Hip Hop: More Than Thugs and Gangstas

By RYAN J. KUO

CONTIRBUTING WRITER

Catching a primetime exposé on hip hop music last month, it was tempting to lose faith in the mainstream media all over again. True to the sensationalist American “news,” the show blasted mainstream hip hop’s depravity, even admonishing Russell Simmons (Def Jam’s founder) in a comically stern interview for promoting hip hop music in spite of poor literacy levels among black children.

It’s probably a good sign that the feature seemed utterly irrelevant. What parent doesn’t already know about Eminem’s foul-mouthed verbal contortions and the whole Ruff Ryding suburban gangsta phenomenon? Never mind that hip hop has been, on and off, the leading artistic force in pop music for the past decade and a half. Never mind that Public Enemy and Timbaland have revolutionized our notions of musicality, that a multifaceted and vibrant youth culture has risen all over the world, and that fantastic new records are still released every couple of weeks.

As with any music, appreciating the thriving state of hip hop is only a matter of digging through the filler. This time, it’s the independently inclined with the advantage, as two underground heroes, virtual unknowns among the airwaves, have unleashed their definitive statements onto the world.

All of the Above

J-Live

Coup d’État

J-Live is considered by some to be a “living legend,” a modern maestro who scratches and spits peerless poetry over his own beats. Though his virtuosic debut The Best Part was shelved indefinitely by record companies, All Of The Above may be his magnum opus. It is a consummate progression of the Native Tongues movement (led by De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest) that was eclipsed in the early ’90s by gangsta rap. The album oozes with the legacies of jazz, funk and soul. Like Common’s Like Water For Chocolate or The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, it consciously positions hip hop as the latest development in a long line of soulful black music. But unlike the former, Above never lapses into sleep-inducing self-indulgence. Unlike the latter, J-Live’s rhymes are clearly labors of love bursting with creativity and depth—these can only be writtens, not freestyles.

In contrast to the empty chest-beating that characterizes much hip hop, J-Live’s lyrics are as central to his music as Bob Dylan’s. A bona fide emcee, J-Live grips the mic with the fire of a hungry artist and the self-assuredness of a professional. He flows like liquid, but his voice resonates with urgency and charisma. His songs are rife with lyrical invention: “One For The Griot” seems like a typical storytelling rap until someone in the studio complains about the violent ending, prompting him to rewind—twice—to come up with a better conclusion. “All In Together Now” takes on new meanings when J-Live skips every other line; half of “MCee” is composed entirely from words beginning with “m” and “c.”

The beats are equally impressive: “A Charmed Life” lays uplifting bass plucks over cymbal-heavy jazz drums; “Satisfied?” boasts an infectious dub groove; “How Real It Is” breaks unexpectedly into vibrant drum ’n bass. At his best, J-Live succeeds in making his voice one with the tracks; they become inseparable. Whether he’s imploring a girl to choose her men wisely, ruminating on the false sense of righteousness the government forged after Sept. 11, or telling studio thugs to rap about their real lives for a change, J-Live makes hip hop sound profoundly relevant.

Arrhythmia

Anti-Pop Consortium

Warp

If J-Live celebrates a return to roots, then Anti-Pop Consortium are hip hop uprooted, making the kind of rap that only record store geeks deem safe listening. Rather than following through on the music’s forebears, they stretch it to its outer limits, showing off its capacity for outward expansion. Screw soul, they seem to say—theirs is the sound of extraterrestrial mechs appropriating hip hop for twisted, brilliant experiments.

Anti-Pop are hip hop’s Autechre, sounding far-out on first listen but making perfect sense on the fifth (appropriately, they’re also on the UK’s experimental Warp label). As former slam poets, emcees Priest, Beans and M. Sayyid rhyme multisyllables like androids possessed by funk, their unfathomable words sounding vaguely familiar at times—like lyrics about hip hop lyrics. They attack the mic with a coordinated fervor not seen since early Wu-Tang or Souls of Mischief, or even the Beastie Boys.

But the tracks are the main attraction on their new album, Arrhythmia—12 mind-bending pieces machine-scrubbed to freshness. “Dead In Motion” is infested by computer glitches that threaten to tear the song apart as electric squelches and null-lines further the sense of claustrophobia. “Ping Pong” uses, appropriately, the sound of bouncing ping pong balls to accentuate its streamlined boom-bap. “Silver Heat” juxtaposes jazzy scat with fat analog bass, and “Mega” swells suddenly into an awesome Wagnerian attack replete with synthetic symphony, choir and ovation. True to their name, Anti-Pop’s music borders on the absurd, thriving on its excesses. Arrhythmia is the consortium’s best work yet, eschewing the muffled bleakness of their debut Tragic Epilogue for an all-out attack on the senses.

These albums are especially strong testaments to hip hop’s vitality and versatility, to be sure, but their release is business as usual for the artists—uncelebrated, unseen. With stuff like this happening every month, who needs an old, joyless news anchor telling us what not to like?