zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric

Monday, December 30, 2002

+++++++++++
IN THIS END-O-THE-YEAR ISSUE of the highly irregular
"CAN'T STOP" NEWSLETTER:
+++++++++++
-> THE POLITICS OF "CONSCIOUS RAP" AND "NEOSOUL"
-> A TRIBUTE TO JOE STRUMMER
-> BEST OF 2002
+++++++++++

********************
'STAKES IS HIGH': "Conscious rap", "neosoul" and the hip-hop generation
********************

[in the January 13, 2003 issue of The Nation]
You can grab it here. Check out the entire Power of Music Issue while you're there.

Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One and Queen Latifah were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians--who, like all artists, always tend to handle the question "What's going on?" much better than "What is to be done?"--had never been called upon to do so much for their generation; Thelonious Monk, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were never asked to stand in for Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the gains of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s were being rolled back. Youths were as fed up with black leadership as they were with white supremacy. Politics had failed. Culture was to become the hip-hop generation's battlefield, and "political rap" was to be its weapon.

Today, the most cursory glance at the Billboard charts or video shows on Viacom-owned MTV and BET suggests rap has been given over to cocaine-cooking, cartoon-watching, Rakim-quoting, gold-rims-coveting, death-worshiping young 'uns. One might even ask whether rap has abandoned the revolution.

Indeed, as the central marker of urban youth of color style and authenticity, rap music has become the key to the niching of youth culture. The "hip-hop lifestyle" is now available for purchase in every suburban mall. "Political rap" has been repackaged by record companies as merely "conscious," retooled for a smaller niche as an alternative. Instead of drinking Alizé, you drink Sprite. Instead of Versace, you wear Ecko. Instead of Jay-Z, you listen to the Roots. Teen rap, party rap, gangsta rap, political rap--tags that were once a mere music critic's game--are literally serious business.

"Once you put a prefix on an MC's name, that's a death trap," says Talib Kweli, the gifted Brooklyn-born rapper who disdains being called "conscious." Clearly his music expresses a well-defined politics; his rhymes draw from the same well of protest that nourished the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and the Black Arts stalwarts he cites as influences. But he argues that marketing labels close his audience's minds to the possibilities of his art. When Kweli unveiled a song called "Gun Music," some fans grumbled. (No "conscious" rapper would stoop to rapping about guns, they reasoned, closing their ears even as Kweli delivered a complicated critique of street-arms fetishism.) At the same time, Kweli worries that being pigeonholed as political will prevent him from being promoted to mass audiences. Indeed, to be a "political rapper" in the music industry these days is to be condemned to preach to a very small choir.

"Political rap" was actually something of an invention. The Bronx community-center dances and block parties where hip-hop began in the early 1970s were not demonstrations for justice, they were celebrations of survival. Hip-hop culture simply reflected what the people wanted and needed--escape. Rappers bragged about living the brand-name high life because they didn't; they boasted about getting headlines in the New York Post because they couldn't. Then, during the burning summer of the first Reagan recession, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released "The Message," a dirge (by the standards of the day) that seethed against the everyday violence of disinvestment. Flash was certain the record, which was actually an A&R-pushed concoction by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel, would flop; it was too slow and too depressing to rock a party. But Sugar Hill Records released the song as a single over his objections, and "The Message" struck the zeitgeist like a bull's-eye. Liberal soul and rock critics, who had been waiting for exactly this kind of statement from urban America, championed it. Millions of listeners made it the third platinum rap single.

Through the mid-1980s, Melle Mel, Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, Run-DMC and others took up the role of the young black lumpenrapper opposition, weighing in on topics like racism, nuclear proliferation and apartheid. And just as the first Bush stepped into office, a new generation began to articulate a distinctly post-civil rights stance. Led by Public Enemy, rappers like Paris, Ice-T, X-Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian displayed the Black Panther Party's media savvy and the Minister Louis Farrakhan's nationalist rage. Politics were as explicit as Tipper Gore's advisory stickers. As the Gulf War progressed, Paris's "Bush Killa" imagined a Black Power assassination of Bush the Elder while rapping, "Iraq never called me 'nigger.'" (Last year, he returned to cut an MP3-only critique of the war on Afghanistan, "What Would You Do?") Rappers' growing confidence with word, sound and power was reflected in more slippery and subtle music, buttered with Afrodiasporic and polycultural flavor.

Many of these artists had emerged from vibrant protest movements--New York City's resurgent Black Power movement; the swelling campus antiapartheid/multiculturalism/ affirmative action movement; local anti-police brutality movements. In each of these, representation was the cry and the media were a target. Rap "edutainment" came out of the convergence of two very different desires: the need for political empowerment and the need to be empowered by images of truth. On 1990's "Can I Kick It?," A Tribe Called Quest's Phife Dawg captured the mood of his audience sweetly and precisely: "Mr. Dinkins, will you please be our mayor?" But while Mayor Dinkins's career quickly hit a tailspin, hip-hop rose by making blackness--even radical blackness--the worldwide trading currency of cultural cool.

In the new global entertainment industry of the 1990s, rap became a hot commodity. But even as the marketing dollars flowed into youth of color communities, major labels searched for ways to capture the authenticity without the militancy. Stakes was high, as De La Soul famously put it in 1996, and labels were loath to accept such disruptions on their investments as those that greeted Ice-T and Body Count's "Cop Killer" during the '92 election season. Rhymers kicking sordid tales from the drug wars were no longer journalists or fictionists, ironists or moralists. They were purveyors of a new lifestyle, ghetto cool with all of the products but none of the risk or rage. After Dr. Dre's pivotal 1992 album, The Chronic, in which a millennial, ghettocentric Phil Spector stormed the pop charts with a postrebellion gangsta party that brought together Crip-walking with Tanqueray-sipping, the roughnecks, hustlers and riders took the stage from the rap revolutionaries, backed by the substantial capital of a quickly consolidating music industry.

Rap music today reflects the paradoxical position of the hip-hop generation. If measured by the volume of products created by and sold to them, it may appear that youth of color have never been more central to global popular culture. Rap is now a $1.6 billion engine that drives the entire music industry and flexes its muscle across all entertainment platforms. Along with its music, Jay-Z's not-so-ironically named Roc-A-Fella company peddles branded movies, clothing and vodka. Hip-hop, some academics assert, is hegemonic. But as the social turmoil described by many contemporary rappers demonstrates, this generation of youth of color is as alienated and downpressed as any ever has been. And the act of tying music to lifestyle--as synergy-seeking media companies have effectively done--has distorted what marketers call the "aspirational" aspects of hip-hop while marginalizing its powers of protest.

Yet the politics have not disappeared from popular rap. Some of the most stunning hits in recent years--DMX's "Who We Be," Trick Daddy's "I'm a Thug," Scarface's "On My Block"--have found large audiences by making whole the hip-hop generation's cliché of "keeping it real," being true to one's roots of struggle. The video for Nappy Roots' brilliant "Po' Folks" depicts an expansive vision of rural Kentucky--black and white, young and old together, living like "everything's gon' be OK." Scarface's ghettocentric "On My Block" discards any pretense at apology. "We've probably done it all, fa' sheezy," he raps. "I'll never leave my block, my niggas need me." For some critics, usually older and often black, such sentiments seem dangerously close to pathological, hymns to debauchery and justifications for thuggery. But the hip-hop generation recognizes them as anthems of purpose, manifestoes that describe their time and place the same way that Public Enemy's did. Most of all, these songs and their audiences say, we are survivors and we will never forget that.

The "conscious rap" and "neosoul" genres take up where 1970s soul experimentalists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield left off. At their best, they are black-to-the-future havens of experimentation that combine a grandiose view of pop music's powers, an earnest hope for a better world and a jaded insider's disdain for rote commercialism. Crews like Blackalicious, the Coup, Jurassic 5, Zion I and dead prez have attained modest success by offering visions of twenty-first-century blackness--hypertextual rhymes, stuttering rhythms and lush sounds rooted in a deep understanding of African-American cultural production and ready-made for a polycultural future. The Roots' album Phrenology stretches hip-hop's all-embracing method--the conviction that "every music is hip-hop" and ready to be absorbed--to draw from a palette as wide as Jill Scott, Bad Brains, James Blood Ulmer and the Cold Crush Brothers. Common's Electric Circus takes cues from Prince and Sly Stone in reimagining the hip-hop concept album.

Tensions often spring from the compromises inherent in being given the budget to build a statement while being forced to negotiate the major label's Pavlovian pop labyrinth, and others have left the system to, as Digital Underground once famously put it, do what they like, albeit for much smaller audiences. Public Enemy has gone to the Internet and to indies in order, they say, to "give the peeps what they need," not what they think they want. After spending more than a decade in unsuccessful efforts with major labels, rapper Michael Franti now records on his own Boo Boo Wax imprint. It's hard to imagine his latest effort, "Bomb Da World"--whose chorus goes, "You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace"--passing muster in the boardrooms. Berkeley-based rapper Mr. Lif cut two of the most funky and politically challenging records of the year, the Emergency Rations EP and I Phantom LP, for the indie Definitive Jux. The EP's clever conceit--that the rapper has literally "gone underground" to escape angry Feds--is easily the wittiest, most danceable critique yet of the USA Patriot Act.

Hip-hop has been roundly condemned within and without for its sexist, misogynistic tendencies, but it has also created room for artists like Me'shell N'degeocello, Mystic, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Goapele and Angie Stone to mix up and transform both rap and r&b. "Neosoul" has been especially attractive to women and post-young 'uns. Its hip-hop feminist critique came into sharp relief last year. After years of flying high, rap sales crashed by 15 percent, leading an industrywide plunge. But multiplatinum newcomers Alicia Keys and India.Arie were garlanded with a bevy of Grammy nominations. Keys and Arie celebrated "a woman's worth" and were frankly critical of male irresponsibility. India.Arie's breakout hit "Video"--in which she sang, "I'm not the average girl from your video"--stole the music that had once been sampled for a rap ode to oral sex called "Put It in Your Mouth."

Hip-hop feminism has been articulated by Joan Morgan as a kind of loyal but vocal, highly principled opposition to black (and brown and yellow) male übermasculinity. In the same way, neosoul dissects the attitudes and ideals projected in the hip-hop mainstream. Me'shell N'degeocello's compelling Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape opens with the line, "You sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass." The most commanding of the neosoul artists, Jill Scott, imagines reconciliation, no longer having to love hip-hop from a distance. On "Love Rain" she sings of meeting a new man: "Talked about Moses and Mumia, reparations, blue colors, memories of shell-top Adidas, he was fresh like summer peaches." But the relationship ends badly, "All you did was make a mockery of somethin' so incredibly beautiful. I honestly did love you so."

Neosoul personalizes struggles, but the approach has its limitations. India.Arie's Voyage to India, for instance, suffers from reducing black radical conviction to self-affirmation mantra. At the same time, the genre mirrors a deeply held conviction of the hip-hop generation: Revolution does not come first from mass organizations and marching in the streets, but through knowledge of self and personal transformation. "Back in the '60s, there was a big push for black senators and politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse," says Talib Kweli. "A lot of people died for us to vote, I'm aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it's an illusion." For a generation that has made a defensive virtue of keeping it real, the biggest obstacle to societal change may simply be the act of imagining it.

These are the kinds of paradoxes the silver-tongued Kweli grapples with on his second solo album, Quality, as masterful a summation of the hip-hop generation's ambivalent rage as Morgan's book, When Chickenheads Come to Roost. On one of his early songs, Kweli synthesized 1960s militancy and 1990s millenarianism in a phrase, rapping about the need for "knowledge of self-determination." At one point on the Nina Simone-flavored "Get By," he sees the distance his generation still needs to cover: "We're survivalists turned to consumers." Echoing Marvin Gaye's "Right On," he measures the breadth of his generation--from the crack-pushers to the hip-hop activists. "Even when the condition is critical, when the living is miserable, your position is pivotal," he concludes, deciding that it's time to clean up his own life.

Kweli never fails to deliver fresh, if often despairing, insights. On "The Proud," he offers a sage reading of the impact of 9/11 on the 'hood--"People broken down from years of oppression become patriots when their way of life is threatened." Later in the song, he cites California's Proposition 21--the culmination of nearly two decades of fears of gangs, violence and lawlessness--and ties it to the intensifying nationwide trend of profiling and brutality against youth of color. But he scoffs at a revolution coming at the ballot box. Of the 2000 Florida elections, he angrily concludes, "President is Bush, the Vice President is Dick, so a whole lotta fucking is what we get. They don't want to raise the baby so the election is fixed. That's why we don't be fucking with politics!"

But politicians can't stop fucking with rap and the hip-hop generation. Senator Joe Lieberman regularly rallies cultural conservatives against the music. Michael Powell's corporate-friendly, laissez-faire FCC has censored only the white male rap star Eminem and the black feminist hip-hop poet Sarah Jones. Texas Republican John Cornyn overcame African-American Democrat Ron Kirk's November Senate bid by linking him to police-hating (and, interestingly, ballot-punching) rappers. When Jam Master Jay, the well-respected, peace-making DJ of rap group Run-D.M.C., was murdered in October, police and federal investigators intensified their surveillance of rappers while talking heads and tabloids like the New York Post decried the music's, and this generation's, supposed propensity for violence and lawlessness.

Now a hip-hop parent, Kweli hopes to steel his young 'uns for these kinds of assaults. "I give them the truth so they approach the situation with ammunition," he raps. "Teach them the game so they know their position, so they can grow and make their decisions that change the world and break traditions." While he critiques his elders for failing to save the children, he knows his generation's defensive b-boy stance is not enough: "We gave the youth all the anger but yet we ain't taught them how to express it. And so it's dangerous."

Here is the hip-hop generation in all its powder-keg glory and pain: enraged, empowered, endangered. The irony is not lost: A generation able to speak the truth like no other before is doing so to a world that still hasn't gotten the message.

********************
OVERPOWERED BY FUNK
How Joe Strummer rocked the world.
********************

Coming this week in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
http://www.sfbg.com

He was born John Graham Mellor into a family that served the Crown. His grandfather was a functionary for the Indian Railway, and his father moved through posts in Turkey, Mexico, Malawi, and Iran. The boarding school boy left to the suburbs of London grew up to be Joe Strummer, and he spent his life purposefully undoing everything his forebears stood for.

Strummer would describe 1976 as his own personal year zero. Across the globe, the arc of the revolution was falling. The Baader-Meinhof gang and Patty Hearst were on trial. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party were in the final stages of violent implosion. The Khmer Rouge were filling their killing fields. Washington bullets were destabilizing Jamaica. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis had left entire blocks and buildings abandoned. Here Strummer came of age as a radical squatter and a spirited pub singer. In a welfare line, he met Mick Jones and Paul Simonon and they invited him into the intensely charged musical sect they would come to call The Clash.

Strummer fast affected his mates. Mick’s tune, "I’m So Bored With You" became "I’m So Bored With The USA". While their punk contemporaries flirted with Nazi imagery and ideology, they romanticized the Jamaican roots reggae rebels. When Strummer, Simonon, and manager/advisor Bernie Rhodes—three white males—were drawn into Black Britain’s summer Notting Hill uprising against the police, the band found its footing. Rhodes had images to contextualize the band’s defiance. Strummer found an opening to explore radical whiteness. "White Riot" distilled his awakening into a 2-minute breakneck, ear-splitting call for England’s fair-skinned sons and daughters to join in striking back against the Empire: "Black people gotta lotta problems but they don't mind throwing a brick. White people go to school, where they teach you how to be thick."

The record also captured the essence of the Strummer’s philosophy: "Are you taking over or are you taking orders? Are you going backward or are you going forwards?" These are the fundamental questions Strummer bequeathed his successors—followers like Bono, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, and Manu Chao. Strummer epitomized the conviction that progressive politics ought to fire progressive music—neither flashy, indulgent prog-rock nor austere, didactic folk but progressive music of the most fevered imagination—big, risky rock that inspired less awe than love, more noise than silence, music that moved down the street with the people and knew when to toss a brick.

Triangulating the First and Third World across the Atlantic in the sunset of the Empire, London Calling was a perfect album, an endlessly mesmerizing reading of American and Jamaican music and myth through English eyes. It’s probably the last great record of the rock era. Many would have been happy if the Clash had stayed there forever and indeed, who knows how many more gems there were to mine. But unlike the generation of indie rockers (and now indie rappers) that followed, the diplomat’s son was not content to repeat "Train In Vain", much less "Capital Radio", over and over. Instead, he would turn his eye to the emerging world—the world after Empire, after America, after rock.

Perhaps Strummer’s background gave him a unique insight into the waves of change that were about to be unleashed on the world, or maybe he just had a good instinct for getting to the right place at the right time. Just as deftly as "Clampdown" had dissected the rise of the National Front, "Bankrobber" captured multiracial alienation inna Thatcherite time. Then "The Call Up" somberly reflected on the working classes’ prospects amidst rapidly militarizing geopolitics. (Now heard next to the Hitchens-esque hit "Rock The Casbah", the tracks offer a dissonance, a clash, if you will, of anti-war and anti-fundamentalism ideals that seems unusually timely for today’s conflicted left.)

Where to go next? New York City. By 1981, hip-hop was pushing through the walls of resegregation erected in the previous decade. The band that once couldn’t see past 1977 would become the hinge between the rock and the hip-hop eras. When city officials tried to pre-emptively squash their seven-night stand, they unwittingly sparked a riot in Times Square. With permits in hand and seven gigs stretched to sixteen, they introduced Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to their audiences and egged confused punkoids into their own cup-tossing mini-riot. Later they would frequent the downtown hip-hop club, Negril, as fans, soaking up vibes with Afrika Bambaataa, the graffiti elite, and the Rock Steady Crew. Now the Clash were pulling their audiences by their leather dog-collars out of their self-made ghettos into the real ones where the future was being made.

Over the years, *Sandinista* has taken its lumps. But in these days of routine double-CD releases, it’s hard to understand why. *Sandinista* sounds more like the 21st century than any rock made in the past two decades. Its incessant forward motion is a welcome contrast to the revival-minded micro-faddism that passes for most of today’s allegedly edgy rock. Alongside the dub and rap and rock, the Clash took on ambient noise, kiddie karaoke, twisted muzak, whistling carnival calypso (echoes of Notting Hill), roof-raising gospel, and the odd fiddle jig. Over it all, Strummer and colleagues tried to give voice to the people of Kingston, Havana, Hanoi, Tehran, and Managua. "The reign of the superpowers must be over", they sang on "Charlie Don’t Surf". "So many armies can’t free the earth."

From the ashes of the sixties, Strummer and the Clash moved toward a kind of musical multilateralism, consensus by connecting-the-dots. *Sandinista* marks the point where they sketch a map of the new musical and political world, where rock myth topples into hip-hop’s corner soul, where the trumpets of polyculturalism collapse Jericho’s imperialism. And Strummer characteristically kept moving. In a short July 2001 guest DJ set with WFMU (http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/321), he revealed where his expansive curiousity and compassion was still taking him. He moved from a scintillating collaboration between Ernest Ranglin and Baaba Maal through Algerian rai, Sudanese soul, South African mbaqanga, and Colombian cumbia, ending with Cornershop’s Indofuturist pop. The prophetic stance he articulated in his life and music falls somewhere between Paul Wellstone and Jam Master Jay, a romantic, hopeful, inclusionary vision of progressivism and a cultural globalization that we’ve only just begun to see swelling in the streets at the turn of the century.

*******************
STEAL THESE RECORDS!
(Unless they're indie!)
*******************

Best Albums of 2002
(All in Alphabetical Order)

Blackalicious-Blazing Arrow
DJ Shadow-Private Press
Talib Kweli-Quality
Mr. Lif-I Phantom
Nas-Lost Tapes
Orchestra Baobab-Specialist In All Styles
Sean Paul-Dutty Rock
Scarface-The Fix
Steinski-Nothing To Fear
Various Artists-Diwali

Next-Best Albums

Afel Bocoum, Daman Albarn, Toumani Diabate and friends-Mali Music
Chuck Brown-Put YOur Hands Up! Tribute Concert
Jason Moran-Modernistic
Nas-God's Son
Meshell Ndegeocello-Cookie
Roots-Phrenology
Sizzla-Da Real Thing
Bruce Springsteen-The Rising
Steely and Clevie and friends-Old To The New: A Tribute to Joe Gibbs
Systemwide-Pure and Applied
Various Artists-Constant Elevation
Various Artists-Red Hot + Riot
Cassandra Wilson-Belly of the Sun

Singles and Spins

Bounty Killer-"Sufferer"
Camron-"Oh Boy"
Capleton-"Red Red Red"
The Clipse-"Grindin"
Elephant Man-"On Line"
Missy Elliot-"Work It"
Freddie McGregor-"Uncle Sam"
Norah Jones-"Don't Know Why"
Lifesavas-"What If It's True?"
Lyrics Born-"Hello"/"One Session"
Mr. Lif-Emergency Rations EP
Ms. Thang-"Get That Money"/"Mi Nuh Know"
Nappy Roots-"Po' Folk"
Nas-"Made You Look"
Public Enemy-"Give The People What They Need"
Radio 4-"Struggle"
RJD2-"The Horror"
Sizzla-"Solid As A Rock"
Erick Sermon feat. Redman-"React"
Tweet-"Oops (Oh My)"
Warrior King-"Power To Chant"

Reissues

Black Rio: Brazil Soul Power 1971-1980
Bullwackies reissues (check Wayne Jarrett "You and I" 10-inch)
Clint Eastwood & General Saint-Two Bad DJ (check "Can't Take Another World War")
Herbie Hancock Box
Keith Hudson-Rasta Communication and Too Expensive
Let's Do Rocksteady: The Story of Rocksteady 1966-68
Mickey and The Soul Generation-Iron Leg
Randy Newman reissues (check Good Old Boys)
Prince Lincoln-Humanity
Augustus Pablo-East of The River Nile and Original Rockers
Scientist-Rids The World of the Curse of the Vampires and Wins The World Cup
The The reissues--esp. Mind Bomb (another eerily prophetic record)

************
If you want to be added to the e-letter list, please send an email to cantstopwontstop@mindspring.com with "gotta be down" in the subject header.
************

Wishing you and your fam peace with justice in 2003,

Jeff

posted by Zentronix @ 2:11 PM 0 comments

0 Comments: