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Last Updated: Oct 21st, 2007 - 09:55:08 |
In the years before Satchel Paige's hurricane fastball out-dueled Dizzy Dean’s or Joe Louis’ fists put Hitler's Aryan propaganda down for the count, black victory lay within the province of myth. For the generations that never witnessed Satchel Paige throwing aspirin tablets past white big leaguers and those who didn't live long enough to see Max Schmeling sprawled like abstract art on the canvas at Madison Square Garden, the quintessential black heroes bore names like Stagolee, the offhanded murderer and Railroad Bill, the fearless and feared locomotive stick-up man. Things being what they are -- and have long been – the stories told within the hip hop were often chronicles in which the outlaw and his misdeeds were rendered in verbal neon.
Earlier I said that if Sonny Liston had not existed, the Blues would’ve had to invent him – and on the real, maybe they already had. That Listonesque Negro made his way through a century of social experience and made himself known again inside hip hop. Both Blues and hip hop fix their imagination upon the same kind of raw, unfinished hero in the stories they tell. The blues Baaad Nigger is the thematic equivalent of hip hop’s Real Nigga. And that explains what the late MC Hood meant on the remix for A Tribe Called Quest’s single “Scenario” when he advertised himself as “buckwild like Larry Davis” – the South Bronx hustler who shot six city cops before escaping the City and evading police for weeks. Beneath this is a fundamental concern for the nature of one’s existence: Audacity, one must recognize, is the antithesis of invisibility.
The stories told in that folklore, inherited by the blues and bequeathed to hip hop relay the doings of strong men who, by their brute strength or brute wit, muscle their way beyond the parameters – legal, moral, social or otherwise – that constrain the rest of us. The hero appears and, by necessity, summons the will to slay dragons – both physical and metaphorical ones – and deliver to us an example of how such problems are to be handled. This is what heroes do.
Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, but hip hop is the only one of its progeny to place equal emphasis upon the telling of stories. Thus, in hip hop we find the folklore of the 21st century. This is a culture that, on the level of its stylistic temperature, its core principles, right down to the stories it tells about itself, regards one question above other concerns: who and what does one represent.
From the gate, the primary criteria for the MC was his ability to deliver the unforeseen line, the swift double-entendre or use the uncommon word to complete a rhyme phrase. But the stark realism or anecdotal satire that characterized early hip hop story rhymes was embellished grammatically – it would take considerable time before artists came to confound the listeners expectations in terms of the story’s structure and dramatic momentum. Where the typical early 1980s story rhyme, like Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” or “La Di Da Di” consisted of a straight-forward, beginning-middle-end narration, a decade later, Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ni@@as Bleed” broke up that structure, conveying significant portions of the tale via flashbacks. He was also among that small number of MCs had mastered the verbal plot twist. He ends “Niggas Bleed” with this gem:
The funny was, through all the excitement
They range got towed – they double-parked by a hydrant
After detailing their reputations for ruthless efficiency throughout the song, we find that they’re inept enough to play themselves by walking right past him in the hallway and then leave their car in front of a fire hydrant during a fire. A masterstroke of irony.
The reality of storytelling is a plot only works when the character is forced to make decisions – and those decisions must have consequences – no matter whether they generate legal drama, loss of love or a spiritual deficit – but they have to cost something. With this cut, the artist hits us with the most ironic of consequences: the revenge-murder that our hero has been looking forward to throughout the song becomes the basis of his own moral crisis. Irony is the state of affairs when one’s actions achieve precisely the opposite effect of one’s intentions. The twist in “Somebody’s Gotta Die” lays in the fact that the protagonist created precisely the kind of hood tragedy he had warned his people against – an implicit statement on the stone-cold nature of life, death and hustle.
As in the blues and its ancestral folklore, there are parallel streams in the hip hop story that usually end with the demise of the protagonist or serve to highlight his – and it’s almost always his – cunning or badness. This latter tendency informs us that the murderer Sheldon “Stack” Lee – the sometime pimp and politician who killed a man for touching his Stetson hat in St. Louis in 1896 – was lionized in the epic “Stagolee” not to honor his act of homicide, but because his ornery audacity hinted at a man who was incapable of being compromised -- even by a system that had bent the spines of thousands of men who looked like him.
By contrast, the folk tales of Shine, who became the sole survivor of the Titanic disaster by having the good sense to swim home or the Signifyin’ Monkey, whose verbal gamesmanship leads him to outsmart the so-called King of the Jungle, comically highlight the craftiness and wit of the protagonist.
In hip hop we find the relentless replay of these curbside chronicles and both these streams – the tragic and the near-comic – can be distilled to a common concern: the bruised nature of the world. These tales are often less concerned with conveying a moral than with establishing the bleak consequences of The Game – no matter the specific variety of flim-flam that term may refer to. The rendering that you receive is that of a gray and amoral universe where victory is self-justifying, success is a destination, not a journey and good is quantified by how many numbers precede the decimal point.
Given the nature of the lives led in the era in which the blues tales came into existence, the tools of violence: the gun, the shank and, failing all else, the fist, take exaggerated importance in the their art. Note this line from the blues classic “C.C. Rider”:
Gon’ buy me a shotgun long as I am tall
Gonna buy me a shotgun, long as I am tall
If you don’t treat me right
You ain’t gonna have no hide at all.
Or Skip James “22-20 Blues”
If my baby don’t do like I tell her to do
I’ll take my 22-20 and cut her half in two
Now ponder those references in relation to Ice Cube’s “Man’s Best Friend,” recorded a half-century-plus after Skip James issued his haunting threats.
Here is the reason why Ice Cube pack
Just in case the little punks try to jack
I can’t keep a motherfuckin’ pit-bull
Under my coat in the small of my back
Or, for that matter, check Tupac’s “Me & My Girlfriend,” the metaphorical reference to his real constant companion:
Nigga, my girlfriend may be .45
But she still live
One shot making niggas heartbeat stop
You don’t need a press release from the NRA to realize that the gun’s standing as the sacred object of the solitary bad man translates neatly from Skip James tool for relationship mediation over to Tupac’s surrogate woman. The gat – and the men who ably wield it are among the most potent and aged of American symbols. We live in a place where ministers are murdered on motel balconies in Memphis and the Constitution enshrines one’s right to stay strapped.
In hip hop, and the street folklore that informs it, the favored obsession is a particular type of tragic arc: the rise and fall of the hustler-king. Beneath, above and beside the posturing that animates hip hop are the references to the hidden toll exacted by the unforgiving boulevards. In “Somebody Gotta Die,” the ending has the protagonist accidentally shooting a child in an attempt to kill the girl’s drug-thieving father. Cube’s elegiac “Dead Homiez” presents snapshot of funeral in which he lyrically pierces the myth of black male invincibility with the line
They say be strong and your tryin
How strong can you be when you see your pops cryin?
That same sensibility informed Ice Cube’s “Summer Vacation” and DMX’s “Crime Story” bleak tales of wrongs done and the karmic consequences of them – both of which end with death or incarceration of the protagonist. Jay-Z dedicated an entire song to that reality. “Regrets” appeared, not coincidentally, on his debut Reasonable Doubt, -- the album released when he was closest, at least in terms of time and lived experience, to the dirt that had gone down in the heart of his native Marcy Projects. Jay-Z was also responsible for the searing lamentation “Meet The Parents” in which a heartless hustler runs the streets from childhood into middle age and winds up unwittingly killing his long-abandoned son in a corner confrontation. Glory, and street glory in particular, are understood as the most fleeting of circumstances. Thus the famed epic of black street lore is titled simply “The Fall.” The poem, anonymously and collectively authored, was learned on street corners and in jail cells and passed through the mouths of generations of ghetto initiates. So aptly did it capture the essence of this life, that the film director Bill Duke lifted the poem to serve as a type of Shakespearean chorus for his dark-souled cop flick Deep Cover.
In hip hop, this reckoning with the tragic bleeds over into a preoccupation with mortality itself. The same spirit that animated Gwendolyn Brooks poem “The Pool Players. Seven At the Golden Shovel” --
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
-- is accepted as a common presumption within elements of the music. And like hip hop, Brooks’ poem begins with a presumption of cool. The state of affairs is such that the culture delivers these kinds of bitter ironies:
Peace to Biggie and Pac
Cause they really were hot
Rap game heavy hitters
It’s a shame they no longer with us
The verse appeared on Big L’s Lifestyles of the Poor & Dangerous – a release that reached shelves shortly before L was gunned down on 139th Street, Harlem, USA.
Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story, “Chronicle of A Death Foretold,” hip hop narration obsesses over the deaths that are widely known to be imminent in communities that are nonetheless powerless to stop them. Big L, the late Harlem MC, composed songs about the stone-hearted doings on his native 139th street, his CD art features a photo of the rapper on 139th and his logo is an image of a man standing on corner under 139th street sign. In short, L gave the world an image of the rapper as boulevard boss, a man posted up on avenue with the mandate to rep hard or go home. His work was defined by a limited palette of themes; he offered up permutations of bitches, guns and income as subject matter. But the local allegiances were clear. And it was in that same locale that the artist was fatally shot in the face over ephemeral beef of ambiguous origins.
A culture, in order to qualify as such, must render some element of life more intelligible. Human experience is bound together by the experiences of birth, maturation, love, procreation, death, et cetera, but it is the existence of culture that makes sense of these phenomena. In hip hop, we witness the ongoing attempt to come to terms with needless mortality – a reality that defines the communities from which the culture sprung. Thus for an artist like Scarface, witnessing death becomes as prominent an artistic theme as it was in Edgar Allen Poe’s death-haunted fiction. Bear in mind that this is the same music in which B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were hailed as prescient for creating lyrical content that in some ways foreshadowed their own passing to the other side. And this reckoning is at turns resolved and ambivalent (note early Nas stating that “When its my time to go/I’ll wait for god with the 4-4.” Or 50 Cent’s declaration that he keeps heat in waist in the event that God fails him.) But the heretical truth is that the claims to prescience fall flat in the face of facts. These are chronicles of deaths foretold in epics of the ancestors. Gwendolyn Brooks' poem begins with the statement of cool and ends with the reckoning with premature death. We Die Soon. The distinction now, is that now, not even the teller of the tale is immune to the bitter end of the story.
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| William Jelani Cobb |
William Jelani Cobb is assistant professor of history at Spelman College. His music criticism and essays have also appeared in The Washington Post, Essence, Emerge, The Progressive and on Africana,com. He is editor of The Essential Harold Cruse.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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