what the f*ck happened to popular black music?

[JSngry]

rap has been far more creatively alive over the last 25 years than jazz. worry about your own house, Mr. Drew.

I'll see that and raise it a

[ghost of miles]

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

[Late]

I wonder how many 18-20 year-olds Mr. Drew associates with. After having spent the last four months (8-12 hours a day) with this age group — culturally diverse, and seemingly fans of the "rap" that's being bemoaned in the article/essay — I'd have to say that they have a lot more awareness off what's going on culturally than they're often given credit for. (Even if they do get plenty excited about fake I.D.'s and who "hooked up" with whom.)

[JSngry]

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

Well, yeah, I feel his pain too. But the specific music he's dogging on is a syptom, not the cause, and I can't help but feel that he's not "getting" the fundamental musical changes (perceptual changes, really) that rap/hip-hop (and lots of other musics) were foreshadowing/reflecting long before the gangsta element came to the fore.

Like I said earlier, bemoan the moral decline of society all you want. I'll be there with you (withihnn reason and up to a point). But frame it as such and don't come out with all this "this ain't what I was taught that music was in school" bullshit. You can't teach nuthin in school until it's already happened, so if what's happening right now ain't what you taught in school, best that you draw upon a principle that you should have been taught in school but probably weren't - namely, that today is tomorrow's history - and take it from there, not get all wigged out that the neat road map that you thought was going to unfold suddenly just got blown out the window.

Look - I'm old enough (two can play this game!) to remember the early days of rap's first commercial peep throught the cracks. The shit was fun (and it swung like mofo), and the social commentary (when it existed) was delivered with a sense of righteousness. I also well remember the intrigue I felt by the musical methods being used - the sampling, the sequencing, the layering, the collages, all that stuff. This was a new way of looking at and feeling time and one's relationship to it, and it was (and still is, I think) an inevitable perceptual shift in the wake of both the increased power, scope, and omnipresence of electronic communications and digital "reality", where anything can be (or give the illusiona of being) literally anything, at any place, at any time. You can't fundamentally alter the nature of "perceptual reality" like this and expect people, especially young people, not to change as a result. You just can't.

Absolutely, the toll/fallout of Reaganomics on the inner-city was immense (and in my mind, morally criminal). But since we're not in the Po;itical Foeum (yet), I'll drop that and go here instead - where inner-city culture goes, the tastes of mainstream American youth culture inevitable follows (the more things change...). And where the mainstream popular American culture goes, Madi$on Avenue inevitably is there to sniff their a$$. That's the weigh of the world. And here we are.

Mr. Drew's decency as a human being comes through loud and clear in his article, but like so many jazz musicians, their impotence is at least partially their own fault. Rather than being in sync with their times, they've set themselves apart and/or above them. Jazz has never been a teen-age music (the Jazz Age & the Swing Kids notwithstanding), but it has always had its finger on the pulse of what was happening within its "native" community. Other than the M-Base crew and a few others, who among the "jazz community" was looking at the Hip-Hop Revolution from a perspective of it being the Next Step In African-American Musical Evolution? And how many were following the Jazz Reagan (WM) down his road of claiming the glories of the past as triumphs that they were somehow entitled to claim as their own? What are we suppose to do, Save The Children by taking them to hear a recreation of Fletcher Henderson at Lincoln Center? Give me a fucking break...

Shit just don't work that way. Never has, never will. You wanna change the streets, you gotta have street cred. You want street cred, you gotta earn it. You wanna earn it, you gotta get down in it, not preach down to it.

It may or may not be too late to save the children. God knows I hope it's not. But it sure as hell is too late to think that ii-Vs and such are the key to doing so. Mr. Drew better wake the fuck up.

Edited April 9, 2006 by JSngry

[johnagrandy]

Also, have you considered the comic elements of the extreme cartoonish hyperbole that characterizes most rap? My 18 year old and her friends love rap and they find it hilarious. Slim Shady is a persona for Marshall Mathers much like Alice Cooper is for Vincent Furnier. I loved Alice Cooper's early seventies recordings and at 13 I found the song "I Love the Dead" to be hilarious, not enticing me towards necrophilia. There are more levels than the literal and while I'm not endorsing the misogyny or homophobia in any lyrics, I find the danger attributed to rap to be greatly exagerrated.

This is a very interesting observation. I've noticed that some of the older gangsta rappers have started throwing little clues at you, here and there, that it's largely an act they don't really believe in. Maybe it's because they got rich and have a completely different lifestyle than when they were coming up and now have a distaste for their original daily routine (i.e. they're just using their past as a vehicle for profits) ...

... but maybe by being immersed in a genre of music you eventually come to see it's flaws even better than detractors on the outside do.

Personally, I think changes in societally destructive rap will come from within rap. There is a quite of bit of dissent in underground rap against commercial rap. ropeadope.com , despite their flaws , does a pretty decent job of publicizing these efforts.

This seems to be how it always works. Despite various factions in the US government and the intelligentia trying to take credit for the crumbling of the Soviet Union, it actually was the USSR's own flawed political-economic structure and activist elements within that ultimately brought it all down.

As for gangsta rap audiences ... it expands out much further than white teenage suburbia. I actually work with a software developer in his early thirties who wears Slim Shady garb to work. Remember the flick "Office Space" ... well, that stuff actually exists.

I do see modern trends in rap as destructive to society, but primarily as just vacuous. In either case, commercial rap is primarily a reflection of where a large portion of mass society's soul is at right now.

Gangsta rap primarily appeals to those who do not have the desire or ability to define their place in the world. They wish to cop the commercial rap style and attitude because it allows a daily illusion of living a life much more dangerous, exciting, and primally sexually-charged than their own could ever be. That's why gangsta rap is largely harmless outside of the African-American community, because the main money-flow demographic's actual actions (as opposed to thoughts) are ultimately controlled by other forces ... like their parents or their employer.

Within the African-American community, I agree with Drew that gangsta rap is self-destructive in many ways. Most pointedly, it unfairly (obscenely unfairly) draws attention away from the real accomplishments of black American society, including jazz and other roots music.

Of course, gangsta rap also appeals to real criminals. But, paradoxically, that makes perfect sense.

I think what Drew writes needs to considered very seriously. There's a lot of awareness borne of long experience in there.

Edited April 9, 2006 by johnagrandy

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I agree that we cannot simply blame it all on rap. Rap represented an interesting turn in pop music, and some of it is, IMO, very good. Sad to say, most of it is pure crap, and there is so much of this crap because we have decision-makers at the top who are, basically, business people. You have people like Clive Davis--to take this back to a pivotal period--who came to the music business by way of an expertise that had nothing to do with music. In my Columbia days, Clive was very good to me, he was fair and above board, but he did not know diddly about the music--he clapped on the wrong beat and based his musical opinions on the ears of others, etc. But he rose to power and artists saw in him someone who could pave the way for them, so he became a beloved executive. He, in turn, loved the attention he got from artists and, hence, from the press.

I mention Clive, because he is someone whose rise I personally observed--there are many Clives and many big corporations running this business. They often care little for the music, because it's all about that bottom line and the PR.

It was Davis who refused to release Wyclef Jean's best album so far - "Welcome to Haiti: Creole 101" - so he had to take it to Koch and release it on the Sak Pase label. The album only made #66 on the R&B charts. What I don't know is; did it do so poorly because it didn't have the undoubted power of BMG behind it? or was it because it was truly out of step with the culture because so little of it was in American and concerned with America? If the latter, then there's some reason to believe that Davis may have been right.

Herman Lubinsky, according to people who knew him, had no taste or feeling for music. Yet he created Savoy Records; the market leader for Bebop and honking tenor players in the forties and the most important Gospel label of the past 60 years.

I don't think there is a straight answer here. I doubt if Davis is any worse than Lubinsky was. But the outcomes were entirely different. There's no denying that a record company needs someone concerned with the bottom line. As far as I can see, the real difference is because one runs major companies and the other ran his own small business, clearly focused on a market which he understood. Major companies tend to try to do all things but also direct their biggest effort at the biggest niche market - the popular market. Because this is a market of people who don't really care about the music, except in terms of a "soundtrack to their lives", they can get away with murder.

I read a book about Motown once. In it there was an interview with a lady who, as a young girl in the school across the road from Motown's studio, had been hired by Gordy as their (part time) quality controller. Gordy gave her a free hand in terms of equipment and, after a while, she asked the audio engineer to make her a record player that would sound as bad as a car radio, so she could tell what the records would sound like when people heard them for that first, crucial, time. THAT's what people use the music for.

MG

[Kari S]

What I'm waiting for is a rapper who raps usuing bebop-rhythms...

Q-Tip came pretty close. Or the guys from Brand Nubian, or Mos Def. This was in the 90's

[Kari S]

I actually work with a software developer in his early thirties who wears Slim Shady garb to work. Remember the flick "Office Space" ... well, that stuff actually exists.

[Kari S]

Anyone who complains about contemporary black music/hip hop is basically not LISTENING to it...

Or is restricting his/her listening to the MTV playlist crap that's polluting the airwaves. Record companies give money to rappers even before they've recorded one thing for chrissakes - just so that they can buy them Escalades and big a** houses.

[ghost of miles]

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

Well, yeah, I feel his pain too. But the specific music he's dogging on is a syptom, not the cause, and I can't help but feel that he's not "getting" the fundamental musical changes (perceptual changes, really) that rap/hip-hop (and lots of other musics) were foreshadowing/reflecting long before the gangsta element came to the fore.

Like I said earlier, bemoan the moral decline of society all you want. I'll be there with you (withihnn reason and up to a point). But frame it as such and don't come out with all this "this ain't what I was taught that music was in school" bullshit. You can't teach nuthin in school until it's already happened, so if what's happening right now ain't what you taught in school, best that you draw upon a principle that you should have been taught in school but probably weren't - namely, that today is tomorrow's history - and take it from there, not get all wigged out that the neat road map that you thought was going to unfold suddenly just got blown out the window.

Look - I'm old enough (two can play this game!) to remember the early days of rap's first commercial peep throught the cracks. The shit was fun (and it swung like mofo), and the social commentary (when it existed) was delivered with a sense of righteousness. I also well remember the intrigue I felt by the musical methods being used - the sampling, the sequencing, the layering, the collages, all that stuff. This was a new way of looking at and feeling time and one's relationship to it, and it was (and still is, I think) an inevitable perceptual shift in the wake of both the increased power, scope, and omnipresence of electronic communications and digital "reality", where anything can be (or give the illusiona of being) literally anything, at any place, at any time. You can't fundamentally alter the nature of "perceptual reality" like this and expect people, especially young people, not to change as a result. You just can't.

Absolutely, the toll/fallout of Reaganomics on the inner-city was immense (and in my mind, morally criminal). But since we're not in the Po;itical Foeum (yet), I'll drop that and go here instead - where inner-city culture goes, the tastes of mainstream American youth culture inevitable follows (the more things change...). And where the mainstream popular American culture goes, Madi$on Avenue inevitably is there to sniff their a$$. That's the weigh of the world. And here we are.

Mr. Drew's decency as a human being comes through loud and clear in his article, but like so many jazz musicians, their impotence is at least partially their own fault. Rather than being in sync with their times, they've set themselves apart and/or above them. Jazz has never been a teen-age music (the Jazz Age & the Swing Kids notwithstanding), but it has always had its finger on the pulse of what was happening within its "native" community. Other than the M-Base crew and a few others, who among the "jazz community" was looking at the Hip-Hop Revolution from a perspective of it being the Next Step In African-American Musical Evolution? And how many were following the Jazz Reagan (WM) down his road of claiming the glories of the past as triumphs that they were somehow entitled to claim as their own? What are we suppose to do, Save The Children by taking them to hear a recreation of Fletcher Henderson at Lincoln Center? Give me a fucking break...

Shit just don't work that way. Never has, never will. You wanna change the streets, you gotta have street cred. You want street cred, you gotta earn it. You wanna earn it, you gotta get down in it, not preach down to it.

It may or may not be too late to save the children. God knows I hope it's not. But it sure as hell is too late to think that ii-Vs and such are the key to doing so. Mr. Drew better wake the fuck up.

We're in agreement more than you seem to think, but I think simply saying that gangsta rap is a sympton rather than a cause is dangerously close to the sort of thinking that Mr. Drew Jr. is exhibiting. I mean, c'mon, how many stories have we read about Bird lamenting that he felt he'd had a hand in furthering the use of heroin among bebop musicians? I'm NOT judging Bird for that, or saying that Bird was somehow therefore a "bad" person... simply saying that the part of Mr. Drew Jr's screed that attacks the glorification of crack and cocaine culture is something that anybody who's spent any time living in the inner city may not dismiss so easily--and also saying that the message of artists can shape culture as well as reflect it. I probably have about a dollop of street cred compared to some, if not many, of the folks here, but what I saw in Indpls.'s "Dodge City" neighborhood was pretty awful (and what I saw working one summer as a door-to-door surveyor). It's a complex problem that's going to require complex responses... but part of the answer IS in pushing role models such as Malcolm X and hell, even the much-maligned Wynton, over the guys you read about in QUEENS REIGNS SUPREME (recent book about the hiphop industry), where surviving a barrage of gunshots is indeed seen as a great aid to commercial success.

You're right, Drew Jr. should have come at this from a different angle. That's basically what I said in my post... and I've heard musical merit in a lot of the gangsta rap I've listened to. But last time I checked, it's not (or shouldn't be) so square to be upset about an ideology that glorifies sexism, hypercapitalism, hard-drug culture, and murderous violence. Whether it's a crafty, insidious political leader or a musical messenger propagating that ideology, I'm going to oppose it. There are plenty of rappers who oppose it as well. To somehow absolve an artist of any responsibility for his or her message because they are merely "symptoms" or reflections of the culture... coming full-circle here to say it's just as wrong as Mr. Drew Jr.'s scattershot assault on hiphop.

[ghost of miles]

BTW, I'd also agree that jazz musicians who've dismissed rap out-of-hand, whether in the 1980s or the present, are doing much to consign themselves to the ol' dustbin of history. Same with electronica. The whole notion of the jazz ensemble, I think, will possibly end up changing as a result.

[JSngry]

We talk, and with good reason, about the "abandoned inner-city youth". And who's "abandoned" them more than the "typical" jazz musician of the last 25 years? Rather than getting in there and sharing their knowledge and promoting their values, they've gone off to Lincoln Center Land and vent nothing but scorn. The connection to the street has indeed been lost, and when that happens, it is museum time. Of course, there have been (and continue to be) exceptions, but the point remains.

Y'all have probably not heard of the late Charles Scott, but he was a Fort Worth bassist/music educator who for years played locally w/Marchel Ivery & Red Garland, a baaaad mothafukkah. One of the last gigs I saw him do before he passed was at a FW jazz/blues festival, and his group was all teenaged kids from his school. He had kids playing beats on plastic tubs, and he had kids rapping in fron of that while he played bass and somebody else (Roger Boykin, maybe) played electric piano behind it all. It was ragged as hell, to be sure, and the "jazz purists" thought that it was a sadly comical performance, but I thought it was beautiful. Here was a guy who knew the old ways reacjing out to the kids, letting them come into his world on their terms. Knowing Scotty, I'm sure that he dropped some science on them along the way, and gave them nothing but positive vibes. Did he spawn any great musicians from doing this? Probably not. Did he give some kids another way of looking at themselves and what their lives could be? Probably so. He's one cat who didn't abandon ship to go off and preach down from on high. I respect the hell outta that.

Look, the whole crack/gansta thing is way out of control and has been for decades now. And the media glorification of it all is irresponsible at best, and genocidal at worst. Nobody's arguing otherwise, certainly not me. But to clean all this shit up is going to take something a helluva lot meaningful and substantial than jazz musicians whining about how nobody plays real songs on real instruments anymore. That shit is A)besides the point; and B)going to be about as effective as not watering the grass in order to kill the weeds.

Mr. Drew's pain about the condition of his community is real, and his outrage about same is absolutely justified. And shared here, make no mistake. But the real perps are not the musicians and the music they create. the real perps are that nebulous yet very real collection of forces known as "the sytem" that gleefully profits (at all levels) from the death and destruction and the glorification of same. That's who & what Mr. Drew should be ragging on, not lamenting the lost splendors of Pop gone by. Because even when and if this societal shit does get cleaned up, the music ain't never gonna sound the same again. So focus. Focus on survival, and let the music do what it's gonna do anyway..

[JSngry]

And furthermore...

I think I'm probably(?) on the record more than once about lamenting the decline of optimism and positivism in Popular Music (all Popular Music) over the lst quarter-century or so. But I don't think I've ever viewed it as anything other than a reflection of the decline of those same things in society at large. People will get sold what they will buy, and people will buy what they can relate to. If people are feeling empty and nihilistic, that's the kind of music they'll buy, and that's the kind of music they'll more than happily be sold.

If you want apples instead of crabapples, plant an apple tree. If the apple tree won't grow but the crabapple tree will, there's a reason, and it's probably not the fault of the crabapple tree. Now, if you got bad or over-run soil, hey - you got bigger problems than just what's growing out of it.

Edited April 9, 2006 by JSngry

[Chuck Nessa]

And furthermore...If the apple tree won't grow but the crabapple tree will, there's a reason, and it's probably not the fault of the crabapple tree. Now, if you got bad or over-run soil, hey - you got bigger problems than just what's growing out of it.

Crabapple trees can steal water and soil nutrients needed by the apple tree. So, it might be the fault of the crabapple tree.

[JSngry]

Thank you, Neil Sperry.

[Chuck Nessa]

[rostasi]

I prefer Howard Garrett

[Kalo]

Fascinating thread; all over the map. Lots of great points, and I can't say I disagree with most of what's been said, except for those who dismiss rap and current Black music entirely.

Yes, most rap is mediocre or worse, but so is the bulk of any genre.

The kind of article Drew, Jr. wrote has been written over and over again through history. The latest music is compared to a past golden age and found wanting. In his argument, the music born of the whorehouse is superior to the music built on the crackhouse, or something like that... (Let's leave alone the merits of mercenary fucking over getting wasted.)

Fact is, Drew, Jr., as accomplished a musician as he may be, swims in the past, not the present. Most innovative music is born disreputable and achieves respectability as the years go by. Time sorts the good out from the bad, and another past "golden age" is born.

Rap, like it or not, is the music of our time and has out-paced rock for a good twenty-five years, jazz by at least fifty. Some rap is good. Some may be great. Only time will tell.

Jazz has never been a popular music, barring certain eras where jazz-influenced music was a passing fad.

That's just the way it is.

On the other hand, J.S. Bach achieved immortality by pursuing a music that was already considered passe in his day. So you never know.

[johnagrandy]

Rap, like it or not, is the music of our time and has out-paced rock for a good twenty-five years, jazz by at least fifty.

In terms of youth: I think rap is on a downslide. Jam bands could be the youth music of our time. Maybe it's where I live, but when the popular been-around-awhile jam bands come through they completely sell out every night. They don't play the giant venues, but the crowds are fanatically faithful long-term followers. New rap stars are minted every day and do play the ampitheatres, coliseums, etc., but most don't last long. It's like teenage girls and their crushes.

[.:.impossible]

Rap/hip hop had a golden age. 86-93. By and large, its over and Kenny Drew Jr. missed it. Thankfully, De La Soul still do what they do...

[Kalo]

Rap/hip hop had a golden age. 86-93. By and large, its over and Kenny Drew Jr. missed it. Thankfully, De La Soul still do what they do...

I love De La myself, and would point to them (not forgetting the contributions of Prince Paul) as central to my own personal "golden age" of rap.

But it's funny how most "golden ages" seem to coincide with the observer's teens and twenties.

[jon abbey]

But it's funny how most "golden ages" seem to coincide with the observer's teens and twenties.

hehe, almost exactly what I thought about posting in response there.

[md655321]

In terms of youth: I think rap is on a downslide. Jam bands could be the youth music of our time. Maybe it's where I live, but when the popular been-around-awhile jam bands come through they completely sell out every night.

1. There aren't any black people at jams shows. (well, maybe at a ratio of 10,000 to 1)

2. Look at albums sales. I would LOVE to believe that jam music is approaching mainstream, but its simply now where near being true. Take the biggest non-Dead jam band in the world, Phish. 50 Cent's last album sold more than their entire catalog. Jam is for white college kids, usually rich white college kids.

[BruceH]

(and if "omniverity" is not a word, let's make it one!)

Do we have to?

[BruceH]

Rap/hip hop had a golden age. 86-93. By and large, its over and Kenny Drew Jr. missed it. Thankfully, De La Soul still do what they do...

I love De La myself, and would point to them (not forgetting the contributions of Prince Paul) as central to my own personal "golden age" of rap.

But it's funny how most "golden ages" seem to coincide with the observer's teens and twenties.

I know for a fact that the golden age of punk happened when I was 15-17.