Hometown Flava

Back in the days when I was young/I’m not a kid anymore/but some days I sit and wish I was I kid again . . .

These rap lyrics take me back . . . back to days when I was a kid growing up in Rockingham, North Carolina, listening to Freda Paine, James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, and others. I learned that music ain’t just music — it’s political platform, memory reinvented, mythology, and yes, weapon.

So now, in my truly not-a-kid-anymore days, I look in on the world of rap music and hip hop culture . . . and understand:

▼ Rap is a unifying force among young people — especially young black males — more potent than the black church, the Nation of Islam, and all the community service organizations combined. Despite attempts by these organizations to provide alternatives or solutions for “at-risk” youth, it is rap that reaches them most directly and most poignantly.

▼ Rap is BIG, and living quite large. For better or worse, rap has been wed to a plethora of cultures worldwide from urban France to rural Cuba. Its roots, growth, and development here in America parallel the be-bop revolution in jazz and the Motown story in Detroit, with an ample helping of ’70s Blaxploitation flicks flung into the gumbo.

▼ For the young, politically maturing offspring of Malcolm’s Generation Xers, rap and hip hop culture are nothing less than the freedom songs of the civil rights movement. Powerful, and yet unfocused, rap is their embraced medium of expression for unity, justice, and full recognition.

The power of rap became apparent in the late 1970s. As the political climate took a conservative downturn, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five echoed the political platform of countless youth with “The Message,” a hard-edged, landmark rap that graphically detailed the perils of inner-city living — “Don’t push me/’cause I’m close/to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head.”

It was reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” and his strong, searching face on the cover of the 1972 album. “It makes me wanna holler sometimes/the way they do my life,” he lamented. Seemed like that same embittered brother was rapping in “The Message,” except this time, he ended on a note of defiance, laughing, “ha/hahaha/ haha,” like he was ready to do somebody in then and there.

On the eve of jheri curls, crack, and ronald reagan, the preacher — the perennial voice of the black community — had gone and reinvented itself, and come again as a rapper. Young people started human beatboxing on street comers, drumming rap rhythms on school desks, and inventing their own hiphopnitized vernacular. For youth who endured the onslaught of a national policy tantamount to domestic vengeance and exacerbated by AIDS, drug abuse, homelessness, and unprecedented levels of violence, rap became both an accessible art form and a weapon.

 

Rap is young — celebrating its 15th birthday — yet it has long and honorable roots traceable to the oral traditions of griots and praise-singers of Afrikan cultures.

The griot or historian-storyteller was vested with keeping the histories of families and entire villages. When Alex Haley traced his Afrikan roots, he visited a Gambian village and listened to a griot. The skillcraft, passed down from generation to generation, is still active and intact — and in rap, too. Rap groups form crews, posses, and klans, each with its own unique flavoring and commentary; they chronicle the stories of their lives and their communities. “Rap music,” says Chuck D, “is the black CNN.”

The praise-singer, though not occupying as strenuous a position as the griot, was the courier of legend and myth. Often accompanied by instrumentation, the praise-singer praised, sang, and recounted the many exploits and events of the community, the tragedies and comedies, marriages and deaths, and countless other meanderings of any given day. The praise-singer’s gig happened anywhere at anytime: in the royal court, on the side of the road, at parades, baby-naming ceremonies, or weddings. I imagine many of them like the rural blues singers of American lore.

When the Afrikan was enslaved and forced to the Americas, the vocal culture ingeniously reinvented itself in the form of the oft-discussed patois languages, worksongs, the storytelling tradition, the dozens, and the drums of Congo Square in New Orleans. Though much of the Afrikan memory has been systematically suppressed, the Afrikan sensibility remains. As Spike Lee’s movie title suggests, we’ve always sought a “mo’ better blues.”

As rappers broke on the scene, more than a few folk (me included) started cross-referencing these vocal artists with musical personalities, techniques, and styles across the time and geography of Afrikan Diaspora. “Rap isn’t a music,” critic Nelson George noted in the Village Voice in 1989. “It’s a cultural black hole able to suck up r&b, rock, go-go, house, and, soon, third world rhythms without losing its combative personality.”

The funky, hard-as-nails style of Jamaican rappers like Shabba Ranks and Patra surely recalls the dj toasters of early reggae music. Shabba’s style also recalls the djembe drum, a powerful, roaring instrument used as the signal drum for dancers in traditional Afrikan orchestration.

The Marley legacy notwithstanding, hip hop culture has been the vehicle largely responsible for introducing reggae music to the Stateside masses. Twenty years ago, dreadlock culture was viewed as an aberration, a “cult” of violence and incoherence. Thanks to the new jack hiphopnitization, dreads are to the ’90s what George Clinton and Parliament were to the ’70s: the funky vanguard.

Consider more connections between past and present: Public Enemy and KRS-One represent extensions of Black Nationalism — Malcolm X’s speeches augmented by John Coltrane’s sheets of sound. They pay homage to the 1960s consciousness rap of the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Bama the Poet, and Amira Baraka. I can see Salt-n-Pepa as the new jack Supremes; and Queen Latifah’s audacity on the mike calls to mind former female royalty such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, and Aretha Franklin. The human beatbox draws on jazz scat, while the elemental record scratches on the rapper’s turntables mimic the one-stringed kora reborn in the Mississippi Delta via a nail, broom wire, and cigar box played with a broken bottleneck. And dare we compare the black church’s shouting tradition of call and response to rap’s communal party cliches?

 

Geographically, rap is everywhere — and most definitely in the South. But the lines separating each region’s unique flavoring are blurry. Rap is a chameleon, whose being adapts and changes to the colors around it, while maintaining its own distinct selfhood. Hip hop culture, like the elusive Esu-elegbara of the Afrikan orisha religion, is not a monogamous spirit.

There is a Southern rap tradition, but save for the blues idiom that informs all black music, it has little to do with traditional devices of black Southern music — the field hollers, gospel moans, and blues shouts. In the rap tradition, the Southern flava is the notorious Miami-based Luke Skywalker and 2 Live Crew. It is up-tempo music with big bass guitar sounds and in-yo-face words about big behinds and other body parts on womenfolk.

The Southern flava split the airwaves with its underground lyrics some years ago as gangsta rap was being born on the West Coast against a backdrop of gangs and crack. Out of New York, an East Coast flava rose from “stop the violence” and consciousness rap of groups like Public Enemy and Po’ Righteous Teacher, and the stylized similes and metaphors of DAS EFX and others.

In the South, there are other “hometown flavas” on more organic and grassroots levels. In Durham, North Carolina, I came across Trendsetter Music, which sponsors an annual Rap Summit, and Boss Records, which boasts of being the first national distributor of rap music in the South. In nearby Greensboro, I visited the Flava Spot, a rap and hip hop retail store, and Funhouse Records, a recording studio. And in east Tennessee, I worked with Field Nigga Nation, a hard-edged group.

So it’s going on. “More rap records are sold in the South than in any other part of the United States,” says Trendsetter rapper John Watkins.

But as further testimony to rap’s elusive nature, the popular Atlanta-bred group Arrested Development is not even considered Southern flava. “The mellow, uplifting message and catchy lyrics of Arrested Development put it in a different school all together,” points out Watkins. “AD follows positive uplift-type groups like De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Jungle Brothers, Zulu Nation, and Afrikka Bambaata.”

“You see,” Watkins insists, “that’s the way to look at hip hop — not geographical, but its unique flavor.”

Watkins started rapping while growing up in Mississippi. “Being from Mississippi, you’d think that I have a Southern flava, but no, it’s East Coast,” he says. “In junior high we would rap around school and you’d hear something from all four major flava groups.”

Watkins readily acknowledges the difficulty of expanding notions of rap flava in the South. But believing the Southern market to be wide open, he and the other Trendsetters — many of whom are fast food managers — pooled their money to get started.

“We’ve bought our own preproduction equipment, samplers, reverbs, turntables, mixers, an effects machine, drum machines, and two portable studios,” Watkins says. “We’re capable of any product, and that’s what really matters — the product.”

 

Though marginalized, rap and hip hop have created a significant economic market and — of necessity — more than a few young entrepreneurs. Nestled in the Tate Street shopping district of Greensboro, the Flava Spot sells rap music and hip hop gear to students at the nearby University of North Carolina. When I rapped with the owners this summer, the store was enduring its first off-season. The sounz being spun by proprietor Frank Jay filled the space with this thing the hip hop kids are calling acid jazz — strictly underground and straight outta New York.

The young businessmen behind the Flava Spot were adamant about one thing: They want it known that drug sales did not in any way finance the opening of the store. “I’ve always made do with what I had,” said founder Mervin Sealy, “and I always dealt with what I had.”

“I’m not going to do anything to pollute my body or my cipher,” agreed Eli Davis, another Flava Spot operator. “Still, a lot of rappers have personally experienced selling rock cocaine. If someone lives that life and raps that, then it’s legitimate.”

We talked about rap lyrics that degrade women. “I contradict myself sometimes,” Davis conceded. “I mean, I’ll listen to Sade and I’ll be like, ‘yeah black woman,’ then I’ll listen to some N.W.A. right after that and . . .”

Sealy’s younger brother, Shane, interjected. “Women in rap are called bitches, ’hos, tricks, skanks, scalawags, and hoochies,” he says bluntly. “It’s just humor.”

This comes to the hard part. Citing rap lyrics that glorify violence and degrade women, Senator Carol Mosely Braun has called for hearings to investigate whether gangsta rap should be banned. Her colleague, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, counters that “the youth have a right to express themselves.” Waters notes that lawmakers would better serve young people by fighting the perils of their reality instead of censoring their music.

Is rap a catalyst for drugs, violence, and other social ills? Is there a point at which rap becomes, as one pundit put it, “black-on-black crime with a beat”?

What comes to mind for me are two slogans embraced by rappers during the Los Angeles riots: NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE and FUCK DA POLICE. Both echoed the sentiments of blacks and others who witnessed the Rodney King beating on prime time. NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE has reached the modern canons of “We Shall Overcome,” and serves as the rallying cry of boycotters protesting a police assault on a black woman in Battleboro, North Carolina. By contrast, Ice T’s “Cop Killer” was censored by the recording industry and banned by many record stores.

Clearly, the choice of slogans is a matter of personal preference. But both are real and legitimate. Considering the violently arrogant history and current reality of this country, an F-D-P day comes pretty natural for some folks, me included.

Still, there is evidence of a change in rap music. John Watkins of Trendsetter Music says that the word is it’s “checkup neck-up” time — a time of new self-awareness and social consciousness. Gangsta rap is loosening up as a result of the recent gang truce, as evidenced by Tupac Shakur’s latest effort, “Keep Your Head Up.” Luke Skywalker and 2 Live Crew are fast becoming old school in the South, as rappers increasingly heed the clarion call of OUTKAST, a new group from Decatur, Georgia — “get up, stand up, and do something.”

What impresses me about all of the “hometown flavas” that I rapped with is their sense of commitment not only to the music, but to one another. If there is a single common denominator among rappers beyond their music, it is a cooperative spirit and shared vision that’s sadly lacking in many youth today. In the face of all the negative media hype rap receives (black columnist Stanley Crouch once challenged another writer to point out a literate rapper), many rappers are making serious and sound decisions regarding where they’re going with their own lives, and raising some helluva righteous issues through their music.

As a black man, I have to be worried about the casual dissin’ of women and the lack of historical context many youth are working out of. But I do understand that just as the sounz spun by Frank Jay fill the empty space at the Flava Spot during the off-season, rap fills a great void in the lives of many young people. For them, America is in a permanent state of off-season. And that’s the real hometown flava — the stone-cold, unfunky universal of being young, black, and poor in America.

There just ain’t nothing wrong with rappers weaving their tapestry of future mythos . . . epic events, heroes, gods and goddesses. As Eli Davis of the Flava Spot puts it, “It’s all a part of people’s lives — where they are and what they see — that’s interpreted in the music.”

I’m outta here y’all. PEACE.