One of the things that struck me a lot about watching this video is that black people are quite possessive about rap and hip hop. Maybe that comes from the trauma of thinking that their cultural achievements are always stolen from white people. It’s true that rock and roll derives from the blues, and it was mainly white rockers who got the biggest bonanzas, who lived like millionaires, while the bluesmen were still wailing away. There is a great amount of resentment about that. But there’s also the other side of the story, that rock music – from the Rolling Stones, to the Who, then Jimi Hendrix, Led Zep, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi onwards – took the art to another level, because they had the superior resources. Blues music is still excellent in spite of the limitations, but it’s mainly a point of departure.
Rap music will always be associated with black people. It’s possible that in the beginning there was a bit of policing to keep the white people out of it. But in spite of a much larger population of white people, rap music was the domain of black people. White people didn’t like it, partly because of racism. But it’s very hard to break into that world, unless you’re very good at it. Beastie Boys only became popular in rap music because they assimilated, and embraced black culture, even though obviously you have to put your own Jewishness on it front and centre. Eminem acted like a black ally and always championed the black rappers. Those were also the culturally vital years for rap music, up till around 2010.
It is true that white rappers in the 2010s suck, but in general rap after 2010 doesn’t really compare to the first few decades of hip hop. It’s not just that white rappers are losing their vitality, but all rappers are running out of steam. Rappers of other backgrounds have to get into that space, because the only way to make a new contribution to that culture without treading over ground that’s already been covered before. The video maker wants to complain about the new generation of white rappers not paying homage to black culture. But rap has been so closely associated with blackness in the past. They contributed to so much of what made rap great: sampling, scratching, freestyling. It became an avenue for black people to explain their frustrations with society. Hip hop was a great form of music because it was a platform that was so flexible that you could basically fill it up with anything you wanted it to. There was the idea that hip hop could be a vessel broad enough to accomodate anything, and of course this attitude of openness was in direct conflict with the notion that hip hop is essentially black.
Almost anything could be dug up from the crates to create hip hop: old movie soundtracks, classical music, jazz, soul, R&B, pop music, rock music, anything from the last 50 years, techno, disco. People accused it of being an art form where people didn’t play their instruments, but they’re missing the point: the record is the end product, not instrumental virtuosity. The hip hop producer is the conductor of an orchestra, not an orchestra member. His task is to stitch the music together, not play the instruments. The period of hip hop from 1980 to 2010 is one of astounding creativity, and not all of it was friendly. There was also an astounding level of violence, bloodsheds, abuse of women, racism and beefs. It was often as violent and nasty as the landscape that the music described.
But when the music progresses at such a rapid rate, it rapidly exhausts its own creativity. And that’s the problem with this guy’s assertion that there’s a crisis with white rap. There’s a big crisis with rap music, period. There’s nothing that you can say about the intersection between rap / hip hop and the black experience that somebody hasn’t done better, somewhere before. There’s nothing more than the rehashing of old tropes from now on. It’s true that there is some kind of failure of white (and other non-black) people to inject some new perspectives into rap music. But if there’s going to be a fresh perspective, it’s going to come from them.
It’s the same thing for jazz music. It started out being black people’s music, and during it’s best years, the black people made the most important contributions. (Notwithstanding that Gershwin, Bill Evans and Jaco Pastorius are genuine GOATs, black or white). And now it’s co-opted by not just white people but people all over the world. It’s natural that if black people invent an art form that has a great cultural impact, eventually they will lose their monopoly on that art form.
Frank Zappa once said of jazz music: “jazz music isn’t dead, it just smells funny”. That was the perspective of a guy who never truly understood jazz, in spite of his prolific output. But it’s true that around 1975, during Miles Davis’ “retirement”, that jazz was going through some kind of impasse. Jazz had just gone through 30 years of exciting fertility, and Miles Davis was present during much of it. There were already the works of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as some kind of foundation, then there was cool jazz, Charlie Parker’s bebop, Monk, Mingus. Coltrane expanded the definition of virtuosity. Miles’ second quintet spearheaded what was post-bop, but they were hardly alone. Miles veered into electrification of jazz, and jazz evolved into fusion. It took in Brazilian influences from samba. It became glorified background music, that CTI tried but failed to commercialise. Then it became more African, like Zawinul’s “world music”. Then, it stopped.
To be sure, there were still a few excellent jazz bands during the 1980s. Bands like Weather Report, Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett were still pushing boundaries with genre-defying work. But it sounded more and more bland, and it sounded more and more like people were repeating themselves. Wynton Marsalis was one of the traditionalists who demanded a return to the good old days of classical jazz, and resisting change. Earth, Wind and Fire got some mileage out of the commercialisation of the form and came up with some great albums. Quiet Storm was a movement that emphasised the work of session musicians, who found some ways of making jazz slicker and more polished. Quincy Jones released a few records that forever changed pop music. But there was no mistaking the general trend: jazz was reaching creative exhaustion, and you had to keep on pushing boundaries and not attempting to enforce them. Eventually there was a short symbiosis between jazz and hip hop, and even then you had to go beyond that.
And then we have to go to another issue: what is it about blackness where you have to hang on to your dominance of a certain domain? Black people do have a trauma about having their belongings snatched away from them. But why couldn’t they occupy other spaces? Why does it have to be something fleeting and ephemeral as culture and music?
Because East Asians have other things to fall back on: we excel at food and technology. We’re good at building infrastructure. In spite of the current success in K pop, and in spite of the sheer number of Asian kids getting pushed to do music, there’s no way that we’re going to produce music pioneers like the Jazz or the hip hop greats. We don’t have a destiny to produce musical greats. You will see Asians in show business or entertainment, but Asians are not going to treat music seriously like it were some kind of academic subject. That’s the black or the white peoples’ attitude, but not the Asian’s attitude. Asians will favour conscientiousness over creativity.
So that’s the problem with the black attitude: they don’t really have this notion whereby they’re going to build infrastructure. If they are going into “business” it means that they are selling merchandise, they’re branding. Or they’re dealing with drugs. But when it comes to building structure, creating IT systems, even producing records, that’s “not black enough”. Even when it came to the Blue Note System, it was Alfred Lion and Michael Wolff who was running the label. It was Rudy Van Gelder setting up the microphones. Pannonica being the patron. There’s plenty of creativity from the black people but it’s astounding how much they depended on the kindness of strangers.
At least as time went by, there were more black people doing the more technical stuff. Quincy Jones was doing record producing and arranging, which is extremely laborious and thankless work. I don’t know how many of the wrecking crew were black. When you hear the Barry White and Isaac Hayes records, think about how much backbreaking work those 2 guys had to go through, in order to orchestrate their music. Berry Gordy at least was a black guy, but I don’t know how much respect black business leaders get.
Maybe let’s talk about rock. Curiously, rock music is a genre that’s quite white. There is a case of a black guy breaking into a white man’s art form. Jimi Hendrix was the first and the greatest black rock star. In fact he was one of the first rock stars. Before him and before the 60s, it was still “rock and roll”. Rock is whiter than rock n roll, but Hendrix still managed to tower over it. He’s the rare black guy who’s a rocker, and not like Michael Jackson / Stevie Wonder / Funkadelic who do rock music but they’re considered soul / R&B / funk who dabble in rock. Lenny Kravitz is another black rocker but he was 25 years later and not on the same level. There were indie bands like Death, Bad Brains, Fishbone and Living Colour. But rock is mostly not a black person’s playground.
I wonder if it had been different if Hendrix had lived into the 80s and 90s. Would he have encouraged more black people to be rockers? To be sure, there were alliances formed in the 70s. Punks and reggae artists were supportive of each other for a short period of time, but they belonged to different tribes.
The rocker did go through a few evolutions. One of the most quintessential rock albums was the Beatles releasing “Rubber Soul”. Bob Dylan listened to it and declared, “I get it, you don’t want to be a cute boy band anymore.” So the image of the rocker as a tough gnarly street gang was born. It persisted into the 70s, when it evolved into hard rock, when the music got a harder edge, and embraced the tougher, muscular, edgier elements. Forbidden themes like drugs and the occult came into the picture, and there was an association between rock and taboo subjects. Glam rock introduced androgyny. Punk introduced the anger and nihilism. I’m not a fan of metal, but it brought in the virtuosity and very tough edges.
Maybe this sat uneasily with the black performers and the black audiences, who at that point in time still preferred to present themselves as shiny happy people. With the sweet harmonies, orchestral arrangements. Even the Funkadelic band in all their freakiness tried their best to show the cheerful, cartoonish side. The quintessential image of Stevie Wonder is the smiling face. Jimi Hendrix, in spite of his nihilism and occasional destructive drunken rages, tried to show the smily hippy side. When Sly showed his darker side, the reception wasn’t entirely positive.
It’s only during the age of hip hop that the grittier side came into the forefront in black music.
The 80s were dominated by a more glamorous medium, and that was due to MTV turning music into something that was a shinier object. Freakish dressing was the name of the game. The new wave bands dressed freakish, the hair metal bands grew their hair long, and tried to demonstrate that underneath all that muscle and leather, there was a sensitive heart underneath. There were too many boy bands and one hit wonders to count.
The 90s were practically an expose of the seedy underbelly of pop culture. It’s when the mask was taken off, and played for laughs. Urban decay and a sense of falling apart dominated the culture. Grunge was basically everybody screaming that they were depressive drug addicts, and they were played over recycled Black Sabbath riffs. This was the aesthetic of ugly beauty. Indie music was also celebrated for the lack of virtuosity, and the amount of great ideas you could express without becoming too obviously technically good with your instrument.
So the beauty of rock music is that it could encompass all these different trends. But for some reason it had always excluded black people. So maybe that’s why black people so jealously guard the space they’re allowed to roam in? But coming back to the main point: the question of what white people have to contribute to rap and hip hop is the mirror image of the question of what black people have to contribute to rock music.
Anyway to conclude: I’m less worried about the “white rapper problem” and I’m more concerned that rap is running out of creativity.
Music Composition 