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The water tastes like cherry wine
Well, I’m going away to live
Won’t be back no mo’
Going back down south
Child, don’t you wanna go?
The L.A. coroner’s office has assured us that Pimp C died a senseless death. He will be unceremoniously ushered into the pantheon of tragic hip-hop figures. He will be deified and, of course, musically misappropriated. His message will be lost in the myth-making process. Local lore will tell the bowdlerized story of another “fallen soldier” whose impact will never be fully understood while the mainstream rap world will reduce him to a footnote, a name to be dropped over the fade out of your favorite rapper’s “tribute” song sandwiched somewhere between Big L and Freeky Tah. He will be loved in memory.
The kindness of death has a depoliticizing effect and Pimp C was a political rapper, a guy with deep convictions. A few lucky people will never lose sight of the fact that he had something important to say. An even smaller number of people will actually understand what he was trying to say and why. It is hard for people to accept, especially in America, that people are products of history. Most Americans don’t care much for history, certainly not the unflattering kind. The American sensibility is youthful and optimistic. Thus even the most oppressed Americans leave remembrance to the chaos of collective consciousness. I’m talking about African-Americans.
We live in America and the cultural home of its black population is the South. All African-Americans will recognize echoes of their deeper selves in that backward region. Our language, our rituals, our values — all of this can be traced to one place, the spiritual resonances of which, we are taught to deny. This has not always been the case. Pride is something African-Americans have always had, but what has become since the 1960s our traditional narrative, our myth, if you will, is the canard that we are a rootless people, torn from the womb of Africa and thrust into a harrowing world half-clothed. Our culture was lost, we are told. We exist as mere shadows of our former selves. Yet deep down we know this is not true. It defies common sense and 400 years of history. Whatever culture America has owes an incalculable debt to us. Our double consciousness tells us this — that we are not shabby, ersatz Africans, but rich Americans. When we hear Aretha sing, Coltrane blow, or Martin speak we are stirred in some strange, ineffable way. And what we hear in those voices is essentially a message from home.
The spiritual death of African-American culture occurred for several reasons. First, white terror and poverty, forced millions of blacks away from the South and into harsh northern industrial cities. Urban blacks many of whom were eager to escape the nightmares of the past (slavery) and the present (lynchings), grew ambivalent and eventually contemptuous of the south culturally and politically. Yet black southern culture thrived in Detroit, Harlem, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It thrived, however, in a historical vacuum, amid desperate attempts at self-deception. After all, there was nothing else to build on. This weakness for self-loathing was eventually exploited in full by those who were truly rootless, those who promised an escape from the indignities of the past, vagabonds and vultures. A powerful rhetoric, some would call it madness, took hold of the black American psyche. Not only were we not southerners, we were not even northerners. We were not even Americans. We were a lost people and everything in society only seemed to confirm this. The self-fulfilling prophecy culminated with the drug epidemic in the 1980s. If we did not have a worthwhile culture before crack, we certainly do not now.
Hip-hop music is the ultimate expression of the post 1960s cultural condition of Black America. It is the only authentically “northern” genre of African-American music and as such represents an ahistorical void. Hip-hop grew out of disco and funk, but no one, not even its earliest performers, knew what it was. It was, and still is, a fundamentally provincial form of music with only a haphazard feel for the traditions that preceded it. Its origins remain obscure. This is a function of its birthplace, New York City, which unscrupulously and voraciously appropriates what it wants from all comers. All truly cosmopolitan places are constantly reinventing themselves and have complex, multi-faceted cultural origins. Who’s keeping track of them?
Rapping, however, is a tradition that stretches far back in African-American culture. It comes from toasting, the dozens, the blues, and badman ballads. Rap is rhythmic speaking. Rap music is essentially rhetoric of the self, rhythmic speaking transplanted into pre-established musical forms (the percussive grunting and hollering of James Brown and ditty-bopping lyrics of Chuck Berry — see “Too Much Monkey Business” — are obvious precursors to rap music). A great rapper is really someone who makes powerful rhetorical statements. 2Pac is, to my mind, quite plainly the vanguard of the tradition, a voice so virile, so stirring, so immediate that he transcends the inherent provincialism of the form. Rappers have, in many important ways, replaced political leaders in the African-American community.
Yet rappers, despite their facility with words, are inarticulate politicians. 2Pac’s thug life ideology, with its political pretenses, is admirable to some extent, but mostly an incoherent morass of black nationalism, crude capitalism, and urban nihilism. Not surprisingly, rap music has failed to create a viable narrative for African-Americans in the post Civil Rights era. It is mostly the bilious spillover of the Black Power Movement, that clownish era of empty sloganeering.
Pimp C, bitch, I’m from the South!
Rap’s provincialism, its emphasis on origins and specific locales, has, I think, allowed it to stumble inadvertently upon an important discovery. While one place functions as the epicenter of East Coast hip-hop (and West Coast hip-hop, for that matter), the South has no capital. What we see there in black commercial music is the construction of a remarkably expansive identity. Houston is no less southern than Atlanta or Memphis or New Orleans. Southern rappers bring history and tradition to hip-hop and give it musical credibility. Southerners tend to be far more conscious and proud of their personal histories than other Americans. It also has to do with the fact that in the South African-Americans still receive musical educations in church and in schools. The south boasts the best marching bands and, consequently, the best trained young African-American instrumentalists. These blacks have reinterpreted vernacular traditions through the language of hip-hop and the results are far more interesting than anything coming from the West or up North.
Pimp C, who grew up playing the trumpet and, judging by his tastes, was deeply rooted in the black music of his parents generation, not only brought an unusual level of political consciousness to southern hip-hop but also a profoundly good ear. Pimp C was not simply a student of black pop music; he knew well the music that blacks made to communicate with other blacks. He had an underground sensibility. This is revealed through his constant references to the 70s Cadillac cruising music of Frankie Beverly & Maze. As Bun B pointed out in a recent interview, Pimp C was a funk and jazz enthusiast. He even recruited Leo Nocentelli of The Meters to play guitar on Super Tight and Ridin’ Dirty.
Pimp C’s production technique is attributable to his musical upbringing:
I grew up in a house, you know … my dad was a trumpet player … he cut some records down in L.A. before he moved to Texas and they sent him to that Vietnam war and tried to fuck him off, kinda. When he got back home from that war a lot of his hopes and dreams to be a professional musician got put on the back burner, he had to work and get his family goin but he always surrounded me with music. At an early age I was listening to BB King, what have you. Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, you dig? With the obvious Marvin Gayes and the Motown records. I mean I think everybody that growed up in the 70s and 80s in them households heard them kinda records. I was getting records that normal people might not get to hear, like the deep jazz records and real blues records and then, times he would be actually playing trumpet in my house. I would see that and he would get me instruments, I mean I had a real organ and a real drum set when I was a child; learnin and just playin by ear.
I grew up in one of those households that Pimp C is referring to. Part of what appeals to people like me about UGK is the way in which they reinterpret that musical heritage. My father played jazz trombone and would blast everything from Tom Browne to the Gap Band. He and my mother, who introduced me at a young age to Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, and Pimp C’s beloved Maze, both had large record collections. And then there was the music I heard in church on Sundays. More so than G-Funk, the most popular brand of rap music when I was growing up, and the homegrown sounds of Big Mike, the Geto Boys, Screwed Up Click, and Suave House, UGK made sense and this is the principal value I see in their music today. Pimp C was at the forefront of a new narrative, one in which southern culture — which is to say, traditional African-American culture — formed an important foundation, musically and psychically. Pimp C was one of the first people to proclaim loud and clear that he was southern and did not give two shits what anyone thought about him or his home. Early on he announced his kinship not just with Port Arthur and Houston, but areas throughout the South. He even went so far as to dub — with a straight face, mind you — his records “Country Rap Tunes” as opposed to “hip-hop”. And he was right. Pimp C’s production is a beautiful, abrasive blend of soul, gospel, psychedelic funk, and hardcore rap. Listening to it you suddenly realize that this is the musical coherence rap has struggled to find since it emerged from the cultural wilderness of the North.
Pimp C saw the South as an autonomous region and he wanted more than anything for it to present a unified front to the rest of rap world. He saw this as central to its musical viability, a point he made on songs like “Knockin’ Doors Down”. What he knew was that the South’s biggest asset is its cultural identity, which is stronger than ones you find in rap scenes elsewhere. What he did not know how to articulate is that this is because when we talk about black American culture we are essentially talking about a distinctive southern culture. The focus on the South in rap music represents a rediscovery of the richness of black American culture. Pimp C with his insistence on being unabashedly, scrupulously, and even fiercely southern was a revolutionary. Like many southerners, he had a firm sense of identity, one attached to a history and a place. In death he becomes the prophet of one of the greatest stories no longer told.