Wayneandwax on UK Funky, 'funkiness', and African-ness.

"My favourite rapper used to say check-check out my melody": 50 Cent and the gangsta-safe octave

Man, 50 Cent is funny. If he didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. He's literally like some sort of rap supervillain; he acts like he's utterly determined to embody all of the worst impulses in hip-hop. Even the worst impulses that contradict the other worst impulses.

The reason I bring this up is because 50 recently said some stuff on the radio (he drops interviews the way other MCs drop freestyles) that tallies with some of the stuff I started tangentially rambling about in my recent post on Chipmunk. Specifically, the equation of melody with weakness.

Ron Mexico over at XXL has blogged about this here. 50 starts out by identifying the equation of melody with weakness as an unfair prejudice held by hip-hop fans:

“They want the hard music from me. They want what I fell in love with from KRS-One and Criminal Minded… And, I understand it because what they would say is wrong with a 50 Cent record is what they enjoy from Drake... When he’s singing on his choruses nobody has an issue because he doesn’t come from a tough background.”

When it's pointed out to 50 that, many moons ago, he attacked Ja Rule for making melodic songs, he clarifies:

“[Ja Rule] was actually trying to hit notes. Like, going away from just using the monotone singing bass in your speaking voice.”

Ron Mexico offers the following commentary:

"50 Cent issues a formal excuse for why his girly gangsta sing-alongs are more acceptable than Ja Rule’s. Apparently Rule tried a little too hard to be a real singer, which, as you remember, wasn’t gangsta enough. In 50’s mind, Ja Rule’s attempts to hit notes made his music fraudulent and unworthy for public consumption. 50 believes that he never left the confines of what he calls 'monotone singing'. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I am assuming he’s implying that he stays within a certain gangsta-safe octave."

So, yeah, pretty funny. This prompted a couple of thoughts. First of all, I think singing is connected with emotional disinhibition. Emotional disinhibition is problematic for hip-hop's tough-guy masculinity because it makes one vulnerable. (Jay Smooth is brilliant on this.) It's more acceptable for rappers to display emotions like anger than it is for them to display 'softer' emotions which might betray emotional weakness, and it's these latter sort of emotions which singing is generally held to express. Hence Chuck D, in 1988, raging "you singers are spineless/as you sing your senseless songs to the mindless/your general subject, love, is minimal". Hence Eminem, in 2002, opting to sing, rather than rap, the first genuinely happy he song he'd ever recorded since becoming Slim Shady - 'Hailie's Song', about how much he loves his daughter. (He even introduces the song by saying, "I can't sing, but I feel like singing; I want to fuckin' sing, 'cause I'm happy".) Hence 50 Cent's contrast between himself and Drake; it's okay for Drake to sing (the thought goes) because he doesn't come from a tough background, and if you genuinely come from a tough background, you have your guard up all the time, and don't - as a matter of survival - go around displaying weakness. You're supposed to be emotionally inhibited. (Remember Mobb Deep's chilling, straightfaced dedication of their greatest moment, 1995's 'Shook Ones Part II', to "real niggas who ain't got no feelings"? 50 Cent loves Mobb Deep. He signed them to G-Unit.) Hence, even, 50's apparently ridiculous contrast between himself and Ja Rule; 50 sings in the acceptable 'gangsta-safe octave' because his singing, so he claims, never wavers from the 'bass' of his speaking voice: i.e., he sings like he's still got his emotional guard up.

...all of which puts a slightly different spin on the stuff I was going on about in that Chipmunk post. Singing, maybe, comes across as evidence that someone hasn't really internalised all the proper stifling, inhibiting codes of working class masculinity; and so it might seem like a flag denoting a lack of authenticity in someone who claims to come from what 50 Cent calls a 'tough background'. Which is, maybe, why it's okay for Jay-Z to get hooks from Rihanna and Alicia Keys, while boasting "my raps don't have melodies" on 'D.O.A. (Death Of Autotune)'. It's okay for them to have melodies. Maybe Drake is allowed to sing, too. Not Jay-Z, though.

(I feel like maybe I haven't made clear enough that I think all of the above is absolutely ridiculous, fucked up, and wrong. Obviously I do. I'm just interested in teasing out the structure of these ways of thinking.)


.....


Secondly.... 50 Cent, generally. His plight comes from the fact that, as I say, he's trying to navigate two different sets of values that have come into conflict with each other. On the one hand, he's internalised the stereotype of the rapper-as-hustler pursuing wealth - and power - at all costs. This is the guy who released two albums called Get Rich Or Die Tryin', not to mention one called Power Of The Dollar. Oh, and there was 'I Get Money'. Now, this means being a pop rapper, who makes catchy, radio friendly songs with R&B singers on the hooks. On the other hand, he's equally supposed to embody the equally powerful stereotype of the rapper as a hard man, a 'gangster' from the 'streets', who identifies himself with 'street' values. This means, a la MC Ren on 'Final Frontier', pouring scorn upon pop rappers who make catchy, radio-friendly songs with R&B singers on the hook - those guys are inauthentic, fakers. That's why 50 was both making pop songs and having a go at Ja Rule for making pop songs.

When 50 first shot to prominence in 2003, it was in part because he managed to pull off the almost-impossible trick of appearing to do both of these things. You can have your pop songs, and you can have your 'authentic' street/thug credibility too. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it model had been lived out already by rap's great twin martyrs, 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. But both of those men had portrayed themselves as self-destructive and self-hating; each was obviously and explicitly a walking nest of contradictions. Listening to the work of either, you sense that a violent, untimely demise seems like the only possible outcome.

50's not like that; he's too smooth, too calculated, and has nothing of the rough, intuitive unpredictability of his doomed predecessors. He's also still alive. So the contradictions that he embodied from the start have long since caught up with him, to the point that he looks increasingly ridiculous, a walking joke driven to absurdities like the ones quoted above to try to make sense of his own behaviour.

#1 this week: Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love

Okay, I'm just going to come right out and say it: 'Fight For This Love' isn't emotionally convincing, and the reason that it isn't emotionally convincing is because of its terrible, terrible lyrics.

The song is basically saying: "hey, our relationship has run into trouble, but rather than breaking up, let's try and work it out, even if that seems difficult". But the lyric sheet is really just a string of vague clichés and empty platitudes. What kinds of problems are there? What exactly makes the relationship worth saving? 'Fight For This Love' doesn't tell us. It just tells us that, you know, love ain't no walk in the park, and, hey, even the good can be a curse. Hmmm.

There's a very good reason, of course, that 'Fight For This Love' is so full of vague gesture and so lacking in detail and specificity. Lest we forget, this is the song that has been chosen to launch National Sweetheart Cheryl Cole as a solo pop superstar. Our reading of the song is supposed to be informed and framed by the fact that it's by Cheryl; we're supposed to fill in the blanks with the details of her own life. Basically, her footballer husband cheated on her. Repeatedly, apparently. And in standing by him anyway, Cheryl has become, in people's heads, some sort of Patron Saint of Working Things Out. Our Cheryl. Good old Cheryl. 'Fight For This Love' clearly plays on this status.

In order to work, then, the song needs to sweep the messy details under the rug. Relationship problems are transformed, by sleight of hand, from issues of concrete wrongdoing into general features of the universe: it's not that he slept with that glamour model, it's that "every day ain't gonna be no picnic". See? Sounds much better. And that's the cheat, the reason why 'Fight For This Love' can't get into details, why it needs to deal in vague platitudes. The record's warm, reconcilatory, egalitarian tone can only be read as autobiographical if we don't fill out too many of the details. If the record were to admit to itself what's really going on, it'd be more like 'Stand By Your Man'; but you can't do records like that anymore without them sounding desperate and fucked up. The failure of 'Fight For This Love', by contrast, is its refusal to acknowledge that there might be anything unhealthy going on here.

The overall effect, then, of 'Fight For This Love' is to mystify relationship difficulties in a way that removes blame, and to deify 'love' as something that's always worth fighting for, when 'fighting' means enduring misery and forgiving any wrongdoing. ("All you can do is make the best of it," Cheryl sings, "can't be afraid of the dark.") That's all this record can say, because it won't get into any of the messy details. Our Cheryl, good old Cheryl. Hmmmmmm.

All of which is a shame, because before you start thinking about any of that stuff, 'Fight For This Love' really is a damn good song. It's got a subtle, understated prettiness, a gentle, warm, musical hug that says everything's going to be all right. Cheryl's vocal performance is really something, too, light and airy when it needs to be, strong and anchored when it needs to be. Love here really is deified, with Cheryl casting herself more as an angel than a real, suffering woman ("you're not in this thing alone, there's always a place with me that you can call home"). Her love is really unconditional. She paints a nice picture. But it all falls apart when you start picking at the details. You shouldn't be convinced.

Forge Radio

I'm on Forge Radio with Ad again tomorrow (Saturday 24th) between 12:00 and 13:30. I'll be playing as much stuff as I can get into 90 minutes, and will probably be goaded by Ad into rambling about it as well. I'm sure you can 'listen again' after the fact if you can't listen live.

#1 this week: Alexandra Burke - Bad Boys

Ooh way! Ooh wah! I haven't checked, but I don't think that this one is another Leonard Cohen cover. Alexandra launches her pop career proper with this sledgehammer electro-soul stomper, all about how much she fancies, er, 'bad' boys. All the talk of being "drawn to danger", "playing with fire" and being divided "halfway between wrong and right" should, on paper, sound a bit edgy, but none of that business is very convincing; Alex is more honest when she sings "some think it's complicated, but they're straight up fun for me!" To whit, 'Bad Boys' is supposed to be uncomplicated fun; a campy bit of Grease pop that doesn't ask or answer any difficult questions. To that end, the exact 'bad boy' credentials necessary to impress Alexandra are left deliberately vague. Are the 'bad boys' in question serial murderers? BNP members? Or do they just sometimes phone in sick for work because they're hungover?

Comedy rap goon Flo Rida doesn't tell us much more than Alexandra does on this matter, although he does offer the mind-boggling grammatical construction "with even the alphabet she only sings the crooked letters". Of course she does. I wouldn't mind a remix of 'Bad Boys' which replaced Flo Rida with Ghostface Killah, who could wail nasally about how much Alexandra Burke wants to sleep with him because he, I don't know, abducted the pet rabbit of a rival crime boss, cut it up and sent it back to him in the mail. You know, that sort of thing. The people need details.

Anyway, I digress, and on its own terms 'Bad Boys' is a pretty awesome pop song, largely thanks to its possession of a chorus massive enough to steamroller complicated questions, those brilliant stupid-fun "ooh way! ooh wah!" backing vocals, and an awesome ending which goes "ooh way! ooh way! ooh wah! DUR-DUR-DUR-DUR-DUR-DUR-BAD-BOYS-BAD-BOYS!"

As an aside, it's something of a testament to the influential power of the X Factor on mainstream British pop at the moment that the next three number one singles after Alexandra are likely to be by Cheryl Cole, JLS and Leona Lewis. The show is the closest thing now to Top Of The Pops, the only cultural force which genuinely brings huge numbers of people together around pop music. Of course, with TOTP you had to have a hit record before you got on the TV, which increasingly is not how things work these days. Anyway, here's hoping this time next year Stacey Solomon is dropping a dubstep-influenced electroballad debut single about the Crimean War. Featuring Drake, probably.

#1 this week: Chipmunk - Oopsy Dasiy

Be careful what you wish for. Some grime fans have long wondered when, if ever, the UK's indigenous MC culture would attain the same prominence and importance for Brits as hip-hop has in America. In the last year or two, grime artists like DJ Ironik, Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder have broken out of the grime ghetto to become fixtures of mainstream chart pop; casting the net a bit wider, UK 'urban' music seems to be swelling with pop stars like N-Dubz, Taio Cruz and Jay Sean. These people are increasingly coming to define the zeitgeist.

But, obviously - making an impact in the mainstream means making pop songs. Grime, in its original and 'purest' form at least, is harsh, brutal, alienating music, both sonically and lyrically. 'Oopsy Daisy' is decidedly not. So grime fans and artists are now, for the first time, being faced with the same fissures that have animated US hip-hop culture for years: being 'street' versus being pop, keeping it real versus selling out, making 'real' music versus assimilating to pop and r'n'b.

Chipmunk is emblematic of this moment more than any other artist, as Martin 'Blackdown' Clark discusses in his recent Pitchfork column. Through recent comments on Twitter, Chipmunk has been hitting out at the inevitable 'sellout' accusations by distancing himself from the grime scene with its "wack ambitionless artists". Signs of a real rift - and real fatigue on Chipmunk's part - come through in his exasperated declaration that "there's no more eskimo dance or sidewinder! GROW UP!!! Times changed!!!" Chipmunk is 18 years old.

Blackdown's barely contained disgust at Chipmunk's apparent disrespect for the scene he emerged from, and his problematic conflation of artistic and commercial ambition, is understandable. But there's a really ugly, dubious narrative that tends to rear its head whenever these sorts of fissures are raised in US hip-hop, and it's one that grime should probably be attendant to in working out how to respond to this new situation.

In short, it's a narrative where being 'real' is equated with a very particular, aggressive, misogynistic model of masculinity. Pop music and r'n'b are coded as feminine and therefore 'weak'. This narrative has been floated around in hip-hop for ages. Former NWA member MC Ren, in his 1992 single 'Final Frontier' pored scorn upon "wack" rap records "usin' r'n'b fuckin' singers in the god damn breaks". He calls out his unnamed targets as hypocrite fakers "trying to go commercial when they started out street", before going on to explain why he wouldn't be doing the same: "singin' and dancin' don't go /with the format that I be usin in my show/it's just hardcore niggas actin' crazy on the stage/wearing gangsta clothes, yo/and spittin on the hoes". Charming. All the elements of the Myth Of The Real are fully formed here; singing and dancing, r'n'b and pop, are all weak, soft and feminine; young black men who associate themselves with these signifiers are not being 'real', or are at least not making real hip-hop music. Real hip-hop music is the province of misogynist "hardcore niggas" who wear the correct "gangsta" uniform.

Nowadays, the 'gansta' archetype is not the dominant, default setting it once was in hip-hop. And those who grew up invested in, and deriving power from, the identity of aggressive masculinity that it relied upon, are feeling threatened - they sense a loss of privilege. So the Myth Of The Real has become ever more pronounced, and ever more defensive and passive-aggressive. Hence the narrative around records like Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 and the Slaughterhouse album, which are - we are told - bringing back 'real' hip-hop; hence Jay-Z's absurd 'D.O.A. (Death Of Autotune)', on which he boasts "my raps don't have melodies", berates rappers for their "lack of aggression", declares "you boys' jeans too tight, your colours too bright, your voice too light", and even invokes the most hackneyed, childish conservative response to loss of privilege - "this ain't politically correct".

Basically, I'm hoping that this same ugly defense mechanism doesn't kick in with the grime community. According to the logic of the Myth, being good means being 'real', and being real means being 'hard', being 'street', making hard, aggressive music with hard, aggressive lyrics. The prevalence and success of this myth says a lot; people find it easy to assume that young black men aren't being 'real' unless they're talking about shooting and stabbing each other. The assumption being, presumably - that's who they really are.

Which brings me (finally!) to 'Oopsy Daisy'. If being 'real' means being emotionally honest, with all the vulnerability that implies, then 'Oopsy Daisy' seems to be about as real as anyone could reasonably want it to be. Chipmunk (eighteen years old, remember), raps about being messed about by some girl, and sounds convincingly hurt and confused throughout. He's emerged from a scene where music is supposed to be violent and angry, but here he puts a cap on his anger: "before I see red, let's stop". He does rhyme that with "I'ma find cupid and put him in a headlock", which is pretty funny, but is also kind of deep. Chipmunk is frustrated, but he doesn't respond by directing lyrical violence at any other people; there's no concrete outlet for his anger - no one to blame - so the only real nastiness in the whole song ends up being directed against an anthropomorphic personification of love itself.

Chipmunk co-opts the gentle, sad tone popularised by Kanye West's brilliant 808s & Heartbreak album; in case you didn't get it, he points out "my hearbeat feels like an 808". (Actually, it's the 808 that sounds like a heartbeat, a gentle pulse which has provided an alternative to the hard-hitting boom-bap.) He even identifies himself with the point of view put forward by a very gentle, very feminine song, when he raps "now I feel like the Saturdays all week, 'cause me and my heart got crazy issues".

So, in 'Oopsy Daisy' a young man is involved in a destructive, unhealthy relationship with a young lady; rather than responding with anger, violence and misogyny, he listens to The Saturdays, feels a bit sad and frustrated about it, tries to be as grown-up about it as he can, and ultimately decides that it's probably best if they don't see each other any more. Is that being real? Is that selling out?

#1 this week: Taio Cruz - Break Your Heart

Taio Cruz rides this self-produced single to number one, complete with the glossy, glittery, autotuned electro sheen that has served his mate Tinchy Stryder so well. In its own quiet, unassuming way, 'Break Your Heart' manages to be a pretty great pop song, what with that big, keening falsetto bridge and that stutter-stutter chorus ("break-break-your-break-break-your-heart" > "break your heart", obviously). On Tinchy's 'Take Me Back', Taio rhymed 'misleaded you' with 'mistreated you', which was amazing; here, he rhymes 'leave you' with 'deceive you', which is nearly as good. Just to keep things interesting, there's even a spacey halfstep middle eight. It's all pretty fun and catchy and well executed.

As if to rub home the fact that 2009's champagne-n-cocaine decadent pop is well into Duran Duran territory, Taio spends the video driving around in fast cars, riding around on a speedboat, and getting off with girls at opulent parties. Which is all in keeping with the song's ludicrously amoral lyrics - "basically", Taio seems to be telling us, "I am a complete and utter bastard, and any ladies who become romantically involved with me will probably end up being treated pretty shabbily". What a cad! Still, at least he's being honest; as that middle eight confesses, "there's no point trying to hide it/no point trying to evade it/I know I got a problem/problem with misbehaviour". Brilliant use of 'evade' there Taio; but when he's grinning on that fucking speedboat he doesn't look like someone who takes very seriously the idea that he's 'got a problem'.

Still, have your cake and eat it; be a dickhead, drink champagne on a yacht, sleep with whoever you want, paper over the cracks with slick electropop, and erase the regret from your voice with autotune. Such, sometimes, is pop music. There's a subtle sadness in this record, although you suspect that we might not notice that until it's too late.