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

Commonweal, June 15, 2001 by Richard Alleva

Rap is the first popular music in the history of popular culture to forgo the pop tune. Oh, rap uses tunes all right, but these "samples" are often fragments of previously recorded hits from jazz, rock, soul, whatever, that are borrowed ("sampled") to form the background of the rapper's rap. Melody dances attendance on the spiel. Therefore, rap--whatever the artistic quality of the individual number--is closer to poetry than to music. It is poetry underpinned by music but, remember, the earliest poetry was always supported by music.

That rap numbers (I hesitate to call them songs) don't lodge themselves--as music--in the memory and, therefore, don't spring unbidden to the lips, is probably a point in their favor for rebellious kids who don't want to share their sound with the world. It is, after all, the huge enclave of youth that has made rap's huge popularity. No enclave, even if it's international, however, can propel entertainment into the sort of intergenerational acceptance that has, up to now at least, allowed popular entertainment eventually to become classic entertainment (Dickens, Italian opera, Chaplin, a lot of rock). Then again, isn't it just a matter of today's kids growing older and carrying rap with them into their adulthood? Isn't this just a case of the "trash" of today becoming the gold of tomorrow?

No. Not as rap now exists. We always forget how much of yesterday's roughhouse entertainment lived down to the low expectations of disapproving oldsters and really did fall by the wayside just as they said it would, even as some other entertainments, equally rambunctious and equally castigated, transcended the initial controversies and became classics. Chaplin lives but not Ben Turpin, perhaps because Ben and his bug-eyed specialty were tiresome to begin with but it took time for the tiresomeness to become evident. The Beatles are now being listened to (with rapture) by my ten-year-old daughter, but she sure isn't grooving to Fabian or Frankie Avalon. Those two boys were plastic dolls and, like most toys, were soon flung on the rubbish heap of pop culture. Rap, a quasi-musical form created not by composers but by disc jockeys like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, may be particularly vulnerable to the inroads of time because so many rap numbers--chaste or obscene, frivolous or political--tend to be formulaic concoctions instead of outpourings from the heart. And verbal concoctions turn to dust faster than melodic ones.

That said, I must now admit that I'm surprisingly sanguine about the future of rap (surprising to myself!) because I now see rap quickly changing, with the desire of its fans for real music beginning to break loose. The simple need to have a song in your head is unquenchable, and kids may just possibly be coming to feel that the in-your-face didactic hectoring of an L.L.Cool J isn't much different from the hectoring of their teachers and parents, even when the rap preachment is done with four-letter words. The huge success of Shaggy's version of the old rock number, "Angel," may be a weather vane. Here, melody returns to the foreground, sharing it with Shaggy's rap, which laces itself about the tune like a vine spreading over a trellis. The melody isn't "sampled" but allowed its full arc, with the rap providing genuine counterpoint and taking on a catchiness all its own. Counterpoint! The backbone of Western music!? In rap!?!?!?!?!?