the blues exist for the express purpose of alchemizing beauty from pain, hip hop is more often about swaggering in the face of it. Denying that pain is an element of its reality. Hip hop is that boxer who gets caught flush by the unseen right hand and then tells his antagonist that it didn’t hurt—and the fact is, of course, that if it really didn’t hurt he wouldn’t feel the need to make that statement. With the exception of Mos Def’s comic “Ms. Fat Booty” and Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” the number of hip hop songs dealing substantively with a man whose woman has left could probably be counted on one hand. And even Jay-Z’s effort tempered by his refrain “I can’t see ’em coming out my eyes/So I gotta make this song cry.” Now compare that to the soreness of the soul expressed in Ishman Bracey’s “Trouble-Hearted Blues,” where he laments
I don’t believe I’m sinking Believe what a hole I’m in You don’t believe I loved you think what a fool I been.
Or Joe Pullum’s 1934 lamentation in “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard?” that
I woke up this morning couldn’t even get out my bed I was just thinking about that black woman And it almost killed me dead.
At the heart of hip hop’s denial of the pain—a pain that is so openly voiced in the blues—is a different relationship to irony within the two musics. The trickster’s ironic approach to life and power relations had resonance to the enslaved for obvious reasons: the trickster appears to be happy and harmless, traffics in deception, and disarms with a smile. The average rapper, though, would rather get shot than smile in public.
Hip hop doesn’t place as high a premium on irony as its ancestral forms, particularly blues—even as it relies upon blues and the surrounding blues folklore for much of its material. This is not to say that hip hop is completely anti-ironic, simply that irony is not at the center of the hip hop ethos. That said, hip hop has precious little room for acknowledging pain in order to ultimately transcend it.
That absence of irony is why on nearly every album cover the rapper holds a murderer’s grit on his face. Even comedic rappers tend to look serious as hell, half-glaring up from an oblique angle, as if smiling is a violation of a sacred MC credo. Irony is at the center of blues, however—it is, at its root, a music about existential despair that is deeply opposed to resignation or defeat. It’s been pointed out more than once that blues was created just after slavery by the most oppressed segment of American society, but rarely do you encounter explicit discussion of race or racism within the lyrics—save brilliant queries like “What did I do to get so black and blue?” Blues grapples with the individual tragedy in full public view, an aesthetic habit that’s absent from all but the most significant hip hop.
HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN’
Fruit may not fall far from the tree, but it does, nonetheless, fall. While blues obsesses over the theme of mobility, hip hop is as local as a zip code. The constant blues references to crossroads, trains, and railroad tracks rise from the itinerant life at the turn of the century. Between 1920 and 1942, at least 293 blues songs about trains or railroads were recorded. This is the music of black wanderers exercising the newly granted right of mobility. And thus we encounter titles like “Goin’ Away Blues,” “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” “Crossroads Blues,” and “Further On Up the Road.” The blues tell us that
When a woman gets the blues She hangs her head and cries When a man gets the blues Lord, he grabs a train and rides.
In hip hop, though, there are no references to highways or trains; railroads have been replaced by another central reference: the City. Or more specifically, the fractured territories known collectively as the Ghetto. Innumerable hip hop songs reference the term: Naughty By Nature’s “Ghetto Bastard,” Rakim Allah’s “In the Ghetto” Nas’s “Ghetto Prisoners,” Talib Kweli’s “Ghetto Afterlife,” Lauryn Hill’s “Every Ghetto, Every City,” Dr. Dre’s “The World Is a Ghetto,” all allude to a socio-economic blind alley, a terrain defined by the lack of mobility of its residents. Scarface—formerly of the ensemble the Geto Boys—underscores this point on the single “On My Block,” where he rhymes, “It’s like the rest of the world don’t exist/we stay confined to same spot we been livin’ in.” Jean Grae riffed on this same theme on “Block Party,” imploring heads to “Get out your house/Get off your block/See something, do something.” It’s no coincidence that Atlanta’s dope markets are known as the Traps. So when ATL-based MC T.I. titled his debut release Trap Music he was signifying on a level that even he might not have been hip to. The descendants of those early century itinerants now find themselves trapped in urban stasis one hundred years and one Great Migration later. Thus the relationship between blues and hip hop is the relationship between journeys and destinations.
The City is the unnamed protagonist of every hip hop song created. Up out of Hazlehurst and Bessemer, Sumpter, Natchez, Mulberry, and Sanford—two million deep—to lands where you couldn’t hear crickets or raise no hogs. In Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois fretted, thirty-four years past slavery, that the City would bring black ruination. A century later, Talib Kweli echoed the sage’s observation on “Respiration”:
Look in the sky for God What you see besides the smog Is broken dreams Flying away on the wings of the obscene Thoughts people put in the air Places where you could get murdered over a glare Where everything is fair.
Hip hop is blues filtered through a century of experience and a thousand miles of asphalt. The City has its own crude dialectics: the mark is to the con as day is to night, the playa is to the lame as east is to west. The City is stone-hewn horizons and temples to vast acquisition. Industrial grit. Vice ecology. Iron arteries. Infinite anonymity and high velocity language. Remixed ritual: malt liquor libation and dice divination. Check out Nas and the cover to his blistering debut Illmatic. The image of the rap artist as a young man is superimposed over the legendary Queensbridge Houses—as if he literally has the projects on his mind. The Bridge: the public housing development that cradled Nas and a starting lineup of MCs and producers like MC Shan and Marley Marl. To the MC, shouting out the ’hood, the specific locale and its denizens is a prerequisite. The perspective of the wanderer has given way to the view of the stationary neighborhood rep, one for whom the hood is the universe and the universe is five blocks wide. DJ Quik broke this down with his early-90s assessment that the whole world was “just like Compton.” In the blood-feud filled arena of hip hop, where fratricide has become a cliché, a brother has to claim his soil—because who else is gonna preserve one’s legend? It would be inconceivable that Mississippi John Hurt would shout down at his Chicago blues counterpart on the basis of geography, but even in the current era of hip hop détente, east is east, west is west, and never shall the listener get that fact twisted.
On another level, the blues relationship to lyricism is distinct from that of hip hop—and most of its pop music descendants. Classic blues were most often collectively authored and speak with the authority of a Negro quorum; hip hop, on the other hand, is obsessed with proprietary concerns. And thus the biter’s place of infamy has remained virtually unchanged since hip hop’s inception. The biter—a mimic, a knockoff, a counterfeiter of rhyme styles—dwells in the sub-basement of hip hop regard, equaled only by the “rapper” who ain’t write his own rhymes. This concern with rhyme larceny and boulevard copyright comes not only as a result of the social and psychological changes in black America since the inception of the blues, but also from a simpler issue: the different instrumentalization of the two musics.
Hip hop has intentionally not produced the equivalent of blues standards like “Stagger Lee” or “C. C. Ryder,” because hip hop has no room for “standards” in the traditional sense. The collectively or anonymously authored song in blues is given an individual fingerprint by the artist performing it. And if performance is an ongoing aesthetic experiment, the standard functions as a lyrical or musical constant, the singer’s interpretation is the variable—along with the nuance of the music backing him. This duality of sameness and difference is fueled by the fact the blues vocalist—who is often also an instrumentalist—controls elements of tempo, chord progression, and detail in the performance of the song, even if the crowd