Kanye West Late Registration Roc-A-Fella Records and Blackalicious The Craft Anti Records
I’m taking a class on teaching English writing to speakers of other languages and one thing my professor often mentions is “the question of content.” What, exactly, are appropriate subjects for students to write about and how do we decide? Teachers must be careful not to introduce topics that learners from other cultures might not be able to write about due to a lack of cultural knowledge that a native English speaker growing up in the U.S. might have. Then again, maybe it’s necessary to introduce topics about pop culture or the American university system so we can help students acclimate to US society. When it comes to deciding what students should write about, the question of content never goes away, because so many people disagree about it. And so it is with rap music. When the beats are equally hot, lyrical content is what divides the wheat from the chaff for most people. And a slew of words that you might throw out in a free-association jam on the question of Content – conscious, conscientious, conscience– must be considered. The rappers who rhyme about faith, family, community, and the healing power of music are often labeled “conscious” these days, meaning, presumably, that they are in fact more conscientious than their sex-drugs-and-hoes counterparts, that an MC who raps about staying in school and respecting women is listening to his conscience, while someone like Eminem, who seemingly advocates drugs and the murder of family members, is not. OK, so what is conscious hip-hop? Where and how is the line between commercial or ‘bad’ rap and ‘conscious hip-hop’ drawn? New releases from Kanye West and Blackalicious, two artists who might be said to carry the “conscious” mantle (albeit sometimes in different directions) offer compelling and disparate answers.
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Blackalicious is one of the groundbreaking crews in the nebulous collection of artists lumped together under the conscious rubric. Their label, Quannum Projects, was a collective started by Blackalicious members Tim Parker and Xavier Mosley (aka Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel) along with DJ Shadow and writer Jeff Chang in the early 1990s. The trail they blazed for indie hip-hop is now well-worn by collectives and labels like Definitive Jux, Mo’ Wax, Okay Player (the Roots), Rhymesayers, and myriad lesser-known, locally-based crews. In the last five or six years, groups like Jurassic Five, Black Eyed Peas (oh, how I long to corner them in a locked room and play their old records for them—“Remember? ‘Money is a drug and MCs is on it?’ Guys?”), and Blackalicious have all shown that rapping about social issues, economic disparity, and spirituality doesn’t equal obscurity in the pop culture game. Blackalicious is nothing if not single-minded about their desire to incarnate the idea of consciousness, and positive consciousness at that, in their music. The Craft is the third installment of what the group has called their trilogy, each album of which has focused on a separate concept: Nia was “Purpose,” Blazing Arrow “Faith,” and the newest record “Discipline.” Indeed, Blackalicious take their craft seriously, as their thesis-statement title track states that to be an MC is a gift from God, “and for that/I vow to be a vessel.” This might be one of the criticisms of so-called conscious rap; for all its moral superiority, sometimes it’s not as fun as bouncing to the latest nihilistic club track—but Blackalicious proves that this doesn’t have to be the case, adding more party songs into the mix than they previously have: “Powers” is about meeting an ideal woman, “Lotus Flower” featuring George Clinton is a paean to a lover, and “Side to Side” (featuring Lateef and also, notably, Pigeon John, formerly of the Christian hip-hop crew LA Symphony, who just signed with Quannum) tells three tales of dance-floor courtship gone awry. These songs are more about dancing and romancing than they are morality tales (there are plenty of those, though, like “The Fall and Rise of Elliott Brown,” the three-part story of a man who turns his life around in prison), but they maintain the band’s disciplined take on positive values; when confronted by an apparently psychotic and sexually aggressive woman, Gab tells her “Don’t take it personal/But I think you need Jesus.” These tracks are fun, but they aren’t distractions from the message Gab and Xcel are so serious about, namely that music is a divine gift and that it must be used to spread love and positivity. You certainly won’t hear me arguing that point, which is why Blackalicious is one of my favorite hip-hop groups. The musical backdrop of The Craft feels sparser and decidedly more hip-hop-centric than that of Blazing Arrow, which featured guest spots from the Blind Boys of Alabama and Ben Harper. Xcel has honed his beats into tight specimens with popping snares and minimal, jazzy keyboard hooks. The backing tracks on “The Craft” could hardly contrast more with the lush orchestral sounds that John Brion and Kanye West created on West’s latest album, Late Registration.
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While Blackalicious maintains indie “cred” while hovering on the edge of mainstream success, Kanye West is currently at the absolute apex of the rap game. He is its de facto spokesman, appearing on the cover of Time Magazine and denouncing the president on national television (“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”). At first glance, West may not fit into the “conscious” box, since he’s a star and does occasionally rap about fancy cars and his own sexual promiscuity. But he is undoubtedly a self-conscious rapper, living out the tension between “higher” values of justice and faith and the tempting, bourgeois lifestyle of an MC with the money to do whatever he wants (“I’m trying to write my wrongs/…but these same wrongs helped me write this song,” he raps on “Testify”). One of the most intriguing tracks on Late Registration is “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” which as a single was not overly concerned with the subject mentioned in its title. On the album, the song is presented with new lyrics, and some of the most damning words spoken to a wealth-obsessed culture by West himself: he accuses people, including himself, of supporting torture and dismemberment of African children by buying diamonds. Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker called West the first rapper to bring attention to this issue, but he wasn’t exactly right; the British Ms. Dynamite did tread this ground lightly in her single “It Takes More,” when she asked “Tell me/how many Africans died/for the Baguettes on your Rolex?” West’s song is more significant, though, given his current status in the pecking order. He devotes an entire verse to this subject rarely mentioned outside Amnesty International circles. “Crack Music,” another standout track, so deftly tiptoes between the “conscious” and the mainstream spheres, as West himself often does. Horns and a gospel chorus form the musical backdrop of a song peppered with drug references and more “N” words than you can shake a stick at. Rap’s flavor-of-last-week, The Game, speaks (hardly raps—preaches, maybe) some of the album’s most chilling lyrics over the song’s quiet coda:
…What we gave back was crack music, and now we ooze it though the nooks and crannies, so our mommas ain’t gotta be their cooks and nannies, and we gonna repo everything they ever took from Granny. Now that former slaves trade hooks for Grammies, this dark diction has become America’s addiction. Those who ain’t even Black use it. We gonna keep baggin’ up this here crack music.
Make of these lyrics what you will. They seem to speak to an odd disparity on our culture that is too complex to treat here: namely, the apotheosis of rap music in American popular culture that has yet to be accompanied by an equal willingness to even discuss racism on a practical level. Elsewhere, the song drops some devastating one-liners (“It’s like we got Merrill Lynched”), but it’s easy to listen to “Crack Music” as just a dope track with a catchy “na na na” hook. This could be an argument against the “consciousness” of Late Registration, since social and spiritual messages rub up against “fun” and/or nihilistic tracks like “Drive Slow,” about cruising for “hoes” and smoking weed. Then again, West also submits a tribute to his mother and a touching portrait of his family as they face the illness of his Grandmother—and even these personal songs include political messages (“Magic Johnson got a cure for AIDS/and the broke motherf—ers passed away?”). You simply can’t dismiss West as an amoral MC, even though his “conscious” lyrics are sometimes buried in a haystack of mainstream rap posturing.
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One important difference between these two records is that, while West’s is musically more varied and interesting, it is also more weighed down by the tension of being both self-deprecating and excessively self-centered. Blackalicious are single-minded and not, they make clear, messing around—their music, they say, is for “supreme people,” and they “vibrate at higher frequencies.” And although he is talented, it seems all West really wants to do now that he can afford it is mess around. I understand that bragging is an essential part of the rapper’s art, with its roots in battle MCing and other oral traditions, and The Craft is not devoid of such posturing (“MCs are puppets/me, I’m Jim Henson,” brags Gab in one of his droller moods). But I am less enthusiastic about spending seventy minutes of my life listening to Kanye West spit about how awesome Kanye West and his colleagues are, no matter how good his beats and Brion’s string arrangements sound. The same shtick that made West such a force to be reckoned with when he was a relative nobody, his insistence on his divine right to be a successful rapper, were endearing. Now that he’s on the cover of Time, it’s getting a little boring. There are so many interesting questions about the proliferation of rap – and I do mean rap exclusively, as one element of hip-hop that has been isolated from its original context as part of a culture – and although it’s been marginalized for too long by so many—parents, teachers, the Church—it’s never too late to start engaging with rap. Ten years ago, I doubt I’d have imagined this would ever be the case, but lately rap is the only genre which consistently moves me, and the same is true of many serious music nerds and casually mp3-downloading kids alike. I still love melodic rock and pop music, which I grew up listening to and which comprises most of my record collection. But there is something about the sheer immediacy, honesty, and personality of rap that grabs me, grabs us, in a way that rock music cannot. Blackalicious and Kanye West have answered the question of content in their own ways, the former with discipline and purpose, the latter with equal parts self-questioning and self-esteem. They are both making vital art that speaks to a certain concern for social, economic, and racial justice; for sincere faith and devotion to God, and for consciousness, which after all goes back to a Latin word meaning “to know.” And that’s why I listen to rap – to hear someone testify to the truth as best they can.