When some musical genre is disparaged, it is often said “this is not music.” But if that sounds, has tempo and sense, the statement becomes a bit rhetorical. Surely, the same was said of Beethoven or of rock and roll. As the quality of a certain phenomenon is denied or criticized, otherness is also indicated, named, constructed and identified.
Rap is born from the exercise of DJing. And it has a point in common with the Jamaican culture of the sound system. Thanks to the forces of the universe, Jamaicans had this conception that music was shared in the neighborhood; custom that spread throughout the world. The pre DJ was called SELEKTA (King Tuby himself was one of them), and his job was to play records, so that people would improvise with phrases on the rhythmic and melodic lines.
But the momentum of rap doesn’t stop there. It is also associated with the figure of the MC (Master of Ceremony), who achieves linguistic juggling full of consonances and metric breaks. Rappers are said to be poets and their sense of language is praised. This is undoubtedly the gateway to understanding.
It says like this rhyme and beat
the Jedi versus the Sith
Symphony sin fin
with a knife and your throat
I would learn to play the violin
search for the word for me,
you wanting to be happy
with Will Smith method
masks out of here
this is typing and speed, no more,
I know that I am my own Judas
I exist because I have doubts
I follow the trail of the buddhas
I live fast lives
and too short
if you rule your affairs,
the rest does not matter
everything heals, nothing roasts,
the rhythm moves
Rapiphero – Noiseferatu
However, there is something that ran its course in rap without much praise: the art of the beat. Take a song and fragment it inside an AKAI MPC, to generate a piece that goes further (yes, in music, anything goes). The most notable example is J Dilla, a beat-maker from another galaxy, who spent only thirty-two years on planet earth. Born in Detroit, Michigan, this producer developed the beat to such an extent that it is enough to listen to his instrumental tracks to realize what it is about and what its aesthetic implications are. In fact, some became a genre in themselves (Lo fi Chill Beats):
The development of the beat in rap is such a virtuous mixture, that it is comparable from its ethics and technique to the moment when the filmmakers realized that the parallel montage exponentially increased the narrative possibilities of a story (with Griffith in “The birth of a nation ”(1915)). It also has a correlation with the artistic break that implies taking something already created, marking it as a work of art and, thus, reinterpreting it (Duchamp, Andy Warhol).
This movement permeated all kinds of culture. The samples of the beats that were initially taken from soul and r & b, went around the world. Suddenly, even the last musical corner could be a sample and build an authentic figure with a message that generally refers to close, social and experiential things. It’s hard to find any social struggle or movement that doesn’t have your rap vision. There is something that sounds and it does not matter if they call it music or not.
If you want to hear more about Poems to rap (and listen to these complete poems), do not miss the chapter number 15 of the third season of Poet’s Whiff.
Find here the previous column of Poet whiff in Surf Pajamas: Poems to be in Pajamas: How to rob a bank
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Cover image: Chase Fade / Unsplash
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