zeruch (zè-rook)

There are various online music fora I have belonged to over the years, and on almost every single one, any number of weird, poorly informed debates have erupted. While all are in some form or another an extrapolation from personal tastes, there are cases where it is also factually erroneous. Sometimes to the point of showcasing profound ignorance. This little statement is to address one particular set of arguments that crops up far too often; it is my cut and paste (or post the URL) response to whether or not rap/hip-hop is “music”.

Barring the simple acceptable answer of “I do not like it”, “I have never heard anything I have found listenable yet” or even “I have no funk in my trunk and cannot bear to listen to it, for it reminds me of this deficiency…”, too often the blithering stupidity of the following is blurted out:

It’s not music because they don’t play instruments.

It’s not music because all the do is talk.

It’s not music because it is all sampled from other peoples material anyway, hence unoriginal.

If you have ever said any of these three statements, you are either willfully ignorant, or a complete trolling dolt.

Part I

The first one is probably the easiest to answer: rubbish. The history of the genre is stacked to the gills not only with amazing instrumental performers, but I would argue that given the technique that has been developed around turntablism, that it has in effect become a fully evolved instrument in its own right (albeit a fairly unique one).

If one goes by the generally accepted history, the first widely distributed rap records were put out by the Sugar Hill label, which did not sport stacks of Roland TR-808’s and other such equipment to make musical backdrops for the MC’s; they used a house band, much as Stax, Motown and other labels had. In the case of Sugar Hill, they had a trio consisting of Skip MacDonald, Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc. The trio played on a litany of seminal cuts, including classics like the anti-cocaine screed White Lines and the urban protest mantra The Message.

Now good studio musicians are an elite lot, but the three members of that house band are arguably in the top of that caste. All continued after Sugar Hill to record under various names together, often with avant-dub savant and On-U Sound label head Adrian Sherwood under names like Tack>>Head, Strange Parcels, Fats Comet, and Barmy Army. They were the first band to tour live with a DJ (Sherwood, although he would operate usually not on stage but from the mixing desk proper) doing on the fly mixing (long before nu-metal turned it into a deranged and pointless ornamentation). They also went on to produce and play with a long list of notables: Peter Gabriel, the Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Talvin Singh, NIN (Pretty Hate Machine is more Sherwood and LeBlanc production than anything else), Seal, Annie Lennox, Joe Satriani, Art of Noise, Depeche Mode, African Head Charge (yes, they came over a decade before American Head Charge), and Bim Sherman. Wimbish is now a member of Living Colour, Head>>Fake and Jungle Funk (the latter two being live+jungle electronica affairs), MacDonald has the blues-dubtronic project Little Axe, and LeBlanc does beats for almost anyone. Sherwood still runs the On-U Sound label, puts out a solo record here and there, and remixes a bunch of others. Tack>>Head itself toured just last year.

From there, the musicianship in hip hop never ended. Tarus Mateen is mostly known for his work as the acoustic bassist for jazz artists like Greg Osby and Jason Moran, but he also plays electric bass or does programming duties for Goodie Mob and Outkast. 8-String jazz guitar wizard Charlie Hunter once recorded and toured with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, which included Michael Franti of reggae/rap/soul group Spearhead and industrial svengali Jack Dangers (aka Meat Beat Manifesto), as well as being part of the jazz-funk band Groundtruther (which oddly enough has guests DJ Logic and Osby on its releases to date). The Roots is a hip hop crew led by drummer Ahmir ?uestlove Thompson, whose own sideprojects have included working with soul singer Joss Stone, in a jazz trio with Uri Caine and Christian McBride, and a live tour with Herbie Hancock.

The aforementioned DJ Logic has made an entire label of hip-hop cross-genre bending forays. He started as the DJ with rock group Eye & I, but eventually founded Ropeadope Records, which works with a broad range of artists (included in Logic’s orbit is blues-rocker Chris Whitley, the remaining members of the Grateful Dead, and jazz organ trio Medeski, Martin and Wood) on top of Logic’s own Project Logic and the Yohimbe Brothers. YB is Logic and guitarist Vernon Reid, himself not a neophyte to hop hop. While most famous for his work in funk metalband Living Colour, Reid is a long time player in New Yorks jazz avant garde and hip hop scenes, playing with Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, Defunkt and various session with groups including the aforementioned Spearhead and Public Enemy. He recently toured with the Roots (replacing their last guitarist, himself leaving to become the new bassist for Incubus), and his debut solo album featured a few spots with rappers Chubb Rock and Beans (of the Antipop Consortium).

Former MC for rap group A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip, has been working with jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkle, and Keith Elam (aka Guru from Gang Starr) has been doing his Jazzmatazz side project off and on for a decade; mixing of hip hop and soul with live instrumentation with collaborators Chaka Khan, Jamiroquai, Meshell Ndegeocello, Kenney Garrett, Angie Stone, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Branford Marsalis among a panoply of others. Me’shell herself vacillates between rap and soul and jazz, is a formidible bassist and keyboard player (having played on albums by John Mellencamp, Steve Coleman, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Harvey Mason, et al) and runs a fusion ensemble group called the Spirit Music Jamia on top of her solo releases.

Mos Def, who recently has also broken into acting, has been running a second gig as the frontman for Black Jack Johnson, of which some of their cuts can be heard on his latest solo release, the New Danger. The band includes Doug Wimbish (there is that name again) and Will Calhoun of Living Colour, Dr. Know of hardcore deities the Bad Brains, and ivory tickler Bernie Worrell (of P-Funk, the Talking Heads and various Les Claypool projects).

This is only scratching the surface.

Part II

Saying that speaking with a measured cadence lyrics which are otherwise not open prose but often stanzas of rhyming verse is not real vocals is a stupid argument and anyone who uses it should be forced to eat an Air Supply or Leo Sayer record whole. It’s rubbish returned.

By that same logic you would have to kill of some of the spoken word mumblings of Bob Dylan (Sorry, but Subterranean Homesick Blues is proto folk-hop, only very nasal and intermittently comprehensible), Johnny Cash, the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron.

You may not like the lyrics or the structure, but it is in fact a structure, which is music (the idea of placing notes in a sequence recognizable otherwise as a tune). Vocal styles vary greatly from the bombastic political rhetoric of Chuck D, the triple word score vocabulary of Beans, the absurdist urban narratives of Del the Funkee Homosapien, and the much maligned (and in my opinion rightfully so) mindless slurring of 50 Cent. Now, I may find 50 Cent mindless slurring, and his albums worth less than his name, but I still am clueful enough to know its music. Just not music I wish to be subjected to if given a choice.

Part III

Sampling. Oh that evil upon music. Rubbish 3: The Reckoning. Sampling seems to have become the little boogieman of musical luddites everywhere, as if its sole purpose is to excerpt the work of others for someone elses nefarious plans. Sampling has its roots in the musique concrete of the 1940s leading on through the loop and sample heavy experiments of everyone from Can’s Holger Czukay, Brian Eno’s various early collaborations with David Byrne from the Talking Heads and King Crimsons Robert Fripp (the latter having codeveloped an ambient tape loop system for on the fly self-sampling called Frippertronics). In many ways some of the first real wholescale sampling happened during the early fusion experiments of the Dark Prince of jazz, Miles Davis. He was one of the first people (if not the first) to truly exploit the studio-as-instrument concept. By playing massive extended jams and then going back and splicing and overdubbing he effectively began a self-sampling concept that continues to this day.

There is certainly arguable cause to castigate the one-riff purloining of producers like Diddy/Puffy/Dummy (whatever he is calling himself this nanosecond), but hip hop has produced some brilliant minds when it comes to musical collage and repurposing. To me the most notable is still The Bomb Squad, whose production on early Public Enemy albums and on releases like the style-bending Bazerk, Bazerk, Bazerk! by Son of Bazerk were milestones. In the former you had the mix of an urban, industrial framework married to a Phil Spector Wall of Sound method; dense, layered bumrushes of audio calamity. in the latter who had a more hit and run approach that ran from one island of aural chaos to the next. If you could even make out the sample sources it was a fleeting thing and so deconstructed as to make truly a whole other work.

Going back to Tack>>Head, you have a band that in the 80s pioneered sampling in terms of live sound collage (eventually taken back into the studio, as well as the use of Jamaican style toasting and more live loop technology triggered by the instrumentalists on stage and into the mix). In their case they used mostly sampling of speeches from political figures, activists and marketing jingles in new contexts. The result was groundbreaking in terms of dynamics and in making a rather innovative performance aesthetic.

I currently am in a studio project just for fun on the weekends (a trio calling ourselves the Heavy Weather Orchestra) and while all three of us play (or have played ) traditional instruments, we currently work in an almost all-electronic, midi’d studio universe. We effectively sample ourselves, as do many other groups these days, to help create a wider palette to work from. Sampling has its uses, and like any other musical technique, it can either be trite work of a lazy simpleton, or it can be really utilized in expressive and novel fashions.

This is tied to those who think that drum and synth programming is somehow cheating musically, which is a retarded idea to start with, since in order to do anything useful with thse tools you still have to have some innate or learned sense of meter, pitch, melody and even key. The machines won’t write the song for you, they onlly faciliate an output from what you input. You can say all those drum machines sound the same, and I could retort that so so does every neanderthal with a Tama 5 piece playing a cheesy Bonzo impersonation in 4/4. I like using electronic drums and drum machines as much as I like playing my acoustic trap kit, but I play them differently and with different goals in terms of sound in mind. Context is King.

Now while I could probably go into much more detail –and I already have gone considerably farther than intended– I hope this provides some utility in giving you a better technical picture of whats happening.

You can still hate the music, but limit it to reasons that actually make sense, like “It just ain’t my cup of tea.”