—Nas[1]

Last week BBC News featured a report couched in questioning: “Has hip-hop grown up?”[2] Besides the obvious condescension, we learned next to nothing (!) about what musical maturity truly means or how it might relate to Hip-Hop. The scantily clad article did very little to examine the dexterity and virtuosity that has sustained Hip-Hop for three decades, and kept it in a permanent state of reinvention. 

Big wheel keep on turning.

Maturity, it seemed BBC was trying to tell us, is achieved when privileged suburban students (a la Yale) find an art-form valid enough to study, and “think critically about,” it. Hip-Hop has indeed come of age because, now, “tourists visit inner city ghettos and Ivy-league students study street culture.” No mention of how this didactic experiment with Black artistry, of how this fetishization, and trivialization, of Black culture is a practice as ancient as colonialism. For, as Ralph Ellison wrote brilliantly a half-century ago, “it is the crime of reducing the humanity of others to that of a mere convenience, a counter in a barrel game which involves no apparent risk to ourselves. With us Negroes it started with the appropriation of our freedom and our labor; then it was our music, our speech, our dance.”[3]

Sara Baartman knew a thing or two about that.[4]

To say I was surprised would be disingenuous. The whiff of ignorance-infused elitism was pervasive from start to finish, so it seemed only right that it would end with a slight nod to the much-hyped, but discredited, generational division between the younger and older Hip-Hop family. 

Somewhere in the shallow depths of my mind, I can hear Toni Morrison reminding: “the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”[5]

* * *

The recent wave of Rock-influenced Hip-Hop is worth exploring.

It all seemed to start when Damon Dash, a much underrated mind I should add, collaborated with Blues-Rock sensation The Black Keys to formulate “a good business model… that kind of protects the artistry, it’s lucrative, but where a lot of people can get [into] it without compromising the brand.” Out of this, Blak Roc sprung, and the rest, as is often said, is history.[6] The project, recorded in 11 days and due November 27 (“Black Friday”), is to feature Mos Def, Jim Jones, Billy Danze (M.O.P), Pharoahe Monch, Q-Tip, Raekwon, ODB (R.I.P.), among others, lacing their vocals onto instrumentals built with the signature sound of The Black Keys.[7]

Then surfaced a video promo clip late last month in which Onyx, the ever-energized New York Hip-Hop group, expressed displeasure about Blak Roc, as they considered the concept essentially a rip-off of their soon-to-be released album, The Black Rock. Group member Fredro Starr described the instrumental feel to be expected on their album—“mad guitars, hard drums.” Sticky Fingaz also promised to deliver “an hybrid album of Hip-Hop and Rock & Roll.” 

They contend the potency of their idea was so strong that, now, “everybody and they mother want to do a Rock & Roll album!” In a stark-raving-mad interview on Sirius Radio, Fedro Starr and Sticky Fingaz went so far as leaving open the option for violent confrontation with anyone involved in “biting” their concept.

Besides the obviously exaggerated outburst (meltdown?), they have every right to express righteous indignation at the recent Rock & Roll frenzy brewing in the Hip-Hop community. Seeing as Jay-Z now wants a Rock project of his own, they might have a point.[9] And, of course, within the last 3 years, unexpected artists like Lil’ Wayne and Shop Boyz have found the initiative irresistible—even if they lack the artistic sophistication to do something worthwhile with it.

But if would be wrong for Onyx to assume, or ordain, themselves the originators of Rock-Hip-Hop mash-up. Run DMC’s pioneering role with “Walk This Way” (Raising Hell, 1986) should never be forgotten. And neither should the Beastie Boys’ unabashed maintenance, and development, of a Rock-reflected sound their whole career.

It would be just as wrong for Jasiri X, the highly skilled Pittsburgh MC, to pronounce himself the first Hip-Hop artist with an inextinguishable dedication to fusing intelligent rhyme schemes with social advocacy. He might be the finest example of our time, but he’s a legatee of the Gill Scott-Herons, Muhammad Alis, Fela Kutis, Miriam Makebaas, Public Enemys, and X-Clans that laid the foundation upon which he has built a legacy of his own.

Hip-Hop artists must always remember, no matter how convenient—and oft times lucrative—it is to forget, that our musical tradition is but an extension of that which came before us. From the West-African folklore, to the North-American Plantation Gospel, to the Blues, to Rock & Roll, to Jazz, to Reggae, to Afro-beat, to Latin Jazz, to Opera, to Funk, to Soul, to R&B, the peculiarity of Hip-Hop is only overshadowed by its strict reinterpretation of those elements. Through sampling, one of Hip-Hop’s greatest contributions to humanity, this truth is set free.  

It’s much too easy to condemn modern-day Hip-Hop production, and use it as proof positive of an innate defect Hip-Hop artistry harbors, but anyone lucky enough to have been exposed to the eclectic creations of Afrika Bambaataa, J Dilla, Outkast, Madlib, Questlove, Black Milk, or 9^th Wonder, can attest to the wide-ranging rhythms Hip-Hop is capable of producing.

No other art-form in the history of modern music is able to boast of exposing so extensively its younger demographic to the sounds of old as Hip-Hop has demonstrated these last 30 years. The regeneration of George Clinton and James Brown are two great examples of Hip-Hop’s philanthropic possibilities.  

In The New Beats, a slept-on classic written by Hip-Hop critic S.H. Fernando Jr., George Clinton applauds Hip-Hop for making his “job easier”—the job of sustaining that critical creation of Funk that is both unique and unnerving.

“I never knew that I would be sampled,” he said, referring to the rampant recycling of old P-Funk records which gave rise to West Coast Hip-Hop—particularly the G-Funk genre. “But once it started working, we wasn’t gonna get on the radio no other way. And when people started bootlegging, I was glad. All of that was part of keeping the funk… alive.”

“Rap is that new, edgy sh**,” Clinton is quoted saying. “It’s gonna be around and, like I said, the funk is gonna be in it, the jazz is gonna be in it. It’s starting all over again.”[10]

Rebirth.

“No idea’s original, there’s nothing new under the sun,” Nas once informed us. “It’s never what you do, but how it's done.”[11]

And The Teacher KRS-One instructs new, neophytic artists to “Go online, look up Kraftwerk/ Everything we doing is past work/ We already wore that hat, those pants, and that shirt/ So do you, man—if that works/.”[12]

In “Rock is Black Music, Too,” an op-ed posted on TheRoot.com, writer Rob Fields declares: “Hip-Hop has run out of ideas.”[13] Like the BBC piece, he provides absolutely no critical insight to corroborate such blatantly misinformed conjecture. The sole evidence cited is that “[t]he best-selling rapper of 2008—Lil Wayne—is doing a rock album.” 

“We need artists who have the courage to explore new sounds and ideas,” he pompously proposes. In the next breadth, though, condescension reigns supreme: “But there's no way today's artists can do that if their grasp of music history only extends to the latest ‘80s record Diddy sampled.”

Thus, Fields wants the Hip-Hop community to examine critically his clarion call, even if the only valuable, however unremarkable, revelation in his piece is that Rock & Roll, before the MTV takeover, was as Black as night—and, in many ways, still is. 

But this isn’t Hip-Hop running out of ideas or things to say. Rather, this is Hip-Hop reinventing itself, re-imagining itself, recreating itself. This is Hip-Hop, like it or not, stepping into destiny.

Journalists of all stripes have always found desperate and unpleasant ways to describe Hip-Hop. Early as 1990, Newsweek had condemned it—“the thumping, clattering, scratching assault of rap”—as “music so postindustrial it’s mostly not even played, but pieced together out of pre-recorded soundbites.”

This laziness, this “biased and uninformed reporting,” as S.H. Fernando puts it, would also be picked up by Time Magazine, which described Hip-Hop lyrical content as “a raucous stew of street corner bravado and racial boosterism… often salted with profanity, and sometimes… demeaning remarks about whites, women, and gays.”[14]

Of course, not everyone lacked so bitterly foresight. Princeton professor and renowned philosopher Cornel West understood, as far back as 1982, that Hip-Hop’s core intention was to serve as an extension of the great, rich, soulful musical traditions that had made its rise possible—to begin with.

Part-time working as American correspondent for the French journal Le Monde Diplomatique, he wrote:

 [B]lack rap music indeed Africanizes Afro-American popular music—accenting syncopated polyrhythms, kinetic orality, and sensual energy in a refined form of raw expressiveness—while its virtuosity lies not in technical facility but rather street-talk quickness and linguistic versatility. In short, black rap music recuperates and revises elements of black rhetorical style—some from our preaching—and black rhythmic drumming. It combines the two major organic artistic traditions in black America—black rhetoric and black music.[15]

What Dr. West was aware of, which so many of his peers lacked the insight to see, was that Hip-Hop could have never taken flesh without the existence of those great sources of musical depth that collectively breathed the breadth of life into it.

E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one.”

Yes, it is true that “Hip-Hop has stood the test of time as one of the only artistic developments, throughout the history of humanity, to come to life without the help, supervision, or even awareness of an adult population.”[16] But it is also true that without a reference point to which the culture was able to refer, this musical phenomenon might have never come to be.

Without a Louis Armstrong to look up to, or a John Coltrane to admire; without a Cab Calloway to imitate, or a Mahalia Jackson to emulate; without a Bob Marley to draw strength from, or an Aretha Franklin to respect; without a Machito to be inspired by, or a Celia Cruz to take cues from; without a B.B. King to learn life’s lessons from, or a Hector Lavoe to pay dues to; without a James Brown to get down with, or a Teddy Pendergrass to uncover the art of seduction through; without a Fela Kuti to develop political audacity from, or a, yes, Gladys Knight to be moved deeply through, Hip-Hop is less likely to have broken out the shell of misery that enclosed the lives of many Black and Brown youth.

And though I would like to see Rap music retain its organic, street-toned, unattenuated quality and sound, if a Rock-inspired theme is the next turn of the wheel, then the selfishness of my preferences would have to succumb to a greater desire—its preservation.

Tolu Olorunda is a cultural critic and a columnist for BlackCommentator.com. He can be reached at Tolu.Olorunda@gmail.com.

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