the rappers gone sacred—Run and Mase, now turned Reverends Run and Mase—trading in throwback jerseys for pastoral robes mirrors a pivot that soul singers have been making for decades. And in so doing they’ve essentially put in for a transfer from one branch of black verbal art to its ancestral root. DMX’s gravelly preacher-voice recalls the old traditions, from back in the times when men of God were still called exhorters. His debut It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a seminar on the asphalt theology of the millennial street hood. No question, the rapper had turned exhorter when he offered an a capella prayer as the sixteenth track on his debut release:
You give me word and only ask that I interpret And You give me eyes that I might recognize the serpent
There is an apocryphal tale that tells of DMX buying a Brooklyn church out of its back-tax debt, offering a blessing to the house of the Lord. The truth or falseness of the story is secondary: what matters is that the story was credible enough to be relayed. The MC replicates and remixes the craft of preaching, jacking one set of oratory tactics for application in the world of sin and concrete. To cut to the quick, there is more than a set of initials connecting C.L. Franklin to CL Smooth.
THE TRICKSTER BLUES
We listen to the MC and we hear the echo of the old-time revival exhorters, but at the same time, the rapper is linked to a whole other side of the black aesthetic tradition—having copped key elements of the blues craft. Blues is at the corner of all American popular musics, but hip hop in particular descended from the blues tradition of orality. If the blues is the sound of a post-slave people in the social vacuum of the American South and the tale of that people on their way north, then encoded within hip hop of the story of what happened once they arrived.
On one level, the bluesman paved the way for the rapper in that the blues brought calm recognition to the concept of human evil as a consequence of human existence. The blank-faced, cinema verité street narration of the gangsta rapper could not have come into existence without the blues and its understanding of morality. Here we have no sacred, no secular because the bluesman grapples with a far older concept—that there is ultimately neither. The world simply is, period. Eons before postmodern literary critics were wise to this, blues people recognized that the world could be read as text, that the dirt road was a metaphor and the juke joint a temple to the prayers of the flesh. In short, that life could be its own holy book.
Gallons of ink have been spilled in attempts to define what the blues is—and what it ain’t for that matter. Literary bluesman and musician Ralph Ellison put it this way:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal existence alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
Caught in the existential staredown with abject circumstance, the blues artist pulls the only weapon available: a sharpened sense of irony, the simultaneous reckoning with the bitter and the sweet, the last-ditch laughter that staves off tears. That confrontation with the absurd contradictions of his own existence—the descendant of allegedly lazy people who were brought to another continent in order to work, member of an unclean race whose primary employment is in cleaning homes—was grist for the blues’ hallmark irony, what we might call the trickster consciousness.
The trickster’s ironic sensibility is a defining feature of the blues, where the hero is the down-and-out player who nevertheless carries an ace—or a razor, depending on the situation—tucked up his sleeve. This is apparent on the version of “Red House” recorded by Jimi Hendrix:
There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay Lord, there’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay I ain’t been home to see my baby, in 99 and one half days.
Wait a minute, somethin’s wrong, this key don’t fit the door Wait a minute somethin’s wrong here, this key don’t unlock the door I got a bad, bad feelin’ my baby don’t live here no more.
I guess I’ll go back over yonder, way over the hill I guess I’ll go back over yonder, way up over that hill ’cause if my baby don’t love me no more, I know her sister will.
Being down don’t mean the same thing as being out and right here we see that getting left by one’s woman ain’t the same thing as being left without a woman. Albert King gave light to the same theme with the version of “Born Under a Bad Sign” he recorded in 1967. He sang:
Born under a bad sign I been down ever since the day I could crawl And if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.
Still, he ends up with the admission that “when I die a big-leg woman will carry me to my grave.” High-octane spirits and well-curved women might well be the death of him, but if he’s going out like that, he plans to shuffle off the mortal plane with the finest pallbearer you ever seen. And the loudly unstated point is that his cadaver is leaving with a finer woman than his peers got—and they still alive.
History spotlights violent resisters of slavery like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nat Turner, and Zumbi dos Palmares, but the average slave, physically outnumbered or at least outgunned, could not always rely upon brute force resistance. Deception, Du Bois points out in Souls of Black Folk, is the natural defense of the weak against the strong. And deception is the primary weapon in the arsenal of the trickster. The trickster in most folklore traditions is not particularly strong physically but manages to outdo his foes with cunning and double-edged wit. Given the nature of the black relationship to the Western world, it makes sense that trickster tales are one of the folklore traditions that survived the middle passage and took root throughout the Diaspora in the form of Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and the Signifyin’ Monkey. Among the Dogon of Mali, the trickster holds a primary cosmological significance:
The Dogon imagination [uses] humor as an image of the creative necessity of disorder … laughter itself becomes a reversal of order for the revelation of deeper order, an abolition of time for the capture of time … Turns the world upside down so that it can proceed right side up.
Among the Yoruba, the trickster orisha Elegba is the master of the crossroads and fate. He is traditionally depicted as a child or an old man. Elegba opens and closes doors. Now look at the crossroads as they appear in blues as one of the most consistent references and double entendres in the form. For the blues artist, the itinerant bard of the newly dilated black world, the crossroads represent decision-making—a particularly important reference given the fact that the essence of slavery is the absence of mobility and the inability to make one’s own decisions. The crossroads is both geographic and metaphorical, an echo of the old trickster ways.
Westerners have conflated Elegba the trickster with their concept of the devil in the raw attempt to impose a good versus evil dichotomy on vastly more complex ways of understanding the world. To the wise, though, the trickster is neither good, nor evil, he simply is. The trickster’s place in the blues, plus the secular emphasis of the form, gave rise to the epithet “devil music.” Never mind the fact that it was in the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the “devil” in exchange for mastery of his instrument. But the blues did not create the trickster—they simply gave him a new venue. The trickster ideal was in place in the pre-blues world of the slave. Bear in mind the old tale of the white woman who leaves the big house to inform her slaves that the terrible news they’ve heard is true—the North has, in fact, won the war. Slavery is over, she says, but if they’re willing to stay on, they can create a world that is “just the same as it always was.” Her slaves line up and dutifully inform her of how good a mistress she’s been and how glad they’d be to remain in her service. The belle goes to bed with a light heart only to awake and find that there is not a single ex-slave in sight for miles. The world had, in fact, been turned upside down for centuries and the Janus-faced slave-trickster knew that deception and flight was the means of turning it right side up.
The blues artist must be willing