Frank W. Hoffmann – Rhythm & Blues, Rap, And Hip Hop (2006)

Автор: Frank W. Hoffmann
Название книги: Rhythm & Blues, Rap, And Hip Hop (2006)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Музыка
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Asignal feature of any encyclopedia is its presentation
of the elements of a historical mosaic
unassembled. The only organizing narrative force is
the alphabet. From this leveled landscape, a reader is
often led to unlikely observations of affinity and
confluence among the encyclopedia’s disparate
entries. Because chronological sequence is not a factor,
we wander as through a museum, forming our
own impressions of the connections among the
things we observe. Encyclopedias are, of course,
especially useful in directing us to a particular topic.
But it is also instructive simply to read through a few
entries in succession. Start at the beginning. Reading
the first four entries—“Paula Abdul,” “Above the
Law,” “Herb Abramson,” “a cappella”—we cover
most of the historical time frame this book represents.
A cappella is the unaccompanied singing style
favored by early rock-and-roll vocal groups of the
1950s. Paula Abdul represents the 1980s pop diva
for whom the dance was at least as important as the
voice. Above the Law takes us into the 1990s, when
hip-hop became king.And Herb Abramson was one
of the founders of Atlantic Records, perhaps the
premier R&B label, with a history stretching from
the late 1940s to today, the home, over the years, to
the likes of Ray Charles, The Drifters, Aretha
Franklin,Wilson Pickett, Chic, and Lil’ Kim.
Reading through a succession of apparently
unrelated topics may feel disorienting at first, but
gradually, among the kaleidoscopic wealth of information,
common themes emerge, connecting many
of the entries to one another in various ways. A
great many of the artists cataloged in this book, for
example, owe their early musical training to the
churches they attended as youngsters. Sam Cooke,
Aretha Franklin, Teddy Pendergrass, and Whitney
Houston are but a tiny sample of artists schooled in
the musical and expressive traditions of black
gospel music. And each of these artists came to
national prominence in a different decade, from the
1950s to the 1980s, a clear indication of the church’s
continuing influence. Indeed, the foundations for
the style shared by hundreds of doo-wop groups of
the 1950s was laid in black churches. And the vocal
stylings common to all modern R&B divas are connected
intimately to a long-standing tradition of
gospel expression.
It is the connections to a traditional past and the
continual, dynamic reshaping of tradition that
gives this music its vitality, its strength, and its wide
appeal.As the past is invoked, it informs the present
with something familiar, and as traditional elements
are transformed, they become fresh. The
Orioles, and dozens of subsequent doo-wop
groups, built on the sound of the Ink Spots and the
Mills Brothers but transformed their elders’
smooth, sophisticated pop, with its perfect
Hollywood-movie diction and subtle jazz inflections,
into a more youthful, unpolished sound with
the lead singer’s voice barely able to contain a sense
of emotional transport. Prince, in forging an eclectic
mix of R&B, pop, and rock elements, demonstrates,
in his early work, a clear affinity for Sly
Stone while offering up a blend that is all his own.
And hip-hop culture, with its widespread use of
sampling, makes connections with a musical past
that range from sound fragments to extended quotations,
such as Dr Dre’s chorus for “Let Me Ride”
(1992), which is taken from Parliament’s
“Mothership Connection (Star Child)” (1976), or
Missy Elliott’s revision (in 1997) of Ann Peebles’ “I
Can’t Stand the Rain” (1974). Furthermore, the origins
of rap in the 1970s as a street music requiring
no instruments are essentially similar to those of
doo-wop in the late 1940s, where groups of kids had
only to gather on a neighborhood street, using
nothing but their voices to make music that would,
eventually, develop worldwide appeal. Such connections
demonstrate the continued presence of a
musical ancestry in the work of succeeding musical
generations, through which develops a sense of stable
and enduring tradition.
Another common thread running through the
encyclopedia is the medium that represents and
transmits the music, namely, recordings. The emergence
of R&B coincided with an unprecedented
increase both in record sales and in records’ presence
on radio (increasingly displacing live broadcast performances).
Records became, as never before, the
music industry’s coin of the realm. And as they
circulated, they allowed black music to travel in
ways that were often forbidden to black musicians
in a segregated and racist society. And as records
developed an unprecedented economic potency, as
increasing numbers of them were produced for
the growing market, recording studios and record
companies sprang up across the country, many little
more than a couple of rooms in a storefront or
warehouse. Making records became an attainable
aspiration for thousands of young musicians who
would have had no such opportunity with the large
established record companies. With the recording
field expanding exponentially, the range of sounds
and production techniques expanded as well, sometimes
through conscious creativity, other times by
accident, luck, or happenstance.
With the recording field so densely and variously
populated, different ideas arose of how a record
should sound, what it should get across. If the
records released by the small independent record
labels lacked the polish of the majors, they held an
undeniable emotional energy, and that was key. As
these often rough-hewn, yet affecting, recordings
became successful, that is, as they became part of
people’s lives, they contributed to the development
among artists and the public of what we might call
recording consciousness—a sense that records have
a uniqueness about them, something different from
live performance. The studio culture that would
build over the years in now legendary studios such
as Hitsville U.S.A. (Motown), Stax, and Atlantic has
become fundamental to how music is produced and
what listeners expect. Disco, Detroit techno, and
other types of electronica are altogether studiobased
genres. And hip-hop, despite its street roots,
has thrived on the creative efforts of an array of
producers making records that both tap into tradition
and bring forth ever-new approaches to sonic
expression. Indeed, the vast accumulation of
records made over the past 60 years is itself a kind
of encyclopedia. Thus, Public Enemy’s Hank
Shocklee says that his brother, coproducer Keith,
“knows records like an encyclopedia.” The records
themselves are repositories of knowledge, experience,
and tradition. It is fitting, then, that they provide
not only pleasurable listening but pedagogic
resources for thousands of young musicians, who
learn their craft by listening, and nodes of collective
memory for successive generations.
In the history of American popular music, the
contributions of black Americans far outweigh their
proportional presence in the overall population. It
is striking that the American Popular Music series
has two other volumes devoted primarily to black
music: Jazz and Blues. In fact, the influence of black
music is so pervasive that many white musicians, in
their most impressionable years, develop an affinity
for black music that forms the basis of their later
careers. Elvis Presley, the songwriters Jerry Leiber
and Mike Stoller, the Rascals, and Eminem are
a representative few of the many white musicians
irresistibly drawn to black musical styles in search of
their own black-inflected voice. The pervasiveness
of the musical influence makes as good a case as any
that, while this music may originate with a particular
segment of the population, it is ultimately transcendent.
That is, while it is certainly the music of
black Americans, it has become also the music of
all Americans, which explains the iconic status of
so many black performers. Sam Cooke, Ray Charles,
Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, James
Brown, the Supremes, Prince, Michael Jackson,
Tupac Shakur, and Lauryn Hill are among the many
stars, representing various musical genres, whose
impact has been felt throughout the culture and
proved lasting.
Moreover, African-American musical influence
is international. There was a time when black
music was only available to African Americans,
when record companies marketed “race” records
only in African-American communities, and
radio all but ignored the music. Mainstream
media companies felt sure that the appeal of the
music was limited. But in the era represented by
this volume, black music proved its power to cross
boundaries of social demarcation and geographic
distance, including oceans. After all, the young
English musicians who seemed to come out of
nowhere in the 1960s in fact had deep roots in
American R&B, blues, and rock and roll. They,
too, had learned from records. The Beatles recorded
reverential cover versions of the Marvellettes’
“Please Mr. Postman,” Smokey Robinson and the
Miracles’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” and
Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)”,
and the Rolling Stones, before they learned to
write their own songs, lived on the legacy of
their heroes—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and
Chuck Berry.
The Rhythm and Blues, Rap, and Hip-Hop volume
of American Popular Music is both an informative
resource and a celebration of a musical tradition.
While it is necessarily selective, it points beyond its
own boundaries in several directions—to other
musical genres covered elsewhere in the series, to
a historical past whose legacy is the foundation of
the music represented here, and to more detailed
stories of the artists, songs, songwriters, arrangers,
records, disc jockeys, radio stations, record labels,
producers, and entrepreneurs whose collective presence
hovers over this project. As such, it is a starting
point for further exploration both of a complex and
fascinating cultural history and of an astonishing
wealth of musical achievement.