Rap Victoriana
What hip-hop and parlor
music have in common.
By Mark Steyn
( 1242 words; posted
Monday, July 1; to be composted Monday, July 8 )
Just over a century ago,
at 207 Grand Avenue, Milwaukee, a cocky teen-ager hung a shingle outside his
door:
Begin block quote here
CHARLES K. HARRIS
BANJOIST AND
SONGWRITER
SONGS WRITTEN TO ORDER
End block quote here
And
with those four stigmatic words, the music business was born. There'd been
music before, but, with Harris, it's the business that impresses. His
first effort was the prototype pop hit "After The Ball," which, 104 years
later, you can still hear every night of the week in the current Broadway
revival of Show Boat . Back then, it began earning him $25,000 per week
almost immediately, and went on to sell 5 million copies of sheet music. This
was 1892, remember, when 25,000 bucks was still 25,000 bucks, and you didn't
have to split it with accountants, managers, coke dealers, and any traumatized
ex-catamite whose father has a smart lawyer.
We've come a long way since then: ragtime and radio,
hillbilly and race records, big bands and showtoons, 45s and triple concept
albums, MTV and CDs and horror-core. ...
You're
not hep to horror-core? Let Ronin Ro, whose book, Gangsta , comes out
next month, explain: "Horror-core," he writes, "was to hip-hop what death metal
is to Brahms or Mozart." To be honest, I think Ro is indulging in a little
rhetorical exaggeration here: I suspect horror-core is a lot closer to hip-hop
than death metal is to Brahms or Mozart. Come to think of it, Brahms isn't
that close to Mozart. But pop music has always had a hazy grasp of
perspective. As David Bowie said on the 1977 "Bing Crosby Christmas Show" when
the host asked him if he liked any of the older songs: "Oh, sure, I love Harry
Nilsson."
But even rappers are getting into the nostalgia act these
days. They're on the new West Side Story recording where Salt-N-Pepa,
Def Jef and others do "Gee, Officer Krupke," and, between choruses, add their
own machine-gun interpolations, beginning with:
BLOCK QUOTE, SINGLE SPACE
THE ITALICIZED LINES THAT FOLLOW
Music by Bernstein!
Lyrics by Sondheim!
I'm talkin' 'bout West
Side Story, it's before my time!
...
So don't criticize the
way that I party
This ain't Broadway, we
learned it the hard way!
NOTE: WE'RE SENDING YOU
THE CD OF THIS...WE SHOULD PUT IN AN AUDIO LINK HERE. END BLOCK QUOTE HERE
It's a cute joke, but the
cockiness and special pleading remind us how things have changed: In 1957, the
Sharks' and Jets' cool was parodic and laughable; in the '96 version, these
gangs are cool for real. Their braggadocio is a cliché--even in Britain, where,
according to record-industry statistics, Doris Day reissues outsell all
American rap. You remember the old Weber and Fields joke?
BLOCK QUOTE, SINGLE SPACE
THE LINES THAT FOLLOW
"Who was that lady I
saw you with last night?"
"That was no lady, that
was my wife."
END BLOCK QUOTE HERE
The British magazine
Private Eye updated it for two gangsta rappers:
BLOCK QUOTE, SINGLE SPACE
THE LINES THAT FOLLOW
"Who was that ho I saw
you with last night?"
"That was no ho, that
was my bitch."
END
BLOCK QUOTE HERE
Which reworking of the protean vaudeville gag prompts a
thought: Maybe, after a century's rise and fall, rap is the final ebbing of
commercial pop, back to its 1890s origins. Even as William Bennett and the
National Political Congress of Black Women renew their assault on companies
that profit from gangsta rap and claim that it marks a shameful new low in
American pop culture, and even as its defenders assert (as Chuck D does) that
it's a counter-CNN for the disenfranchised, gangsta rap is merely the wheel
coming full circle--back to Charles Harris and "After The Ball." If the defense
is that 1990s rap is documentary--"the authentic sound of the streets"--well,
so were those verse-and-chorus ballads of the 1890s. These were the first songs
of the American cities, cautionary tales of the vicissitudes of urban life:
"Mother was a Lady," "She is More to be Pitied Than Censured." Harris' hits
were (as TV movies say) "based on a true story"--like his grisly ballad of an
orphan girl asking the telephone operator to be put through to her dead mother,
"Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven." My personal favorite is a pop hit of 1898 by
the black writer Gussie Lord Davis, about an overnight train full of passengers
irritated by a sobbing infant and demanding to know where the mother is. As the
child's young father explains, mother is in a mahogany casket "In the Baggage
Coach Ahead."
If you think that sounds a
little lurid, that's the whole point: These were ripe metropolitan melodramas
served up for the genteel piano parlors of the suburbs. Same with rap: For all
it's hailed as the voice of the urban poor, 70 percent of its sales are to
suburban whites, for whom Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke" or Niggaz Wit'
Attitude's "Fuck tha Police" offer the delicious, voyeuristic frisson of
life in Compton or the South Bronx without actually having to live there.
For
most songwriters after "After The Ball," for everyone from Irving Berlin to
Carole King, lyric-writing was an exercise in compression. Rap returns us to
the same sprawling prolixity as 1890s ballads--and 12-verse story songs,
whether they're lilting waltzes or numbingly hard-core, are rarely
distinguished as music . Almost all turn-of-the-century blockbusters have
the simplest of tonal structures. Similarly, rap is the logical consequence of
pop's 30-year promotion of street cred over music: the reduction of the tune to
a banal pneumatic backing track, the debasement of lyric-writing to a formless
laundry list of half-baked hoodlum exhibitionism. 1990s gangsta rap is
rhythmically simple and harmonically negligible, 1890s ballads are melodically
simple and harmonically negligible, but the effect is the same: Even as the
subject matter in each case proclaims its modernity (railroads and telephone on
the one hand, guns and crack on the other), in both cases, the music underneath
belies it.
There is one major difference, of course. Charles K. Harris
just opened the newspaper, found a suitable story and wrote it up. Gangsta
rappers have eliminated the middleman: They are the stories in the
papers. Half of 'em wind up getting shot: Ol' Dirty Bastard (liver blown away),
Tupac Shakur (half of his groin blown away), Randy Weaver, producer of
"Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z." (everything blown away) The other half take
pre-emptive action: Slick Rick recorded his last album while serving time for
attempted murder; Snoop Doggy Dogg was acquitted on technical grounds. "Out
here, it's not just about making the records," one rapper tells Ronin Ro in
Gangsta . "It's about staying alive after they're released." Rappers,
says Ro, "battle over who drinks more 40s, kills more niggaz, jacks more cars,
slaps more hos," and all for the amusement of those white 'burb kids in the
reverse baseball caps.
Pop music is mostly
minstrelsy: Following "After The Ball," while black ragtime composers starved,
white Tin Pan Alley hacks stuck "rag" in the titles of their novelty songs and
sold millions. Today, we can see Michael Jackson's ever more bleached
complexion as a shorthand for pop's history: He's the first black singer to
become his own white cover version--to start out as Little Richard and
transmogrify into Pat Boone. But gangsta rap is something else: You'll hear
nothing of W.C. Handy or Ellington or Stevie Wonder in rap; it's a negation of
a century of black music. Instead, in its principles, in its forms, in its
opportunism, in its willingness to pass off individual pain as mass
entertainment, it returns us to the 1890s, to the whitest popular music we've
known in this country. Gangsta rap is the whitest black music there is. At
last: reverse minstrelsy.
