Tonight I am taking part in a debate about the morality of hip-hop, billed as the first of its kind. The case against the genre, that it has recently "gone to the bad" will be put by Jason Whitlock, a Fox sports commentator. And, yes, it's relevant, he's a (youngish) African American. Whitlock's angry j'accuse is, essentially that hip-hop began as party and club music "that once gave us great joy and/or offered us inspiration". Now it's degenerated into celebration of what he calls "prison culture". He names names: "Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg have perverted the American dream for black youth."
As Whitlock sees it, hip-hop, in its recent commodified form, (designed to make money for, overwhelmingly, white entrepreneurs) renders acceptable the wholly unacceptable. Namely that African Americans are often more likely to get their higher education in jails than in college. And, as Tupac Shakur once put it, "I see no changes" – even with a black president.
By glamorising prison and violence the new hip-hop, Whitlock argues, makes incarceration a rite of passage into true black manhood. It's clear that he's is not in the puritan ("bluenose") tradition of American censorship. Nor is he some Aunt Jemima who just doesn't get it. Whitlock declares himself a one-time lover of the music and evidently values those early (let's call them "classic") rap songs which are, typically, laments, not glorifications, of the destiny of young black males. One of the founding texts of rap, Grandmaster Flash's The Message, for instance, glamorises nothing. It's a bitter protest song – as potent as Billie Holiday's protest against lynching in Strange Fruit:
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care
I can't take the smell, I can't take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far
Cause a man with a tow-truck repossessed my car
It's true that some early rap artists and their entourages liked to pose as gangsters and indulged in some very amateurish and lethal gun play in the 1990s. But as the witty Ice T, who raised the ire of Charlton Heston with Cop Killer, explained he (Ice-T) was no more a cop killer than he (Heston) was Moses. It's art, you fool. And the fact that young African Americans shoot each other is a social problem – not a by-product of any music.
In his seminal study of blues and jazz, Blues People, Leroi Jones (later self-renamed Amiri Baraka) argues that African Americans, during slavery a culturally deprived and oppressed community, made music from its most primitive constituents: the voice, the drum and whatever instrumentation they could fabricate or scrounge. Blues (of which rap is a direct descendant) diversified in New Orleans instrumentally thanks to the vast number of brass and wood instruments, and side drums, left over from the civil war. Had that catastrophe never afflicted the south, Louis Armstrong might well have gained fame as a virtuoso blues singer plucking away on a cigar-box banjo.
Hip-hop features rap with cheap, readily available and easily mastered electronic systems for its musical accompaniment. Its core, however, remains the archetypal drum and pre-eminently the voice – "slanging" and "rhyming" and "flow". In jazz you can have an "instrumental", with no vocals. It is a contradiction in terms where rap is concerned. Words are what it is.
And those words (I would particularly point to those composed – often spontaneously) by Shakur, Ice Cube, and Snoop Dogg – can legitimately take their place in what we regard as poetry, not music. The antics of the some of the performers may disgust us (but no more than, say, Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson) but it's a voice, and words, that should be listened to before easy conclusions are drawn.
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