From blues to soul to rap & hip hop

I’ve never had much interest in the blues, though I am partial to bit of bluesy Southern soul, so when the death was announced this week of the ‘last of the great Delta Bluesmen’ David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, I must confess I’d never heard of him. But it got me thinking about a book I read some years ago about that attempts to explain the decline of the blues and the rise of soul music.

‘Right on: From Blues to Soul in Black America‘ by UK sociologist Michael Haralambos fascinated me, possibly because I was trying to understand (and still am) the demise of soul music, which, by the end of the 1980s had been replaced in the hearts of black America by hip hop and rap. Knowing how soul music came about in the first place, I thought, might help understand its demise and why the music that replaced it took the form that it did.

Writing in the early 1970s, Haralambos advances a subtle and convincing argument about race and music and how the changing fortunes of the black American population in the post-war years transformed their popular music.

The blues
Haralambos argues that, though racism is rarely mentioned in the blues, racism is still the subtext. The music, it can be argued, expresses a mood of fatalism about life, and of being downtrodden. Lyrically, it is articulated in terms of relationships gone wrong, being down on your luck and suffering hard times. In short, the world is unfair but there’s not much you can do about it, you have to get on with life as best you can. In the deep South racism is (or was) all-pervasive, a kind of background noise. It’s part of life but isn’t talked about directly.

To the children of the millions of black Americans that migrated north in the boom years of the 1940s, the blues was increasingly alien. The music of their parents and grandparents didn’t fully connect with their own experiences and aspirations. Instead, they latched on to the joyous music and positive message (albeit secularised) of the church to express the optimism that urban life and increasing prosperity garnered. All this, despite ongoing racial inequality and the struggle for civil rights.

The optimistic mood can be found in fairly obvious lyrical metaphors such as the train moving forward (the Impressions ‘People get ready’ being the most famous example), or even the way many (mainly) Detroit singers used to incorporate a kind of musical laugh into their songs (Darrel Banks’ ‘Angel Baby’ – “Ha ha ha ha ha yeah!” is typical but there are loads of examples). What a contrast to the downbeat vibe of the blues, and what a change the music signified in peoples’ sense of themselves, over only one generation.

The book doesn’t go any further than the 60s if I remember correctly, but you can see that by the end of the decade and into the next that the mood and the music shifts dramatically as America slips into decline, black political movements run their course and fail to deliver, and opportunities and possibilities seem more elusive.

Despite these enormous changes, soul music doesn’t go away in the 1970s. It loses some of its raw energy and optimism, but in many ways the music gets stronger as singers, songwriters, producers and arrangers mature and develop. Soul music mostly disappears from the mainstream and returns to the black American market that the likes of Berry Gordy were trying to break out of in the first place. Much of it doesn’t make it any further than the broadcasting range of local black radio stations, though some reaches the shores of the UK, thanks to many keen and sharp-eared collectors, dealers and DJs of northern England.

(The Voices of East Harlem perform ‘Right on be Free’ at Sing Sing prison. Soul music began to develop more or a social conscience and grow much darker in the early 1970s )

A more commercial strand of black American music does survive and do pretty well in the mainstream. Acts like Diana Ross, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Stylistics and the Three Degrees achieve varying levels of chart success, albeit with a more watered down, blander version of soul music. Unfortunately, all are now widely remembered for their pop tunes instead of other, more significant work. Marvin Gaye’s seminal ‘What’s Going On’ aside, the soul music of the 1970s is so often unfairly dismissed as bland and lightweight.

Rap
For me, the emergence of rap and hip hop at the end of the 70s represented the final, extinguishing of 60s optimism and the aspirational music it gave birth to. The hard-edged, beat-driven music that displaced soul largely expresses a mood of cynicism and bitterness. If rap and hip hop has any emotional content, then it’s that of anger. Of course, there are examples of melodic and even humorous music that emerged from both genres – the first international rap hit was, after all, the tongue-in-cheek Rappers Delight (which incidentally was released on singer Sylvia Robinson’s dedicated rap label Sugar Hill Records, that emerged out of the much revered soul label, All Platinum). In general though, hip hop and rap feel like music made by and for people in a world devoid of any positive vision or aspiration. They celebrate and revel in the parochial, they express frustration and pessimism. Their message to the world seems to be “fuck you”.

(Sylvia Robinson, founder of early rap label Sugar Hill Records, and before that, All Platinum)

What amazes me though is that regardless of the ups and downs of people’s social and economic circumstances, we, human beings, still feel compelled to make art and music, to express ourselves, to create and innovate. I really don’t like hip hop but I’m inspired by the fact that even when people are having a hard time and the lofty ideas and possibilities (like those we had in the 1960s) seem to have melted away, we still want and need to make music to express what we feel about our lives and the world about us.

That said, rap and hip hop are still music for pessimistic times, which goes a long way to explaining why they have endured for more than 30 years. Personally though, I can’t wait for something a little more optimistic to come along.