Hip-hop: 50 cents short of a dollar
Posted: 2006-05-14 12:42pm
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IN THE NORMAL course of affairs, rap doesn’t particularly impinge on my life. I did my share of listening to Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy a couple of decades ago, and that was enough, thank you. If my two teenaged sons adore Kanye West, well, I can leave them to it, safe in the knowledge that I spent the first dozen years of their lives inoculating them with Ray Charles records. That should enable them to work out that I Gotta Woman is a better record than Gold Digger, but if not, well, there’s only so much a parent can do.
Sometimes, however, there’s no avoiding the hip-hop home-boys. Rap is the all-purpose Muzak of modern life, as ubiquitous as the rattle of pneumatic drills on the North Circular. There I was the other day, for example, listening to Timeless, the new record by that Sixties samba hero Sergio Mendes, when the Black Eyed Peas suddenly crashed into the studio and set about mutilating (yes, there’s no other word) that quintessential Brazilian anthem Mas Que Nada.
A grisly experience, and almost as grim as Black Eyed rapper will.i.am’s performance on the next track, That Heat, which included the deathless line “Brazilian beauties with booties that wobble . . .” After I had picked my jaw from the floor, I realised that will.i.am had done us all a great favour by reminding us how huge a gulf separates rap from the best pop music.
We’re not supposed to say things like this, obviously. Admitting to disliking hip-hop is, we are told, a sure sign that you have entered middle age. But it’s not necessarily so, is it? I thought rap had run out of steam when I was 23, yet I never grow tired of discovering new musicians from the realm of world music or — less often, admittedly — jazz. I love Motown and blues too. After journeying through those soundscapes, listening to the latest rap hit is like being invited for a five-course dinner at the local Burger King.
All the same, you court trouble by professing that rap is depressingly one-dimensional. As Slate, the online magazine, reported this week, the pop singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt has been accused of racism for saying that, although he liked the early days of rap, he is bored by the modern-day version.
No one ever accuses me of being anti-Christian when I say I’m allergic to Cliff Richard. But rap is, well, different. Pop critics, who are — need I remind you? — overwhelmingly white and middle-class, and guilt-ridden to boot, employ a curious double standard here. It’s absolutely OK to ridicule the audience for country music — “white trash” have always been fair game. No one would ever try the same with Dr Dre’s posse — and not just because of the risk of flying bullets.
Of course, it’s worth recalling that there was a time when blues music was dismissed as worthless and socially unacceptable by many middle-class black Americans. Eager to be accepted by the white world, they regarded the shouters and big fat mammas as a coarse and painful reminder of hard times. Today, a Robert Johnson CD is the last word in chic, and we chortle over Bessie Smith’s gentle double entendres about “keyholes” and “jelly roll”. Maybe a similar process will one day carry 50 Cent into the pantheon, though I doubt it.
Rap sceptics should take comfort from the fact that there are black American intellectuals who are just as irritated by the adolescent swagger. The commentator Stanley Crouch never misses an opportunity to lay into gangsta rappers. “They are at the bottom of the evolutionary scale,” was one of his politer comments. John McWhorter, the outspoken young fellow of the Manhattan Institute, ridicules hip-hop revolutionaries in his new book Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America.
As it happens, McWhorter doesn’t dislike all the records. What irritates him beyond belief is the notion — universal among music journalists and the trendier breed of academic — that the radical voice-of-the-streets slogans are anything other than a lucrative form of theatre. For McWhorter, it is all just another symptom of what he calls “therapeutic alienation”: too many black people, he argues, embrace alienation as a way of “hiding from facing the real world as self- realising individuals”.
The ultimate irony is that the biggest market for in-your-face rap is not the dispossessed ghetto youth. The real money is made in the white suburbs, where teens who live in the most cosseted environment in the history of mankind are able to live out fantasies of being the roughest, toughest guy in the ’hood. As the cultural critic Martha Bayles has observed, the music has supplanted heavy metal as the soundtrack of a young man’s rite of passage.
Meanwhile, the packaging and the slick videos exploit racial stereotypes that were all the rage in the Jim Crow era. The minstrel show is back, and nobody seems to have noticed.