I am so sick of hearing people complain about how hip-hop
is destroying civilization. It's exactly like the way people
used to talk about bebop, and jazz
generally, and movies, and computer
games, and dancing, and everything else I feel strongly
about. I loved hip-hop when I was in the sixth grade. Then
I got an "education" about music and learned to
dislike it. Now that I'm free from the vestigial traces of
European classical pedagogy that infests our musical culture,
I'm realizing that I was right in sixth grade. Hip-hop is
the most exciting thing that's happening right now.
As a musician of my acquaintance says, "Not so big on
melody, is it." Not primarily, no. It's bigger on prosody,
rhythm, cultural taxonomy, modular repetition, social journalism,
dancing, and most importantly, making
the actual lives of actual humans more tolerable. "It's
just pushing buttons." Yes, it is, and it really is nowhere
near as easy as it looks, especially
not if you want to do it well. We here in America confuse
'effortful' with 'valuable', which perhaps is true if you're
churning butter or assembling widgets, but is most
emphatically not true when you're talking about music.
So what makes hip-hop such a musical advance? For me, it's
the way that the beats and samples raise the musical signal-to-noise
ratio as high as it can go. Wynton Marsalis decries hip-hop's
lack of melody and harmony, and he's correct that, so far,
hip-hop has used a limited musical vocabulary. But is this
bad? Complexity is not the same thing as quality. Wynton's
records are jammed with melody and harmony, in fact too much
of it. Like so much modern jazz, they're one great idea after
another, executed flawlessly by the 'best' musicians in the
world. So why are they mostly such snoozers? What's missing?
Hip-hop's answer is: Space. Silence. Tension. Resolution.
Repetition. Audience participation. Ego dissolution. Intensity.
Editing. This is no fault of WM as a musician - he's as good
a jazz trumpet player as it's possible to be in this day and
age. The problem is that the world is changing fast, and the
cultural context that bebop evolved in is long gone. Hip-hop
is trying to keep up with the present, and WM is intentionally
living in the past. Who can blame him? The world is in many
ways an increasingly terrible place, especially if you're
a black man from New Orleans, as WM is. I can only begin to
imagine how much rap must grate on WM's ears, but WM's own
music suffers from its yearning for the past.
Jazz has been trying to build intensity out of complexity
since the sixties, but the returns have been steadily diminishing
since. It seems like the jazz world got stuck here:
Donna Lee
Giant Steps
and never heard about these:
So What
A Love Supreme
much less these:
Chameleon
It's About That Time
Meanwhile, Miles' song title is right, time has been moving
on, and I wish my fellow jazzers would open up wider to where
the world is right now. Hip-hop poses a challenge to the academic
jazz world in particular, which rivals only the academic classical
world for obsessiveness about technique, abstruseness and
navel-gazing. Hip-hop encourages you to just be here in the
world in the year 2007, in all of its awfulness, with TV and
advertising and capitalism and guns and drugs and George Bush
and so on, and stare it in the face, and then put a funky
dance beat underneath it. A beat made with computers! The
very tools of the blue-eyed devil's capitalist machine! Could
anyone have imagined thirty years ago that the best and most
booty-shaking grooves in the world would someday be made with
computers?
Programmed beats cause my musician friends much agita. I
can practically see their heads shaking as they read this.
A jazz buddy disparages Missy Elliott as sounding like "James
Brown played by robots." In a way, he's right, but he's
missing the larger question: does James Brown played by robots
sound good? I would say, it sounds unbelievably good. I despair
of ever finding a drummer who plays with the kind of restraint,
focus and sense of space that Timbaland's beats have. Have
you heard the nonsense that human drummers are playing right
now? I'll take JB played by robots any day.
But how could it be? How could a drum machine sound better
than a person? It has to do with focus and pruning of irrelevent
detail. For the most part, human drummers try to create intensity
by adding complexity. Good hip-hop creates intensity by simplifying,
by removing information. A rock or jazz drummer often marks
the ends of phrases with a fill, a more complicated and busy
figure than the main background pattern. A DJ or drum programmer
rarely uses fills; they're tedious to program and sound goofy
played by computers. Instead, hip-hop often grabs your attention
at the song's turning points with silence. An especially attention-grabbing
move is the one-drop, where you quickly mute the drum machine
on the downbeat at the beginning of a phrase or section. It's
like arriving at the top of a flight of stairs and immediately
stepping into a hole, only to be caught a beat or a bar later
when the drum track gets unmuted. Once you get used to the
one-drop and other creative uses of silence in hip-hop, especially
the current stuff, the flailing bombast of modern rock and
jazz drum kit technique starts sounding outdated and corny.
Indie rock's solution for pre-empting virtuosic lameness is
just to play flamboyantly badly, not a good strategy in this
listener's opinion.
I don't think anyone should be going near a drum kit in this
day and age without listening to ?uestlove.
Don't See Us (live)
?uest is the first truly great drummer of the hip-hop generation,
and he got that way by listening to lot of drum machine music.
Even my white friends who can deal with drum machines and
the musicians who strive to sound like them often get hung
up on sampling. The idea is that the original recording required
'musicality', while the sample didn't. Playing instruments
in a recording studio is expensive and time-consuming, while
sampling is cheap and easy, right? So therefore one results
in better music than the other. Here's the problem. Two given
bars of an old Curtis Mayfield recording played over and over
sounds better than just about anything. The law is going to
be a long time catching up with me on this, but the musical
truth is that the
sample isn't an act of thievery, it's an act of loving and
creative scavenging. Hip-hop sampling eliminates a great
deal of information from the original, rejecting all of the
unfit replicators until it finds the right meme, the one that
you want to hear over and over - the hook. Popular and folk
songwriting has always been based around the construction
and repetition of hooks; hip-hop just pushes this strategy
to its logical extreme.
Is the DJ's job to just stand there while the record spins
or the computer cycles around a loop? How is that musicianship?
Here again we run into a common confusion. Listening is an
activity. It's by far the most important component of musicianship,
though we forget this because it's invisible and doesn't come
across on TV or in the classroom. Listening is an activity,
and a challenging one. You need to pay constant attention
to make music with a drum machine, to know when to do a one-drop,
when to drop out for two or four or eight bars, know when
to stop the song completely and when to keep it rolling, know
whether to fade out or end abruptly. Let me say this again:
even just playing pop songs with an iPod or something at a
party, to really do it well, is nowhere near as easy as it
looks. Try it sometime. You find out quickly: anybody can
learn to press play and stop and turn a volume knob, but not
everybody knows how to rock the party with it, ie not everybody
can do it in a way that you'd want to hear twice.
What are we going to do about the vast ocean of recorded
music, musicians? Hope it just goes away someday? Or get on
top of it? I say we get on top of it. The only way out is
through, and I think hip-hop offers the best way through.
People like Missy Elliott and Timbaland aren't just reacting
to computers, they're pushing the computer's possibilities
as hard as they can be pushed, and are reaping big artistic
rewards. Missy's big hit a couple summers back, Work It, was
a genuine Pro Tools masterpiece.
Work It
Dig the reversed vocals in the chorus. Listening to singing
backwards is as bizarre an experience as you can ask for,
and here was a huge pop hit that used it as its hook. The
chorus also includes an elephant sample replacing the word
"penis", which is funny, given how filthy how the
verses are. Don't listen to this song with your kids or coworkers
around. But do listen to it on headphones and hear all the
delicate little layers of sound, especially in the last bar
of the chorus. It sounds like music from the twenty-fifth
century, if we're lucky. Computer music is only cold and emotionless
if the musicians are.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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