Reggae and rap: form versus content

August 13, 1997
Issue 

Comment by Denis Olsen

Many readers no doubt appreciate the critical edge pursued in Green Left Weekly's Cultural Dissent pages. It's nice to know that at least somewhere there exists a forum that argues for an aware culture, one that tries to transcend the crippling norm that dominates so much of contemporary film, theatre, music, literature and television.

But sometimes, I fear, this enlightened quest can fall victim to itself.

In Green Left Weekly #283 Norm Dixon and Sujatha Fernandes in separate articles address the question of the politics of reggae and rap. Because both of these musical forms arise out of US black cultures, both writers seem to assume that rap and reggae are intrinsically better, and therefore potentially, at least, more political, than other forms of popular music.

While anyone is surely allowed their preferences, could they not have asked the same questions of some other musical form — heavy metal, for instance, or country and western? Perhaps the two reviewers have their special interests, but by default the ready focus on particular musical styles seems to suggest that the form of the music determines its content.

We're talking about a basic beat here, overlaid with established instrumentation and lyrical elements. At its core, whether the music goes "boom-boom-boom" or "boom-chukka-boom" has precious little to do with its politics.

I often note a similar attitude to Latino rhythms which are girded with the laurels of struggle and revolution, simply because the tempo is thought to have had something to do with the success of the Cuban Revolution.

Whether I like, or Norm and Sujatha like, these sounds, is not the point. The medium is not in itself the message. Even in the same edition of Green Left Weekly, Sujatha Fernandes polemicises against the Spice Girls and Christine Anu for being willing accomplices in a marketed backlash against feminism and Aboriginal rights.

If being black or aggressively female is not inherently the same as being politically progressive, then what's so special about rap or reggae?

Labels such as "the people's music" or "the music of the oppressed" doesn't help us much either. All music has its roots at some time among the plain folk of some land.

Back in the 1920s, the Communist movement in this country promoted musical preferences too which were thought to be more radical than others. A musical evening at the local party rooms then had little to do with the musical tastes of proletarian or peasant, black or white. Instead it was sure to be a night out with Beethoven or Mozart.

It doesn't follow that classical music is somehow more aware of the world than say, folk music is, just because Mozart or Beethoven were keen on the 1789 French Revolution.

An analogous argument put forward by folk much less political than either Norm or Sujatha is that the core of a particular musical form is an intrinsic spiritual quality at its centre. In black R&B it can be called "the blues", which you gotta have before you can play it. Another term is "soul" — a quality copyrighted by a few special performers.

These terms so often bandied about are readily equated with the life of the performer — the harder the life, the deeper "the blues". Many commentators then go on to assume that "the blues" — a form, by the way, not limited only to Afro-American music (for example, Greek rembekiah is a "blues" form) — is synonymous with struggle and therefore has more political credentials than other music.

But why is that, do you think? Why should folk feeling sorry for themselves within the space of eight or 12 bars be more political than an 80-page symphony? What aspect of the form determines the music's content?

The problem is that the question is the wrong way around. Content can take any form, but at the same time it doesn't determine it. The penchant of each generation for particular musical preferences doesn't determine what the music will say.

What the music says is determined by one thing only: who controls it. And it's no good having something to say if you don't possess the means to say it.

So the question is not reggae or rap per se, but whose reggae and whose rap it is.

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