side up.
Among the Yoruba, the trickster orisha Elegba is the master of the crossroads and fate. He is traditionally depicted as a child or an old man. Elegba opens and closes doors. Now look at the crossroads as they appear in blues as one of the most consistent references and double entendres in the form. For the blues artist, the itinerant bard of the newly dilated black world, the crossroads represent decision-making—a particularly important reference given the fact that the essence of slavery is the absence of mobility and the inability to make one’s own decisions. The crossroads is both geographic and metaphorical, an echo of the old trickster ways.
Westerners have conflated Elegba the trickster with their concept of the devil in the raw attempt to impose a good versus evil dichotomy on vastly more complex ways of understanding the world. To the wise, though, the trickster is neither good, nor evil, he simply is. The trickster’s place in the blues, plus the secular emphasis of the form, gave rise to the epithet “devil music.” Never mind the fact that it was in the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the “devil” in exchange for mastery of his instrument. But the blues did not create the trickster—they simply gave him a new venue. The trickster ideal was in place in the pre-blues world of the slave. Bear in mind the old tale of the white woman who leaves the big house to inform her slaves that the terrible news they’ve heard is true—the North has, in fact, won the war. Slavery is over, she says, but if they’re willing to stay on, they can create a world that is “just the same as it always was.” Her slaves line up and dutifully inform her of how good a mistress she’s been and how glad they’d be to remain in her service. The belle goes to bed with a light heart only to awake and find that there is not a single ex-slave in sight for miles. The world had, in fact, been turned upside down for centuries and the Janus-faced slave-trickster knew that deception and flight was the means of turning it right side up.
The blues artist must be willing to reckon with human frailty, the dead-broke, woman-gone existential zero-ness that has to be admitted before it can be transcended. In short, one must recognize one’s frailty before it can be used to your advantage. But if the blues exist for the express purpose of alchemizing beauty from pain, hip hop is more often about swaggering in the face of it. Denying that pain is an element of its reality. Hip hop is that boxer who gets caught flush by the unseen right hand and then tells his antagonist that it didn’t hurt—and the fact is, of course, that if it really didn’t hurt he wouldn’t feel the need to make that statement. With the exception of Mos Def’s comic “Ms. Fat Booty” and Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” the number of hip hop songs dealing substantively with a man whose woman has left could probably be counted on one hand. And even Jay-Z’s effort tempered by his refrain “I can’t see ’em coming out my eyes/So I gotta make this song cry.” Now compare that to the soreness of the soul expressed in Ishman Bracey’s “Trouble-Hearted Blues,” where he laments
I don’t believe I’m sinking Believe what a hole I’m in You don’t believe I loved you think what a fool I been.
Or Joe Pullum’s 1934 lamentation in “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard?” that
I woke up this morning couldn’t even get out my bed I was just thinking about that black woman And it almost killed me dead.
At the heart of hip hop’s denial of the pain—a pain that is so openly voiced in the blues—is a different relationship to irony within the two musics. The trickster’s ironic approach to life and power relations had resonance to the enslaved for obvious reasons: the trickster appears to be happy and harmless, traffics in deception, and disarms with a smile. The average rapper, though, would rather get shot than smile in public.
Hip hop doesn’t place as high a premium on irony as its ancestral forms, particularly blues—even as it relies upon blues and the surrounding blues folklore for much of its material. This is not to say that hip hop is completely anti-ironic, simply that irony is not at the center of the hip hop ethos. That said, hip hop has precious little room for acknowledging pain in order to ultimately transcend it.
That absence of irony is why on nearly every album cover the rapper holds a murderer’s grit on his face. Even comedic rappers tend to look serious as hell, half-glaring up from an oblique angle, as if smiling is a violation of a sacred MC credo. Irony is at the center of blues, however—it is, at its root, a music about existential despair that is deeply opposed to resignation or defeat. It’s been pointed out more than once that blues was created just after slavery by the most oppressed segment of American society, but rarely do you encounter explicit discussion of race or racism within the lyrics—save brilliant queries like “What did I do to get so black and blue?” Blues grapples with the individual tragedy in full public view, an aesthetic habit that’s absent from all but the most significant hip hop.
HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN’
Fruit may not fall far from the tree, but it does, nonetheless, fall. While blues obsesses over the theme of mobility, hip hop is as local as a zip code. The constant blues references to crossroads, trains, and railroad tracks rise from the itinerant life at the turn of the century. Between 1920 and 1942, at least 293 blues songs about trains or railroads were recorded. This is the music of black wanderers exercising the newly granted right of mobility. And thus we encounter titles like “Goin’ Away Blues,” “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” “Crossroads Blues,” and “Further On Up the Road.” The blues tell us that
When a woman gets the blues She hangs her head and cries When a man gets the blues Lord, he grabs a train and rides.
In hip hop, though, there are no references to highways or trains; railroads have been replaced by another central reference: the City. Or more specifically, the fractured territories known collectively as the Ghetto. Innumerable hip hop songs reference the term: Naughty By Nature’s “Ghetto Bastard,” Rakim Allah’s “In the Ghetto” Nas’s “Ghetto Prisoners,” Talib Kweli’s “Ghetto Afterlife,” Lauryn Hill’s “Every Ghetto, Every City,” Dr. Dre’s “The World Is a Ghetto,” all allude to a socio-economic blind alley, a terrain defined by the lack of mobility of its residents. Scarface—formerly of the ensemble the Geto Boys—underscores this point on the single “On My Block,” where he rhymes, “It’s like the rest of the world don’t exist/we stay confined to same spot we been livin’ in.” Jean Grae riffed on this same theme on “Block Party,” imploring heads to “Get out your house/Get off your block/See something, do something.” It’s no coincidence that Atlanta’s dope markets are known as the Traps. So when ATL-based MC T.I. titled his debut release Trap Music he was signifying on a level that even he might not have been hip to. The descendants of those early century itinerants now find themselves trapped in urban stasis one hundred years and one Great Migration later. Thus the relationship between blues and hip hop is the relationship between journeys and destinations.
The City is the unnamed protagonist of every hip hop song created. Up out of Hazlehurst and Bessemer, Sumpter, Natchez, Mulberry, and Sanford—two million deep—to lands where you couldn’t hear crickets or raise no hogs. In Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois fretted, thirty-four years past slavery, that the City would bring black ruination. A century later, Talib Kweli echoed the sage’s observation on “Respiration”:
Look in the sky for God What you see besides the smog Is broken dreams Flying away on the wings of the obscene Thoughts people put in the air Places where you could get murdered over a glare Where everything is fair.
Hip hop is blues filtered through a century of experience and a thousand miles of asphalt. The City has its own crude dialectics: the mark is to the con as day is to night, the playa is to the lame as east is to west. The City is stone-hewn horizons and temples to vast acquisition. Industrial grit. Vice ecology. Iron arteries. Infinite anonymity and high velocity language. Remixed
