Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  All this might spell death to anyone who staked their identity on the existence of rock music as a cultural force. Few take that idea seriously in 2015, when the prime – perhaps sole – purpose of rock (and pop) is to entertain. It is of no account that every review of a young artist necessarily has to spell out which particular segments of rock history they are reviving, consciously or otherwise. The vital ingredient is connection with the audience: the ability to conjure up songs that sound like anthems, which offer the opportunity to congregate in joyous union.

  Imagine that you were imprisoned in the total cultural isolation of solitary confinement in 1995, and then released blinking into the daylight of 2015. As a brutal form of rehabilitation, your social workers take you to a rock festival, where many of the leading lights of the past decade are performing. Let’s conceive a bill comprising Coldplay, Adele, Mumford & Sons, Ed Sheeran, Paolo Nutini, the Kings of Leon, Jake Bugg and the Arctic Monkeys. How many of those acts would leave you reeling with incomprehension, unable to grasp exactly which planet they had come from, and what they were trying to achieve? My guess is that you would be able to understand and describe them all by reference to the music you had heard before your exile – strange faces, reassuringly familiar sounds.

  Elsewhere at the same festival, however, on other stages, you might find the setting and its soundtrack more disturbing or surreal. That is where you would find the acts who have pursued novelty in the shape of constant cross-fertilisation of different musical traditions, scouring the continents in search of fresh blood for rock’s tired veins, and where you witness tens of thousands of people leaping about in exhilaration in front of performers whose only role is to push buttons on a machine, and wave their arms in the air.

  [The 1990s were] full of music6 that was sold and praised on the basis that there’s something inherently thrilling about genres swapping spit down at the indie disco … These days, genre-blending is again just part of the landscape. Eleven years ago, Radiohead’s two-footed lunge into intelligent dance music on Kid A had critics gasping at their boldness. Now they cross-pollinate their sound with dubstep or Afrobeat and receive a polite nod or a muffled yawn … From the xx through Janelle Monae to Animal Collective, almost every acclaimed act works towards forging a sound by taking cues from a mass of other styles. Hybridisation is a basic tenet of art-pop.

  Tom Ewing, The Guardian, 2011

  Fusion was once a matter of simple arithmetic: country plus rock equals country rock; Latin plus soul equals Latin soul. These basic combinations were easy to grasp, but could offer musicians a new world of possibilities, and allow, for example, the country-rock experiments of the 1960s to fuel the fifty-year tradition now known as Americana. ‘Fusion’ itself was applied to the amalgamation of jazz principles with a variety of popular forms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, from psychedelic rock to progressive rock to every imaginable form of funk.

  The fusion of recent decades has involved more complex equations, and a limitless array of stylistic and rhythmic variations. Some genres, such as country, metal and punk, prefer their practitioners not to stray too far off the path. But musicians such as Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Damon Albarn and Beck have based their careers on a refusal to be restrained. Meanwhile, increased migration around the globe has brought ever more diverse communities into social and artistic contact. This has encouraged endless experimentation, a constant mingling of musical genes. But it has also created a form of global pop, with the same rhythms being heard in territories that would once have owned utterly distinctive musical traditions. Almost every nation on earth seems to share the same jukebox. You could enter a bar in London, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Hong Kong, Cape Town or Lagos and expect to hear Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus, Pharrell or Beyoncé. Indeed, in 2012–13 it seemed as if every person on the planet was dancing to one song: ‘Gangnam Style’ by the South Korean pop star Psy. Via YouTube alone, there had been approximately 2.5 billion views of his video by 2014 – a number which equates to one in three of the entire global population. Its success removed any boundaries between the dance-pop that dominated the Anglo-American charts and the K-Pop and J-Pop traditions of Korea and Japan. Twenty-first-century pop could come from anywhere, and aim to please anyone.

  Fifty years ago, British or American performers could only hope to conquer territories overseas if they too spoke English. To delve any further into the global community, they had to target specific audiences – French, German, Italian – with songs translated into those languages. Even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were required to make this concession, although it was the unstoppable momentum of their success which prevented subsequent rock performers from having to follow suit. In the twenty-first century, global media corporations, and the all-access arena of the Internet, have enabled the products of America’s film and music factories to be exposed and distributed almost simultaneously around the planet. The position of the United States as the wounded but still dominant financial superpower also confers on it the right to shape the entertainment of every continent. Rather than forcing its stars to reflect distant cultural traditions, America simply sells a polyrhythmic brand of danceable pop which makes sense in every culture.

  Local shifts in racial demographics have contributed greatly to this redrawing of cultural identities. In Britain alone, the acceptance of reggae and its offshoots as part of our national diet is testament to the impact of West Indian immigration since the late 1940s. The influx of families from the Indian subcontinent had a less immediate effect on our popular music, until bhangra filtered out of the Sikh community in the late 1970s, acquired a persistent disco rhythm, and began to toy with Western instruments. Unlike reggae, however, bhangra developed an almost entirely independent system of record distribution and concert promotion. Only posters in shop windows or on London Tube stations would alert the non-Asian population to the existence of acts such as Heera Group UK – or to the vast ethnic audience drawn to concerts by visiting stars of so-called Bollywood cinema, whose names would not be recognised beyond those with Asian roots. In the national media, more attention was paid to artists who stepped into the Western arena, such as Sheila Chandra, Apache Indian and Fun-da-mental.

  Similar trends could be documented around the world. But the most significant intervention into global popular music has come from the explosion of Latin pop in the United States and beyond. The journalist and author Robert Morales noted sceptically, if accurately, in 1999: ‘Latin culture gets recycled7 as an American fad every decade: Ricky Ricardo, the mambo, disco, Miami Vice, Julio Iglesias, Menudo and the Macarena.’ What distinguished the Latino influence on American culture in the late 1990s, and enabled it to survive, was the population statistic which says that those of Hispanic origin already outnumber Caucasians in the state of California, with Texas likely to follow suit. Latin culture is no longer a foreign novelty, but a major element in the American lifeblood. As a result, Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez and Enrique Iglesias have become stars not just amongst Spanish-speaking communities but across the whole United States – and hence around the world.

  Yet the blurring of lines between Latin American and American cultures has had consequences beyond the political debate about the fate of the 10 million or more ‘illegals’ who have come north from Mexico to settle in the United States. On either side of the border, the Spanish-speaking community is enthralled by the narcocorridos, or drug ballads: a Hispanic equivalent to gangsta rap, perhaps, except that these songs chronicle and celebrate real-life outlaws, not the mostly fictional protagonists of hip hop’s murder sagas. Many record stores of northern Mexico and Southern California are filled with CDs of what sounds no more dangerous than folk music, accompanied by guitars, accordions and tubas. But, as author Ioan Grillo discovered, these Mexican ballads were tales of ‘prison escapes, massacres8, new alliances and broken pacts’ – bulletins from the front line of the drug wars. What isolated them from other forms of popular music wa
s that, like classical pieces in the eighteenth century, they were written to commission (from murderers and smugglers, rather than noblemen and clerics). Balladeers could earn as much as $10,000–15,000 for a song which celebrated the exploits of a Mexican godfather, or the heroics of an imprisoned outlaw. The narcocorridos were banned from radio play on both sides of the border, but sold in enormous quantities. There were even videos to promote them, such as the all-star clip for Movimiento Alterado’s ‘Sanguinarios del M1’ – a Tex-Mex tune in which the customary accordion was augmented by rattling percussion designed to denote gunshots.

  The narcocorridos can be talked away as a cultural phenomenon no more injurious, ultimately, than the American tradition which connects gangsta rap to so-called blaxploitation movies, and cherishes cowboy ballads celebrating the killers of the Wild West. Transplanted across cultures, however, music can be employed for more chilling purposes. The ethnic warfare which ripped apart the African country of Rwanda in 1994 – Hutus butchering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, plus any of their own tribe who were reluctant to join in the killing – was stoked by radio station RTLM. Its schedule was packed with material by Simon Bikindi, a Rwandan singer-songwriter whose work was not just patriotic, but sometimes incited violence. Bikindi claimed that ‘Nanga Abahutu’ (‘I Hate That Hutu’) was a song of reconciliation, but it was widely interpreted as a call to penalise those who failed to lend their support to the ethnic cleansing. He was ultimately tried and convicted as a war criminal, for his speeches rather than his songs. But the most disturbing aural evidence is provided by the surviving tapes of RTLM propaganda broadcasts. While announcers chanted slogans of tribal hatred, the station played the song which had become synonymous with this incitement to kill: ‘Now That We’ve Found Love’, a playful, benign tune by the American rap artists Heavy D & the Boyz. Gangsta rap suddenly seemed tame and parochial by comparison. But as hip hop became a global language rather than an African-American art form, such crossed wires and indistinct lines were increasingly inevitable.

  MTV Jams has made R&B9 acceptable to mainstream white America … white kids don’t have to seek out the new R&B because it’s right there in their living rooms. It is, arguably, their culture too.

  Bill Bellamy, host of MTV Jams, 1993

  Eminem raps like a girl10, man … I just don’t like that squeaky little voice … He sounds like a little wimpy girl, you know? His stuff is OK, but it’s meaningless. The words are meaningless. Slim Shady? Who cares?

  Vanilla Ice, 1999

  Rap history repeated itself around the world. In 1995, Kool Shen and Joey Starr were arrested for insulting police at a rally against France’s right-wing party, the Front National. The pair comprise the hip-hop duo NTM, an abbreviation for a French slang expression which translates as ‘fuck your mother’. Their crime was to stand on stage in Toulon and shout ‘Fuck the police’, which was interpreted by officers as inciting violence. For ‘NTM’ read ‘NWA’, and it could have been Compton in 1988, where California cops refused to provide security for concerts by the group responsible for ‘Fuck Tha Police’.

  In South Africa, where so few black citizens had access to broadband that rap was transmitted by cellphone rather than the Internet, POC (Prophets of da City) were banned from national TV because station managers feared their music embodied ‘a spirit of violence’. It was only when their video ‘Understand Where I’m Coming From’ received a prestigious award in France that the SABC withdrew its censorship. The rap collective had already received unwelcome attention from the government for an earlier recording, ‘Ons Stem’, which satirised the Afrikaner national anthem. Lest one imagine that South African hip hop was a bastion of righteous anti-authoritarianism, however, less progressive trends were entering the scene by the late 1990s: overtly sexist lyrics, discounting the crime of rape; and potentially lethal rivalry between crews and rappers, which stoked all-too-recent memories of the split between East and West Coast affiliations in the United States.

  As the African-American writer Farai Chideya noted in 1997, ‘Many African youths11 are looking to America to find ways to express their own hopes, fears and frustrations. American pop culture has always been global pop culture, so it’s only natural that black Africans would identify with black American artists.’ That pattern was repeated around the world – in Cuba, Japan, New Zealand, throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. Wherever young people identified themselves as being in opposition to authority, hip hop and heavy metal provided outlets for outrage, anger and rebellion.

  The African-American hip-hop community willingly accepted this global tribute to the potency of their home-grown culture: the traditions of the South Bronx now spanned the globe. But white performers proved to be more difficult to assimilate. Black America had been struggling to hold on to its own traditions since records as white (and bland) as Paul & Paula’s ‘Hey Paula’ had topped the Billboard R&B charts in 1963. In 1969, R&B gave way to Soul; in 1982, soon after the white duo Hall & Oates had reached No. 1 on that listing, it was renamed the Black Singles Chart. That didn’t exclude the likes of George Michael and Lisa Stansfield, the latter achieving three No. 1 Black hits. Hip hop remained a defiantly black culture, however, until 1990, when Vanilla Ice was dubbed the ‘Elvis of rap’ (a barbed compliment indeed). His performance on ‘Ice Ice Baby’, hinged around a sample from David Bowie’s collaboration with Queen, ‘Under Pressure’, should perhaps have earned him the title of ‘the Pat Boone of rap’, but its novelty value carried it to No.1 on the US Pop charts. He was quickly followed by his Hispanic equivalent, Gerardo, with ‘Rico Suave’. But there was no 1956-style takeover of this black tradition: Vanilla Ice was soon forgotten.

  Hip hop may have remained black, but its audience demographic expanded through the early 1990s. By 1994, approximately half of the US Hot 100 was filled with records which bore at least some allegiance to the rap tradition. Nobody could now pretend that this was a style which appealed to black listeners alone. Inevitably white hip-hop fans wanted to participate in this culture, in a more public arena than their bedrooms. As the decade unfolded, an increasing number of white rappers began to surface: Everlast and Danny Boy, alias the House of Pain; Kid Rock; and most visible and controversial of them all, Marshall Mathers.

  He emerged from a Detroit trailer park in a predominantly black neighbourhood, grew up rapping with and against black performers in local clubs, and was taken under the wing of Dr Dre. Like most of his counterparts, Mathers adopted a pseudonym, Eminem; then added a further layer of mystery and obfuscation by giving Eminem an alter ego, Slim Shady. These identities rivalled for his soul, and allowed Mathers to treat his past and private life as fuel for violently misogynistic verbal fantasies about his wife and his mother (besides gratuitous slaps in the face for his fellow celebrities and friends). If the rap form already encouraged hyperbole, Eminem simultaneously carried it into the realms of tabloid trash and experimental fiction.

  No strategy could have been better designed to unsettle friends and foes alike, and leave everyone questioning his motives. One 18-year-old white fan told Vibe magazine: ‘I love Eminem12, but I don’t love hip hip. He’s so original. And so cute.’ But like the Beastie Boys more than a decade earlier, Eminem created a door for generations of white listeners to enter the world of hip hop (and also put his money and name behind his struggling black friends). He was not alone: the boy band N Sync tackled rap music with such authenticity that Baby Gerry, from the black collective Full Force, publicly congratulated Justin Timberlake on his skills as a human beatbox.

  The word now was ‘crossover’: no longer a sin, but – especially in a failing industry – every performer and executive’s dream. Hip hop was so inescapable in contemporary music by the start of the new century that it became customary for every ‘urban’ (a euphemism for what the British industry calls ‘Music of Black Origin’) record to feature a cameo appearance by a rapper. Mariah Carey, for whom crossover was as natural as breathing, was the first
major star to demonstrate the commercial potency of these collaborations, when she allowed mid-1990s singles such as ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Honey’ to be remixed with raps by the likes of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mase. Soon hip hop grew so powerful that it was the R&B singers who guested on rap records, rather than vice versa. ‘Can one artist or group13 hold people’s attention for 3.5 minutes,’ asked Vibe in 1995, ‘or does everybody always have to be guesting in everybody else’s videos?’ The question was answered in the twenty-first-century, when the key words in the credits for any R&B or rap single were not the artist’s name, but the identities of those listed as ‘featuring’ or ‘with’ in the small print.

  Those who had staked their life on the purity of grunge in the early 1990s were appalled when superior fashion brands such as Ralph Lauren began to introduce designer plaid shirts, so that every Wall Street trader could look like Kurt Cobain at the weekend. The exploitation was only just beginning. Within a matter of months, Sears department stores launched an Urban Images line, modelled on the dress codes of the hip-hop community. Cue more outrage: except that, unlike its more hypocritical rock cousin, hip hop had never disguised its preoccupation with money and designer goods, all of which registered its escape from the ghetto and its triumph over racial stereotypes.