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Penthouse and pavement
There seem to be two prevailing suppositions in regard to contemporary rap music.
- Current rap music is ethically execrable but musically irresistible; and
- Current rap music is inferior because of its lyrical homogeneity, which is (incidentally execrable, but more importantly) aesthetically deadening.
The first is the line taken by many professional reviewers, who tend to write about rap with either an apologetic, or faintly mischievous, air. The degradation and hostility that (it is supposed) constitutes the literal content of the music makes it in a sense still socially forbidden, but that trepidation is outpaced by the music’s attractive invention and endless stylistic multiplicity (Lils and Youngs replicating with the ferocious sameness of cellular division). For many such writers, one cannot shake the impression that a certain perverse pride is taken in smuggling slang, tamed and italic, into the Times or the New Yorker. This attitude appears to feed a leniency toward the quality of the music. The built-in sociological conflict provides the necessary tension for their story to cohere, so it may be unnecessary to devote much discrimination to the work itself. Critics who are journalists have a tendency, probably due to forced exposure to great swaths of their field, to be too easily pleased by any virtue, however small; this distraction only exacerbates their problem.
The second attitude is a more correct, but also more confused. It is a correct identification of a problem, but wrong both in scope and effect. Lyrical homogeneity, really, homogeneity of any kind in popular music, is by itself a trivial observation; it is a virtually universal condition of the art form across styles and eras. Associating with this homogeneity an automatic dismissal isn’t so much wrong as a narrow perspective — there have been very few times in pop music when the bulk of the material being produced isn’t suffering from the same problem; and it is a truism that these are trimmed and ironed out by their tailoring into history. Faced with the breadth of current production, the quantity of refuse is astounding, but inevitable.
Further, it isn’t, as is frequently mentioned, the subject-matter of the lyrics that makes them, after a period, routine and dull1. That is, it isn’t either cash, or money, or hos that are boring, but their configuration: they seem always to be mentioned in the same order, with the very same phrases, arranged in incredibly similar, and too often rather wooden, verses. Genre, like all essentially arbitrary formal constructions, provides a framework that can be developed to greater or lesser effect, but current rap music more often than not does not develop it at all. And this strikes me as somewhat less inevitable than the above; as here, even the best rappers are doing little more than the worst (when they distinguish themselves, it is often elsewhere — track selection, musical phrasing, or charisma, etc).
Possible reasons for this are numerous, but most compelling may be the apparent attitude towards the form — very little pride is taken in workmanship. And success as the only criteria makes for a happily opportunistic monoculture, but at an advanced stage, an arid field. The semi-religious treatment of an “art form”, however apparently empty and pretentious, that generally accompanies even the most massive and commercial talents in other media (e.g., Steven Spielberg) seems to, in rap music, have very nearly evaporated. The last concrete examples of it — Outkast, for example — already seem caught between making their act forced or firmly anachronistic.
Today rap is heavily balanced in favor of its musical component (and there, largely limited to sensational production rather than structural development — this may mirror the present issue, but only as an analogy). I do not intend to suggest that the literal, verbal is the primary, or even a necessary component, and I am far from subscribing to the view, that certain circles have dogmatically maintained, that the music ought to serve the societal good or aspire to convey concepts and ideas. But historically it is a music whose chief triumphs have come from artists whose main interest was conjuring vivid images of themselves; and, in the current state, this appears to be impossible. When every rapper is recasting the same two dozen stock phrases, there are not sufficient distinguishing characteristics to make out distinct figures; there remains a stance, or pose being struck, but it is not a very vivid one. It looks like the shadow or imprint of some original personality, a reconstitution in each song by the rearrangement of component parts. This characterization would seem to swagger shamelessly into the postmodern trope of a multiplicity of objects and no authors; and perhaps this is accurate enough. But much of the appeal of its earlier eras was distinct authors, and there doesn’t seem to be enough to these objects to fill the void. So even if rap is not, as is sometimes said, ailing: it is at least becoming one-sided.
1 I should say, “isn’t only”. But this is a different issue. Anyway, it is true that some subjects are better than others, and the genre structure of crack dealing has not thus far proven to be especially amenable to expressing a very rich spectrum of human experience.