man is superimposed over the legendary Queensbridge Houses—as if he literally has the projects on his mind. The Bridge: the public housing development that cradled Nas and a starting lineup of MCs and producers like MC Shan and Marley Marl. To the MC, shouting out the ’hood, the specific locale and its denizens is a prerequisite. The perspective of the wanderer has given way to the view of the stationary neighborhood rep, one for whom the hood is the universe and the universe is five blocks wide. DJ Quik broke this down with his early-90s assessment that the whole world was “just like Compton.” In the blood-feud filled arena of hip hop, where fratricide has become a cliché, a brother has to claim his soil—because who else is gonna preserve one’s legend? It would be inconceivable that Mississippi John Hurt would shout down at his Chicago blues counterpart on the basis of geography, but even in the current era of hip hop détente, east is east, west is west, and never shall the listener get that fact twisted.
On another level, the blues relationship to lyricism is distinct from that of hip hop—and most of its pop music descendants. Classic blues were most often collectively authored and speak with the authority of a Negro quorum; hip hop, on the other hand, is obsessed with proprietary concerns. And thus the biter’s place of infamy has remained virtually unchanged since hip hop’s inception. The biter—a mimic, a knockoff, a counterfeiter of rhyme styles—dwells in the sub-basement of hip hop regard, equaled only by the “rapper” who ain’t write his own rhymes. This concern with rhyme larceny and boulevard copyright comes not only as a result of the social and psychological changes in black America since the inception of the blues, but also from a simpler issue: the different instrumentalization of the two musics.
Hip hop has intentionally not produced the equivalent of blues standards like “Stagger Lee” or “C. C. Ryder,” because hip hop has no room for “standards” in the traditional sense. The collectively or anonymously authored song in blues is given an individual fingerprint by the artist performing it. And if performance is an ongoing aesthetic experiment, the standard functions as a lyrical or musical constant, the singer’s interpretation is the variable—along with the nuance of the music backing him. This duality of sameness and difference is fueled by the fact the blues vocalist—who is often also an instrumentalist—controls elements of tempo, chord progression, and detail in the performance of the song, even if the crowd already knows what the lyrics will say. Even as the blues chords are made recognizable by flatted or “blue” notes, the arrangement itself is scarcely redundant. Blues lyrics may change over time, but only in the way that all oral literature is revised according to the failings or embellishments of individual memory. So the blues musician can sing the same lyrics a hundred times while never singing the same song twice.
In the arena of hip hop, the instrumentalist and lyricist are completely distinct; rappers don’t spin records, DJs don’t rap—and even if they did, no one could excel at both simultaneously. The rapper as an artist owes his existence to the fact that DJs couldn’t flow verbally while spinning records. On the basic level, a Master of Ceremonies is simply a host; in the beginning, the MC was the entertainer charged with keeping the crowd amped for the real performer—the DJ. The earliest of hip hop turn-tablists built their reps by their ability to shoot game over the mic, incite crowd participation, and shout out simple couplets. In short, order, though, DJs like Grand Master Flash, Grand Master Caz, and Kool Herc began outsourcing their rap to hired vocalists, or as they came to be called in the trade, rappers. Flash charted this development precisely:
I was like totally wack on the mic. I knew that I was not going to be an MC, so I had to find someone able to put a vocal entertainment on top of [my] rearrangement of the music. After so many people tried, the only person that really passed the test—and I think he was one of my lifesavers, with his technique—was Keith Wiggins, who, God rest his soul, has passed. His name was Cowboy. Cowboy found a way to allow me to do my thing and have the people really, really rocking, you know? So we were the perfect combination for some time.
The MC has far less control over what is happening musically than any other vocalist and thus his only resort in creating something new is in the uniqueness of his flow and lyrical content. Otherwise, four rappers reciting the same lyrics over the same track will sound distinct from each other, but qualitatively far more similar to each other than four jazz musicians playing the same arrangement or four blues singers with the same song. But hip hop does possess a canon of standards: the instrumentals and beats.
In early hip hop we witness black music stripped down to its most fundamental and ancient elements: vocals and percussion. Early critics of the music—some of them black—disregarded hip hop for its allegedly elementary approach to music, where harmony was often an afterthought. But that kind of perspective missed the point entirely—the sound was elemental, not elementary. And the only thing required for the rapper to break it down was a percussive statement whether it be programmed into an electronic beatbox or improvised by a human beat-box. Critics who missed that point found themselves re-mouthing aged platitudes. As Baraka observed in Blues People:
The most apparent survivals of African music in Afro-American music are its rhythms: not only the seeming emphasis in the African music on rhythmic rather than melodic or harmonic qualities, but also the use of polyphonic or contrapuntal effects. Because of this seeming neglect of harmony and melody, Westerners thought the music “primitive.” It did not occur to them that Africans might have looked askance at a music as vapid rhythmically as the West’s.
Here is the drum—the one instrument expressly forbidden by the antebellum slavocracy—now reinstated as literally the only instrument needed for hip hop. Here is the Gospel of Sly Stone: all we need is a drummer. Rappers from time immemorial have been ripping mics to disassembled snippets or instrumentals of “Apache,” “Big Beat,” “Good Times,” or “Impeach the President.” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” has been stripped apart like a six series Benz in the neighborhood chop shop and farmed out to a dozens of would-be producers, but the number of rappers to freestyle over that particular instrumental tilts toward the multiple thousands. In hip hop, the constant is the beat, the variable is both the lyricist’s flow and his ability to conjure up a completely different array of themes and punchlines to accompany that beat. Where the singer of blues standards wants to keep the same lyrics as a means of establishing his unique stylings, the rapper wants to do just the opposite—and thus is mandated to eternally dis the biter of rhymes.
In both hip hop and blues we encounter the vocalist as the alter ego of the artist complete with the adoption of a nom de mic—the kind of artistic pseudonym that has its roots in the blues tradition. Nobody’s mama named their boy Redman, Jay-Z, or Biggie, but neither did anyone come into this world with a tag like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, or Leadbelly. But there is a distinction even inside this parallel. The two musics have different relationships to the characters they create; the blues musician can sing about evil, but is not necessarily expected to live that way. His use of the first person is as a metaphor for the collective or as a storytelling technique equal to the novel written from the perspective of the protagonist.
Among the zero-sum hustlers of hip hop inc., the credo of “keeping it real” reigns supreme and gives birth to the ever-present contempt for the rapper ain’t live it the way he spoke it. “Real” is to the rap industry as “All-Natural” is to fast food supplier, as “New and Improved” is to the ad agency, as “I Solemnly Swear” is to the politician. Witness Jay-Z’s assault upon his cross-borough nemesis Nas on “The Takeover”:
Nigga, you ain’t live it you witnessed it from your folks’ pad scribbled in your notepad created your life.
But hip hop’s numb insistence upon “reality” misses the fact that the artist’s task is to understand and interpret the whole world—even those realities that are not his or her own. The demand that there be minimal space between word and deed is ultimately equivalent to demanding that De Niro remain in character as young Don Corleone into the infinite future. Talib Kweli was wise to this angle as well,
