Why can’t we brothers
Protect one another?
No one’s serious
And it makes me furious!
Don’t be misled.
You listened to any rap lately?
There’s some really thoughtful and thought provoking stuff out there but,
for the most part, those offerings are few and far between in pop media. There are far more folks emulating Soulja Boy
right now than Talib Kweli. And if you
turn on Hip Hop radio (104.1 in STL), you’re likely to be served a musical diet
composed of 2 Chainz, Yo Gotti and Future.
They’re clever, stylish, and, in many ways, innovative, but they rarely
say anything of any real weight or depth.
This may be due to the fact that in the past two decades, Hip Hop
artists have gone Pop. And as happens so
often when a genre becomes Pop, the subject matter has narrowed and diluted. But we didn’t end up with some bubble-gum
form of Hip Hop (it’s funny that rap had the opposite trajectory of many
genres, getting grittier over time. A
genre whose first popular stars were Kurtis Blow and The Sugar Hill Gang has
yielded Lil Wayne and Rick Ross while Punk has devolved from the Sex Pistols to
Avril Levine). Instead Hip Pop (yeah
that’s mine, coin it) artists kept their subject matter gritty, in an effort to
keep their base audience satisfied—attempting to stay real and relevant to the
experience of street people. In fact, Rap,
even in its current Pop incarnation, is often seen as a lens into the streets;
rap artists bring to the fore the lives, livelihoods, and aspirations of the
hood. But, in the process, pop rap glamorizes
a lot of what’s not good in the hood, instead of critiquing it and inspiring us
to fix it.
That’s why every, once in a while, it’s good to take a few steps back…way
back. Rap wasn’t the first form of music
to report the struggles of street people and broadcast it writ large for the
American public. In fact, before Kurtis
Blow riffed the poignant “brakes on a plane, brakes on a train, breaks to make
you go insane,” and before the Sugar Hill Gang was making every gangster shake
his head in disgust instead of delight, it was the Soul artist that held the
title poet laureate of these here streets.
And never was this role played to better effect than when Curtis
Mayfield released his masterpiece, Superfly,
in 1972.
If you’ve never heard, Superfly,
I suggest you go listen to it, in its 37 minute entirety, right now. I’ll wait here. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yuqk1cATO4) Is your mind BLOWN right now? You’re welcome.
The gritty soundtrack for a popular blaxploitation film of the same
name, Superfly was Mayfield’s fourth
solo album after leaving the Impressions and his most successful album up to
that time. It had two singles that sold
over a million copies and was one of a handful of movie soundtracks in film
history to out-gross its film. It was a
massive hit, easily on par (proportionally… there were fewer of us in ’72) with
the reach of many of today’s Hip Pop releases.
Just like many Rap lyrics today, the film and album dealt with the
trials and triumphs of drug dealers in the inner city. On first glance, the songs on Superfly are replete with the drugs,
sex, violence and braggadocio that would be familiar to a 21st
century Hip Hop connoisseur. Nowhere is
this clearer than in my personal favorite track from the album Pusherman.
Though never a single, the second track from Superfly, Pusherman, is
the song to hear from this album. You’ve
already heard the bass line somewhere and you probably didn’t know it. The melody and vocal cadence has been sampled
or referenced by rappers as diverse as Eminem, Ice-T, and The Clipse. It’s been selected as one of the 500 songs
that shaped Rock & Roll by the Rock and Roll Hall of fame. As soon as you hear those iconic first
lyrics, “I’m your mama. I’m your
daddy. I’m that nigga in the alley,” you’re
strapped in for a ride through a day in the life of your local pusher.
We might compare this classic track to the second track off 2 Chainz
debut album that dropped last August.
The track is entitled simply, Crack. The opening lyrics go, “Started from the
trap now I rap/ No matter where I’m at, I got CRACK.” Now, to be fair, part of what 2 Chainz is
doing in this track is punning that his music is intoxicating and addictive and,
therefore, though he no longer sells literal crack, he has still “got crack.” But he is also paying homage to the dope boy
lifestyle in this and the following track, Dope
Peddler, in a way that is anything but critical. It’s comical, celebratory, clever in places,
but not critical.
Upon first listen to Pusherman,
you might mistake Curtis Mayfield for endorsing that lifestyle. The music is irresistibly laid back and cool. The lyrics speak confidence and control.
I’m your mama. I’m your daddy.
I’m that nigga in the alley.
I’m your doctor. What you need?
Want some coke? Have some weed.
You know me. I’m your friend.
Your main boy—thick and thin.
I’m your pusherman.
He goes on to talk about “making money all the time” and having the “baddest
bitches in the bed.” How Hip Pop is
that?
Keep listening. He doesn’t just
let the pusher off without a challenge.
Just as the bass line changes and the muted strums of that sublime funk
guitar alters the mood, the pusher’s own self-assurance is challenged as we
learn he’s been told he could be nothing else but a hustler in spite of himself
and how he has a woman he loves desperately and wants to give her something
better than himself. “How long can a
good thing last?” he asks. This pusherman
is deeper than Rap allows the dope boy to be.
He has a broader story and he understands the moral complications of
what he’s doing. This draws the whole
practice into question in a way that the dope boy folklore in Hip Hop seems
unwilling to do.
Mayfield does a similar trick with the violence that is so often
portrayed in our music and, then as now, is such a problem in our
communities. Usually when violence is
invoked in Rap, the main affect is to illustrate how tough the speaker is. Not for Curtis. The first single released from the album, “Freddie’s
Dead,” recounts a tale of a junkie who gets caught up and is presumably killed. He frankly relates in the opening lyrics, “Freddie’s
dead/That’s what I said.” He goes on to
do a lyrical one-two punch to both drug dependency/trafficking (Freddie’s on
the corner now/If you want to be a junkie, well/ remember Freddie’s dead) and
violence (Why can’t we brother’s/ protect one another?). He manages to be cautionary, without being
preachy when he relates the two lines, on an island by themselves in the whole
song,
If you don’t try
You’re gonna die.
It’s important that Curtis does all of this without sounding
preachy. He couches the message within
the story itself. He tells a gritty
street tale, throws in some wisdom here and there, but never lets the message
overpower the method, which is ultimately the art that the listener is seeking
to enjoy. Obviously, no one wants to be
preached to in a Pop song. That’s why
subtlety is important; that’s what Mayfield had and what all of us who attempt
to write any kind of music can learn from him.
Now, I’m not some good-old-days historophile bent on turning back the
clock. Not all music in the seventies
was so conscientious. This was an age
that saw popular music that was every bit as vapid as what’s offered today
(Disco Infernoooooo!) But that music
didn’t purport to be REAL the way Hip Pop does.
No, I listen to contemporary Rap music.
I own both 2 Chainz and Future’s albums.
At best, it’s a guilty pleasure; at worst, it’s a weekend anthem. But I don’t take it seriously. It is stage craft. It’s a theatre of the absurd. I never forget what it is and how harmful
listening to only this kind of music—only getting these messages—can be. It’s like a steady diet of junk food—pizza, French
fries, and coke—all day, every day. It’s
just bad for you. The meat-and-potatoes is
the stuff like what Curtis Mayfield put on wax 41 years ago. It was, and remains today, the very epitome
of real.
So, what is real? We have to
take better care of one another. We have
to build one another up. We have to kick
materialism and dependency. These things
are real and they were the very ideas that Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Bobby
Womack and other Soul artists tried to bring to light in the early
seventies. They are the ideas that can
save and strengthen our communities. And
it’s what we have to find a way back to now.
No comments:
Post a Comment