My Take on Rap Music

So this conversation has been going on for a while and yielded some really interesting thoughts and points. The fans (Ron, Kevo and I to varying degrees) have rallied to the genre's defense and the detractors have expressed valid points that i would have dismissed a few years back but now are starting to grow on me...most specifically that the music that people listen to does have an affect on them.

I have a few concerns before i launch into this...one of which is that i'm not sure where to post it. Do i post it on the music blog because it's about rap music or do i post it on the socio-political blog because it is a social commentary. One of these days i'm just going to have to consolidate the damn things...i digress.

My other concern in typing this is that i'm sitting in a house i own, typing on a relatively top-of -the-line computer that i also own, in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the entire country, Scottsdale, AZ. Now i don't live in the nicest part of the nicest neighborhood in town but still...i'm not living in the projects or ghettos -- my town doesn't really have too much in the way of these types of neighborhoods even -- so how am i going to sit here and talk about rap music and the plight of black people and music's affect on the inner city when, hell, i've never really even been to an inner city for fuck's sake... So i'm a bit torn, but i'm going to press forward. Here's the deal. In the paraphrased words of Ben Folds, i'm a suburban white kid with a relative life difficulty of ZERO. Everything i am going to write has been viewed through that scope and everything you see is going to have to be read through that lens and digested accordingly. Disclaimer over.

My first hip-hop CD ever was Wyclef - The Carnival. I bought the edited version at a walmart in Jackson Hole Wyoming because i desperately needed new music and i wanted to piss my mom off by buying a rap CD, i think. I listened to this CD all summer and ended up liking almost every song on the CD, the beats appealed to me and the lyrics stuck in my head. I've always been able to memorize lyrics in about 3 listens of a song and knowing all the strange lyrics (including the song in Haitian french) just worked for some reason. It's a fun, light-hearted CD and i felt that a lot of the more "gangster" lyrics were tongue-in-cheek anyway. When they talked about shooting people (and i'm pretty damn sure that the collective body count of Wyclef, Lauryn Hill, Pras Well, Melky Sedek, and the others on this CD don't climb too high...) it seemed more along the lines of watching a mob movie or playing a violent video game than people actually discussing reality. It still does. I can watch the Godfather and not put a hit out on my enemies. I can watch Goodfellas and not start selling blow. I can steal a car and shoot a hooker in Grand Theft Auto and never even remotely consider doing these things in real life. Hereto, therefore, i can listen to rap music and not (even subliminally) start thinking that the actions spoken of are even the slightest bit OK. As Kevin put it in his comments, even a lifetime of listening to NWA has never caused Kevo to reach back like a pimp and smack a ho. The same, obviously, goes for me. One of my favorite rap songs of all time is "Ain't No Fun" by Snoop and that's about the filthiest song i've ever heard. I've always looked at it as a parody and never thought that any human being ever would listen to it and consciously think "You know what? I gotta start treating women like this. It sounds great!"

As i've said before, misogynistic and degrading lyrics are not new, and they're certainly not mutually exclusive to black people. Over the course of the history of music, dating back to African tribes thousands of years ago, there is evidence that words and sound were combined to create music in rituals and traditions that were made to lower and debase women and raise up the confidence and superiority of the men (the warriors). It has been passed down for thousands of years and as bad as our music seems today, we (as in today's humans) definitely didn't invent it. Like i say all the time, and i've pointed out in often in my Everything is A-Ok blog, we really haven't evolved that much. We're not that much different, that much more mature or that much smarter than our ancestors of thousands of years ago. Evolution is a process that takes millions of years. We've advanced an iota. We still beat our wives and televise it on Cops. We're not any better. I know we'd like to think that we are, but we're not. At all.

Now i'm not saying that it's OK, i'm just trying to provide some context. We have come a long way in our respect and treatment of women and they have proven their great worth to us ignoramus men time and time again throughout history. I'm not saying that because tribes of indigenous people treated their women poorly 8,000 years ago, that it's OK today. It's not.

Music has always been a great communicator of thoughts and ideas. Musically talented people have always been the story tellers and instant messengers of every generation. When white people ripped Africans from their continent to bring them to the U.S. as slaves, the negroe spiritual was born. They weren't allowed to gather in great numbers so they passed on messages of hope and strength through music. Music is, and always will be, a medium in which ideas and messages are carried on. So, i suppose i have no choice but to finally admit that music, and more importantly the message contained in that music, is a powerful thing and to varying degrees has an affect on all of us. It would be ignorant (and i've been accused of ignorance a time or two) to assume otherwise.

Here's where it gets sticky and entirely friggin off topic. If music is a great communicator and it's messages affect us no matter what (and i think that they do.) then it becomes a matter of right and wrong vs. censorship vs. responsibility. Earlier in the post when i talked about the different kinds of violent and inappropriate media that i've taken in throughout my life and how it hasn't affected me, i meant that it hasn't spurred me into violent and/or illegal actions. To say that it hasn't affected me at all would be completely incorrect. I have certainly had major emotional reactions to music. I've admitted time and time again in this very space that i love music that makes me feel something, that gets something out of me and that i hate music that doesn't move me in some way, no matter how brilliant the musicians that created it may have been. I have heard songs whose lyrics struck me at a particular time and motivated me to change the way i thought about certain situations or people; and in the end, some of those changes in perspective have even caused me to act differently the next time i faced the situation. So, if you want to oversimplify it, i'll go ahead and admit it: Music at some point in my life has driven me to take an action. I chalk up the fact that i've never slapped a ho to the fact that my parents taught me the difference between right and wrong. I know better. I know that would be wrong, so i don't do it. It would be easy for me, as an affluent white male from a good part of town with parents who cared about me and are still married, to write off the societal implications of rap lyrics by saying, "Well, if parents would just teach their kids right from wrong..." and wipe my hands of all the extenuating circumstances. But that wouldn't be fair. Parents are just like any other group of people, a few good ones and a whole lot of shitty ones. So we can't rely on parents to tell their kids, "Hey, it's fine if you listen to Dre. Just know that you can't cap a nigga just because Dre said so." It's never going to happen. Some parents just don't give a shit and so we'll always end up with kids who have no concept of the right way to behave. It'll never change.

So then what? Do we rely on the government to censor the music we listen to so that kids with crappy parents don't act out lyrics they hear? I think that's a slippery slope and one that is so obviously a bad idea that we don't even need to discuss it. We do still live in America, and despite all that is happening around us, we do still hang on to a few scraps of freedom ie. it's ok for the government to censor and hide war news, but it's not OK to censor our rap music. That's where we draw the line. Makes perfect sense, right?

So the third option is responsibility. When Talib Kweli has a forum with 4th and 5th graders or Russell Simmons holds a hip hop summit, that is practicing responsibility. Still, is it just me, or do you not see Mims, Yung Joc, 50 Cent and Suge Knight lining up to host these things?? It's just never going to happen on a wide scale. There's no interest in it and more importantly, there's no damn money in it. If it was human nature to be responsible, we wouldn't still have cigarettes or liquor or drugs or television or cheeseburgers (BORING!)...in fact, we wouldn't even be having this conversation in the first place. So i'm not going to hold my breath and wait for the rappers and hip hop artists to make sweeping changes in the name of responsibility. Call me a pessimist, but it ain't friggin happening. From the very top (white) executive at the top record label, to the kid selling his demo on the corner, there is absolutely no interest -- financially or otherwise -- in protecting the children from dirty, obscene, irresponsible lyrics.

So what is rap to do? Or rather, what are we to do about rap? Here's 2 possible answers. The first one cynical and the 2nd, somewhat optimistic.

It goes completely out of style as a genre.
And that's it. That's the only feasible way that rap lyrics will ever be OK. For them not to exist at all. And if they exist, for people not to give a shit. You don't hear anyone complaining about how Polka is ruining our children, do you? Any news lately on the kids who were jailed because of the Waltz? How about that congressional hearing on Bach and Chopin? All of those things went out of style, became obsolete and are no longer affecting our culture. If rap music goes this way, the discussion will go away.

And the second:
Mos Def has this speech at the beginning to Black on Both Sides (my favorite hip hop album ever) and he says something along the lines of, "Hip hop is the people. We are hip hop. And hip hop won't get better until the people get better. So when you ask me, 'hey Mos, what's gonna happen with hip hop?' i say, 'what's gonna happen with us?' Hip hop will get better when the people get better."
And that's the poignant line for me. Hip hop will get better, when the people get better. That's the only solution.

Can the people get better? We will see.