Noise, energy, blare, blast - and voice and words as just a joyous shout of self-assertion
What I've less interest in: lyrical rumination, inwardness, reflection
What I've no interest in: didacticism, messages, uplift
I like tracks that are like engines with the foot on the gas... unflagging... jets of steam shooting out from underneath
The kind of rap I like is in fact rap where the rapping is not that important as semantic content, instead it's all about the the sheer pumping flow-motion of it. Another form of rhythmic thrust dovetailed with the track .... the voice completely merged with the dynamo of the beat.... an adjunct to or constituent element of the groove.
I suppose human beatboxing would be the ultimate extension of this idea, but - fun as it is - it's a step too far beyond the semantic into purely rhythmatized vocalism.
What thrills (more on this below) is a dance between sense and nonsense, a battle between lyrical meaning and the demands of rhythm.
Okay, now this next example does have great writing but what matters is the swing and unflagging pump-action of Rakim.
But in case you think it's all old skool, stuff from three decades ago
That tune contains within it the "engine" / foot-on-the-accelerator idea.
Now this one - it's a "Loose" for 21st Century
I have no idea what Kanye is on about here - what gets me is the sheer aural thuggery, it hits me like Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Pt 2"
Languid is fine so long as it's pure feline sass - again, the words play their part but above all it's the grain and tone of his voice that makes this seductive
This now forgotten fellow was my early Platonic ideal of rap - "annihilating" sense in the cyclotron of rhythm madness
I wonder why Mantronik didn't just invite T. La Rock to be the MC in Mantronix?
(MC Tee is a sweet presence in the sound, but he's overmatched)
"Push It" belongs in this company but my fave Salt N' Pepa is this:
Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Skinny Boys... some Public Enemy moments...
Latterday exponents: Onyx, DMX, Lil Jon
For sure, the writing-as-writing is often great - DMX especially, LL and Beasties too, Chuck D obviously
But primarily it's about energy and vocal force and command
I feel that whenever you have to concentrate - when there's wordplay, allusion, meta-reference - or even where there's picture-lyrics that appeal to your visual and imaginative faculties.... this is detracting from the pure musicality, the insistence of rhythm.
I'm with Nietzsche here: his distaste for the Italian style of opera in which musicality is distorted by and suborned to the requirements of the libretto - the result being “semimusical declamation” from a “singer who speaks more than he sings” and appeals to “the listener who desires to hear the words above the music”
(My rap version of this would be going to see El-P (supporting Cannibal Ox) and finding the too-many-words thing really aggravating - and even more so the way that fans in the audience would rap along to the too-many-words that they'd learned by heart, all of them).
Against this unmusicality, Nietzsche exalted the folk song, where the primordial incantational force of melody and rhythm overrides the text:
“The continuously generating melody scatters
image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their
mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady
flow.”
This might seem a paradoxical expectation of rap, which is nothing if not speak-sing.... but I guess I'm saying the "sing" - rhythmelody - and other non-semantic vocal aspects (grain, intonation, etc), these are more important than the "speak" (meaning communication).
My favorite rappers makes me glaze out, dip in and out of lyrical-focus, catch words here and there
Just like the Rolling Stones, like the Fall - like most great rock music in fact
The golden rule with pop and rock overall is that lyrical sense is fairly low down on the list of virtues... it's not absent, it doesn't contribute nothing to the pleasure and power, but it's far from the be all and end all.
You can have great pop and rock with lousy words
But no lyrical cleverness or poeticism can salvage music that is sparkless.
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The ad libs era of recent trap was a massive re-irruption of exactly-what-I-like - vocal noise, non-semantic energy-bursts, voice-as-logo, onomatopeia, voice FX, gimmicks - purely rhythmatized speech and non-speech - made all the more delirious through being filtered through Auto-Tune and other processing technologies.
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Talking about folkmelody, image sparks and mad precipitation, Nietzsche would have loved these surely
I know what you mean, and many of those tracks are indeed fantastic, but... for me, in the very greatest rock / pop / folk, the lyrics really matter, and the same is true in rap. Even with bands that don't seem like tweedy wordsmiths, like Black Sabbath or the Pistols or the Stooges, their best songs have amazing lyrics.
ReplyDeleteIt's the difference between, say, War Pigs and Iron Man: in War Pigs the lyrics are chilling and evocative; in Iron Man they are kind of goofy. And that means War Pigs just is a more overwhelming experience.
(I came to this realisation through Joe Carducci's insight about Sabbath's melodic skills. You might not think of them as the George and Ira Gershwin of their day, but they wrote great tunes, and their melodic hooks were an important part of their overall impact.)
In the same way, the greatest rap tracks work both on the level of effect and of content. Fight the Power, Mind Playin' Tricks on Me, Takeover, Nicki Minaj's verse on Monster: the ideas and the wordplay are a big part of why they work so well.
From what I have heard of contemporary rap, it seems like the vocals-as-noise era may be passing, and dense verbose lyrics are coming back. I think I like it.
"The Takeover" is definitely one where you focus on the lyric all the way through, it just builds and builds - The Takedown is more like it, devastating for both targets.
ReplyDeleteBlack Sabbath - well I would wheel them out as proof positive of the relative non importance of lyrics. I can't remember any lines from "War Pigs" except when they do the rap no-no of rhyming the same word - "generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses". Also: under what circumstances do generals mass? I suppose maybe at some chamber within the Pentagon, around a big table. But generally it'd be like one general and a whole heap of subordinate officer and troops surely!
"Iron Man" I can only remember the "I ... am ... Iron... Man" bit at the start.
Lyrics shape and direct the energy of a record, and can so in profoundly impactful ways. But "Street Fighting Man" would most likely be just as exciting if it had lyrics of the "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'" type - ie. about being hot for a chick, cocaine etc. Conversely, the lyrics of "Street Fighting Man" would have zero incendiary qualities if clad in the sound of, say, Poco.
Fair point: that masses / Masses rhyme is pretty bad! I try to make peace with it by telling myself they are different words that just happen to be homonyms.
ReplyDeleteA "mass", as in a lot of something, comes from the Greek "massein", meaning to knead or clump together. Whereas "Mass", as in a Catholic church service, comes from the Latin "missa", meaning being sent out into the world.
It's perfectly reasonable to despise, say, The Chronic or Welcome to the Terrordome whilst appreciating the production, due to the unpleasantness of the lyrics. Is your argument a de facto celebration of pop rap, as it were?
ReplyDelete(By the by, does anyone make the irony defence of gangsta rap anymore? Did it ever actually apply to anyone?)
I don't know it if it's exactly "pop rappist".... there's a little bit maybe of my argument about disco, that the best disco wasn't the underground stuff but the stuff that made the charts. But there's a lot of shit chart rap so it doesn't really apply.
ReplyDeleteReally it's like a Nik Cohn take on rap - celebrating it as as energy, flash, noise, hooks, funny lines, exciting non-sense - as opposed to its matured stages of complexity, subtlety, sophistication, storytelling. A preference for the Little Richard era of rap, as opposed to its Dylan-Springsteen-Costello eras (and for later occurrences that seem to tap into, be still in touch with, Little Richardness).
I'm not familiar with the irony defence - and can't think of an argument that was ever made that could be described like that.
It's fairly clear that nearly all gangsta is a theatricalized exaggeration of actual realities that are much less glamorous. Closer to The Wire than The Godfather. There have been gangsta rap tunes that are grimly and dourly realistic - DMX has a bunch, including one about a convenience store heist that is badly botched - as writing it's Wire-level realism. The life of crime as boredom and stress.
The shift away from a "rock critic" perspective on hip-hop, where Arrested Development and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were valued more than Mobb Deep, has been interesting. As much as we've suffered through plenty of lame lyrical/conscious rap, I really valued the concept albums of Ka, who died a few days ago, as well as his independence from the music industry. You're not gonna get the perspective of his final album, a nuanced critique of African-Americans' relationship to Christianity, from mainstream hip-hop (or any other form of mainstream music.) While the idea that Public Enemy - or, later, ILLMATIC or STANKONIA - should be the model for hip-hop has dated badly, I think the genre's lost something as it's pushed away overt politics. Recent mainstream hip-hop seems geared towards catering to teenage boys' fantasy lives, when the genre can do (and has done) so much more.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, trap artists have come up with some intriguingly contradictory combinations of lyrics, vocal tone and music. The lyrics of "Mask Off" are standard flexes about money, drugs and fame, but when performed by Future over the flute sample, the song sounds soulful and more weary than boastful.
ReplyDeletehahahaha stylo posting the archetypical bourgeois-bohemian L there, :D.
ReplyDeleteEither gangsta rap is too lumpen and undisciplined for the conscious bourgeois subject, in which case one would have to make a concession to more reflective and conscious lyrics, at least, or gangsta rap sells middle class consumers an exagerration of their fantasies, in which case there should be no problem for the bourgeois to admire it both lyrically and sonically, because the aforementioned unglamorous reality ensures their secure existence.
From the proletarian interpretation, naturally, all culture under capitalism is bourgeois, and there cannot be any independent proletarian culture as such (especially when it is fuelled by proletarians, ditto hardcore continuum rave) precisely because the proletariat is the class to end all classes by abolishing commodity production. If it can complete its revolution. And, even if it cannot, the proletariat is not a fourth estate, and hence bourgeois society is the truly post-caste society. So, even if you reject Marxism, the dilemma still remains, and by trying to chart a middle way you do not get a jot closer to solving the issue...
Excellent banter, keep it up chaps!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7f-OEvCQWg The greatest example of the irony defence regarding gangsta rap.
ReplyDeleteThe rapper most beholden to irony is Eminem, obviously; not a gangsta rapper, but one enthralled by gangsta rap (and substantially smarter than most of the fly-by-night weaklings assuming that use of the N-word would automatically make them Snoop). But I find it ridiculous to claim that irony isn't a factor in hip-hop generally, and especially in the most articulate gangsta rap. A concrete grasp of irony made Ice-T and Ice Cube the greatest gangsta rappers, and an inability to grasp irony made the horrifically overrated Tupac a killing joke.