What is it about hip-hop?

I was watching Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai last night. The scene where the mafia underboss is dancing around to Public Enemy got me to thinkin': what is it about hip-hop that attracts skinny, middle class white boys?

I’ve been listening a lot to the old Ricky Gervais podcasts over the past couple of months. Usually when I come back from work I “enjoy” mindlessly vegetating in front of my laptop while listening to an episode I’ve already heard four or five times because I’m too tired to think about anything else. In fact, when I’m not listening to Ricky Gervais, I’m usually listening to an album I’ve heard 15 times before, so I guess listening to the podcasts is actually slightly fresher than that. Thanks to a lack of money and my job and daily two-hour commute, my finger is so far from the pulse of recent music that I feel like weeping.

I digress.

I’ve been listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast and it occurred to me that Stephen Merchant’s “Hip Hop Hooray” feature (where he is allowed to play a single hip-hop song, called “the worst feature on British radio” by a visiting Jonathan Ross) entirely exemplifies the people I know who like hip-hop, including myself; they are usually tall, underweight, incredibly white and more often than not suffering from bitterness at the world having been niggled by minor bullying throughout their life, manifesting itself in a heightened and rather dry sense of humour, laced with an underlying misanthropy. 

Steve Merchant - straight up gangsta

I can think of several examples of this among my own very limited circle of friends (although admittedly it may simply be the case that I stick with people like myself); while there are clearly going to be a number of exceptions (people I know who are skinny and white but don’t like hip-hop, or people who aren’t and do) there does appear to be a clear pattern there. Furthermore, there are certain absolutes; the hip-hop fans I know are exclusively male and they do seem to be angry about something (although who isn’t?).

So where is the appeal? Why do angry anaemic whiteys listen to so much angry black music? In a way it seems as if, generally speaking (as always), our generation of “alternative” and explicitly angry young people are either deeply entrenched in metal or emo music, both visually and musically, or they dig hip-hop (sometimes, rarely, they are into both). Is it simply the case that the angriest music that can be found that isn’t guitar and wearing-lots-of-black based is hip-hop, regardless of how irrelevant or culturally misplaced this might seem to an outsider? Just what do experiences of drug dealing, white oppression, black ghettoisation and exploitation etc. have to do with a relatively well-off, over-educated, ginger Scottish kid?

Punk was the last great explosion of white anger in the UK. Since then, what have we really had? America has experienced hardcore punk, grunge, riot grrrl, emo, and a much larger share of decent metal bands (I’m think Slayer, mostly), and of course the huge majority of hip-hop, angry or otherwise. Scandinavia and Europe have had the rest of the decent metal. What have we had, objectively speaking? Post punk was fairly angry but too introspective and experimental to be really considered so. Since that we’ve experienced nothing that could really be considered a definitive movement of angry young people, other than throw backs to punk, fairly boring metal bands (Napalm Death being one example to the contrary) or a bastardisation of foreign music scenes, and the yoof have had to look abroad for inspiration. It starts to become less surprising then that people turn to a genre that seems culturally poles apart from our own experience (apart from perhaps in the largely black youth of the largest British cities, London and Birmingham); an irony which is lost on many listeners, and occasionally lost on even the more aware of us.

Does this really matter? Well, I often think about meeting GZA or Chuck D in the street (it’s bound to happen sooner or later) and trying to explain to them why I like their music and why it speaks to me. Would they even want me as a fan? If I tried to explain to them that the irony wasn’t lost on me, wouldn’t this just seem like an insult, a kind of hipster cop out pose, that makes it sound like I enjoy their music as part of an elaborate cultural juxtaposition based joke? Other than that, what do I have? I enjoy it because it’s anti-authoritarian, because it speaks about struggling under oppression; but their idea of oppression and my own are so far apart that the contrast is laughable. Perhaps a combination of the two is the real explanation. Despite the seeming triviality of my own gripes against society, their lyrics are so powerful that they make me feel part of a larger movement against “the man” generally. But this sense of cultural displacement and guilt that I get from listening to hip-hop is certainly interesting.

Chuck D

As I hinted at before, the only people who don't seem to have this problem are London and Birmingham based black kids. Obviously I'm talking about a very specific type of hip-hop here, but it seems strange that, as a genre generally, only a certain type of person has a "legitimate" right to listen to it. This may be the mainstream confusing genre with medium; there's a big difference between Flying Lotus and Eazy E. Even so, I think this is a wider issue of cultural "robbery." I'm sure some people get the same creepy feeling when they spot a white guy sporting a Run DMC or Wu Tang t-shirt in the as I do when I see a white dude with dreads. 

*Shudder*

Heeeeey now

Five years on from Stadium Arcadium, an album I'm told was fairly decent but which was released long after I had grown tired of RHCP's stadium rock antics and pseudo-alternative hippy/heroin chic bullshit, we are presented with "The Adventures of Raindance Maggie", a song so generic that, having just listened to it, I've forgotten what it was like already. Which can't be good. But I do remember the chorus is along the lines of "Heeeeey now."

This one was produced by Rick Rubin (natch), who has a production discography that looks suspiciously like an alternative rock conveyor belt. The cover artwork is by Damien Hirst (Kiedis said of it, in one of his more discerning moments: “It's an image. It's art. Iconic. We didn’t give it its meaning but it's clearly open to interpretation.” The wikipedia page for the album is full of great quotes like this, the sort of things that actors are forced to come out with when they're promoting some shitty cash cow of a movie, like "it was a real pleasure working with Michael Bay, he's a real artist" or whatever):

The promo artwork is by Mr. Brainwash, "protégé" of Banksy, who, if he is real, seems to be a lot like Nathan Barley. It isn't even that good:

So why do I care? Well it strikes me that this album will probably be extremely commercially successful, as most of their albums are, and yet I just heard it being played on 6 Music, a well known home of alternative rock and indie. My point is, really, why does anyone care anymore? Who is this album aimed at? It isn't in any way interesting to anyone other than RHCP obsessives, who will undoubtedly lap it up, and yet I'm sure thousands of other music fans will probably buy it anyway, out of some vague feeling that they might be missing out if they don't, or that it's an important cultural document. It sets a bad example for young people getting in to an underground music scene to put RHCP on the playlist of 6 Music, because it holds RHCP up as, at best, a great band, or, at least, a band who used to be great who are still rocking it and showing how you can be successful and artistically credible in the music industry. They aren't either. 

The people involved seem to be some of the biggest names in music and art; surely that should be reason for excitement. But it just isn't. It isn't "underground" or "street art" to have Banksy's "protégé" go around slapping stickers on bins to promote the album (or more accurately, to tell somehow else how to design the stickers; a conversation which must have consisted of "do a robot and the RHCP symbol", and then have a street team, who work for free, go around slapping them on), and it isn't "avante-garde" or "alternative" to have Damien Hirst to do the cover; these people are now at the very core of the art mainstream. 

Of course it's well documented that the "alternative" music scene of MTV and MTV2 and the like is just another angle for record companies; they are selling this "scene" just like any other. It just strikes me that people should surely be over that by now, that it's time for something new, particularly when RHCP seem to have so blatantly phoned in on this latest "effort". 

Death Becomes Us

What happens to you when you die? I don’t mean where will your soul or spirit fly to, I mean will your body be buried, cremated, dumped on a rubbish tip, set alight in a Norse longboat… what? In Mark Everett’s autobiography, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, he recalls his father’s request that his body be dumped in the rubbish; a stipulation E’s mother did not have the heart to carry out until long after his father’s death (thankfully she threw out his ashes, not his body). In our largely secular Western society, there is no obvious way of dealing with a dead body; while rituals have always surrounded the dead throughout history, in most religions and cultures, how do we now deal with the dead and dying? 

In the past there has always been a script to follow, whether it be a Catholic wake, a Protestant funeral, the preparation of a stone-age barrow filled with the dead persons possessions or a good, old-fashioned Egyptian embalming; the variations are endless. In a society where people have largely lost the belief that death leads to an afterlife or reincarnation, where our bodies are largely destined to become worm food or fertiliser, nobody wants to be reminded that death is an everyday event, largely unimportant to anyone outside the person’s immediate friends and family. Rituals of death are seen as outmoded, outdated or superstitious. Is it hypocritical to have a church service funeral, or a wake, or any kind of death ritual when you believe that your body is simply an empty and used shell once your consciousness has left it? I’ve always liked the idea of being cremated and having my ashes scattered at sea; is this a hopelessly romantic gesture, designed to inflate my dead ego? Or does it help my relatives and loved ones to see me off in style?

The issue isn’t just a lack of religion; it’s a lack of community. The Western world is such a highly populated place to be, and there’s no time to worry about each individual death. The obituary page is seen as the interest of the morbid; nobody else has the time to read about the death of one of the many local butchers, one of the numerous local policemen, etc. Collectively, we only care when one of our favourite celebrities dies; a phenomenon which has nothing to do with the death at all, but which is simply about eulogising over their contribution to our entertainment, and ignoring that they were a recluse for the last five years of their life, living with ill health and largely forgotten. Death is hidden, often in antiseptic hospital wards or behind closed doors. Is this a problem? Do we need death in our lives? My attention was grabbed recently by a Mexico “Death Cult” which is apparently growing in popularity amongst “drug traffickers and criminals.” Of course I don’t think it’s exactly healthy to revere death in such an over the top way; but I certainly think that’s it’s also unhealthy to have death hidden. When someone does have to deal with death the psychological effect might well be extremely damaging, if death has become something that appears in movies and television but never in real life.

It would appear that, perhaps subconsciously, we do have a desire to deal with death and have some manifestation of death in our lives. This appears not only in various visual mediums, such as film and television drama, but also in fashion. While previously only a semi-underground subculture, such as punk or metal, used death imagery in clothing and fashion, it is now a relatively frequent occurrence to come across children, teenagers, young adults and even middle aged people sporting skull and death imagery on t-shirts, bags and jackets. Only today the foster child under my parents care was dressed in a shirt to go to a birthday party; it was only when he took his jumper off that I noticed the skull and crossbones symbol imprinted on the breast. Death has become a cartoon presence in our daily lives, something we are desensitised to; in children’s clothing, it is a shorthand for the “naughtiness” of the child in question; in the clothes of mainstream, “hardworking”, middle class people it shows a mildly banal “alternative” streak to their fashion sensibilities. It’s a fairly common theory that we are desensitised to death in modern society; but does this increasing and almost unconscious wearing of death imagery also show a desire to see and deal with death? 

Can you take the terrifying adventure into unspeakable horror?

I watched this recently;

It was pretty great; it was the first movie adaptation to be based on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, followed later by Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007), the latter starring Will Smith and allegedly being a bit of a stinker. I haven't seen it, but I think I ought to check it out. 

It's a very interesting concept for a movie, and I'd like to read the novel; essentially, without giving too much away, the central character (played by the always most excellent Vincent Price), is the titular last man to survive a now clichéd zombie/vampire apocalypse. He stalks the (un)dead by day, in an interesting mirroring (geddit, mirror?) of what the vampires stereotypically do by night; however, while the vampires are actually shambling oafish halfwits, Vincent Price's character, Dr. Robert Morgan, is an organised and extremely effective killer; making him a "legend" amongst the vampires, as a fearsome and frightening spectre of death in a world where vampirism is the norm. 

The film asks interesting questions about normality and the argument that "might makes right"; is it morally "right" for Robert Morgan to seek out and kill the members of another "race", when that race has annihilated and replaced his own? Is he simply a murderer of other sentient beings, or do humans take precedence if threatened at large, even if it is by creatures stronger and more adapted to survive than them? 

The film was genuinely creepy at points, and Vincent Price was as brilliant as ever; a tad melodramatic, and a scary presence even without the inclusion of vampires. 

In personal news, I didn't get the Columnist position I was gunning for at IdeasTap, and I didn't even get an interview for a job in Waitrose; which is essentially confirmation that my writing sucks and my practical skills are non-existent. I'd like to think that I didn't get the Waitrose job because I'm over-qualified and they didn't think I'd stay very long, but quite honestly I seriously doubt it. It's no good bemoaning the current economic climate either; I reckon I was simply sold a lie when I took on English as a degree subject, and I've pretty much wasted the last five years of my life as far as my career is concerned.

So that's an encouraging thought.

But hey, at least I know a fair bit about how to read books.