Rap in America

One of the more sorrowful mysteries of American culture was recently suggested to me by a friend as a topic for this column. The mystery is, simply put, Why don't white people like rap music?

Of course, the question implies some over-generalized assumptions. These days there is a sizable white audience for rap among the high school and college crowd. But among the palefaced late-twenties to thirty-somethings who comprise the bulk of my, and my friend's, peers and party mates, the most vital and innovative contemporary black music around is still met mostly with willful ignorance and occasional condescension.

There are a number of complicated reasons why rap, unlike so many other forms of black popular music, has thus far failed to jump the color bar. One of them is aesthetic. Rap disdains European musical conventions, even those of Celtic origin which have historically formed the melodic sinew and harmonic muscle of blues-R&B-rock and roll. Rap is entirely about subtleties of rhythm, sonic texture, and attitude, and as such it is probably the most Afro-centric music to originate on this continent in this century. Unlike disco or Michael Jackson, rap doesn't meet white listeners halfway. Instead rap challenges us Caucasians to retrain our ears, and other body parts, to meet its specifications.

Aesthetic difficulty may partly explain why rap has yet to take America's Top 40 by storm. But that is no excuse for the educated, middle-class, alternative-leaning sector of the white audience which usually wears its allegiance to obscure, non-mainstream sounds on its avant-garde sleeve. We're talking here about the neo-folkie, rock audience that religiously follows the musical tourism of Great White Poobahs such as David Byrne and Paul Simon to the farthest reaches of the globe (South Africa, Senegal, Brazil, etc.) and into the deepest recesses of the record store "Import" bin, meanwhile largely ignoring home-grown American Afro-pop.

From generation unto generation, this white liberal-to-radical-to-bohemian audience has always been with us. For 40 years it was perennially in love with the black music of the previous generation. When rock and roll was busy being born, this crowd listened to jazz; when Motown was changing the world, they discovered the blues; while disco ruled, they finally found Memphis soul.

These days this audience opts for black music that is distant in space rather than time. But the arguments are the same: The new or popular stuff is commercial, manipulative, repetitive, and most of all "inauthentic," while the old or obscure stuff is the true cultural expression of a downtrodden people.

This aesthetic has the twin benefits of pre-empting charges of racism while avoiding too much contact with the actual downtrodden, who are rarely so fashionable in life as they are in abstraction. It should be noted that the first white audience for new African-American music (rap included) is always predominantly working-class, precisely because working-class whites are more likely than their collegiate counterparts to rub elbows with real, existing black folks in their daily lives.

BY NOW THE HANDWRITING is on the wall that this "alternative" audience, which has attained demographic identity in the sophisticated wing of Yuppie-dom, is about to lead the culture into yet another folk music revival, with the parameters of folk this time extended to encompass all manner of Third World exotica (African, Middle Eastern, Latino, etc.). And that's OK. As much as I may distrust some of the white impulses behind the new internationalism, I have to admit that it unearths some great music. And I hope the royalties trickle down.

However, the facts are these. Rap is self-evidently the realest, most authentic American folk music of this or any other postwar age. It is a homemade, bottom-up, democratic expression of a community's daily lived experience. But, unfortunately for the rappers, the cultural milieu they illuminate is one that most Americans wish would just go away. Rap is an authentic expression from the black and Hispanic urban youth of the alleged underclass who, frankly, scare the hell out of most white people.

For the most succinct, and fascinating, explication available both of why rap is worthy of serious attention and why it often doesn't get it, I recommend spending a few hours, or days, with the album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy. Public Enemy, being black suburbanites themselves, come to rap more from aesthetic conviction and ideological commitment than from necessity. With the extra perspective this provides, Public Enemy, as the bourgeois, suburban lads in The Rolling Stones once did with rock, proceed to distill all that is aesthetically and politically disturbing in rap style into an essence so purely contrived as to be utterly irresistible.

Public Enemy talks a lot about Louis Farrakhan and uses snippets of his speeches on their album. Farrakhan works better here as an in-the-mix shock tactic than he does in life as a tough-talking but small-minded, anti-semitic, and homophobic demagogue. And I tend to think that shock tactics are more Public Enemy's point than anti-semitism. They use one track, "Party For Your Right to Fight," to deliver a history lesson about the Black Panther Party. It's a public service you're not likely to find elsewhere in our cultural Land of Forgetfulness.