Neil Mccormick How I finally fell in love with hip hop
Put any preconceptions aside, says Neil Mccormick, and you’ll unearth musical and lyrical riches galore
Tomorrow, the Gods of Rap descend on Wembley Arena. This extraordinary line-up of three veteran acts – De La Soul, Public Enemy and Wu-tang Clan – suggests hip hop is now so venerated that it has entered the heritage business. Whether you are tempted to put your old baseball cap on backwards and bum rush the show probably depends on whether you recognise hip hop as the defining music of our times, or still think it’s just a lot of shouting over beats.
When I talk to music fans of a certain age, I am surprised by how many still consider hip hop to be youth music, new music, or worse, not music at all. But its birth can be traced to the New York Bronx in the Seventies. It is as old as electro (with which it shared an emphasis on innovation) and more or less contemporaneous with punk (with which it shared a rebellious attitude, attacking convention and upending musical form). As a white middle-aged Irishman raised on The Beatles, I am here to tell you that hip hop is for everyone.
As an obsessive music fan in the Eighties, I did not pay particular attention to hip hop. Certainly the big crossover records of that era are part of the soundtrack of my life, from Grandmaster Flash’s White Lines to Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk
This Way and Salt-n-pepa’s Push It.
The deep wordplay and sleek flow of Rakim made me prick my ears up but I found a lot of early rappers clunking compared to singer-songwriters, the sentiments too often crass and production abrasive to ears tuned for melody. These are still common complaints among listeners who reject rap wholesale, along with being affronted by impenetrable slang and aggressive braggadocio. The prevalent use of the N word has been difficult for white audiences to cope with, and rap has often been characterised as regressive in social terms, rife with homophobia and misogyny.
Yet those strike me as outdated criticisms. Over the years, hip hop has engaged in a very progressive debate about its own ideology and language, to the extent that its biggest contemporary star, Drake, portrays himself as an introspective, touchyfeely liberal who scored a number one hit last year with an anthem of female empowerment, Nice For What.
But, in truth, the way I listened changed radically too. As the Nineties dawned, I felt the urge to learn more about the biggest musical story of my time. So I dived in to hip hop the way a teenager approaches music, listening to things I did not immediately like or understand, listening repeatedly, until I became attuned to particular sonic dynamics, musical structures and lyrical styles. I discovered a world of
such richness and variety that stereotypical criticisms quickly faded into insignificance.
The Wu-tang Clan’s 1993 debut Enter the Wu-tang (36
Chambers) was one of the albums that reconfigured my taste. It wasn’t so much the rapping as the production, the way their leader RZA used distorted samples to create moods of weird ambience. I don’t think it is pretentious to view hip hop as an extension of modernist 20th century classical music’s rejection of melody and harmony in favour of exploring rhythm and polytonality. If you can tune into it, those clashing sounds become thrilling, particularly the ways inventive producers pull in melodic hooks and sound bites to create a shifting balance of sweet and sour.
I can’t claim to have grasped what the Wu-tang Clan rapped about. But then, I can’t honestly say I always fully comprehended what Bob Dylan sings about yet I remain mesmerised by his dazzling language. Anyone who appreciates
Subterranean Homesick Blues is well primed to enjoy hip hop. Just try rapping it.
As a lyric lover, I became deeply enamoured of Tupac Shakur’s philosophical seriousness, flamboyant vocabulary and audacious rhyme schemes, before the tragic rapper became a victim of the violent social milieu his lyrics documented. In the mid-nineties, Eminem shocked many with his scabrous and sometimes juvenile humour, yet I don’t think there has been a more gifted and complex wordsmith in popular music since Dylan. His breakthrough hits were produced by Dr Dre, who brought an elastic funkiness to the genre with NWA and Snoop Dogg.
There have been accusations that gangsta rap glorifies anti-social behaviour, but it is not hard to detect a deep moral code in the best of these newsy narratives of crime and social deprivation. Outlaw songs have always been a resonant part of folk traditions, and you can trace a connection all the way from blues staple Stagger Lee to Somebody’s Gotta Die by the late Notorious B.I.G., a crime story with a savage moral twist. It is true that many rappers have been caught up in the world their songs illustrate, with tragic results. But it is nevertheless a mistake to confuse the messenger with the message. Jay-z’s classic 99 Problems is a hard-hitting track about police persecution of black males in America that makes ironic use of the insulting term “bitch”. As the rapper was at pains to explain in his book Decoded:
“The obvious point of the chorus is that I wasn’t talking about women.” The bitch in his song about racial profiling refers to a police sniffer dog. “It was directed at people who hear buzz words in rap music and immediately dismiss everything else that takes place.” But if the language or style offends your sensibility, then cast the net wider. The rhythms and complex chords of jazz flow through hip hop from Busta Rhymes to Anderson .Paak. The punch and fire of rock has powered up sensational albums from the Beastie Boys to Rage Against The Machine. For irresistible dance-floor grooves, I defy you not to shake your booty to Missy Elliott or Outkast. If it is tunes you seek then look to the pop charts, where Drake has become an exemplar of modern rap’s melodic development, conjuring up a sing-song flow with digitally modulated vocals. And if you want all-of-the-above in one mad melting pot, I recommend Kanye West’s 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album so adventurous, Elton John hailed it as “the Sgt Pepper of hip hop”.
I suspect even the most rap-phobic listeners know far more hip hop than they realise, simply because it has provided the very soundtrack to our times. As the Gods of Rap concert demonstrates, hip hop is so old it is in danger of becoming respectable. Time to catch up, surely, before it is featured on Antiques Roadshow.
The Gods of Rap play Wembley Arena tomorrow. Tickets: godsofrap.com
‘Gangsta rap has been accused of glorifying antisocial behaviour, but it can have a strong moral code’