For People Who Only Need A Beat

 I was watching this video on YouTube when I realized that I was really enjoying the soundtrack. It was suited to the video, and was wonderfully strong.

I'm not usually someone who says that about a rap track. I've said before that I respect the genre--first heard The Last Poets while in college, was a P-Funk fanatic like forever, picked up on Afrika Bambataa in the 70's etc., etc., but for all that, it's not my kind of stuff. So my reaction was a little bit self-startling. I decided to look through the comments (which, on YouTube, is sort of like going into the men's room at a rock club) until I found who'd done it. I didn't get the track, but it was by Tupac.

Now my old white guy distant (and maybe obligatory) respect kicks in. I'd heard his stuff, known his story, read his words, knew that the folks who followed him followed him for a reason. And if there's one genre of rap I can listen to with enjoyment, it's the political stuff (Fear Of a Black Planet is a disc that doesn't get old for me), but, frankly, I'm listening to the politics. 

This was different, though, because I really wasn't paying attention to what Mr. Shakur was saying when I responded positively to it, mainly because the video content was unrelated. It was puzzling, but when, later, I realized it was something that was going to rattle around in my brain for a while, I went back to try to find the clip again, and couldn't find it. So I set the whole thing aside.

Until eMusic had on their New and Noteworthy listing an album called The 3rd World, by a guy named  Immortal Technique. (Is he French with that last name? As it turned out, Peruvian, but i was close.) It was just plain wonderful. an angry, political, intelligent voice. The beats certainly seem to work, though I may be unfairly influenced by DJ Green Lantern's name. I was more than agreeing with Mr. Technique, I was enjoying it.

Was I, who have Beverly Sills and ABBA and Riders In The Sky on my iPod, finally beginning to Get It?

I was almost certainly not getting what someone steeped in the hip hop culture and/or the black experience is expected to get, but I was sure as shootin' getting something.

What I was hearing, maybe fully for the first time, was a voice. All the stuff that contributes to it. Modulations of pitch, volume, speed, tone and inflection that make speaking more than talking. As with most structures, you can let rap's rhyming become a doggerel trap and the beat a bondage (and the whole thing, as Charles Wuorinen put it, pitch-free pop) or you can make it all work.

Why'd they start doing this? Sure, this was a street thing: When even access to a musical instrument is beyond you, you could still get your hand on a turntable.  (Of course, in other contexts, people start with that thought and end up with karaoke.) But why, at a time when black music was everywhere in the ascendant, did the performers and the audiences turn their backs on such a miraculous heritage of passionate and magnificent musicianship in favor of this leafless tree of a form? What was missing that rap supplied?

Well, the answer might be, as it always is, a voice. For all the omnipresence of black faces, that can be seen as their being co-opted. The reason that Michael Bolton and Kenny G are trying to sing and play like black folks does not mean anything good for the folks themselves. The musicianship, the drum, all the hard-won heritage has won, but what do they still not have? A voice.

It's a co-option of their own: one of the strongest currencies in modern America--the hit single--is converted into a form that lets a black man or woman speak. And it doesn't have to be political--not even most of the time, because what they want to say is banal, personal, miserable, stupid, self-aggrandizing, religious, nihilistic, self-destructive--you name it. Sometimes it's got perspective, sometimes not. 

And so rap trades in the skill of R&B and replaces it with one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal, developed in churches when churches was the only space they had, when religion was the only thing allowed that didn't look like the bridle, bit, stall and nosebag of an animal. 

Rap preaches--if only about how much money one has.  Anti sermons and non sermons share the stage with sermons. Not for me to choose. I naturally gravitate to the stuff that I agree with and which occupies me. And it seems to me a bit problematic, and even too much like the universal American hunger simply to be in the media spotlight to use that tool to wave dollar bills in the air. But at least I understand a bit more of what's going on.

The question remained to me: why did I respond to Messrs. Shakur and Technique the way I hadn't before? I may be getting smarter as I get older, but I'm not getting any less white. (It does seem I'm going to stay this color.) So what sensitized me to it? had I learned to listen better recently?

And then it hit me.

OMFG, George Carlin.

After he passed away, the cable channels (HBO, I guess) were running all his specials back to back. And there was so much of his stuff I simply didn't agree with. As he was ranting about how all politicians are corrupt and (repeat after me) if voting were effective it would be illegal, I was wondering why I was simply not shifting into whack-a-troll argumentative mode? If this were a stump speech or an address to    the Ralph Nader Mutual Endowment Fund, or even just some guy at a party wearing a goatee and a turtleneck mouthing off, that's where I'd be. Why was I, as a mater of fact, laughing?

And I realized that just ranting was not what Carlin was doing. After every outrageous remark he would pause, and look at the audience. It was the rhythm of the venerable stand-ups waiting for the laugh, but it was clear that George couldn't be waiting for the laugh on some of the stuff. it wasn't meant to hit the guffaw button. They weren't meant for that; George didn't want  to let you off with a release.  But what he was doing when he paused and looked and cocked an eyebrow was saying "Did you hear that? Did you get that? Did you like it?"--which is something what ranters (and political types) never do. He was entertaining his audience, but in the sense of having us to dinner. Every piece was presented with the opportunity to examine its absurdity as well as its salience, and you could laugh at that as well. So by saying hard, dark, cynical truth using the rhythms of that most intimate and vulnerable of public presentations, the stand-up, he was able to do something really interesting.

And just as George used stand-up for his own end, my other friends could take the forms of the sermon (and the ht single) to turn it into something else. And of course  having had my ears and mind degunked by another old white guy, I could turn around and appreciate what I hadn't before.

So, Thank you, George, Tupac, and Immortal (can I call you Mort?): it was a pleasure listening to you.

And hearing you speak.