what the f*ck happened to popular black music?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

Doesn't that mean there's good smooth jazz?

There are some Smooth Jazz albums that fit rather better into the tradition of Soul Jazz than others. Try Urban Knights for that - of course, Ramsey Lewis does make a dfference. In general, Smooth Jazz suffers from exactly the same defects as Smooth Soul - some talented musicians and singers, but not much soul, not much conviction, no real story to tell. They probably wouldn't be ALLOWED by their labels to tell their story anyway.

MG

[Epithet]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

Doesn't that mean there's good smooth jazz?

There are some Smooth Jazz albums that fit rather better into the tradition of Soul Jazz than others. Try Urban Knights for that - of course, Ramsey Lewis does make a dfference. In general, Smooth Jazz suffers from exactly the same defects as Smooth Soul - some talented musicians and singers, but not much soul, not much conviction, no real story to tell. They probably wouldn't be ALLOWED by their labels to tell their story anyway.

MG

Well, it was a rhetorical question intended to show that saying that particular categories of music have good stuff just hides the aesthetic judgement in the choice of category. (With reference to AllenLowe's example: if he doesn't think any smooth jazz is good the argument now hinges on the placing of smooth jazz in the jazz category.)

[Epithet]

There are some Smooth Jazz albums that fit rather better into the tradition of Soul Jazz than others. Try Urban Knights for that - of course, Ramsey Lewis does make a dfference. In general, Smooth Jazz suffers from exactly the same defects as Smooth Soul - some talented musicians and singers, but not much soul, not much conviction, no real story to tell. They probably wouldn't be ALLOWED by their labels to tell their story anyway.

Plus, these labels are so unfixed. I had a guy write me last night and tell me how much he liked the "smooth jazz" that I was playing and that the guitar was really lovely - I was playing Wes.

Must've been Bumpin'.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

There are some Smooth Jazz albums that fit rather better into the tradition of Soul Jazz than others. Try Urban Knights for that - of course, Ramsey Lewis does make a dfference. In general, Smooth Jazz suffers from exactly the same defects as Smooth Soul - some talented musicians and singers, but not much soul, not much conviction, no real story to tell. They probably wouldn't be ALLOWED by their labels to tell their story anyway.

Plus, these labels are so unfixed. I had a guy write me last night and tell me how much he liked the "smooth jazz" that I was playing and that the guitar was really lovely - I was playing Wes.

Wes was THE pioneer of Smooth Jazz; 10 years before it happened.

MG

[montg]

Last, but not least, it's time to address the musical quality of this bullshit, or more accurately, the lack of it. Way back when, when I first started studying music I was told that music had to consist of three elements: melody, harmony and rhythm. Rap music (an oxymoron similar to “military intelligence “or “jumbo shrimpâ€) has basically discarded the first two elements and is left with nothing but rhythm.

This is where he lost me.

Guy

Actually, this is the part that makes the most sense to me. I'm not saying melody and harmony are absent from rap (I'm not familiar enough with the genre to catch the nuances, if they're there)--but, all I hear in rap is headache-inducing rhythm. Hard for me to find anything spiritual or transcendent & those are the qualities I'm looking for. OTOH I hear nothing but spirit when I hear Same Cooke. Or Marvin Gaye etc.

Of course, as Martin Williams once said, when people hear jazz, they ask "where's the melody?".

Edited April 8, 2006 by montg

[WD45]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

This is spot on.

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months? We see the same shit every time. To expect another Marvin Gaye is like waiting for the next Bird. It ain't gonna happen. Culture evolves, as does the musical continuum.

Remember Lincoln Logs? Man they don't make toys like they used to...

[JSngry]

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months?

Because things keep changing more and more and we're freaking out that they ain't never gonna be like they used to?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months?

Because things keep changing more and more and we're freaking out that they ain't never gonna be like they used to?

Why? I don't think you are. I know I'm not. Why do some people?

MG

[montg]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

This is spot on.

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months? We see the same shit every time. To expect another Marvin Gaye is like waiting for the next Bird. It ain't gonna happen. Culture evolves, as does the musical continuum.

Remember Lincoln Logs? Man they don't make toys like they used to...

Culture evolves, but that doesn't mean it progresses. I'm not pining for the past, but I'm sure not gonna say that 21st century America, from a cultural standpoint, has progressed from where it was 30 years ago. I'm hoping for a way forward.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

This is spot on.

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months? We see the same shit every time. To expect another Marvin Gaye is like waiting for the next Bird. It ain't gonna happen. Culture evolves, as does the musical continuum.

Remember Lincoln Logs? Man they don't make toys like they used to...

Culture evolves, but that doesn't mean it progresses. I'm not pining for the past, but I'm sure not gonna say that 21st century America, from a cultural standpoint, has progressed from where it was 30 years ago. I'm hoping for a way forward.

Cultures don't progress; they change. There's no way anyone can say that any culture is the result of more progress than any other culture.

MG

[Neal Pomea]

While I was out, I decided that KD Jr is really taking a very parochial view of black music. If he were to look into the different popular musics of Africa, he'd find everything he thinks is lacking in America; right up in his face. America has no God-given right to be the cutting edge of black music, simply because it was for eighty years or so.

MG

This is why I say I didn't understand the premise of Drew's article.

[Kreilly]

I do tend to think that people who complain about how bad a particular category of music is just aren't finding the good stuff - it's like listening to a smooth jazz station and than complaining that there's no more good jazz - you just have to know where to look for it, and it's not always easy to find, especially if you're an outsider to the kind of people who make that music -

This is spot on.

Why is it that we hash this whole topic over every few months? We see the same shit every time. To expect another Marvin Gaye is like waiting for the next Bird. It ain't gonna happen. Culture evolves, as does the musical continuum.

Remember Lincoln Logs? Man they don't make toys like they used to...

Culture evolves, but that doesn't mean it progresses. I'm not pining for the past, but I'm sure not gonna say that 21st century America, from a cultural standpoint, has progressed from where it was 30 years ago. I'm hoping for a way forward.

Cultures don't progress; they change. There's no way anyone can say that any culture is the result of more progress than any other culture.

MG

I could not agree more.

[AllenLowe]

I don't think I made my point clearly - I wasn't talking about smooth jazz, per se - I was only pointing out that if you complain about an entire form of music while only listening to one segment of it, you're being myopic and betraying an unwareness of the big picture - it's like people who complain about current-day rock - there's a guy on my local FM station who plays incredibly intersting indie-rock groups that I would never encounter outside of that show.So it's there for the finding, but part of the problem is that the mass media have become more and more conglomerated - on the other hand, things like the interenet (and this group) are great antidotes -

Edited April 8, 2006 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

I wonder what an article with the same title written in 1976 by Kenny Drew Sr. would have read like?

[Chuck Nessa]

Don't think he'd have noticed or cared enough to write about it. Used to get frequent letters and postcards from Kenny and he was all "peace, love, beauty and joy".

[Alexander]

There's always been good and bad in pop music, black or white. There's a lot of good black pop music out there now.

Erykah Badu to start with. Listening to "World wide underground" for the first time, I got the same feeling as the first time I liistened to Ornette Coleperson's "Free jazz" - hearing a music that was so blindingly creative, yet firmly entrenched in the culture it represented, and with an incredible groove to it.

Plenty of other neo-Soul singers around who are every bit as good as the soul singers of the '60s - Mary J Blige; Angie Stone; Alicia Keys (when she's on it); Belita Woods, who sings two great cuts on George Clinton's "How late do UF2BB4UR absent".

Wyclef Jean; Public Enemy; The Last Poets; KRS1; Gil Scott-Heron represent a political thread in Rap that can't be disregarded and lumped into an anti-social bag.

And there have always been plenty of songs about sex and violence. Try Wynonie "Mr Blues" Harris or Dinah Washington. Like many in the past, many of the modern ones include a strong dose of self parody - Redman's multiple versions of Johnny "Guitar" Watson's "Superman lover" are hilarious; as are many of Busta Rhymes' things.

I think black popular music is just as good now, and just as bad, and just as BAAAD, as it's ever been. I love it!

MG

To this I'd add Jill Scott and M'Chell N'dgecello, two freakin' WONDERFUL contemporary black singers. Before her talent ate her brain, I'd add Lauren Hill (she was amazing with the Fugees and her first solo disc is wonderful too). The Roots are, as I've said before, one of the best bands around, full-stop. They are every bit as musical as they are rhythmic. ?uestlove knows his shit. Common is great too. Then there's Cody ChestNUTT...Mos Def...Roy Hargrove's RH Factor...

Anyone who complains about contemporary black music/hip hop is basically not LISTENING to it...

Edited April 8, 2006 by Alexander

[JSngry]

Anyone who complains about contemporary black music/hip hop is basically not LISTENING to it...

Or, at the very least, only a part of it.

[Christiern]

I agree that we cannot simply blame it all on rap. Rap represented an interesting turn in pop music, and some of it is, IMO, very good. Sad to say, most of it is pure crap, and there is so much of this crap because we have decision-makers at the top who are, basically, business people. You have people like Clive Davis--to take this back to a pivotal period--who came to the music business by way of an expertise that had nothing to do with music. In my Columbia days, Clive was very good to me, he was fair and above board, but he did not know diddly about the music--he clapped on the wrong beat and based his musical opinions on the ears of others, etc. But he rose to power and artists saw in him someone who could pave the way for them, so he became a beloved executive. He, in turn, loved the attention he got from artists and, hence, from the press.

I mention Clive, because he is someone whose rise I personally observed--there are many Clives and many big corporations running this business. They often care little for the music, because it's all about that bottom line and the PR. Look at Wynton, he is a good sample of what happens when non-musical factors determine artistic judgement. I bring up Wynton, because here--again--is someone whose image I saw being molded by PR and furthered by people with twisted priorities. Wynton got a good start with Blakey and I, for one, saw him as a strong contender for future greatness--it didn't happen, because the Madison Avenue mindset took over. Instead of leading to a shining star on the jazz firmament (which, I think, could have happened), it brought us Dizzy Gillespie's Coca Cola™ club at a music complex that best can be described as a tourist trap.

If Wynton were the only drop of water in this soup, there would not be a problem. He, at least, has talent and there are times when it still surfaces, albeit briefly (let's put aside his personality--which, BTW, was also affected by the Columbia-generated makeover). The question posed by Kenny Drew, Jr. was: "What happened to black popular music?" Yes, the knee-jerk answer is "rap," but the proliferation of that style is only a symptom of a much deeper problem. I think most of us can agree that it American pop music has been seriously diluted (think of any recent Grammy telecast), but we should not blame the non-singers who painful vocal graffiti assaults our ears or the self-named composers who wouldn't recognize a melody if they could hear it--we should, instead, point a finger at the accountants who encourage mediocrity (possibly because they don't recognize it), and at the tin-eared press (ever in need of advertising revenue) that blissfully believes press releases. There was a recent time when "bad" was good, but now "bad" is really

bad

and the ring of the cash register is to the industry's corporate ears the only true music. That is the crux of the problem, as I see it.

Let's face it, were it not for re-issues, there would be very little of substance with which to fill the CD bins. Reissues don't bring in tons of money but, accumulatively, they help to finance performances that cannot stand on their own and they give record companies a semblance of being more than a Twinkie factory. Oh, yes, the crap that hits the charts also generates big bucks before it takes a quick path to oblivion (future reissue producer will have a hard time, I suspect)--think of all the weak performances you have heard on SNL and the daily nighttime shows, people you never heard of before and are not likely to hear again. Think also of the enthusiastic whoops and hollers these performers generate from the audience. That brings us to another important factor: the dumbing down of music fans.

Here we can put much blame on the corporate-operated media, not least of all the payola paying, playlist dependent radio stations that dot the country, and the satellite hubs that feed their audio grub to the ears of millions. Madison Avenue proved long ago that excessive repetition can be like a drug, and what is Madison Avenue if not a corporate culture (vulture?). Young audiences are constantly being fed inferior music and told that it is "cool." They are eating it up just as readily as they buy into brand name sneakers and clothes--ah, we're back to Mad Ave, aren't we?

People in the record industry like to tell us how music that feeds the intellect doesn't sell. Well, have they tried to market it? No. Just as Wal-mart and Home Depot is killing off the mom and pop stores, so the music business conglomerates have all but eliminated the local disc jockey who played that great music and loved to listen with you. Gone, too, is the little record store where the man behind the counter knew what you liked and often shared your love for it. And let us not forget the small, independent record label whose owner collected records, just as you did, who recorded the music as a labor of love--hey, these are the guys to whom we owe most of the good stuff that re-emerges with every small advance in audio reproduction technology.

So, all this ramble to say what I think: when it comes to the current pop famine, we should not put the blame on those who create the crap as much as we should put it on those who create the atmosphere in which it thrives.

I am not asking for the return of the "good old days," but I wish we had maintained the level of taste that once almost routinely produced enduring music, and that encouragement of artistic development had not been stifled by corporate and individual greed (as well as the RIAA).

This is too long and rambling for me to re-read it, so I hope it ended up making a modicum of sense.

[jon abbey]

rap has been far more creatively alive over the last 25 years than jazz. worry about your own house, Mr. Drew.

[Chuck Nessa]

rap has been far more creatively alive over the last 25 years than jazz. worry about your own house, Mr. Drew.

[JSngry]

rap has been far more creatively alive over the last 25 years than jazz. worry about your own house, Mr. Drew.

I'll see that and raise it a

[ghost of miles]

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

[Late]

I wonder how many 18-20 year-olds Mr. Drew associates with. After having spent the last four months (8-12 hours a day) with this age group — culturally diverse, and seemingly fans of the "rap" that's being bemoaned in the article/essay — I'd have to say that they have a lot more awareness off what's going on culturally than they're often given credit for. (Even if they do get plenty excited about fake I.D.'s and who "hooked up" with whom.)

[JSngry]

I feel some of Drew Jr.'s pain, and I'm not willing to write off all of his screed to simple "time is passing me by" fogeyism. His anger, I think, is motivated more by what crack & cocaine have done to many African-American communities in the past 20 years. (Hasn't had a happy impact in a lot of white communities either.) That anger leads him to focus primarily on gangsta rap, inducing a blindness to the many interesting things going on across the broad spectrum of music these days. In any case, the social/political/economic changes that have gone down in the past 25 years aren't gonna be solved by Mr. Drew Jr. or anybody else soon... if in any of our lifetimes. So I sympathize with his despair; but I'm not betting on his community-outrage solution, except as a small, small part of the answer.

Well, yeah, I feel his pain too. But the specific music he's dogging on is a syptom, not the cause, and I can't help but feel that he's not "getting" the fundamental musical changes (perceptual changes, really) that rap/hip-hop (and lots of other musics) were foreshadowing/reflecting long before the gangsta element came to the fore.

Like I said earlier, bemoan the moral decline of society all you want. I'll be there with you (withihnn reason and up to a point). But frame it as such and don't come out with all this "this ain't what I was taught that music was in school" bullshit. You can't teach nuthin in school until it's already happened, so if what's happening right now ain't what you taught in school, best that you draw upon a principle that you should have been taught in school but probably weren't - namely, that today is tomorrow's history - and take it from there, not get all wigged out that the neat road map that you thought was going to unfold suddenly just got blown out the window.

Look - I'm old enough (two can play this game!) to remember the early days of rap's first commercial peep throught the cracks. The shit was fun (and it swung like mofo), and the social commentary (when it existed) was delivered with a sense of righteousness. I also well remember the intrigue I felt by the musical methods being used - the sampling, the sequencing, the layering, the collages, all that stuff. This was a new way of looking at and feeling time and one's relationship to it, and it was (and still is, I think) an inevitable perceptual shift in the wake of both the increased power, scope, and omnipresence of electronic communications and digital "reality", where anything can be (or give the illusiona of being) literally anything, at any place, at any time. You can't fundamentally alter the nature of "perceptual reality" like this and expect people, especially young people, not to change as a result. You just can't.

Absolutely, the toll/fallout of Reaganomics on the inner-city was immense (and in my mind, morally criminal). But since we're not in the Po;itical Foeum (yet), I'll drop that and go here instead - where inner-city culture goes, the tastes of mainstream American youth culture inevitable follows (the more things change...). And where the mainstream popular American culture goes, Madi$on Avenue inevitably is there to sniff their a$$. That's the weigh of the world. And here we are.

Mr. Drew's decency as a human being comes through loud and clear in his article, but like so many jazz musicians, their impotence is at least partially their own fault. Rather than being in sync with their times, they've set themselves apart and/or above them. Jazz has never been a teen-age music (the Jazz Age & the Swing Kids notwithstanding), but it has always had its finger on the pulse of what was happening within its "native" community. Other than the M-Base crew and a few others, who among the "jazz community" was looking at the Hip-Hop Revolution from a perspective of it being the Next Step In African-American Musical Evolution? And how many were following the Jazz Reagan (WM) down his road of claiming the glories of the past as triumphs that they were somehow entitled to claim as their own? What are we suppose to do, Save The Children by taking them to hear a recreation of Fletcher Henderson at Lincoln Center? Give me a fucking break...

Shit just don't work that way. Never has, never will. You wanna change the streets, you gotta have street cred. You want street cred, you gotta earn it. You wanna earn it, you gotta get down in it, not preach down to it.

It may or may not be too late to save the children. God knows I hope it's not. But it sure as hell is too late to think that ii-Vs and such are the key to doing so. Mr. Drew better wake the fuck up.

Edited April 9, 2006 by JSngry

[johnagrandy]

Also, have you considered the comic elements of the extreme cartoonish hyperbole that characterizes most rap? My 18 year old and her friends love rap and they find it hilarious. Slim Shady is a persona for Marshall Mathers much like Alice Cooper is for Vincent Furnier. I loved Alice Cooper's early seventies recordings and at 13 I found the song "I Love the Dead" to be hilarious, not enticing me towards necrophilia. There are more levels than the literal and while I'm not endorsing the misogyny or homophobia in any lyrics, I find the danger attributed to rap to be greatly exagerrated.

This is a very interesting observation. I've noticed that some of the older gangsta rappers have started throwing little clues at you, here and there, that it's largely an act they don't really believe in. Maybe it's because they got rich and have a completely different lifestyle than when they were coming up and now have a distaste for their original daily routine (i.e. they're just using their past as a vehicle for profits) ...

... but maybe by being immersed in a genre of music you eventually come to see it's flaws even better than detractors on the outside do.

Personally, I think changes in societally destructive rap will come from within rap. There is a quite of bit of dissent in underground rap against commercial rap. ropeadope.com , despite their flaws , does a pretty decent job of publicizing these efforts.

This seems to be how it always works. Despite various factions in the US government and the intelligentia trying to take credit for the crumbling of the Soviet Union, it actually was the USSR's own flawed political-economic structure and activist elements within that ultimately brought it all down.

As for gangsta rap audiences ... it expands out much further than white teenage suburbia. I actually work with a software developer in his early thirties who wears Slim Shady garb to work. Remember the flick "Office Space" ... well, that stuff actually exists.

I do see modern trends in rap as destructive to society, but primarily as just vacuous. In either case, commercial rap is primarily a reflection of where a large portion of mass society's soul is at right now.

Gangsta rap primarily appeals to those who do not have the desire or ability to define their place in the world. They wish to cop the commercial rap style and attitude because it allows a daily illusion of living a life much more dangerous, exciting, and primally sexually-charged than their own could ever be. That's why gangsta rap is largely harmless outside of the African-American community, because the main money-flow demographic's actual actions (as opposed to thoughts) are ultimately controlled by other forces ... like their parents or their employer.

Within the African-American community, I agree with Drew that gangsta rap is self-destructive in many ways. Most pointedly, it unfairly (obscenely unfairly) draws attention away from the real accomplishments of black American society, including jazz and other roots music.

Of course, gangsta rap also appeals to real criminals. But, paradoxically, that makes perfect sense.

I think what Drew writes needs to considered very seriously. There's a lot of awareness borne of long experience in there.

Edited April 9, 2006 by johnagrandy