the two. In their approach to poetry—maybe as part of their collective efforts to shake themselves free of the constraints of whiter poetics—rhyme was often de-emphasized in the work of the Last Poets, Baraka, and Scott-Heron. Hip hop took the elements of verbal expression and percussive accompaniment, but within this new culture rhyme became—and three decades later remained—the most valued element of hip hop lyricism.

It is an irony of history that the complex culture fermenting in the South Bronx and Upper Manhattan came to national attention via the Sugar Hill Gang, an artificially flavored composite group whose “Rapper's Delight” was the first commercially successful recording of the genre. (It was not, however, the first rap record—that distinction belonged to Fatback Band's “King Tim III.”) Sugar Hill Records, the indie label owned by Sylvia Robinson, a former R&B vocalist, had gotten in on the ground floor of the movement. That said, they went on to sign future legends Busy Bee, Crash Crew, and Sequence, the first all-female rap act. Rival Enjoy Records, headed by Bobby Robinson, who had discovered Gladys Knight and the Pips, was responsible for the careers of the Funky Four Plus One, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Spoonie Gee, the Disco Four, and the Fearless Four.

Between the 1979 release of “Rapper's Delight” and 1983, the music was perceived as a cute Negro niche market capable of producing free-spirited confections like Kurtis Blow's “The Breaks” in 1980 or the occasional noteworthy musing like Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's “The Message” in 1982. For the purist, though, the era yielded manifold musical blessings: Afrika Bambaataa's “Jazzy Sensation,” “Looking for the Perfect Beat,” and the heart-rate spiking “Planet Rock.” The Fearless Four released “Rockin' It” and “Problems of the World Today,” the Treacherous Three offered “Yes, We Can, Can” and “Action”—not to mention lesser-hailed contributions from Grand Master Flash and his five MCs like “Scorpio” and “Survival.”

To later ears, the toddler awkwardness of the early music is apparent in a way that it never could have been to the contemporary listener. That said, all artistic development begins with shots in the dark and for the artists of hip hop's embryonic stages, there was simply more dark to shoot at. That reality could be seen, for instance, in the awkward intonations and unruly variations in pitch that early MCs employed. Check the Fearless Four's “It's Magic,” a classic release whose supernatural boasts made it a thematic cousin to the Tempations' “Can't Get Next to You.” The most notable trait of Mike C and Peso's MCing is the wild alternation between false baritone and high-pitched excitement. That brand of unruly intonation had given way to more subtle vocal changes even before the Old School era expired, but their approach to verbal styling wasn't accidental. Just as the rhyme routines of early rappers bore the hallmarks of the soul groups they were imitating, their tonal adventurism was an inheritance from the fast-talking, pitch-varying pseudo-baritone couplets that radio deejays—another ancestor to the hip hop MC—had been practicing for decades.

The radio deejay was in fact a significant precursor to the rapper. That much was clear as early as 1979, when the Fatback Band's “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” appeared. The first recorded rap record featured King Tim throwing down his rap over funked guitar riff. And unlike the Poets, Baraka, or Heron, whose work, in retrospect, sounds raplike, King Tim was rapping. The recording is virtually identical in stylistic terms to the early work released by the Furious Five, Grandmaster Caz, and the Funky Four—artists who were the first to be assigned the label “rapper.” But the recording is also thoroughly reminiscent of the cadence, intonation, and pitch of the radio entertainers who, by the 1970s, were long-established media personalities.

Rap was delivered to that nebulously defined American deity the Market by the Sugar Hill Gang's “Rapper's Delight,” but the political birth of hip hop could arguably be traced to Melle Mel's 1982 rhyme manifesto “The Message.” While “Rapper's Delight” had remained true to the party spirit at the center of the newborn culture, “The Message” had taken aim at the decaying metropolis—and the decaying lives lived within it—that had made that desperate partying so essential to daily survival in the first place. Frantz Fanon famously pointed out in Wretched of the Earth that music and dance remained social safety valves that siphoned anger away and actually made life under inhuman conditions tolerable. Frederick Douglass informed readers of his autobiographical narrative that slavemasters encouraged black people to participate in all manner of recreational diversion in their few moments of respite so as to prevent them from hatching plans to seize their freedom. But with all due respect to Douglass and Fanon, Mel could've schooled them on the revolutionary potential of black joy.

Hip hop was that joy. And on that level, the distinctions between “The Message” and a contemporary party track like the Treacherous Three's “Put the Boogie in Your Body” were less clear than the conventional wisdom would have one believe. “The Message” succeeded—as did Public Enemy's later rhyme polemics like “Welcome to the Terror-dome”—primarily because the form was blazing. What Melle Mel put down on that record, backed by a cluster of ascending keys and a rotund bassline, was undeniable. Had a lesser MC taken aim at the ills of South Bronx living, no matter how desperately they needed a public exposé, crowds would've ignored it while jamming to apolitical bangers like “Put the Boogie in Your Body.” In Melle Mel, though, there was a brilliant combination of both talent and political insight.

Sugar Hill had gotten over with a market success that was, in terms of form, a series of verses strung together without pause. Kurtis Blow's “Christmas Rappin',” released that same year, contained a series of rhymes tied together by the holiday theme. But later offerings more closely adhered to the traditional song structure of sixteen bars followed by an eight-bar chorus. By the time of releases like T-Ski's “Catch the Beat” in 1981, the eight-bar “hook” had become a feature of hip hop songs. Even so, nothing in the music's short history had the kind of resonance of Melle Mel's enduring refrain “It's like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” which was probably the first classic hook in the art form. His mic skills allowed his indictment of the cancerous ways of Reagan-era America to initiate a genre of overtly political hip hop.

Even outside of “The Message” it would be hard to overstate Melle Mel's impact upon the early evolution of the art. (Kool Moe Dee would later point to Mel as the single greatest MC in the history of the music.) In the years, now decades, following the ascent of Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, there would be dozens of rappers who might be considered to be better than Melle Mel was, but none has been as far ahead of their peers as Mel was circa 1982. His was an unimpeachable position atop the lyricist food chain—a spot he held at least until he ran up against Kool Moe Dee, who had set his sights on Mel's crown after having verbally humiliated Busy Bee. The fact is that for the Melle Mels and Kool Moe Dees there were no precedents; they were artists who had to first create their art form itself before getting down to the business of creating actual art. Every subsequent generation of MCs had a whole genealogy of artists to define themselves against. Melle Mel had a pen, a pad, and an idea.

Run DMC is to hip hop as BC and AD are to history. The emergence of the Queens duo and their insistent opening statement “Sucker MCs” signaled a new era in the music commercially as well as aesthetically. Everything down to their ascetic sartorial choices indicated a shift in priorities. Where Afrika Bambaataa's Soul Sonic Force performed in costumes worthy of George Clinton, Run DMC and Jay opted for the solemnity of all-black outfits offset by black fedoras. Prior to them, hip hop acts blew on stage with Parliament-sized delegations; by the mid-1980s, their format—two MCs and a sole deejay—had become the standard. Not only did the revenues get divided into fewer hands, the structure of their songs changed as well, becoming more individualistic and defined.

But what made the era they inaugurated worthy of the term golden—an adjective gleaned from that longest glorified of precious metals in hip hop—was the sheer number of stylistic innovations that came into existence. The era witnessed the emergence of definitive influences, Big Daddy Kane, Queen Latifah, Ice Cube, the Ultra Magnetic MCs, Main Source, 2 Live Crew, Cypress Hill, LL Cool J, MC Lyte, Slick Rick, Too Short, KRS-One, Doug E. Fresh, EPMD, Kool G. Rap, Ice-T, Biz-Markie, NWA, Rakim—almost all of whom were under twenty-one years of age when they made their debuts.

Artists spend years trying to cultivate a unique approach to their chosen form; in these golden years, a critical mass of mic prodigies were literally creating themselves and their art form at the same time. In addition to verbally decapitating MC Shan, for example, KRS-One, the Bronx-born, Jamaica-descended sage and MC, returned hip hop to its Caribbean roots. On tracks like “The P Is Free” on the debut classic Criminal Minded, KRS fused bottom-heavy dancehall riddims and patois seasoned flow with the standards of hip hop articulation. The same would have to be said for Just-Ice, who in addition to pouring the foundation for gangsta rap had blended ragga stylings of his Jamaican ancestry on 1986's Back to the Old School. It came as no surprise then that KRS and Just-Ice would find themselves trading island-inflected verses on the 1988's “Suicide.”

A Tribe Called Quest constructed an impossibly original sound based on H2O cool melodic structures that complimented their smoothed-out rhyme patterns. It's hard to believe that their 1990 debut album People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was crafted by artists who were less than two years out of high school. Tribe not only distanced itself even further from the tradition of rhyming routines that sustained the early rap acts, their individual members didn't even necessarily appear on the same songs. On tracks like “8 Million Stories” from Midnight Marauder and “Luck of Lucien” from People's Instinctive Travels, Phife and Q-Tip delivered distinctive solo lyrical efforts. There had been precedent for this: “The Message,” which was released under the name Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, featured only Melle Mel rhyming. But that solo performance had underscored rising tensions within the group and factored in their breakup later that year. At the same time as Tribe, De La Soul, their fellow members of the Native Tongues collective, produced Three Feet High and Rising which took rhyme to new degrees of abstraction, running extended, elusive metaphors like “Potholes in My Lawn” for the length of an entire song.

The thematic boundaries of what constituted hip hop were not the only thing expanding. Hip hop's relationship to female practitioners of the microphone craft had always been ambivalent at best. And unlike blues, which is literally incomprehensible minus its female articulators; or soul, in which women artists are arguably more aesthetically influential than males; or gospel, where women absolutely are more influential, hip hop's boundary-stretching visionaries were overwhelmingly male. Hip hop's early development had no female artists who were as proportionately influential as Bessie Smith or Aretha Franklin in their respective genres (though, ironically, Sylvia Robinson of Sugar Hill Records was arguably the most important industry executive in the early history of the form). The Golden Era witnessed the ascent of female artists like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah as both artistically and commercially significant, Roxanne Shante as a lyrical assassin with no adjectival modifiers preceding her name, and a regiment of second-tier female MCs like Antoinette, Monie Love, Ice Cream T, and Sparky D. At its core, hip hop was still about a cornered black masculinity using verbs and nouns as a means of defending itself—but the Golden Era brought with it a (grudging) respect for a small collection of women MCs.