A middle-aged white rock ‘n’ roller struggles to hear the music in St. Louis hip-hop
By Chris King
Photograph by Wiley Price
Hip-hop is not music, it’s noise—violent ranting over mechanized sounds stolen from other sources—and it contributes to the degradation of youth.
I would guess that you have heard this opinion. Perhaps you have voiced it. I certainly did, many times, until I landed a job working for a black newspaper, the St. Louis American.
I came into the job knowing, as does anyone who has drawn a breath in this city in the last five years, that St. Louis has a significant hip-hop scene. In fact, I had a privileged position from which to watch this scene long before I reported on it, because one of my best friends in town, Adam Long, is a hip-hop recording engineer.
And when the St. Lunatics, Nelly’s original group, recently had trouble finding a master of their first recording, Adam—a redheaded Anglophile from Minneapolis with a thirst for astronomy—was able to hand them his old backup copy.
As much as I respected Adam, though, I always turned a curt sneer to his many rap mixes he had played me over the years. “This is not music,” I would say, “it’s noise—violent ranting over mechanized sounds.”
There is nothing like a paycheck to make a person reconsider his boundaries. As the new editorial director of a black newspaper that covers a city with an international hip-hop star, I knew I had to deal, finally, with this noise.
I was surprised to find it highly musical. I found much to hum in the endless avalanche of mixes Adam dumped on me.
I remember formulating my new sense of this music while arguing with an old friend, Cliff Froehlich, arts and entertainment editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the first man who ever paid me to write.
“Hip-hop is not music,” Cliff said, more or less. “It’s noise—violent ranting over mechanized sounds.”
I objected on the grounds that every generation says this about the next form of music coming up.
“Yeah, but it’s the way rap is put together,” Cliff continued. “One group of people makes ‘the beat,’ ‘the track,’ and then someone else comes along and raps over it. It’s so mechanical.”
It struck me that this is just a new version of the old music/words split, no different, say, than Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Only the terminology differs, because in the hip-hop world, I was learning, the person who composes the music—the track, the beat—is called a producer rather than a co-writer.
My conversation with Cliff went elsewhere, but I can tell you what he would have said next, because I had said it so many times myself: “But the ‘producers’ in rap don’t even play real instruments!”
In fact, I had learned, many do, if by “real instruments” we mean the ones rock musicians play. My new friend Orlando “PrettyBoy” Watson is one of many local producers who work with live musicians on most of their tracks.
And what of the producers who work mostly from other sources, using “samples” of the recordings made by others?
As a songwriter myself, I knew very well that composition is the art of the collage, whether one is in control of that process or not. We learn this, painfully, by showing a new song to a bandmate, who then throws it back with the tiniest changes, and suddenly it’s a song by the Beatles.
In refreshing the work of others, one snippet and innovation at a time, the hip-hop producer commits consciously the crime of which all songwriters are guilty.
Crime. There, I said it. What of the degraded criminal element in hip-hop? What do I have to say to my old self about that?
First, that no rock music fan can bemoan this without hypocrisy. Sex, violence and drugs went very nicely with rock ’n’ roll long before hip-hop came along. The gangsta rapper only perfected what Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger (and the bluesmen before them) began.
By now, just one year removed from rank ignorance, I have watched many hip-hop artists at work. Their attention to craft and detail is typical of the artist, not the thug, even when they are costumed like thugs and composing verses defined by a thug ethos. I have seen Chingy rewrite the same verse on his BlackBerry, over and over again. I have seen the young men of the All Stars rip apart pieces of paper with abandoned verses like any frustrated writer.
As Pierre and Chip of the local hip-hop duo 1Dime once said to me, “We’re reporters.”
They write what they know, which is, of course, what every writing instructor on earth will wake up tomorrow and tell his pupils to do. Trouble is what most hip-hop wordsmiths know, and trouble is what they tell, using the popular music of their cultural context. It’s art, not noise.
Chris King is editorial director of the St. Louis American and plays in the band Three Fried Men.
