Against Everything
Page 16
On the low stage, forty feet away, there was Ian, there was Guy. They were playing songs off Repeater. It was as I’d heard: Ian MacKaye sir-ing and ma’am-ing his audience, polite to a fault, deliberately friendly (“Good evening, everybody. How are you this evening?”; “What the heck?”), before launching into another brutal song of resistance and noise. The conscious gentleness seemed to confirm the possibility of a music that could put this channeled eruption of violent emotions toward—what? The two pits were roiling simultaneously, like the inside workings of two mad clocks, in need of repair while still in motion, and could be captured in one view with Fugazi at their head. I watched the eyes of boys right near me, blanked, numb, as others whirled in pointless energy—personally valuable, maybe, like a martial art, a discipline, a way of conquering all fear—but I sorrowed that all this seemed unworthy of the band, the music, the unnameable it pointed to. Someday, someday, I thought. I want to do something worthy of this. One thing worthy of all this beauty, before I die.
[2007, 2009, REVISED 2015]
LEARNING TO RAP
It’s a fortunate fate to have your lifetime be contemporary with the creation of a major art form. Embarrassing, then, not to have understood it, or appreciated it, or become an enthusiast, even a fanatic, from the first. Especially shameful when it could have carried you, if only in imagination, across a racial barrier in America—at least as far as you can go without kidding yourself, when you’re white, and therefore approaching from the wrong side. I came of age at the same time as hip-hop. But like some other ostensibly politically minded middle-class white Americans of my generation, I made a historical mistake: I chose to believe in punk rock exclusively. This meant pledging allegiance to a minor tributary (post-punk) of a minor genre (punk), to squeeze the rind of a major genre, rock, that had been basically exhausted by 1972, instead of committing to a new world-historical form.
My mistake also meant in practical terms that I didn’t learn to rap properly when my mind was supple, at an age when language is effortlessly absorbed. Not that I am completely incapable or innocent of rapping. But I had never applied myself.
I tried to make up for the deficiency, finally, last year. I vowed that I would not rap in front of anyone else, ever, and that I would not try to write my own raps. I just had the idea that I could fix myself, privately. The immediate irritant was that I can hum rock, and of course I can sing along. I know a good part of the lyrics to all kinds of old songs: “Sunshine of Your Love,” “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” But I couldn’t rap along beyond a few simple refrains, not even to hip-hop songs I thought I knew well, which seemed to be increasingly occupying my head in the first year of Obama’s presidency. This disability began to seem sinister, not to say racist.
I really didn’t know how hard it would be to rap along until I tried. I had projected a straightforward plan of study. I would begin with the classics. I didn’t want to go around on training wheels—I’d start immediately with the best. I wanted my repertoire to include songs I could live with forever. So I started with the first track from the first Nas album, “N.Y. State of Mind,” which had lived in the back of my mind as a blur for a long time.
“I think of crime when I’m in a New York state of mind”—that and other easy lines, I already possessed in memory. And the famous aphorism “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” which gets quoted often enough. Plus boasts like “It’s only right that I was born to use mics,” which gave the title to a Michael Eric Dyson book. But I suffered the illusion that a chorus or a standout aphorism was comparable to a verse. I thought I would just start at the beginning and roll through, rewinding the song and memorizing, as if it were a classic rock song or a folk ballad. I went for a walk outside on a hazy day in July, with my headphones, and pressed play:
Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin’—
“Rappers I…” what?
Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin’—
“Rappers I—mubbliggithm…”
“Rappers I go up in ’em…”
“Rappers I grow up with ’em…”
I think what Nas is saying is that his rhythmic flow has such force that it sweeps his rivals’ legs out from under them. He whirls them over and lands them on their backs, as Bruce Lee knew to judo dumb opponents. That Nas can do this just with his musical skills, he confirms in line two:
Musician, inflictin’ composition
But I couldn’t get past the impossibility of line one. The first line is seventeen syllables in just over two bars, across eight beats in a quick 4/4 tempo—at eighty-four beats per minute. The delivery is shifted slightly, as I hear it, so that it starts with a quarter-rest and crosses into the next two bars on the last syllable. Rather than marching in the iambs of most English versification, the meter sounds subtly trochaic, suggestive of falling rhythm. And seventeen syllables! By contrast, think of the first line, over a comparable two bars, of Elvis’s “That’s All Right,” a kind of entry into the story of rock:
Well, that’s all right, Mama
Six syllables, slowed by a caesura, delivered in the same length of time as Nas’s seventeen. If that seems an unfair comparison—Elvis is just getting warmed up!—there’s also “All Shook Up”:
A-well-a, bless-ah my soul-a, what’s wrong with me?
Twelve syllables in two bars.
Obviously it’s not the number of syllables that should impress anyone about a lyric. That would be like judging opera by the number of people onstage. It’s the implication of the words and, for the pleasure of the ear, the way they’re laid across the rhythm and the breath. One thing that registered immediately about hip-hop, at a minimum, once I tried to accompany it, is that it’s a more difficult and complex lyrical art in performance than just about anything that has ever been known to rock, and it has been so for about twenty years. I guess all hip-hop listeners already know this, and I fear they will be narrowing their eyes now with distrust. But I notice that some white people my age, but especially those a decade or two older, when they try to rap, fall into end-stopped, nursery-rhyme couplets, when such rhythms haven’t been common in MCing for more than two decades. It’s like thinking of rock ’n’ roll exclusively as the era before solid-body electric guitars predominated—say, 1963 and earlier.
It took a week of repetition for me to get the Nas song right. I still can’t point the accents correctly when I do it at full voice. My delivery is made worse by the fact that my rap voice is very much a white person’s voice, therefore unappealing to me, as I suspect it would be to anyone else. Rapping involved muscular tasks my mouth was not yet practiced enough to do, plus a mental focus and precision that’s hard to sustain, and simply isn’t called for with rock lyrics, not even, like Bob Dylan’s, the most verbose.
I should add that I had to look to the Internet to find the most plausible construction of Nas’s first line. There are now countless hip-hop-lyric exegetical sites that try to resolve what is being said. Even so, interpretive disagreements persist.
—
I grew up Jewish in the Boston suburbs. New York was the home of my father’s side of the family. If my grandmother didn’t take the Amtrak from New York on the weekend to visit us, we drove to the apartment, in the co-ops for workers in the garment trades, on the Lower East Side.
The New York City Housing Authority had erected the Samuel Gompers housing projects just across Delancey Street, twenty years before. They razed half of the neighborhood to do so, including the tenement in which my grandfather had been born. This was slum clearance. It created tensions, between the low-income Orthodox Jews in workers’ housing, erected by the unions, on our side of the street, and the low-income black and Puerto Rican residents of the public housing erected by the city on the other. My grandfather had managed to keep the family on the street on which he’d been born, but now looked back on it from the reverse direction, toward the new buildings that sat on to
p of his remembered home.
One zone of contact was underneath my grandmother’s first-story window, in Sheriff Park. From its picnic tables, I heard beatboxing and rap for the first time in 1980 or 1981, when I was five and six. I hung at the window to wait for the groups that gathered around battery-powered boom boxes (at that time white people called them “ghetto blasters”). This competed with the J/Z trains on the ramp of the bridge overhead. This rolling canvas for graffiti is now nostalgized, but at the time it seemed Martian to me. My grandmother’s paper was the Daily News, which carried a front-page report of someone pushed onto the tracks or dragged into a subway tunnel and beaten, seemingly daily—at least, every time I visited—up through 1984, the year of Bernard Goetz, the subway’s white vigilante. I laid my head on the sill listening, like a spaniel, or leaned my face into the screen, at risk of tearing it, until my father would call me to Shabbos dinner.
The first song I tried to rap—learning the chorus at least—came from a K-tel compilation on cassette. K-tel was a music-repackaging service that compiled a month’s radio hits on cassette for sale on nighttime television and by mail order—also in drugstores, where I got my copy of Get Dancin’, or whatever it was called. That number was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982). Lying on my bed in the suburbs, in my seven-year-old voice, I rewound and repeated, and never forgot (this is accented in slow, elementary notes, on the beat, over more complex syncopation):
Don’t—push—me—’cause—I’m—close—to—the—edge
I’m—try—in’—not—to—lose—my—head Ha ha ha ha
It’s like a jungle sometimes,
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.
—
A cliché of hip-hop memorialization—for both fans and artists—is the anecdote of the first time one heard rapping of real duration and realized one was hearing something unknown and transformative. Kids who would later become rappers place the moment in firsthand experience, one artist watching another. So it is in Jay-Z’s autobiography, Decoded, where he recounts child Jay seeing a teenager freestyling a capella in a circle in the Marcy housing projects—the opposite end of the Williamsburg Bridge from Delancey Street, and four subway stops away.
Even I, knowing nothing, can confirm that there really was something about hip-hop’s early arrival that made it feel seismic. I guess that’s what it means to be in the presence of a major new art form. And even I, as I got just a little bit older, wanted to read values into the new music to make it “real,” political, an answer of rival values to the grinning pumpkin head of Ronald Reagan on the evening news, a face I had learned by 1984, and his re-election, was going to get all of us killed with an arms race and his MX missile, but was busy jailing and killing black people among us and selling out Latin America in the meantime.
I find it surprising how many musical moments in early hip-hop I did hear as the years passed, despite being in no sense committed as a fan. Kids notice things that aren’t like everything else. I remember waiting up at night for a short-lived local video station in Boston, a free rival to MTV, to play Run-D.M.C. in 1985. I knew to procure N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton on cassette in 1988, with no radio airplay, because of newspaper denunciations of the songs “Fuck tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta”—if it made the newspapers so deranged, it had to be speaking some truth. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm I knew by heart, along with De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. White people would bring the gossip that these last were mysteriously denigrated as “hippie rap” or “backpack rap” in the black community (how did we know?). I actually saw a few golden-age acts perform, basically by accident—Black Sheep, Ice-T—as I later saw the Wu-Tang Clan, on bills with rock bands or at public events and free concerts. But this same sense of an open secret, of constant unused knowledge, is probably true for other white people my age. I had every chance to lose my heart to the music, despite barriers. I just failed to do so when the time came when everyone has to make the choice of music that will define him, or the subculture indexed to it, not for the private pleasures of bedroom listening, but by his clothes and manner and friends and public identity. At that critical moment of conversion in the teen years, I blew it.
I know the exact moment of the mistake. It was the first year of high school, and older white students started giving me tapes. This was mostly music not available in any store I had ever been to. In the decisive week, one friend handed me Minor Threat’s Minor Threat (Complete Discography), and another gave me Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
Public Enemy had built a place already in my consciousness. I had heard Public Enemy the summer before I started school, in the long opening sequence to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, with Rosie Perez fly-dancing to “Fight the Power.” I saw the movie at a Tuesday matinee, took the train home, knowing it was the best new movie I’d ever seen, and went back to see it again at the same time the following day. “Fight the Power” included a refrain that probably—secretly—means nearly as much to me as the national anthem, and plays over and over in my mind, though I can still only mumble it with terrible embarrassment even when I’m by myself (“Fight the power / We’ve got to fight the powers that be”). I recall how the verses awakened my childish mind from suburban slumbers:
Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me
Is he straight out racist a sucker or simple and plain
Motherfuck him and John Wayne
Cause I’m Black and I’m proud
I’m ready, I’m hyped plus I’m amped
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp…
Who were those heroes, I wondered. Shouldn’t mine be the same?
Hearing Public Enemy and Minor Threat, I was scared by both, and I knew that I wasn’t wanted in the world of either one. But I gave myself up to punk, and I didn’t at that moment give myself up to rap. Why? I couldn’t say to myself then, “Because I’m white,” though surely that’s the quickest way to state the complication. Even now, I don’t want to say it. Not in my head, and not out loud. What kind of resistance (in the psychoanalytic sense) or vanity is that? I want to not say it because for as long as I remember, seeing the way race divided things in my grandparents’ world, I knew it was bullshit, because I could see that they wanted to be white, and they weren’t. They were poor, Orthodox Jewish, and weird. My parents, in taking us out to the suburbs, had let me gain the habits and self-confidence of vanishing identity, which even they—first to go to college, first to leave the ghetto—never gained. I got to be the first in my family to be effortlessly white, and thereby also the first to obsess on how whiteness is bogus and unfair, not something you’d want to creep in and poison your mind. Or maybe it was the success of black education: canonical American literature, which now includes Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Du Bois, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Dr. King, Malcolm, Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Ishmael Reed, Morrison, Audre Lorde, and more. To ever say “I am white”—even though I was reaping the rewards of being seen as white—would be like pulling a sheet over my head as a mental Klansman. On the other hand, what else am I? I wasn’t minoritizing myself again; I wasn’t putting on a yarmulke and tsitsith. Sometimes I worry the whitest white people of all, the most unmarked and heedless, who pay the least price and gain the most unfair freedom, are those like me who get to be both “raceless” and antiracist, never having to fight it out in the mud of poverty, sidestepping the system, pretending to have no skin in the game.
I think I knew, in a way, that the really courageous thing would have been to step across the line, to become a white appropriator of black hip-hop music, if I could still force myself really to stay wrong: to be always a white face in black crowds, to be a faker and conscious of crossing, and know it and suffer it. To acknowledge becoming an outsider and a clown, without a hope of ever belonging. Not to be one of those Caucasian hip-hop heads who took it back to the s
uburbs, who felt they did own it. I might have needed the thrust of compulsion and mad love. Or courage beyond what I had.
—
So many stupidities really stem from inexperience. As I worked on my rapping in 2009, I felt I newly understood a phenomenon of the streets of New York, Boston, every American city I’d ever lived in—why you’d run into young black men, quickstepping on the sidewalk or standing on the subway, rapping at full voice to songs that leaked out of the cups of their overloud headphones. You don’t hear people singing along on subways or downtown pavements to other genres with the same degree of frequency, except for aging crazies. “Hmmm,” I would have thought once upon a time, “what is the proper liberal explanation for what seems otherwise like rudeness?” At hand, I had the old explanations I learned as a kid for inner-city graffiti and suburban skateboarding: This is a way of reclaiming public space when it is segregated, owned by absentees, or dominated by adults.