A Timeless Wavelength

Lightnin’ Rod – Sport

Anyone who thinks that rap music hasn’t grown more musically sophisticated over the years would do well to listen to any contemporary hip-hop track, and then revisit Lightnin’ Rod’s legendary 1973 album Hustlers’ Convention. I’m not saying it’s a bad album; I quite like it.  But this album is to hip-hop as the Apple II is to personal computing:  important for being the first to gain widespread recognition, and fondly remembered by its fans, but nowhere near as advanced as what would come later.

This track, the album’s opener, is a representative sample.  Its stock bassline and ’70s Blaxploitation guitar riffs (provided by Kool and the Gang, no less) are nothing special, but it’s in the lyrical delivery that this album really stands out by utterly failing to stand out.  This song, and every other song on the album, more or less adheres to the lyrical meter of anapestic heptameter.  This is the same meter used in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” a poem that I will never again be able to read without hearing wokka-chikka-wokka in the background.   The hip-hop hits of the ’80s didn’t use this exact same rhythm, but they tended to have a fairly rigid pattern of their own, one that could easily incorporate lines rhyming “hands in the air, y’all” with “just don’t care, y’all”.  Now compare that to the present day, when every rapper is expected to have his own distinctive “flow” and most rap songs are impossible to describe in terms of a single metrical style.

What’s fascinating to me is that the wide metrical gulf that separates Lightnin’ Rod from, say, Chamillionaire is contrasted with a stark lack of diversity in other areas.  Rap music, regardless of era or style, tends to have the same basic drumbeat, in 4/4 time, with bass on 1, snare on 2, and a slight variation of the same on 3 and 4.  I am not aware of any rap song that has ever been set to waltz time or 5/4 swing; I would love to be proven wrong.  And while it has become popular in recent years to incorporate “R&B breaks” or little pieces of melody (these days unfortunately usually provided by that detestable machine, the vocoder), most rap vocals are strictly rhythmical and so have no melodic or harmonic components to speak of.  Yet we have barely scratched the surface of what can be accomplished within this seemingly rigid musical framework.

This post was mainly an excuse to use the phrase “anapestic heptameter.”  It’s what NLP researchers and Amazon.com call a “statistically improbable phrase.”

A Tribe Called Quest – Skypager

There’s a scene in Almost Famous where Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres describes a marvel of 1970s technology:  a “MoJo,” an early fax machine that could transmit at a blistering “18 minutes per page”.  It’s a stock joke frequently found in movies that are set in the past:  just look how enthused people were about this technology that we now consider stale and primitive!  Not like us, with our [insert technology that will look absolutely primitive in five years]!

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear “Skypager” by A Tribe Called Quest were written in 2008 as a parody of early-’90s technology.  It’s just hard to recall, in these days of Bluetooth-enabled Internet-equipped cell phones, that people were once impressed by a little box that beeped and (if you had the deluxe model) displayed one or two lines of text.

Pfife tells us that “conceptually a pager is so complex / ’cause I be standin by the phone ready to flex”.  For the kids:  a “phone” used to be this big object you had to plug into a wall and couldn’t fit in your pocket.  Almost every public place had a “pay phone” bolted to the wall that you could use if you put in a “quarter,” which before the economic collapse was still considered “money”.  You’d send a message to a Skypager by dialing from one of these phones and typing on the primitive keypad, and then the person’s pager would go off and they’d read your message and stop whatever they were doing and go find another pay phone and call you back.  I guess, conceptually, that is pretty complex.  So why did people do that?  Well, the Pfife tells us that “the ‘S’ in ‘Skypager’ really stands for ‘sex’”.  Apparently in the days before high-speed streaming Internet porn you had to page somebody and have them actually show up in person to perform sex acts.  Quaint!

Pfife must have been popular, because his Duracell batteries only lasted him for three weeks.  I’m not sure about the memory capacity on a Skypager, though:  at the end of the song Q-Tip’s “shit is overflowing” because “they won’t allow another page”.   I guess all those 8-letter messages add up after a while.

I wonder if there’s a nerdcore song somewhere reminiscing about the dialup BBS?

Beastie Boys – Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun

Here’s a track to celebrate the release of the 20th anniversary remastered edition of the Beastie Boys’ classic sophomore album Paul’s Boutique. The Beastie Boys began life as just another NYC hardcore band, but soon developed an interest in the emerging hip-hop culture.  They first gained mainstream recognition with 1986′s License to Ill, the album that first brought rap music into the suburbs.  It was a collection of fairly basic tracks that mostly featured the B-Boys rapping over a single looped sample and a drum machine track, but for the mid-’80s, that was pretty much par for the course.

For their next album, the Beastie Boys teamed up with now-legendary producers the Dust Brothers, with the intention of making a hip-hop album that took full advantage of studio production techniques, and broke away from the genre’s usual basement turntable sound.  The result was the birth of the modern hip-hop album:  layers and layers of samples, mixed with live instruments played by the Beastie Boys themselves, that combine to make a sound as rich and complex as anything then being made in the rock music world.  This was a couple of years before M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice would score mainstream hits with tracks that sampled famous songs, prompting a legal backlash and forcing future artists to pay for samples or eschew them altogether.  It’s been said that Paul’s Boutique could not have been made at any other time, because the sheer number of samples would make it prohibitively expensive today.

This track, “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun,” is as good an introduction as any to the album.  It features live thrash guitar and distorted, Black Sabbath-style wah-wah bass interspersed with clock chimes from Pink Floyd’s “Time,”  a bit of guitar from Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” and a bongo break from the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Last Bongo in Belgium.”  It showcases both the band’s hardcore roots and their willingness to sample from extremely diverse sources.

The Evolution Control Committee – By the Time I Get to Arizona (Whipped Cream mix)

In the late 1980s, Arizona governor Evan Mecham was sort of America’s version of Prince Philip, casually making all kinds of racially insensitive statements in public.  He referred to black children as “pickaninnies,” said a group of visiting Japanese “got round eyes” when they heard how many golf courses were in the state, and responded to allegations of racism by claiming that he had hired plenty of blacks, not to fill a quota, but because they were “the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job.”  But it was his decision to cancel the state’s observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for which he was most notorious.

Mecham proved to be both unpopular and incompetent, and, it turned out, criminal.  He was removed from office amid allegations that he had embezzled public funds and campaign contributions, and Arizona Secretary of State Rose Mofford became governor until the next election.  That election went to John Fife Symington III, and many hoped that, despite the fact that his name sounded like a cartoon billionaire, he might re-instate the MLK holiday.  But it wasn’t to be, and in 1991 the political rap group Public Enemy released the song “By the Time I Get to Arizona” in protest.

The video was particularly shocking, because it depicted PE as a paramilitary, Black Panther-style organization devoted to the assassination of state government officials.  Members of the group are shown placing bombs under cars, delivering poisoned candies, and firing assault rifles.  It may not seem shocking in today’s gangsta rap world, but in 1991, most white people’s idea of rap included the likes of M.C. Hammer, the Fresh Prince, and Kid ‘n Play.  The idea that the militancy of the 1960s hadn’t quite died out, and that blacks could still get mad enough to kill, was frightening enough that for a couple of days the PE video was the top story in the news.  Even black civil rights workers were critical of Public Enemy, pointing out that the violent response depicted in the video was antithetical to Dr. King’s own commitment to non-violent resistance.

So how do you top one of the more shocking moments in rap music?  By remixing it with an upbeat mariachi number from Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, which is exactly what experimental band The Evolution Control Committe did.  Something about a trumpet section playing Muzak-style mariachi music has a way of rendering even the angriest lyrics completely non-threatening.  The remix was done without the permission of Public Enemy, but when an interviewer asked frontman Chuck D what he thought of the remix, he responded, “I think my feelings are obvious. I think it’s great.”

The Gourds – Gin And Juice

Nina Gordon – Straight Outta Compton

I’ve remarked before about our culture’s unfortunate tendency to ridicule artists who violate its implicit musical Apartheid.  A side effect of this tendency is that one can get an easy laugh by performing a “white version” of a song by a black artist.  The most famous example in recent memory is the Gourds’ bluegrass cover of “Gin and Juice,” but Nina Gordon’s surprisingly mellow rendition of N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” is also worthy of mention.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that the joke only seems to work one way:  a hip-hop or R&B version of a Perry Como song wouldn’t elicit the same laughter as these whitened rap songs.  This is partly due, I’m sure, to the fact that one of the few remaining socially acceptable stereotypes of black people is that they have “more rhythm” than their paler counterparts.  But another factor is that rap music, particularly gangsta rap, represents a violent, dangerous lifestyle that suburban or rural whites aren’t supposed to be able to understand, and it’s laughably pretentious when they attempt to do so.  (The same premise, minus the racial subtext, is behind Pat Boone’s album of heavy metal covers:  a conservative middle-aged crooner shouldn’t be making “devil music.”  It’s probably no coincidence that, back in the 1950s, Pat Boone was famous for making safe-for-white-kids versions of R&B songs.)

These two tracks are entertaining to listen to in their own right:  the Gourds lay down some pretty decent fiddling and mandolin picking, and Nina Gordon makes Ice Cube’s threatening lyrics sound positively pretty.  But the main appeal of these songs is ultimately a cheap gag:  white people love to ridicule themselves as boring folks with no rhythm.  Meanwhile, fifteen or twenty years later, where are the artists behind the original versions of these gangsta tracks?  Ice Cube is making family-friendly comedy movies like Are We There Yet?, and Snoop Dogg is showcasing his parenting skills on reality TV.  It seems that when gangstas grow up, they turn into the same dull suburbanites who were supposedly too lame to understand them in the first place.