Ebony and Ecstasy
After nearly two decades in separate corners, hip-hop and e-music are back together on the dance flo
Hip-hop and electronic dance music are brothers who have taken different trajectories in their lives. When hip-hop was called rap and emcees still wore leather pants and mascara, the music was up-tempo and DJ-driven, just like the super-club sounds of today. When rap helped to spawn "electro" in the early '80s heyday of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock," Cybotron's "Clear," and the Jonzun Crew's "Space is the Place," it was one of the last times that hip-hop and electronic dance music were truly in the same gang. Perhaps it's fitting then, that in 2007, a time of '80s revivalism among the cool kids, hip-hop and e-music are getting back together.
Exhibit A, of course, is Kanye West's chart-dominating "Stronger," which samples Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Hovering at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart, it's based on the crunchy analog keyboards and voice-box vocals of the French duo's track, which itself harkens back to an era of electrified, '80s disco. Meanwhile, Dude 'N Dem's "Watch My Feet" is an exercise in "hard house" that's amazingly reduced to half-time break-beats. And Village Voice pop critic Tom Breihan notes that Timbaland has forever had an "overt techno streak," dating back, I might add, to his production of Missy Elliott's house-paced, 2001 club hit "Get Ur Freak On." That was about that time that Sean "P. Diddy" Combs started hanging around the DJ booths of South Beach and Ibiza.
Today, the most unstoppable element of electronic music in rap is ecstatic, Teutonic trance. We can probably thank Usher and his bombastic 2004 track "Yeah." Baby Bash's recent hit "Cyclone" is a feast of stratospheric strings, right out of the glow-stick Netherlands, but set to the low idle of contemporary beat-making. On the e-music side, there have been nods to hip-hop from DJ Claude VonStroke ("Who's Afraid of Detroit") techno producer Dabrye's (Two/Three) and remixer Trentemøller ("Les Djinns"). Most prominent among the e-meets-b-boy crowd is Spank Rock, whose latest EP, "Bangers & Cash" goes off the deep end of "booty music," reflecting reverence for 2 Live Crew's perv-boy antics while employing high-tech production and trance-inspired elements.
Interestingly, Sasha Frere-Jones's recent New Yorker essay, "A Paler Shade of White," argues that "rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties" and became, essentially, free from black influence. Rock, as I argue in "Pop's Living Dead" [CityBeat, October 9, 2003], stopped evolving around 1979, a victim of self-segregation (rock fans burned disco records in Comiskey Park that year) at a time when African-Americans moved on to create rap, disco, and soon, house and techno - new genres far from rock. But with that came a hyperawareness of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop - an almost anti-rock sentiment. As the genre stepped further away from its multicultural roots, it turned its back on its brother, the often-effeminate dance music genre. In the late '90s, a defiant saying in hip-hop clubs - where men would line the dance floor, arms crossed, and bob their heads as women gyrated - was "n------ don't dance."
Today, hip-hop is recapturing the groove. Diddy's super-club exploits and Eminem's ecstasy shouts helped. As well, shared technology in the studio is unavoidable: Reason, Ableton Live, and Serato Scratch software dominate both genres. With shared tech comes shared sounds. Furthermore, hip-hop has also grown up and is flipping the script on cultural appropriation, like Diddy sampling the reggae-crazed Police. But one horizon always weighed heavy on the artistic mind of any Afro-futurist: Space is the place. The biblical prophet Elijah was lifted by a sweet chariot into a sky afire ("The Roof is on Fire"), an image later reflected in the teachings of the Nation of Islam, which preached of an interstellar "mother plane" in the sky, a vengeful promised land, so to speak. This heavenly futurism found its way into the music of George Clinton (the Mothership Connection) and a long line of skyward dreamers (Sun Ra, Afrika Bambaataa), reaching into the electro '80s and beyond. The dance floor, I would argue, has always been a plane apart, a space for freedom of movement literally, and in the mind's eye.
Published: 10/25/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
