DOOM is the man’s name and you better spell it with all caps. Only, the man behind the mask is Daniel Dumile, and you may know him by any one of the names MF DOOM, Metal Fingers, Viktor Vaughan, King Geedorah, Zev Love X, or one half of Madvilain, Danger DOOM – and now – JJ DOOM. While strictly speaking at least five of these aliases are an extension of the same character, it’s clear from viewing his career through this wide-angle lens that here is an artist who thrives off of his own creativity. It’s also evident that DOOM likes a change of surroundings, but it was immigration officials rather than his own invention that brought the London-born emcee back to the UK in 2010.
Not to be kept quiet for long, DOOM teamed up with producer Jneiro Jarel (that’s the JJ part) onKey To The Kuffs; an album that finds the supervillain coming to grips with his new South London home and all the UK-inspired references that go with it. In case you might suspect some kind of hackneyed ‘DOOM does London’ job, though, in a character-defying move he has left his crowbar at home and cockney references serve as little more than a backdrop for his usual lyrical capers. What glorious capers they are too, jumping right into the record’s first and perhaps finest rhyme on ‘Guv’nor’:
“Catch a throatful from the fire vocal / Ashing and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull / Volcano out of Iceland / Go conquer and destroy the rap world like the white men.”
While his influence has been vast, at his best DOOM remains peerless in terms of dexterity of expression and concept. One rapper’s plain and empty boast, is DOOM’s abstract brag or vital token of advice; That’s coming from a guy who knows the rap game better than the back of his own mask. On ‘Retarded Fren’ he moves “like an iceball, off-guard, soft, hard – ask him if he give an F like report card,” while on ‘Bite the Thong’ he taunts the younger generation: “Go for the club, kid, one-hit wonder / Killing it – a brilliant career move blunder.”
The most significant treat here though is the sombre ‘Winter Blues’, finding a tender, merlot-drinking DOOM in a rare moment of vulnerability. The song finds our villain in a weary state after the day’s hustle, slinking back to his girl’s house (presumably through the window) to recharge off the touch of her flesh. “Each and every day, making cash with Satan / can’t eat, can’t sleep, it’s exasperating,” he admits, before indulging in his deep desire for loving, human contact. Set to Jneiro Jarel’s sleepy strings and pulsing beat, this is not just a beautiful song, but a welcome and unexpected extension of the DOOM character fifteen years after it first emerged.
Not everything on Key to the Kuffs is so vital, and the fact that I’ve mentioned just one Jarel contribution is probably telling of his importance here. The presence of an outside producer as opposed to recycled cuts from his Special Herbs collections is a definite advantage, but for the most part the spotlight is DOOM’s, even when Damon Albarn and Beth Gibbons turn up for curiously low-key cameos. Moreover, as long-awaited hook-ups with Ghostface Killah and Madlib remain on the cutting-room floor for now, JJ DOOM might not be the collaboration that everyone wanted to see, but ultimately hip hop needs this guy – in whatever incarnation he decides is necessary.
“I run New York” snarls Angel Haze, in a refrain from the Gil Scott-Heron-flipping lead single of her new EP, Reservation. It’s a bold claim at the best times, but in a year when the east coast is alive with inspiration from talent new and old, what separates this 20-year-old native-American born emcee from the pack? For starters there’s her versatility, both stylistically and in terms of persona. Throughout the EP’s duration (which is 14 songs and nearly an hour long, I should add), Haze expertly straddles scrappy, street-hardened battle raps (‘New York’, ‘Werkin Girls’), with affecting personal tales set to R&B hooks (‘Hot Like Fire’), half-pace dubstep wobbles (‘Wicked Moon’) and most impressively of all –successful pop/rap fusion (‘Drop It’, ‘This is Me’).
Angel Haze has all the technical attributes at her disposal; she’s demonstrably driven, a sharp lyricist, competent singer, and most of all she raps as though her life depended on it. While there are moments that she might give an impression of vulnerability, give her an inch and she’ll bite - hard. But underneath the taunts and bravado is a complex human being; the type who wonders aloud what it would be like to be beautiful – to be gentle – but can’t help feel angry at a world and an industry that doesn’t always allow for that. Does Angel Haze run New York? It’s still a bold claim, but if she keeps up this momentum perhaps posturing will find reality. [Ed – since writing this she’s earned herself a deal with Universal, so there you go].
I meant to write about HBK Gang’s Iamsu! in the last column, but somehow his excellent KILTmixtape was squeezed out at the last hour. I intend to make up for this here, not only by pointing you in the direction of that release, but also a new collaboration with fellow Bay Area rapper/producer Jay Ant. If I had to choose, this joint-tape is maybe the stronger of the two, with Su! and Ant sharing production duties and trading verses to devastating effect. Stylistically, Stoopid is a more steady-handed, modern update of the hyphy sound, occasionally moving closer to traditional territory in the tape’s more energetic moments. It’s in the purposeful, slower rhythms in which the pair excel though, such as the spatially perfect bass ‘n’ clap productions ‘Stoopid’ and ‘That N*gga’
Fans of Action Bronson’s retro New York rap would do well to check out this mixtape from his close-affiliate Meyhem Lauren. Not only does Respect the Fly Shit feature Action on five of its twelve tracks, but behind the dials are two of his most regular collaborators, Tommy Mas and Harry Fraud. As such, you probably know what to expect here, but the tape is given an extra energy by the nature of how it was recorded; holed up in an Austin hotel suite during SXSW with a revolving door of touring emcees. Although the exhaustive guestlist (Roc Marciano, AG Da Coroner, Sean Price, Heems and more) makes it difficult to view this as a pure solo statement, Meyhem makes it count with every opportunity. There’s an audible chemistry at play too, as these like-minded individuals assemble in one-place, inspiring one another and bouncing punch-lines off the hotel room walls.
Sticking with a retro vibe for a second, Antwon’s new record End of Earth is a curiously diverse nine-track collection. Beginning with a vocal-less drone intro and the marching doom-rap of ‘Laugh Now’, the album quickly finds itself in the more familiar territory of lo-fi Miami-synths and spacey post-Clams (are we using post-Clams yet?) productions. Amazingly, all of that just about hangs together, and when he hits his stride it feels like Antwon could be on the cusp of something great. Bonus points are also awarded for this brilliantly nostalgic video for album standout ‘Living Every Dream’.
If there was one Jackie Chain for every mono-flow Keef-a-like coming out of Chicago right now, the world would surely be a happier place. Bruce Lean Chronicles is the second tape Chain has released this year, as the Alabama rapper finds himself in the familiar position of being signed to a major (Universal), but with no debut album scheduled for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to envision what more he has to do to be given a push; these twelve southern rap cuts are all tailored to radio, but the label continue to bide their time while Jackie offers up first-rate material on the house. On Bruce Lean Chronicles, Chain sounds in his element over cheap sounding club tracks (‘So Throwed’, ‘Only Way I know’), blended with the crisper, vintage-sounding beats provided by the likes of DJ Burn One (‘Windows’) and Big K.R.I.T. (‘Parked Outside’).
Starlito continues to prove himself as one of the most consistently inventive mixtape rappers on new project Post Traumatic Stress. The Nashville emcee flips a collection of previously released beats in his trademark death-bed drawl, further exploring his intriguing persona through smart wordplay and narrative. The title track, for instance, takes a refreshingly personal look at infidelity, as Lito’s gradual and expertly detailed storytelling reveals the full extent of the heartbreak caused. While Post Traumatic Stress is a relatively short half-hour tape, Starlito is rarely worth ignoring, and this project whets the appetite nicely ahead of a sequel to his Don Trip collaboration, Step Brothers, due later this year.
–
Originally featured on Drowned in Sound. To read the full feature including an interview with Aesop Rock, click here.
The digitisation of music consumption is either the best or the worst thing that could have happened to Aesop Rock. On the one hand, while hip-hop’s free mixtape culture moves at lightning pace, Aesop’s dense, lyrical mosaics can take months, even years, to digest. The sheer volume and availability of rap music in 2012 has made keeping up with it a daily struggle, let alone trying to form meaningful bonds with records. So for an artist like Aesop Rock, who requires your total, undivided attention if you’re to stand any chance of breaking down his songs, the mêlée for recognition is tougher than ever.
On the other hand, the saturation of hastily produced hip-hop seeking instant gratification makes Aesop Rock’s star shine all the more brightly. Arriving a matter of months after Lil B released an 855 song mixtape that nobody listened to, Skelethon is Aesop’s first solo album since 2007 – and it shows. This is not intended as a whining diatribe against our increasingly frivolous relationships with rap records, but this is one that shook me by the shoulders with a potent reminder that music is a two-way process. Skelethon is a wildly energetic, funny, poignant, nostalgic and sad record; the result of huge personal investment on Aesop’s behalf, but without substantial effort from the listener all of that is rendered worthless.
Lyrically, Aesop has always followed freeform internal monologues, but in the five years since he released None Shall Pass his focus has become even more inward. This is the guy who once wrote the fiercely combative indie-rap fuck you jam “We’re Famous” alongside El-P, but now proclaims himself an “armchair hater, I wouldn’t piss on your coffin, but when I see your picture I draw dicks on it.” Production-wise too, Skelethon is his first fully self-produced solo effort without contribution from regular collaborator Blockhead. Recent collaborative projects with Felt and Hail Mary Mallon have certainly honed Aesop’s skills as a beatmaker, and his eerie, bass-heavy production creates an apt mood for a record fixated with death.
If this all sounds a bit heavy, thankfully Skelethon is also wonderfully funny. ’Grace’, for instance, tells the story of a dinner table confrontation between a young Aesop Rock and his father, resulting in a convoluted stand-off over his reluctance to eat a side of green beans. This warm nostalgia is revisited on the ode to teenage rebellion ‘ZZZ Top’, and then through a touching tribute to the late Def Jukie Camu Tao, on ‘Racing Stripes’. Aesop’s remembrance of his friend through goofy but affectionate storytelling is also the closest the record comes to a proper hook.
The loving recollection in ‘Racing Stripes’ is purposefully positioned behind the Kimya Dawson assisted ‘Crows 1′ and ‘Crows 2′, which examine the grieving process and the displacement of the graveyard within the context of lost loved ones. As suggested by the record’s title and artwork, death is a subject that has weighed heavily on Aesop’s mind throughout the writing process, and it’s in this two-parter which that theme is translated most poignantly. As he wanders the graveyard revelling in the gothic imagery of headstones, woven branches and “cousin death’s wing-ed lapdogs” (that’s bats to you and I), Dawson’s spooky vocal clarifies the awkward distance between memory and decay; “I’m not gonna rot, no, fuck that snot, you can let them let you rot, man, but I’m not gonna watch / I’m not gonna stand atop your plot, I love you friends, but I’m just not.”
As well as death, Skelethon is an album about childhood and isolation; finding comfort in the former while expressing difficulty with the latter. At times it seems almost as though Aesop has lost his faith in humanity, bemoaning society’s conventions and values while finding pleasure in donuts (‘Fryerstarter’), fireworks (‘Saturn Missiles’) and animals (‘Homemade Mummy’). ‘Ruby 81′ paints this picture most vividly, telling the story of a missing two-year old girl at a panic stricken 4th of July party, rescued from a pool by the family beagle who carries the child between its teeth. “Good dog”, the song concludes, as a tense, beatless drone reaches its climax and the party guests try to make sense of the chaos.
Skelethon‘s final play and masterstroke is to take all of the tantrum and frustration from its previous 14 tracks, and turn it on himself in the concluding ‘Gopher Guts’. A repeating motif in which he claws baby snakes and green frogs out from the ground reaffirms Aesop’s affinity with nature, but despite willing these animals to have dynamic, meaningful existences, he simply lets them go. Then, in the song’s bruised and uncharacteristically straight-talking last verse, a series of confessions; “I have been completely unable to maintain any semblance of relationship on any level / I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril.” Stepping out from behind a barrier of language, here is a brutally honest moment of self-reflective vulnerability. For an album which so brilliantly documents one man’s life-long rebellion, it’s powerful that its final soul-baring verse should reduce Aesop Rock to the raw bones which haunt his existence – to the Skelethon.
Rebellious African People’s music is a concept that is at once straightforward and deceptively complex. Stylistically – operating as the album does within the field of hip-hop – by its own definition it already gives a fair idea what you’re likely to hear. Yet that concise, emotive phrase is also a summation of a truth that trickles through the veins of all hip-hop, a genre founded on an ongoing struggle for equality. Of course, rap is far from restricted to one issue, but R.A.P. Music is an album that takes the energy of hip hop’s rebellious instincts as its heart and reminds us of their importance.
Taking the album’s title by its other meaning, R.A.P. Music is also a record with 25 years’ worth of rap references sewn into its grooves. Just fifty days separate the births of Killer Mike and this album’s sole producer El-P, two people whose formative years were spent immersed in rap music’s golden age. That close relationship with hip-hop’s history is obvious throughout, as El-P’s beats bump and swagger with the best of them, while Killer Mike spits references to OutKast, Ghostface, Cuban Linx, Biggie, Goodie Mob, Eazy E, Slick Rick, 2 Live Crew, Def Jam circa ’93… You get the picture. I haven’t even started on the implicit references.
Mike is more than just a skilled name-dropper though, he’s also a first rate storyteller, social commentator and occasionally – as on the tribute to his grandfather, ‘Willie Burke Sherwood’ – genuine tearjerker. The two most directly political songs, ‘Raegan’ and ‘Don’t Die’, sit purposefully next to one another in the centre of the album. While the former tackles a wider set of issues, spanning contemporary hip-hop, the Iran-contra affair and modern day politics, ‘Don’t Die’ is a more focused dissection of police discrimination. Mike’s description of a violent altercation between a young black male protagonist and a cop is perhaps R.A.P Music‘s finest moment, enhanced by El-P’s presence, channeling Mad Max through a dystopian sci-fi instrumental. Just when you thought your system was getting its full work-out too, the song’s final section rattles the waveform to its extremes with a thunderous kick-clap combination.
On the subject of El-P, it’s no great surprise that he provides a masterclass in production throughout. Importantly, it isn’t the case that you could simply switch these beats with those on his recently released solo album Cancer 4 Cure; they’ve been tailored to Mike and play to his strengths. ‘Southern Fried’, for example, makes use of a church organ and wailing electric guitars to give the song its country rap flavour, while the relative simplicity of ‘Jojo’s Chillin’ affords Mike plenty of breathing room to tell his hilarious drug smuggling tale. Even so, when awarded his one guest verse on ‘Butane (Champion’s Anthem)’ he makes one hell of an entrance (“Yo, I’m a grinch, with a grin I will shit on your kids / till the light, get a grip, get a hold of my dick bitch, make a wish”).
Killer Mike has spent the last decade not getting the praise he deserves as an MC, though few would have predicted that his jump into the critical limelight would come via collaboration with El-P. But then, Mike’s style and content has never been a snug fit for the big label system, and El-P too has found his career rejuvenated by association with some new faces outside of the Def Jux stable. Before this record’s release, the coming together of these two was mooted as an unlikely collaboration, but for a record which can basically be viewed as a love letter to rap music, I’d struggle to think of a more logical pairing.
Many artists’ careers are defined by their classic material, but the way in which the ghost ofIllmatic haunts Nas is unique. Because while it’s generally accepted that the other survivors from hip hop’s golden age are years past their best work, remarkably Nas has shown almost no signs of depreciation. In terms of ability at least, his voice is practically unchanged from the one you hear on his 1994 debut, he’s still a remarkable lyricist, and at his best, his flow remains pretty much untouchable. Over the past two decades we’ve seen criticisms of his beat selection, concepts and mainstream ambitions, but it’s rare you’ll find it argued that his talent on the mic has waned.
It pains me to have started yet another Nas review by mentioning Illmatic, because to reduce his career to that one album is both tiring and unfair. But it’s useful to establish that the reason we will him to succeed with every new release is because, as he’s sporadically shown, that 21-year-old Queensbridge kid is still within him.
Following his public divorce from Kelis and a $6m run-in with the tax man, Life is Good arrives ironically after a difficult period in Nas’s personal life. Yet as is suggested by its title, this is the most comfortable he’s sounded in years. Given Nas’s history of attention-seeking album concepts, the image of him clutching part of his ex-wife’s wedding dress might well have been some awkward display of bitterness, but the record’s content finds Nas at peace; delivering honest but considered insights into his private life, New York and his long and fascinating career in hip hop.
The first of the album’s big hitters, ‘Locomotive’, features three excitable verses bouncing off of No I.D.’s vintage, swaggering baseline. It’s a song that should delight and tease his critics in equal measure, and he knows it too; the song’s intro surely intentionally echoes the rattling train sample from ‘The Genesis’, while Large Professor lurks in the background without dropping a verse before Nas signs off with a smile – “That’s for my trapped in the Nineties ni***s.” ‘A Queen’s Story’ and ‘Accident Murderers’ follow, taking the album from New York’s gritty streets to a citywide vista as seen through Scorcese’s camera lense. A sweeping string section and a flourish of keys complete the Hollywood picture, while Nas flexes his storytelling muscles. That directorial distance is important for the now 38-year-old rapper, who is able to offer insights his younger self might not have been able to, while not being afraid of being self deprecating either (“I’m pushing 40, she’s only 21 / Don’t applaud me, I’m exhausted G”).
As great as it is hearing Nas construct these compelling narratives though, some of the album’s best moments are those drawn candidly from his own family life. The single ‘Daughters’ for example, is a mature exploration of his flaws as a father, which ends up making interesting comment on gender expectations too: “When he date, he straight, chip off his old papa / when she date, we wait behind the door with a sawed off / ‘Cause we think no one is good enough for our daughters.” To dig up an old beef, this makes Jay Z’s tribute to his then newly-born daughter, ‘Glory’, seem all the more limp and forgettable.
Back to that album cover, then, and you might be surprised to find Nas in a surprisingly tender and bittersweet mood. His divorce from Kelis is most directly addressed on parting shot ‘Bye Baby’, as he gives a genuinely touching reappraisal of their relationship. Just as with ‘Daughters’, this is a subject that is often disastrous territory when it comes to hip hop, but he’s not posturing here when he claims to have no regrets over rushing into marriage. Nas has written rhymes about women all throughout his career, but never have I felt such affection as when he raps; “You screaming at the racist cops in Miami was probably the highlight of my life, like hiyo look at my wife – gangsta”. That adoration isn’t easily faked, and it’s refreshing to hear mainstream rap music dealing with family life in non-generic terms.
To pretend that Life is Good is flawless would be misleading, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable return to form. A slight, but unmistakeable mid-album lull is forgivable considering its lofty heights, with only the party-track misfire ‘Summer on Smash’ and its car horn of a Swizz Beats hook majorly disrupting the album’s momentum. At this stage in his career, and following in the footsteps of two records that arguably tripped over their own concepts, it’s great to hear Nas sounding focussed once again. Whichever version of him turns up on the next record, let’s hope life is still good for Nas, it suits him.
Presumably we’ve all read enough articles about Frank Ocean’s sexuality by now to not dwell on it too much in a discussion of Channel Orange; a record which is only minimally influenced by that context. But this young artist’s touching story of his first love and its struggles is relevant for a different reason. It’s relevant because those two concise paragraphs that have been dissected, analysed and misinterpreted at nearly every opportunity, posses the very same qualities which can be traced through Frank Ocean’s best music, of which Channel Orange contains its fair share.
As perfectly encapsulated by that message, initially destined for the album’s liner notes, Frank Ocean is a gifted storyteller. He sings often sad, simplistic tales of love, which might take form in songs about relationships, or on a more basic level, simply humanity itself. Take ‘Crack Rock’, for example, which at first appears to be a typical enough story of teenage addiction, but within its detail is a powerful sense of compassion for the hopelessness of these kids’ cause in life, as well as a frustration at the corruption which allows for that. Similarly, ‘Pilot Jones’ is another non-judgemental view of drug abuse, finding a protagonist mourning the decay of a relationship while finding comfort in the ecstasy of getting high and having sex with that same person. Some of life’s big questions will often be found at the bottom of Frank Ocean songs, embedded in characters and situations and hitting all the harder for their implicitness, gently revealing new layers of poignancy.
There’s a thread running through the Inevitable Frank Ocean backlash of dismissing this album as hipster zeitgeist, soon to be dismissed once R&B is forgotten again under a pile of chaps with guitars ‘saving’ rock and roll again. But what makes Ocean special is that his talent isn’t really defined by genre, and it’s the timelessness of these songs which will hold value no matter how they’re packaged. Sure, it helps that the straining falsetto of ‘Thinkin Bout You’ is reflective of that song’s sheer desperation, but the same could be said of how Nick Cave delivers his most heartfelt ballads, yet nobody is questioning his medium. I’m not necessarily trying to compare Frank Ocean and Nick Cave, but there’s a disparity between those two worlds that needs to be looked at, and we need to ask why one can be so flippantly dismissed as disposable.
Channel Orange is framed by the towering set pieces of ‘Thinkin Bout You’, ‘Pyramids’ and ‘Bad Religion’, but as a full record it sets its own pace and works its charm slowly. From the slick Neptunes produced idealism of ‘Sweet Life’ to line-dancing anthem of the future ‘Forest Gump’, there is a seamless blend between traditional and modern elements, as well as between subtlety and grandiosity. Like last year’s Nostalgia, Ultra, the songs are neatly linked together with tape deck recordings and lo-fi snippets of life, allowing these stories to breathe and also distancing Ocean from necessarily being the record’s focal point. Even the unexpected soft-rock soloing of John Mayer serves a purpose, creating a tranquil interlude between the album’s poppiest moment (‘Lost’) and the spiky snare hits of ‘Monks’.
Further cameos from Andre 3000 and Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt feel welcome, if not entirely necessary. Even so, both can be found on typically tongue-twisting form, riffing off of Ocean’s narratives without attempting to dominate or ‘steal the show’. Although strangely, the same could be said of Frank, who we may well be able to position within the context of these songs, but only occasionally does he assume the lead role. Of course, a great story is more than just the sum of its characters, but with Ocean sitting in the director’s chair, Channel Orange is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished records of the year.
‘Hip hop on trial’; this was the name given to a global debate that took place in London just two weeks ago, the third in a series of discussions hosted by Intelligence Squared in association with Google+. A panel of expert speakers were assembled at the Barbican Centre and around the world via video links, from Q-Tip and KRS-One to Benjamin Zephaniah and Jesse Jackson, with the intention of going back and forth over the motion “Hip Hop Doesn’t Enhance Society, It Degrades It”.
I won’t pretend to be an impartial observer here, but this seems to me an absurdly generalised way to frame a debate over a genre as varied, complex and historically charged as hip hop. Provocative hooks sometimes lead to interesting discussions, but in this case what followed was a bizarre reprisal of disputes I thought had been buried alongside whether or not Marilyn Manson is to blame for the massacre at Columbine High School.
Of course, a bit of ignorance was to be expected from those looking in from outside of the culture, and we can forgive Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis, who chaired the debate, as she attempted to challenge The Roots’ drummer ?uestlove on the group’s supposedly negative lyrical content. We also heard from attorney Eamon Courtenay, the chosen advocate for the motion, who began by admitting he is ‘not an expert’ on hip hop. Interesting choice of prosecution judge then, but what really took me by surprise was the case for the defence; a selection of hip hop stars, journalists and intellectuals who conceded a series of baffling own goals as they struggled to justify the allegedly damaging consequences of mainstream rap music.
The most spectacular failure came from KRS-One when questioned about some of the provocative and misogynistic words used in hip hop’s language. In his defence of the Kanye West lyric, “You know how many hot bitches I own”, taken from last year’s Watch the Throne, KRS quite remarkably tried to argue that Kanye uses the word ‘bitch’ to mean car. He goes on to assert that in hip hop the term ‘white bitch’ will always refer to cocaine, and ‘nigga’ derives from the word Negus, meaning king. As you can imagine, viewers both inside the room and online were not convinced. But even if these codes, as KRS describes them, have any partial truth, this argument only serves to disarm hip hop of its freedom of speech. Not everyone has to like it, and often that’s kind of the point, but rap music’s portrayal of the uglier side of life is not to be avoided or apologised for.
I should say here that not everyone on the panel made such a hash of their arguments, and when given the chance to speak, American hip hop journalist Dream Hampton and University professor James Peterson contributed salient points. But then, so many of these discussions are flawed before they’ve even begun. The reductive framing of hip hop as a purely negative form of music understandably had its defenders digging up the many examples of conscious rappers new and old. They’re right, of course, to make the point that the beauty of hip hop is how broad an art form it is, and how it can be appropriated by anyone as a means to communicate anything. But once again, by making this distinction between conscious hip hop (a term I dislike anyway), and say, gangster rap, we devalue the artistic merit of the latter.
Not everyone even bothered to stick around and argue their case. When Joe Budden of Slaughterhouse was called upon to justify the supergroup’s use of misogynistic language, he was apparently dumbstruck, as if it had never occurred to him that such a question would be asked of him. He then proceeded to stumble through the first argument which fell into his head, before hilariously withdrawing himself from the debate, admitting; “Y’all are not my motherfucking demographic, to be honest with you.” Similarly, The Guardian’s Paul Lester (not the first time these two have been likened to one another, I’m sure), wrote a blog dismissing the whole debate as a hangover from the 80s, before attempting to capture the excitement of rap music by dissing 50 Cent and dropping in a bunch of voguish contemporary references. To an extent he has a point; this does feel like an argument from another era, but that doesn’t make me any more comfortable watching a genre of music that I love being blamed for society’s ills.
Things took yet another strange turn as the debate moved onto its perplexing Act Two, posing the question ‘is rap is just bad poetry?’. By this point, it was difficult to know whether to be more confused by the prosecution’s attempt to separate rap from its very form, or the defence’s insistence on validating that form by comparing it to the work of classic poets. Not that I don’t believe certain rap music deserves that elevation, but it seems strange for a genre so rooted in anti-establishment values to now be seeking acceptance through anything other than its own lyricism.
Emeritus English Literature professor John Sutherland used the example of Walt Whitman and his struggle against prejudice of his sexuality, making the point that rap music was born out of struggle in the very same way. But if hip hop is going to be widely appreciated as a serious artistic form, it will do so not through the struggles of the 19th century, although as the evidence beautifully brought to light by Frank Ocean last week demonstrates, Whitman’s battle is far from being won. Instead, we must engage with and listen to what hip hop has to say to us in the present day. Looking at this music in such broad, simplistic terms will get us nowhere, especially without any exploration of the environments it is born out of. Of course, not all of what rap music has to say will have any use to us at all, but the vast majority of any genre of music’s output is essentially disposable.
In Ice T’s new documentary film Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, a handsome selection of hip hop’s biggest names discuss their relationship with music. While by no means a perfect film, if it does one thing well its show how much hip hop means to young people looking for a form of expression. There’s a particularly powerful section with Eminem, who as much as anyone exemplifies the idea of turning a dismal, grey environment (sorry Detroit!) into a world of colour and imagination. It’s easy to be cynical about stories of rap music saving lives, but watching Eminem switch between discussing his semi-recent overdose to excitedly reciting his favourite Treach verse is enough to make you believe his claim.
The use of negative language and values in hip hop is a difficult issue that won’t be fully explained or explored in an article of this size. But if we’re going to talk so brainlessly about whether hip hop degrades or enhances society, we’ll need to do a lot better than pretending rap music is always positive. After all, hip hop was arguably born out of negativity, and if society wasn’t degraded already then it’s difficult to see how it would ever have existed.
