THE RAP ON 'RAP' : Yo, where's the melody? - place of rap music in popular culture

Commonweal, June 15, 2001 by Richard Alleva

In his article, "Yo Comma Dog" (New Yorker, March 12), about the illegal gun possession trial of Sean "Puffy" Combs, Adam Gopnik makes a statement that is both indelibly phrased and indisputably true: "Hip-hop remains the pig in the python of American culture--the indisputably new thing that refuses to get digested." But in speculating about why this is so, Gopnick can only advance a theory that he himself finds inadequate: "Rap and its artists just can't get a break from the watchdogs of the white middle classes: the cops and the critics both take them too literally." Gopnik rightly dismisses this idea, because the police can't help paying attention to "guns going off in people's faces." As for the critics, "highbrow resistance to rap long ago crumbled--the Times is much kinder to Eminem than it ever was to Billy Joel."

But if it's not a matter of irrational cops or finger-wagging critics, why don't the python's digestive juices work? Why is the pig still protruding?

Is it because of the hoodlum lifestyles of the rappers? Though only the hard-core gangsta rappers get into the big, homicidal messes, it's hard not to be leery of a subculture in which a West Coast-East Coast feud produces the dead bodies of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (aka Notorious B.I.G.). But are the other branches of show business even relatively pristine? Sport has its O.J. and numerous football and basketball stars taking dope and beating up girlfriends. As for actors and film directors...let's see, where do I begin...or end? Roman Polanski, River Phoenix, Gig Young, Michael Jackson, John Belushi, and now (perhaps) Robert Blake, among many others, have contributed to a show-biz rogues' gallery. Yet neither the world of sport nor the products of Hollywood constitute an "indigestible lump" in our culture. No, we'll have to look elsewhere than in police files to discover why an entire entertainment genre remains suspect.

Is it the sheer obscenity of rap lyrics? Again, we are mostly talking about gangsta rap, with its ethos of urban despair, greed, misogyny, and vengefulness. Gangsta obscenity certainly prevents it from being piped into nice restaurants and business-building elevators and, to that extent, does quarantine itself from the middle class. But do cuss words and depicted bloodbaths keep the action-film genre from being absorbed by the general filmgoing audience? And, since a lot of non-gangsta rap lyrics are surprisingly benign, why are all rappers still kept at a certain distance from the mainstream audience despite enormous popularity and financial success?

Is it because rap is so firmly embedded in black culture while American culture, on the whole, is white, middle-class in its orientation? But is the first half of that statement still true? The most reviled (as well as one of the most successful) of rappers is Eminem, the avatar of strictly white trailer-trash culture. Furthermore, white middle-class boys in their teens are the main consumers of rap. But, given that fact, how strange it is that more movies and television ads don't feature rap on their soundtracks. In the 1950s, the Tin Pan Alley style of songs sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Patty Paige was used in any ad that needed music, and in the 1960s through the 1990s, rock was the sound of choice. Rap has made certain inroads in advertising and onto movie soundtracks by now, of course, but it by no means achieves the ubiquity that rock and Tin Pan Alley used to enjoy. Maybe the reason for rap's ambiguous place in our culture--wildly successful yet definitely suspect--can be found in facts so obvious, so close to the surface of things, that we ignore them because of their very obviousness.

What is the most striking thing about popular culture? Its inescapability. It invades our lives even when we want to keep it out. I never watched the TV show "Welcome Back, Kotter" but couldn't escape its characters, the "sweathogs," because their faces were printed on the lunch boxes held by the little kids who shared a bus with me every morning as I went to teach drama classes in downtown Washington, D.C. Similarly, I didn't see Star Wars when it first came out but, within three months of its release, I knew the names of all the main characters, their relationships and motivations, and the overall plot. How did I come by this knowledge? I'm not sure, but I did.

Movie characters and sequences don't stay on the big screen. "Seinfeld" wisecracks were repeated at workplaces the morning after each episode. Comic strip characters don't remain within their panels but become thirty feet high on billboards and one inch small on postage stamps. Rock 'n' roll songs that were played on jukeboxes in the 1950s sold cars on TV advertisements in the 1980s and 1990s. If high culture is a quiet place you go to, pop culture is the air you breathe and the microscopic insects in that air that dig under your skin.

Now, what is the single feature of pop music that launches it, unbidden, into your unconscious? The tune. You are walking down the street and suddenly find yourself humming or whistling a tune. You don't decide to do this, it happens to you. Melody isn't necessarily an indispensable feature of all music, for no one whistles a tune from La Mer or Pierrot Lunaire, and currents and countercurrents of rhythm and tempo that are the driving forces of jazz. But, as far as pop music goes, the unforgettable tune (whether you want to forget it or not) is the hypodermic needle that injects the song into your consciousness.