Worst of rap taints whatever’s left, that’s the problem

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“There’s more to hip-hop than the n-word

Offence-seeking critics should get over the swearing, and see hip-hop as one of the most vibrant musical genres.”

So begins Tom Slater’s defence of musics most controversial corner, over at Spiked. We’re all getting so caught up in hip-hop’s semantic frills, goes the gist of it, we’re failing to see the substance that lies beyond.

It’s a multi-faceted issue too big for one post, so I’ll let two aspects ride for now, partly because I haven’t – thank God – heard much in the way of homophobic lyrics myself and partly because I can at least understand the ‘empowerment’ argument for the ad nauseam use of  the word ‘nigger’, even if I’m unconvinced by it.

This leaves the gutter language and the general equation of women with disposable hankies. More than enough to blast some big holes in Slater’s apologetics.

First, however, for those of you who may have seen my Twitter avatar, I have to disclose my unlikely position in this debate. I am a white, 50-year-old Daily Mail reader who likes hip-hop.

Those may be the only words still capable of shocking Tom Slater.

How it comes to this, I have no idea. All I know is that I heard my first rap number in the autumn of 1979 and it registered. Maybe the writer in me was subconsciously won over by the idea of a song’s tempo being driven by the spoken, rather than sung word. All I know for sure is, I ‘get’ it.

I can’t tell you where rap becomes hip-hop or vice-versa, or whether they’re the same thing but I get it. I hear that unmistakable beat and I’m listening. I am to the genre what my Uncle Arthur was to classical music – no expert but “I know what I like, son; I know what I like…”

And the flip side applies with equal vigour. I know what I don’t like.

I don’t like language that was only ever meant to be a buffer zone between anger and physical violence being presented as a valid component of the creative process.

I don’t like sex being lyrically stripped of all the love and charm that makes it worth a damn in the first place.

My hip-hop playlist, you won’t be surprised to hear, is somewhat petite and exclusive.

Like many rappers, however, I write for a living. My standards are high: I can think of numerous things I’ve written that could have been rattled off in half the time had I just been willing to call someone a mother****ing douchebag and been done with it.

But that wasn’t good enough. Because silly, old-fashioned me believes that what separates a real writer from someone who’s just playing at it, is putting in the hours. The real writer takes time to pinpoint the words that reveal exactly what he’s angry about, why he believes  he’s right to be angry and what he thinks should be done about it and the potency of those words isn’t diminished one iota by the fact that he’d happily use them all in front of his grandmother.

On the contrary, in fact. Your average rapper might be appalled at the idea of a no-curse rule but he would probably produce a far better track because of it. Because when he has to use words that genuinely explain and convey, and has the talent to meet that challenge, he can transport even this middle-class white guy into any ‘hood he wishes. He can leave me in no doubt as to what makes him angry, sad or ecstatic. That’s exactly what good writers and meaningful words do.

The F-word, on the other hand, only ever lets off steam. We can hear it anywhere, so it takes us nowhere and it reveals little of its author other than the possibility that his vocabulary may not be that great.

What’s more, and here’s where I think Tom Slater’s argument breaks down, when a track is drenched in expletives and a snarling dismissiveness towards women, it is futile to expect us to “see past its brash exterior”, because there’s nothing beyond it to see. Our ears are already assaulted, our lip is curling, our mind made up. We can’t “criticise it in terms of the quality of the picture it paints, rather than the language that it uses,” as Slater contends, because too often the unsightly globs of crudity mask whatever subtle brushstrokes might exist in the background.

Ultimately, an artist has no-one but himself to blame for this. If my novel takes five chapters to get going and all the Amazon reviews say they gave up on it after four, the onus is on me to change the first five chapters. That’s the deal in the media, your audience ultimately decides what’s good, not you.

Which is why the assertion that we should “get over” the swearing in hip-hop is perhaps best met with another one.  Tom Slater should “get over” the fact that not everyone is as easily pleased as he is.

Why writers have it easier than musicians

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Older Son plays his song at a church flower festival this morning. Browsers and moochers mill around him like he’s just another ornament, while family and friends hang on his every note.

I have heard this song rehearsed for what seems like months now: belted out with style when the voice was good and dragged out like a cat from the fireside on those nights when his voice was ready for bed some time before the rest of him. I’ve heard boy and guitar examine the tune from all angles, most of them simply because they happened to be there.

All my pride in this self-taught, confident musician doesn’t mean there weren’t days when I’d have paid him money just to sing something else.

And yet this morning, I’m struck by how polished it sounds, as if I’d become blind to the fact that all those ragged practices might one day unite in a seamless whole.

Writers are lucky. Our rehearsals are secret affairs. The words appear and are rearranged silently and as long as we shoo away the over-the-shoulder audience, no-one beyond a few feet of us is any the wiser as to the almighty mess from which we fashion something presentable.

The musician without access to sound-proofing never knows this luxury. His creative gestation period is an unavoidable spectator sport from the moment the Muse starts kicking. Which is why, when near-perfection finally dusts itself down and emerges from the rubble, he astounds us all the more.

And that’s the trade-off.

Big band sound strikes the wrong chord

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Playing Big Band music in the den today.

“I like this,” says Younger Son, “it reminds me of Tom and Jerry.”

Somewhere a million miles away, Glenn Miller drives the heel of his hand hard against his forehead.

Chris Moyles, the rest of your life starts here

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It was an epochal moment on Radio 1 this morning. DJ Chris Moyles‘ irritation (and I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this) at the vowel-twisting, consonant-dropping urban patois in which Professor Green drenches his lyrics could no longer be confined.

You could hear it simmering a few months ago, when Moyles daringly took the mick out of Dizzee Rascal‘s diction but this morning the dam wall was well and truly breached. This morning, he fulminated, he raged, driven to distraction not by dialect but by lazy, sloppy speech dressed up as hip, uttered by people trying to be something they aren’t.

You can hear his rant here. It starts 1:45.30 in and ends at 1:47.00.

It is effectively a 90-second audition for a job on Radio 2.

I like Moyles a lot and will happily tune in to whichever station puts a mike in front of him. New contract notwithstanding, however, I believe we’ve just witnessed the beginning of the end of his time at Radio 1.

Welcome to middle age, sir.

Nothing quite like grown-up chats with your kids…

By text yesterday:

“Dad, there’s a new album I want to buy.

One review claims: ‘It’s like having a plastic bag taped over your head for an hour, while Satan uses your scrotum as a speedbag’.

Sound any good?”

Finally, my Eurovision is 20-20

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After 40 years of tuning out the music and cocking a merely cursory ear at the transitory excitement of the voting process, I finally get the Eurovision Song Contest.

While Britain appears stuck in a musical timewarp (Pete Waterman, we now know, is no George Gershwin, although this puerile rant suggests he may need time to accept the idea himself) the rest of the continent has moved on, with Saturday’s array of songs at least offering some musical depth, even if the lyrics remain unlikely to change lives.

What really caught my interest, however, was the inspired use of modern technology to show a continent coming together. Big-screen rallies in city squares we’re used to but the webcam coverage from homes around Europe was a triumph.

Staged? Who knows? What I do know is that by the time of the brilliant mass dance routine with which TV padded while votes were being counted, I was gripped.

There will be times when this blog decries Brussels and the whole notion of a United States of Europe. Some of you will mark me down as a little Englander accordingly, unmoved by anything happening east of Dover.

So know this: there can’t be enough cultural exchanges, town twinning and trade treaties between European nations for my liking. My sole objection is to those idealists who would ram a one-size-fits-all governmental template down on a group of nations too disparate to bear it.

Saturday night, however, was the kind of European union that does work. And not a politician in sight.

A wee dream

Cheryl Tweedy via last.fm

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Three Glenmorangies before bed while ‘networking’ at a press do in Northumberland last night. Promptly dreamt that I was Cheryl Tweedy‘s second husband.

A bottle of Glenmorangie for Christmas please, someone.

Busking the new cultural battleground

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Say it ain’t so.

Older son plays his new guitar in a Birmingham high street. Favourably received in the main, he collects £18 in his equally new guitar case.

The sole conscientious objector, he tells me on the ‘phone later, is a gentleman of Arabic origin who rants at him in a foreign tongue for a few moments, shakes a fist and nods contemptuously in the direction of the lad’s musical earnings, before wandering off.

I hope he was either drunk, disturbed, or simply having a bad day.

I hope he was anything other than a glimpse of the future.

It’s ‘Classic FM’, not ‘Classic Right-On’

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One of those did-I-hear-that-right? moments in the car this morning.

A Classic FM presenter actually referred to Peter Tchaikovsky as “Tchaik”.

Even on Classic FM, apparently, three syllable words are becoming a trifle taxing. In which case call him ‘Peter’, surely?

That’s the problem with trying to sound phat. Push it too far and you ending up sounding like something else altogether. Although it does rhyme with ‘phat’.

I know they grow up fast but ye gods…

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.Aggrieved 10-year-old son storms into kitchen after muffled but heated debate with his brother. “Mum,” he demands to know, “is there anything wrong with me liking Vera Lynn?”