To the tune of that old blues song that white rock bands have ripped off and called “Bad to the Bone,” the voice of a middle-aged black man sings:
“I come from Mississippi, where I was young and running wild. Ended up in New York City. That’s where I had my first child. I named the boy Nassir. All the boys call him Nas. I told him as a youngster he’d be the greatest man alive.”
Then the tempo quickens and the drum riff explodes. The rapper known as Nas brings the lyrics, a hip-hop tribute to the history of black music.
“We getting busy bridging the gap from blues to jazz to rap. The history of music on this track. The blues came from gospel, gospel from blues. Slaves were harmonizing them aahs and oohs.
“Old school, new school, no school rules.”
I could swear my jaw dropped when I heard these lyrics from Nas’ single “Bridging the Gap.” A member of the hip-hop generation actually acknowledging that blacks have a musical history that pre-dates hip-hop and rap? Why, it’s almost unheard of.
In fact, it’s hard to get young folks these days — and it doesn’t matter what race or ethnic group they come from — to disabuse themselves of the silly notion that nothing significant happened in this world before they were born. When I’ve tried showing movies from the 1950s and 1960s to a class I teach at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University — usually white and Asian — I get reviews that read something like this:
“For a movie made in the 1960s, such-and-such wasn’t too bad.”
Or this one, if I committed the offense of showing them a black and white film:
“Such and such wasn’t a bad movie, even if it was in black and white.”
I don’t have the heart to tell the poor deluded dears that Hollywood was making good movies long before they were born and that many of them were in black and white. Likewise, good music was around long before rap and hip-hop. It sounds like this Nas guy may have actually listened to some, and heeded the words of one Duke Ellington, who said that there are really only two kinds of music: good and bad.
And with rap and hip-hop, as with any other genre, we get some of both.
True, way too many rap videos feature lyrics extolling the lifestyles of gangstas, pimps and thugs. We’ve heard our women referred to by their “black brothers,” more than once, in ways that we’d be ready to crucify a white man for if he’d uttered them.
But every now and then a gem slips through, one that outdoes the best of the music from previous eras. There is no rock or rhythm and blues equivalent of Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony’s “Crossroads” video. I still prefer Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” to almost anything I grew up listening to.
Kanye West almost floored me with these lyrics from “Jesus Walks”:
“…I can talk about anything except for Jesus. That means guns, sex, lies and videotape. But if I talk about God, my record won’t get played.”
Thank heavens — or whoever’s in charge of such things — that “Jesus Walks” has been played plenty this year. And I can’t forget to thank Outkast, who are only putting out the most innovative and imaginative music and videos of any genre these days. Whenever I’m humming the words to “I Like the Way You Move,” I end up saying “I don’t know about the way they move, but I sure like the way these young men make music.”
Not every member of my generation feels that way, of course.
We baby boomers, much like today’s hip-hoppers, figure we invented real music. A good friend of mine described how she went to a health club one day and was grooving to an Outkast tune when some nearby baby boomers demanded that it be turned off. They apparently forgot that their parents felt the same way about the Beatles and Elvis.
But as Nas has made clear, all American music is linked — and the link stretches back to the African continent.
