I never listened to rap when growing up, and as I have re-discovered a wide variety of genres this last decade that I didn't like when I was a teenager, rap and hip-hop in general continues to elude me. There's something about the whole "posture of it" that just repels me; the lyrics are all about stuff that have nothing to do with me (and really, for anyone) and is a nightmarish repetition of the same themes and tropes about bang-bang and money-money, turbo-chicks charged banality and useless and aimless bravado, dissing between themselves that just hide that they have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing else to actually talk about once the ghetto gospel dies. A mindless repetition of gun sounds, vinyls scratches and... not much more; the so called poetry of the streets facing the vapidity of a brick wall. Losing itself in an unintended self-parody that is meant to be unhinged and authentic but just looks sad from the outside.
But actually, the deeper reason that explains why I don't like rap has nothing to do with the vanity-ridden intellectualization of the fact. It has nothing to do with rap being "good music" or "bad music" whatever the fuck that means anyway. After all, all genres are based around heliocentric themes, formulaic shticks and banality. No, the real reason I don't like rap is because I don't feel it. Most music is passable, in the sense that "it lends itself to be listened to", but there's no moment when it sounds that I feel every molecule of my body vibrating at the same time, and without that, it's no different to me than elevator music or whatever pop slop is sounding in the background of the cafeteria. No part of my brain hears Kendrik Lamar and goes "yes, this is me" or "this sound embodies a mental state that is known to me". I don't know what to say, we have lived very different lives brother. It's really nobody's fault. All I know about the hoods and black culture comes from Bel-Air and RDCworld1. After all, I'm a white european boy from an upper low middle class family. I once watched that movie. Growing up, rap was just Eminem's weird gimmick. Also the music that the trashy people I actually knew seemed to really like.
That said, there are some songs I actually like quite a lot. Two of them are from 2Pac. The other is this one:
How it came to be like this, was quite fortuitous. I have always loved Aruarian Dance, as a sort of one off song I would put in random playlists to expand their scope and make them seem less shallow than they really are. Then, one day, for no particular reason I clicked on the author.
There, between normal looking other instrumental tunes I saw this weirdly named song.
Luv (sic.) pt3 (feat. Shing02)
All my alarms blew off. What kind of title is that. Isn't this whole "feat" thing what rappers and djs do? Who the fuck is Shing02? What the hell is a luv(sic)? So clicked on it. And it was weird as fuck. I... I didn't even knew if I liked it or not. The tune was great, and the rap lyrics seemed to interplay nicely with the whole thing, but at the same time they still grossed me out a little bit. I didn't knew if I liked it because of them or in spite of them. I listened to it a couple more times and decided to put it in a little forgotten list full of misfits I don't really listen much to but still find they have an unidentified nice vibe to them; like The Q4, John Murphy, Woodkid and The Mountain Goats. A weird compilation of somewhat obscure sounds to be visited when I run out of ideas about what song to put where. Feathers have lived rent free in my head ever since.
Fast forward about a decade.
I was climbing in the fightclub-esque abandoned factory turned clandestine climbing gym in my home town, when someone put some rap music that sounded weirdly familiar. I casually said "this sounds like Nujabes". Instantly, they guy that put it in the speakers stopped whatever the hell he was doing in another room and came where I was to stare at me with a thousand yard-stare and asked: "who said that". It turns out, it was Nujabes. There are some artists that, they are not obscure, but to recognize them in a crowd of people instantly makes you best friends with whoever put it in or at least, you recognize each other as the giga-connoisseurs you are and share a silent link through the invisible link of objective genius musical taste. Nujabes is one of them. It has happened me before. The guy wasn't an stranger anyway, but I could sense he was seeing just then now and then in a light he hadn't seen me under before. We talked briefly. I asked him if he knew what style was this whole thing supposed to be, or if he knew other artists that made similar things to that one-off conceptual album. He said he didn't. Then, a couple of days after I asked the same to my other Nujabes friend, and he said the same.
What a curious thing, I thought.
And for no other particular reason than that, in my never-ending quest to broaden my musical horizons (or more prosaically, find music I like) yesterday at 1AM I decided to descend into the rabbit hole and search for an style that didn't exist between the depths of a genre of music I knew nothing about and don't like at all.
I started where any sane person would, using an outdated webpage from a former mad-scientist spotify engineer that created a cluster based definition of musical genres constructed from scrapped (internally stolen) user data. There I saw that what I was looking for was either something called "ambeat" or "rap jazz". The problem was that, exploring both two-dimensional clusters, what I found was not exactly it. A good starting point, but not it. The thing is, "it" it's not just a normal rap song with a jazz or ambient base underneath it, it has to be more nuances than that; with some interplay between the two, empowering the illusory and ironic juxtaposition of the two that made it sound fucking magical. Most stuff was just too ambient or too beat, and lack the introspective and littered with literary lyrics that elevate it above the usual street banter. Lo-fi hip-hop also don't quite covers it, as it (by design) lacks an undercurrent of intensity.
Then I went old-school spotify digging. Related artists, searching all featured artists on anything that smelled slightly as what I was looking for. Quickly I realized I was running in circles around the original conceptual album and a guy called Cise Star. It became quite obvious to me that what I was looking for was not a defined genre, but the work of an small group of like minded individuals that occasionally did this very particular brand of fusion rap. Which is often the origin of most genres per se, but made searching for gold much more difficult. The playlist was risking to become a handful of tunes from the original work that started this journey and not much else. It has happened to me before.
But, then I realized something odd. A whole lot of unrelated songs by unrelated artists had a track with "nujabes tribute" in the title. I thought this guy was obscure. Most of them were not very good, but I found they played an important role just by being there. As if just having a song with such name in your repertoire somewhere made you part of a distinguished club of the real ones. Once again, Nujabes brothers. So, aside from brute force looking for tributes and checking out the artists other works, I decided to go absolutely insane in my quest and just googling the guy.
He was japanese, made music and died somewhat tragically. That was the extend of my knowledge of him before that. What I found was almost an entire subculture centered around the guy. The extensive wikipedia page, the 50K+ subreddit, the fan-art, the tattoos, the memes. Most relevant was a hand-made translation of a transcript of a text by Shing02 (remember him?) found in uncatalogued japanese vinyls about the origin and creation of the already infamous conceptual album.
I will let the man speak for himself:
I first dedicated "Luv(Sic)" to the goddess of music in the end of 2000, and fifteen years later, we have a six-part series (Hexalogy). There is a certain voice that unites the chapters, a character if you will. The way Luv(Sic) is spelled (as in the Latin sic, for a misspelled quote) symbolizes how it wasn't a straightforward love song, there's a layer of obscured honesty. Obviously, there's many classic hip-hop songs in the form of love letters, such as LL Cool J's "I Need Love," or Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R", but to me it was important to write something personal, a song that spoke about my own vulnerability about wanting to have a lasting relationship with music.
The transcript is quite worth it, and can be read here.
Man, I love when stuff comes with lore.
I resumed my digging. Both through spotify shenanigans, google and everynoise cluster analysis. Slowly, but surely, a drip of good songs started to fill the empty bucket. I didn't even stop to look at it or re-listen to a lot of stuff, so lost I was in my frenzy. Eventually, when bird already chirping somewhere outside my room, I felt satisfied. I closed the list with the original song sampled in the song I posted before, which I found I actually had listened to before a long time ago when making a jazz playlist about a decade ago. Man, the world is a time machine. I went to sleep wondering if the list would held up the day after, or if this only made sense in the moment, like a feverish dream.
So I woke up today unreasonably late, eat dinner made coffee smoke a bit and eventually remembered about what I did the night before. I'm listening to it right now. It fucking works. Not only that, it slaps. I did it. I've healed myself from the ignominy of my own musical chauvinism: I found rap I like.
