Yo, It’s Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water, Homies

I finally figured out how to get my kids to listen to my music. Force. By sheer parental authority, I required them to submit to my musical tutelage in the hopes that they might discover what real music is. OK, actually we struck a deal. On the way to school we would listen to their music in the car and on the way home, by golly, we would listen to mine.

On the way to school I endured Limp Bizkit, Dr. Dre, Destiny’s Child (which I didn’t mind too much) and, oh yes, Eminem. But on the way back I tortured them with the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and, oh yes, Jimi Hendrix. Then one day the magical moment came. My teenager begged to hear Hendrix one more time. Then we started to sing along, “You don’t care for me, I don’t care about that, you got a new fool, ha, I like it like that, I have only got one burning desire, let me stand next to your fire!” Quickly, I changed tracks and the solemn strains of “Hey Joe” rang out: “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand? I’m goin’ downtown to shoot my ol’ lady, ‘cause I caught her messing around with another man.”

Suddenly, I realized that their music and my music weren’t as different as public opinion would have me think. In fact the subject matter of R&B;, pop and rock music hasn’t changed at all. It was, is and always will be about love, sex, money, power, drugs and violence, in one form or another. In the 1970s, KC and the Sunshine Band sang, “Shake your booty” and today rapper Mystikal sings, “Shake yaha--!” The Beatles sang, “I get high, with a little help from my friends.” Snoop Dogg sings, “Rollin’ down the street smoking ‘endo,’ sippin’ on gin and juice.”

Some approach it tenderly. Some approach it raw. Some approach it symbolically. Some use the blunt ugliness of the violence to turn us away. Others stand on peaceful shores and beckon us gently (Marvin Gaye, “What’s Goin’ On”).

While Hendrix’s “Joe” didn’t put his wife in the trunk and drive her off the cliff, as depicted in an Eminem tune, she was dead nonetheless. Interestingly, the lyrics of today’s rap music seem to obscure rather than reveal the underlying message. Possibly because their explicitness consumes all your mental attention the first 20 times you hear the song. Today, the message is often buried under raw, nasty, scatological and pornographic words that most of “us” don’t understand anyway. The central critique of rap is that no such message is discernible. Maybe it’s because we haven’t listened that 21st time.

I must admit, the first rap song I heard blew me away with the power of its social critique. In fact, the title of the song was “The Message.” It begins, “Broken glass everywhere, people pissin’ on the street like they just don’t care!” While in 1979 the lyric seemed scandalous, for one who had been in a New York subway, there were no other words to describe the experience. However, its chorus made the point of the song unmistakably clear, “It’s like a jungle sometimes; it makes me wonder how I keep from going under, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

The extreme lyrics of Eminem et al. suggest to me the imminent end of the evolution of rap. One must ask, now that Eminem has broken through the taboos of murder, rape and incest, where can the genre go next? Snoop Dogg, for his part, recently made the leap into X-rated videos. This is, in fact, a capitulation to the boundaries that he has reached. There is nothing else he has to say that we are interested in hearing. Nor can he manage a more creative way to say it. So now he retreads his biggest hits with accompanying sex scenes.

The truth is that the best rappers begin with a burst of power, speaking out of their experience. But as soon as they run out of genuine material, they start to speak out of their fantasies and imagination. What we quickly find is that their fantasies are generally pathetic and their imagination is bankrupt. How much money they made (by rapping about their real life). How many women they’ve had (after making all that money--funny, none were the lovers before that they have now become). How much power they have (over other rappers whose fortunes have faded, “West Si-I-ide!”).

The rap wars that killed Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls are the saddest examples of how they have never really transcended the environment that spawned them. Even Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ $300-million empire may not save him from 15 years in prison on weapons and bribery charges. And this is why, in the final analysis, they are more to be pitied than feared. So Eminem may follow Snoop Dogg to the video booths. Or he may squeeze one more angst-filled rap out of his Grammy-winning experience or his pending prison sentence for his weapons conviction. So I don’t worry that he will corrupt my boys. In fact, I think I’ll just kick back, relax and watch how they deal with the music of their kids!