Saturday Night at the Oldies Guest Post: From Gospel to Rap, Part I

By X. Malcolm

Bill suggested I wrote a post on how we get from gospel music such as Richard Smallwood’s uplifting Total Praise, to the uncompromising lowness of this gem (lyrics) by West Coast rappers 2 Live Crew? What is the bridge, if any, between ‘I will lift mine eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121) to ‘Put your lips on my dick, and suck my asshole too’?

I think the whole story would be a long story, and might not be the true story, which would include the engagement between high and low culture, the history of jazz and popular music in America in the twentieth century, and the troubled relationship between African and Western musical culture. That would be too much. But I will have a stab at part of the story, as follows.

The story of rap begins with two men, in my view. The first is uncontroversial: the music of James Brown has its roots in the late 40s and early 50s, when jazz, originally a popular genre, split into a high and a low form. The high was the ‘bop’ and ‘cool’ style which emerged in the mid-1940s: a musician’s music, played at an impossible tempo, with strange harmonic intervals. Opus de bop by Stan Getz (a white musician) gives you a good sense of the type. It was music to sit and listen too, as in a concert hall. It was highbrow, it was not dance, and it had little popular appeal.

The low form was Rhythm and Blues. It is generally agreed that the genre begins with ‘Flying Home’ by Lionel Hampton (1942). Here is a superb reconstruction by Spike Lee of how the number might have gone down at the Roseland Ballroom in the 1940s, in his film biography of Malcolm X. Listen out for the solo by Illinois Jacquet (0:53), the kind of honking tenor that became a staple of R&B, such as in Brown’s Chonnie Oh Chon (1957, Cleveland Lowe on tenor).

Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Georgia, after meeting Bobby Byrd, who had formed a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters. Brown had wanted to be a preacher, fascinated by the power of the preacher over his audience, and by the flamboyance and pageantry of preachers like Sweet Daddy Grace of the United House of Prayer. Here he is playing the part in John Landis’ incomparable The Blues Brothers (1980). The hymn is ‘Let Us Go Back to the Old Landmark’, by W. Herbert Brewster. ‘Let us kneel in prayer in the old time way’. Here is a less breathless version by Clara Ward.

It is well known that Brown’s music had an influence on rap, although this was more because of the killer grooves of backing drummers such as Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks. Here is Starks explaining the art of the slippery beat and the ghost note, also Clyde. Beats such as Funky Drummer (1970) were the basis of nearly all rap beat, and Brown’s work is recognised as the most sampled in hip-hop. This is well-known, I shall pass over it for now. But his style of singing (or shouting, or speaking) was also important: what Smitherman calls the songified quality of the political raps of Stokely Carmichael and especially of the ‘preaching-lecturing’ of Martin Luther King. Listen to King’s famous speech on August 28 1963, where he takes off on a middle C, drops to a B then back to C then D and then takes a long flight ending in Isaiah 40:4 ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low’.

In using the semantics of tone, the voice is employed like a musical instrument with improvisation, riffs, and all kinds of playing between the notes. This rhythmic pattern becomes a kind of acoustical phonetic alphabet and gives black speech its songified or musical quality. (Talkin and Testifyin, The Language of Black America by Geneva Smitherman, 134—35)

King’s speech was at the March on Washington, when demonstrators such as Joan Baez sang negro spirituals like ‘We Shall Overcome’. (Baez is of Mexican extraction on her father's side and is a sort of vicariously oppressed person).

The second influence is Malcolm X, who did not like ‘We Shall Overcome’ at all. ‘Any time you live in the 20^th century and you start walking around singing ‘We shall Overcome’, the government has failed us’. His ideology hung on two points: black separatism and black identity. The first was negative: complete separation of blacks from whites, a separate homeland for blacks, and none of this God’s children joining hands singing ‘free at last’, etc.

He thought MLK and other civil rights leaders were stooges of the white establishment, and his story of the field and the house negro is a sort of parable for their relation to the white power structure. The house Negro lived in the house, ‘close to his master’. He dressed like the master, ate the master’s food, and identified with the master. ‘So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself’, using the word ‘we’ to mean the master, and other house negroes. But the masses were the field negroes. ‘When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die’. Why were so many black people excited about a march on Washington, ‘run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive?’

He rejected the religious basis of Western culture, joining the Nation of Islam in the 1940s, and changing his surname to ‘X’ from his birth name which ‘the white slavemaster’ had imposed upon his forebears. He never spoke much about music, but he would have surely rejected the symphonic Western style of Smallwood’s introduction to the gospel song as the child of a house negro. Recall that the moment of Jake’s ultimate conversion is not prompted by black music, but by a short overlay written by Elmer Bernstein in the classical idiom. ‘At one moment I needed God to touch John Belushi’, said Landis. God touches man not in the African genre of dancing and shouting but through the harmonic complexity of the western tradition? According to Malcolm, when a black man is is bragging about being a Christian, ‘he's bragging that he's a white man, or he wants to be white .. in their songs and the things they sing in church, they show that they have a greater desire to be white than anything else’.

Unlike King he rejected nonviolent civil disobedience, saying that black people were entitled to defend themselves ‘in the face of the horrific assaults and murders that black people faced on a daily basis’. ‘Bleeding should be done equally on both sides’. At one time, he espoused a form of black racism, in a sort of Manichean worldview that viewed white people as devils, with black people as the original humans. ‘Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage.’

His positive ideas on black identity were less clear given, as he freely admitted, that black identity had been obliterated by slavery. ‘A people without history is like a tree without roots’. To be sure, there was the identity moulded by the idiom of jazz, but this had its origins in the ‘jungle’ music of the Cotton Club. The growling trumpet of Cootie Williams is distinctive of Ellington, but it is set to scantily clad light skinned African American girl dancers apparently transported from some jungle tribe. X sought a different identity, locating it the civilisation of Egypt.

Many of his ideas were taken up by the rappers in the 1980s. The first is easy to overlook. Malcolm complained that singing was the problem of black politics. ‘This is part of what’s wrong with you – you do too much singing’. Right. Songs are just bad poems. ‘Take the music away and what you’re left with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpy syllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors,’ claims poet Simon Armitage. Rap ended that. Speech introduces a different character to music. It commands your attention, invites you to consider its meaning. The rapper is not singing to you, he is telling you something, in the manner of an aggressively young black male.

Here are rappers Public Enemy with Too black, too strong, which is to say, black coffee is strong, but only becomes weak if it is ‘integrated’ with cream. Listen out for Clyde Stubblefield’s groove 1:07. Rapper KRS-One developed a sort of rap manifesto. Like Malcolm, he recognised that civil rights is not designed to solve the problem of racism, and that rap involves ‘rethinking what you think is normal, by rethinking society’. Rappers rejected the integration that was fundamental to the golden years of American popular music. Paul Robeson sang ‘Old Man River’, written by Jerome Kern. Billy Holiday sung ‘Strange Fruit’, written by Abel Meeropol. The embrace of violence is essential to the rap of the late 1980s, but I shall discuss this later.

Thus the elements of the genre as I see them are (1) a repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield (2) the use of speech rather than song, (3) the attitude of the genre, reflected in its aggressive style of delivery, and (4) the political position of the genre, particularly the ideas of Malcolm X. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else? 

(Minor edits by BV)

Addendum by BV (12/11/17)

Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.

Comments

[BV]

Great job, X.

[Jan Sobieski]

Fascinating guest post (Thanks both to the author and our humble host for permitting this and its followup!).

It's interesting that you bring up how rap is spoken and influenced by Malcolm X's brand of identity politics. As it so happens, I'm reading Martin Jay's history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination and beginning the chapter on the School's aesthetics and analysis of pop culture, including popular music. X's distaste for singing, which you attribute as important to rap's adoption of speaking, almost yelling racial social commentary as a matter of form (your 2, 3, 4) echoes Theodor Adorno's purposeful decision to write in difficult prose. According to Jay, this was to force the reader to meet his ideas with a certain amount of seriousness and stimulate "critical" thinking as the first bastion of resistance against the inhumane conditions Adorno and company perceived as endemic in Western civilization.

This isn't to say that there is a direct lineage between the Frankfurt School and modern rap or Malcolm X, for that matter. Adorno notoriously loathed jazz. I don't think he would be too enthused with rap nowadays either, even the Critical Race Theory-laced tirades of Kendrick Lamar -- a rapper quite popular among my fellow millennials today. Rap, like Social Justice ideology, has been commodified by capitalism. Whatever "critical" potential for negation the culture and ideology of Social Justice may have had, it's been pacified, and in some ways via rap, which is passively consumed by millions one itunes download and or rotation of the radio dial at a time. So rap, I think, would be considered just another depressing cog in the barbaric Culture Industry by the likes of Adorno.

I bring it up because I find it interesting how different leftists arrive at remarkably similar conclusions and attitudes.

Sorry for the digression. I await Part II most eagerly.

[BV]

X,

What is the difference between rap and hip-hop?

And can you honestly say you ENJOY listening to the sort of rap crap to which you have linked? To me it is interesting the way diseases are interesting to the pathologist.

[BV]

Jan,

Please do not insert HTML codes unless you know how to turn them off.

[BV]

Jan,

The backward slash is the off switch. I just edited your comment to turn off italics. Otherwise they get perpetuated throughout the thread.

Best to avoid HTML in comments. Use asterisks instead for emphasis.

[Malcolm Hex]

Thanks for posting this! Great pictures!

>> What is the difference between rap and hip-hop?
Branding, as far as I can see. ‘Hip hop’ used to mean the scratching of vinyl, i.e. the repetitive backing beat, ‘rap’ means the Sprechgesang aspect, but popular usage conflates the two, so let’s go with popular usage.

>> And can you honestly say you ENJOY listening to the sort of rap crap to which you have linked?
Do I like it? Well I bought the first commercially successful hip-hop single in 1970, because I liked the backing sample, Good Times, by Nile Rodgers. Note Rodgers is a skilled musician. Grew up in East Village in the 1950s, parents were junkies into the cool bebop idiom, and Rodgers knows his jazz. And as I point out in the post, the musical basis of rap has a fine pedigree.

I listened to it until the late 1980s – this is a work of genius. Bu then, for reasons which will become clear in Part II, I stopped listening to it.

>> To me it is interesting the way diseases are interesting to the pathologist.
You should get out more. If you mean this (note to pedants, the title is actually ‘Bring the Noise’), it is masterfully done. Also, I wanted to avoid the kind of article you might see in a newspaper for elderly people about the degeneracy of the modern age. I have a cherished songbook inherited from my mother published in the 1930s, which goes on about the evils of ‘swing’.

Glad it attracted some interest, though.

[Jan Sobieski]

My apologies, Bill. Thanks for cleaning it up.

[Jan Sobieski]

X,

Do you know where the profane and pornographic lyrics come from? Does it follow from the widespread African American rejection of "white" bourgeois norms of civility and sexual modesty and restraint in favor of the idealized hyper-masculine "thug lyfe"?

[Malcolm Hex]

@Jan - Part II to come!

[Chris Cathcart]

I sent a few-hundred-word email to BV about my own experience (in the context of my intellectual development) with hip hop (rap) as a teen, which included a lot of 'gangsta rap', and which basically ended abruptly with the '92 L.A. riots. But I had my philosophical awakening as it were with KRS-One / Boogie Down Productions. (I owned on cassette 'Edutainment' and 'Sex and Violence.') In principle there is something to be said for the "conscious hip hop genre" but the less like Thomas Sowell and the more like Malcolm X (prior to his break with the Nation of Islam) it is, it'll probably have that much less usefulness. We're talking the wisdom of "bourgeois tradition" in Sowell vs. some rather radical-left, anticapitalist (Malcom X: "show me a capitalist and I'll show you a bloodsucker"), and other inferior intellectual products that surely have contributed to the cultural ills in the black community today.

I don't really know what would be the best example of KRS-One/BDP music to link to today; I haven't listened to it in a long time. But I have fond memories of that, as well as of lyrical specialists like Eric B & Rakim, Kool G Rap and DJ Polo, and Big Daddy Kane.

For more cultural context for the '92 riots, though, you need to go to the "gangsta rap" genre (e.g., N.W.A., Ice Cube, Ice T, Geto Boys), where you get more of the alienated-from-mainstream-white-America vibe, and lots and lots of vulgarity (dressed up in more-clever-than-wise lyrics). Place decades of economic stagnation, constant leftist meme-infusions, clear-cut problems with family coherence and stability in the black community (contributed to in part by a failed "war on drugs" that results in a lot of incarceration of black males), all into a cauldron along with media dishonesty surrounding the Rodney King beating - namely, the deliberate withholding from public consumption the first few seconds of the video showing King rising to his feet and going toward an officer - and the riots were basically the inevitable 'perfect storm.'

The other King, MLK, said something about riots being the voice of the voiceless, or words to that effect. Perhaps that is a true statement but it doesn't get at any wider context, like what would lead these supposedly voiceless people to voice their anger in *that* way rather than in another, more intellectual, more conscious, more own-soul-ordering, sort of way. More like the later (post-Mecca-pilgrimage) Malcolm X rather than the toxic Nation-of-Islam-period Malcolm X?

[Chris Cathcart]

I should add that into that toxic cauldron you can throw some true injustice and marginalization of black people, but the causes of the problems in the black community go way beyond that, and they begin at home (ahem). "Social injustice" is the leftist explanation for every social problem it seems; leftists have been really long on that and really short on own-soul-ordering advice. This is the primary/fundamental reason for leftist intellectual bankruptcy today.

(The biggest leftist hero of all time, Marx, conditioned (ahem) leftists to think that political or social change is the way to make a better world, and that own-soul-ordering can be overlooked. Own-soul-ordering is all a product of the social environment, after all, or so they say. But just as culture is upstream of politics and the intellect is upstream of material factors in human life, in terms of causes of social change over time, so the leftists have been working from a lousy playbook ever since Marx. Plato was much more on track in explaining how a well-ordered soul would be a precondtion for a well-ordered polity. Leftists want more polity in our lives, to "improve the opportunities and conditions for people," as if that cart can pull a horse. The less leftists talk about soul-ordering and the more they talk about "social justice" - and Rawls helped condition them to this way of thinking as well - the less useful they are to a discussion about how to achieve societal progress.)

But we should not ignore contributions from true unjustices and marginalization. They're still there. It's just that Sowell has a lot more wisdom here than Coates. (Amy Wax of U Penn agrees with Sowell that it's more "bourgeois tradition" that we could use, since the solutions enacted by the left since the Great Society programs were put into place don't seem to have worked well at all. This observation makes Ivy League students and faculty go off the deep end, dialogue-wise.) Only when black leaders, including intellectual ones, incorporate and reference whiteys like Plato and Aristotle into their rhetoric, can we really begin to take them seriously as leaders or intellectuals. Then we'd have more constructive hip-hop like KRS-One and less of the decadent stuff that fuels vice and resentment. (Now, if some leftist moron wants to read racism into any of this, then bring it on I say; how much more credibility can these people possibly use up before they either get their acts together or are disregarded by the reasonable and constructive folks? Looks like U Penn students and faculty can be disregarded in these discussions as they have little if anything positive to contribute.)

It's also the case that someone like Sowell has more of a tough-love kind of approach: develop those habits that are more likely to make you less marginalized and treated unjustly. (To learn about these habits left-leaning educators could study just a little Aristotle now and then, instead of the zero amount they seem to be doing now.) It's like the thought I had when "progressive" Hollywood blacks and their enablers were complaining about the lack of Academy Award nominations for black talent. (This was only one or two years after the tremendous and deserving '12 Years a Slave' won Best Picture, mind you.) And that thought was: stop whining, go out and make better pictures and put in better performances, then, and erase any doubts about merit. The grievance industry seems to have a different and less constructive focus, though. They appear to be more reflexively inclined to regard such "tough love" advice as racist or racially insensitive. So "learn some Aristotle, get better habits, stop whining and blaming others, erase doubts as to your merits, and generally kick butt" is a racist sentiment? And leftist losers wonder how we end up with the decidedly anti-PC Trump as president?

(I would have preferred the philosophy-major Fiorina as president; I wonder how academic philosophers would have tried to contain *that* phenomenon, a right-wing president versed in philosophy including Hegelian dialectic, something the practice of which requires learning the views of the other side rather than a lazy caricature of them? But that would mean the left becoming something other than what it is, i.e., the left, and leftists are afraid of there not being a left anymore, so I guess we can't really expect that. Get Fiorina in there as president, and the left would melt down for good, guaranteed. The cultural preconditions for a Fiorina becoming president would have to be different than at present, though . . . but how much different? What happens if/when some other right-winger well-versed in philosophy and with more charisma than Fiorina comes along? The left isn't remotely prepared.)

[BV]

Jan,

Thanks for reminding me of Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination which I read way back in the fall of '73, the year it first appeared. In those days in Boston I was reading a lot of Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno (Negative Dialectics and Jargon of Authenticity mainly).

According to Jay, "jazz remained for Adorno a source of continued horror." (186) Jay goes on to say that Adorno rejected any sort of purely aesthetic analysis of jazz in favor of psychosocial critique. Jazz, Adorno opines, "does not transcend alienation, it strengthens it. Jazz is commodity in the strictest sense." There is nothing liberating about it. The febrile Adorno goes on like this.

By the way, he is not an Italian but a German Jew: His real name is Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.

Jazz is pseudo-democratic and pseudo-individualistic since improvisation is just repetition of certain basic forms. 'Hot' jazz represents only an illusory sexual emancipation.

"If anything, the sexual message of jazz was castration [sic!], combining the promises of liberation with its ascetic denial." (Jay's words, 186, paraphrasing Adorno)

You can get a whiff from this of the Left's febrile tendency to eat its own: they fall all over themselves trying to outdo each other as to who can be the most 'critical.'

No wonder I soon abandoned the Frankfurt boys and plunged deep into Husserl and Heidegger.