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Monday, January 21, 2008
CHECK THE RHIME
A Tribe Called Quest
The Low End Theory
Jive : 1991
[Buy It]
GIMME THE LOOT
The Notorious B.I.G.
Ready to Die
Arista : 1994
[Buy It]
IGNORANT SHIT
Jay-Z
American Gangster
Roc-A-Fella : 2007
[Buy It]
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-Up Gang/Star Trak : 2006
[Buy It]
I'M ME
Lil Wayne
The Leak EP
Cash Money Records : 2007
[Buy It]
In terms of genre evolution, hip-hop is the hare to rock's tortoise. In its brief tenure - let's call it thirty years, give or take - hip-hop has undergone more fundamental sea-changes than rock has arguably seen in its longer life-span. There are numerous factors at play in hip-hop's rampant mutation: its modular construction and all-inclusive purview lend it a lot of flexibility, and it was born in an age when the very passage of time seemed to be speeding up recklessly. "Golden Age" rappers like A Tribe Called Quest were acutely aware of hip-hop's mercurial nature: much of their music was taken up with deifying old-school masters whose reign, while parsed in fog-shroudedly remote, creation-myth tones, had been put out to pasture just a few years before. This better-days nostalgia seems in retrospect to have been directly predicated against an on-rushing future that, if it wasn't inevitable, feels that way from our current vantage.
Did Tribe intuit that, even as they were on top of the world, they were trembling on the verge of obsolesence? In the early 90s, west coast G-funk, with its sinister yet breezy synths, and east coast crime rap, with its gunshot snares and minimal arrangements, would topple Native Tongues-style Afrocentric jazz-hop from market supremacy. It's tempting to imagine that the narrative of crime rap continues in an unbroken line to the present day, but the truth is that crime rap itself has undergone fundamental changes, which go beyond superficial style and regional sub-genres. There is always a trend in creative movements, once they've been developed enough to be crystallized, for tropes to come unstuck from what they signify - in rock, we might look to "baby"s, "come on"s and "girl"s - ejaculations that need no longer connect to any narrative enacted within a given song, but which, through sheer repetition, have become a sort of musical filler or genre-identifying shorthand. At this stage of development, the conceptual transforms into the purely aesthetic. And when I listen to modern crime rap, I wonder if it's reached this stage in its development, as its relationship to the violence that is fundamental to the genre seems to be verging on the existential - violence not as a mechanism within a greater social framework, but as a state of nature.
The Notorious B.I.G. was crucial in laying the template for New York crime rap as it would develop over the course of the 90s. Yet he seems fundamentally different than the abstracted crime rappers of today. Biggie reveled in violence, to be sure. But his violent acts were couched in a context that explained them, even if it didn't quite exonerate him. The eruptions of violence in stick-up kid anthem "Gimme the Loot" (which, somewhat ironically, samples Tribe's "Scenario" remix)were strung together with sturdy ligaments of cause and effect. Here's Biggie (taking a schizophrenic two-voice approach that has misled many to believe there's a guest rapper on the track) spelling out very clearly the impetus for his actions:
When it's time to eat a meal, I rob and steal
'Cause mom duke aint giving me shit
So for the bread and butter I leave niggaz in the gutter
And later:
Oh shit! The cops! Be cool, fool
They aint gonna roll up, all they want is fucking doughnuts
So why the fuck he keep lookin? I guess to get his life tooken
I just came home, ain't trying to see central booking
Oh shit, now he's looking in my face
You better haul ass 'cause I ain't with no fucking chase
So lace up your boots, 'cause I'm about to shoot
A true motherfucker going out for the loot
So there it is. Despite the fantastical quality of Biggie's violent urges and his unreptenent nihilism ("I wouldn't give a fuck if you're pregnant/ Give me the baby ring and the #1 Mom pendant"), his was an era when it was still necessary to make a case for outlaw-hood, and he makes that case in no uncertain terms: Stealing is a pragmatic solution to hunger and material lack, and cop-killing is a pragmatic solution to wanting to stay the fuck out of jail. There are still plenty of rappers who explore the social and cultural forces around urban violence - off the dome, I'm thinking of Pharoahe Monch, in songs like "When the Gun Draws," and Ghostface, one of our last great storytelling rappers. But more commonly, we see rappers interpreting crime-talk as a genre trope that requires no explanation or justification or even context - rappers no longer kill for a clearly-defined reason, they just kill, as inevitably as rockers pay homage to the most ambiguous babies and guuuuuuurls. Jay-Z, with his usual bulletproof pomposity, addressed this shift from meaning to form in last year's "Ignorant Shit":
This is that ignorant shit you like
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick, plus ice
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you love
Nigga, fuck, shit, maricon, puta, and drugs
C'mon, I got that ignorant shit you need
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, trick plus weed
I'm only trying to give you what you want
Nigga, fuck, shit, ass, bitch, you like it, don't front
Hova's more concerned with groupthink here than with the denaturing of meaning in crime rap - "Ignorant Shit" was born into the age of Young Jeezy, rap's great anarcho-fascist, whose obliterative presence is most saliently summarized in one part of his song "Hypnotize": "Now I command you niggaz to get money," in a bassy, implacable voice-of-god. But he does touch on the idea that crime rap's signifiers have ossified into something static. Compare Biggie's deeply causal crime rap to something more modern, like Clipse, and you'll find a fundamental layer of meaning to be absent from the latter. In "Chinese New Year," there's no context, no backstory, no justification - the killers simply show up at your door, masked and armed, somehow gleeful in the sheer act of violence, which has become a end instead of a means - Biggie was like a desperado, but Clipse more resembles a dark malefic force of nature flitting inexorably about the periphery of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Lil Wayne might be the greatest rapper at work today because he's most fully understood, perhaps just intuitively, this semiotic shift in rap music, and most fully avails himself of the malleability it entails. He's taken violence, drugs and theft into his vocubulary while fully recognizing them as hollow ciphers that can only be useful as guideposts in a hermetic celebration of self. This allows him recourse to dizzying pop cultural pastiche, transitioning seamlessly from Dwayne Wayne name-drops to belligerent threats, or dropping non-sequiturs like "When I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins/ That ain't got shit to do with this, I just thought that I should mention" amid his crime-talk. Of course, Wayne's tacitly acknowledging that the crime-talk itself "ain't got shit to do with this" either - only Wayne and Wayne's greatness truly signify in Wayne's world. His new single "I'm Me" begins with an awe-inspiring ground-clearing:
Un-fuckin'-believable
Lil Wayne's the president
Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em
Even if they celibate
Notice how the temetic opening sally situates the song in a Wayne-centric world: he's not running for president, he's not saying he *should be* president - he *is* the president, point blank. It really brooks no argument. Notice how "fuck 'em" attaches itself to no specific group and boasts no specific motivation - like Clipse's crime scenario, it's a universal stance that posits the self against all comers, the struggle being enacted not between a corrupt culture and one of its disenfrachised denizens, but the known (the self) against the unknown (the other, i.e. everything).
(If you'll allow me a brief tangent, there's a lot of rad stuff going on in this song that doesn't relate to this post, most notably the abrupt yet organic-feeling shifts in tone that Wayne's free-associative style so often creates. A stupid-funny pop culture jibe ("I know the game is crazy/ It's more crazy than it's ever been/ I'm married to that crazy bitch/ Call me Kevin Federline") leads into a larger-than-life boast: "The ground shall break when they bury him." Yet here, Wayne seems to catch himself off-guard, as if his own line suddenly opened up a yawning awareness of mortality under his feet. "Bury him?" he asks, in a tone of voice that indicates he's startled himself, "I know one day they gotta bury him/ Better lock my casket tight baby so I don't let the devil in," and here the punchliney flow he's favored so far gives way to a malleable, urgent cadence, as if his own acknowledgement of limited time has renewed his hunger.)
Anyway, the chorus of "I'm Me" is perhaps the most honest, endgamey manifesto rap has ever seen, one that seems to perfectly summarize a rap climate where violence is portrayed less as a social condition and more as a natural side-effect of late-capitalism's doctrines of competition, conspicuous consumption, and self-aggrandization. It is a perfect distillation of this trend - the diminishment of meaning, the wax of the hermetic ego - and it goes a little something like this:
Bitch, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me, I'm me
Baby, I'm me, So who you, You're not me, You're not me
And I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire
I know that ain't fair, but I don't care
I'm a motherfuckin' Cash Money millionaire Labels: brian, rap
posted by Brian
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