Avram Andreea Larisa MA American Studies, 1st year African-Americans in the Media, prof.

Dr Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

Jazz and Hip-Hop in the Media Black, White or Grey Art?

Introduction The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at two music genres, typically associated with African-Americans, that influenced the development of American culture, namely jazz and hiphop. In order to grasp a better understanding of how they may have influenced American culture and, more specifically, the image that we have of African-Americans in the media nowadays, a short history of both genres will be given in the first two parts of the paper. The circumstances under which they were shaped are of high importance when drawing a parallel between the two, especially when pointing out the similarities that they share. Both jazz and hip-hop started out as street art forms meant to relief pain and frustration brought upon African-Americans by a society (still) reluctant to fully embracing them. In their respective beginnings, jazz and hip-hop singers (musically illiterate otherwise) would showcase their talent in the streets and more often than not engage in music battles that gave them an opportunity to become known in their own communities.

However, in time, jazz managed to become a well established, world-wide acclaimed and studied art form. Is there any chance for hip-hop musicians to hope for the same? In terms of development and influence, can hip-hop be the next jazz? Or have its values been corrupted along the way? How have music videos that promote hip-hop influenced this corruption?

I.

A Short History of Jazz

Jazz brings together African and European music elements. It originates in black communities around New Orleans, Louisiana, in the twentieth century, and it was initially based on music similar to early types of blues, sung by rural Black slaves. The structure of this music lacked the European concept of harmony, it bringing together the highly improvisational call and response pattern, typical to slave work songs, and traditional African rhythms. Dr Billy Taylor, also a renowned jazz musician, saw the birth of jazz music as a response to the oppressions African-Americans were forced to put up with during slavery, and as a positive direction in which they managed to channel negative energy:
In order to survive the harsh, restrictive and demanding realities of enslavement, they were forced to be resourceful and creative. Since music had always played such an important part in the daily lives of so many Africans from different tribes, countries and backgrounds, it was quickly seized upon as a tool to be used for communication and as a relief from both physical and spiritual burdens. (2)

The spiritual relief is connected, I believe, with the slaves refusal to become victims, because when ones identity is already jeopardized, the easiest solution is to accept the identity of a victim. African-Americans, however, being rather united and proud people, mirrored these

general characteristics of theirs in their music. Even if they took out the central instrument used in African traditional music, the drums, they kept the same kind of feeling to their music and used it as a tool meant to help them keep their pride. Toni Morrison also noted that even when its begging [jazz] to be understood in the lyrics, the music contradicts that feeling of being a complete victim and completely taken over. [] I dont see it as a crying music. (18). Having its roots in work music, it is obvious that early jazz musicians could not read music. Their progress from call and response pattern to playing music for a living at the beginning of the twentieth century was based on one key ingredient: improvisation. Dr Billy Taylor talks about the importance of improvisation in the development of jazz music: Improvisation was an important tool for many of the earliest jazz musicians who were self taught and learned to play by trial and error (2). So it was part of their coming of age, of their building their own culture. It was a step forward towards getting an identity, which was similar to the baby-steps a child takes towards adulthood. In 1879, New Orleans established Storyville District, where prostitution and brothels were tolerated. Storyville District quickly became a place where jazz could develop as a genre and where many musicians were able to make their living, playing jazz in brothels and saloons (Kennan, 9). By 1894 however, Storyville District, along with New Orleans and the rest of the South, had become segregated, and a large number of African Americans moved to the North and West, taking jazz music with them and spreading it to other states. Segregation and, later, World War I moved aspiring musicians from the South to more technologically developed cities (mainly Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles) which made their access easier to recording studios and having their music played on the radio.

This takes us to The Jazz Age, generally considered to have happened in the 1920s, although scholars have argued (Ted Vincent, Alain Locke) that when talking about jazz as black music, a more accurate period is between 1918 and 1926:
Alain Locke dates [] the Jazz Age from 1918 to 1926 (declaring that commercialization changed the music scene around 1926). In Chicago, Jazz Age black music appears to have been mostly under the control of African Americans from 1918 into late 1921 or 1922. In fact, black initiative on the organizational front was evidenced in the years just before the Jazz Age proper, when the music industry was just beginning to experiment with the types of show places that would, in time, evolve into modern nightclub. (43, 44)

It is around this time that battles also gained popularity. Jazz bands would improvise together; they would begin on a given theme and improvise, shifting turns from one to the other, in order to have supremacy and recognition, to be seen as the best, the most skillful band: each band would try to outplay the other in a contest of skill, endurance, and, in these days, volume. (Grandt, 308). Later on, similar to the battle of the bands, another type of competition would emerge, one that could give recognition to one of two individual musicians; this was called cutting contest:
Often, the competition pits two musicians who play the same instrument against each other, according one chorus to each player at the beginning before steadily decreasing solo space [], occasionally even two or one. The cutting contest thus constitutes the musical variety of African American oral traditions like signifying, playing the dozens, or other call-and-response patterns. (Grandt, 309)

Another event that changed the course of jazz after World War I was the moving to Europe of some African Americans, especially jazz musicians. In the 1920s, jazz was no longer a regional music dominated by African Americans (Carney, 6), instead it became the definition of modernity in the early twentieth century. Due to coverage on radio, jazz had managed to be heard abroad, more importantly all the way to Europe. And it was successful too. Thus, there

were musicians who chose to play in Paris, at first, and this marked a new beginning and transformation for jazz because, being appreciated, it started being imitated by white Europeans who, despite having knowledge in music, lacked all the emotion that came from years of slavery, oppression, violence. This, however, brings us closer to how jazz music is perceived today. By being accepted world wide and by being given this new white face, jazz gained a different status. It is still based on improvisation, but I could not dare to say that there are any jazz musicians who cannot read music nowadays. It has become a subject of study in music schools and it enjoys great appreciation throughout the world. Still, even though I do enjoy listening to lets say contemporary Japanese jazz musician, Hiromi Uehara, and I find her music highly entertaining, it will never come close to the raw emotion that African Americans would convey in early days jazz. It simply differs.

II.

A Short History of Hip-Hop

Hip-hop emerged on the streets of New York City, in the South Bronx section, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Gladney, 292). It was born as a reaction, out of African Americans outrage to the injustice and discrimination they had to put up with. It is heavily relied on Afro-Carribean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual and dance forms (294). Even though it tends to be widely associated with violence, we will later see how this is more closely related to the image rappers have in the media. Quite on contrary, initially, hip-hop lyrics would be or sound violent so as for it to become a relief of pressure and anger that would normally lead to actual violent acts. This is also what Amiri Baraka was saying in his poem, Black Art:
We want poems that kill. Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Let there be no love poems written until love can exist freely and cleanly. (in Gladney, 292)

It has been established that, at least in its early days, hip-hop can be qualified as Black Art and as having the same goals as the Black Arts Movement (Gladney), especially if we associate hip-hop lyrics with black poetry: Failing to analyze hip-hop lyrics and ideology critically and intellectually may lead one to dismiss an art form capable of transmitting ideas to a community in dire need of positive solutions (Gladney, 292).

Apart from improvisation, another early characteristic of hip-hop is the establishing of supremacy through rapping battles. This still occurs nowadays with underground hip-hop artists. The battle refers to a competitive arena in which two M.C.s vied against each other in the presence of an audience to determine lyrical supremacy (298). By the end of the 1980s hip-hop began being noticed, and some of the artists starting signing contracts with music records. Because music record companies owners were white Americans whose sole interest was the well-being of their business, getting hip-hop in the recording studio also meant making a more commercial type of hip-hop, one accessible to both black and white audiences. This phenomenon drew the attention and unfavorable response of other hip-hop artists or simply Black Artists, who saw it as betrayal, in a way, as selling their art to the white man, the very target of their anger and frustration in the first place. As an example, Addison Gayle, Jr noted that the black artist in the American society who creates without interjecting a note of anger is creating not as a black man, but as an American. For black anger in black art is as old as the first utterances by black men on American soil (in Gladney, 291). Signing contracts with record labels also meant exposure through videos, and videos meant (and still mean, I believe) a certain image pre-fabricated for African Americans that reached every home everywhere through the MTV Channel. Early examples of commercial hip-hop are M.C. Hammer and Sir Mix-a-Lot. They have been fought back by many artists, one of whom, Busta Rhymes, was also one of the first to pin-point a difference between rap and hip-hop, in his the lyrics of his song, Syntax Era:
Rich blood sucker of the poor I see you, hickory, dickory hey, watch out for the trickery What happened to creativity, dignity, integrity

Understand that word and how you use it, rap is business music, hip-hop is cultural music. (in Gladney, 294)

Some years later, when Busta Rhymes joined white diva Mariah Carey for an R&B collaboration song about romance and betrayal, some of us were still wondering what happened to creativity, dignity, integrity. Like many did before him, and even more after him, Busta Rhymes probably simply decided that business music paid better. Apart from hip-hop artists who eventually trade art for their personal well-being, t he problem with many of the videos for commercial hip-hop is that, in order to be appealing to both the white and the black man, they make use of women, showcasing them dressed provocatively and, basically, objectifying them. This is a habit that lives to this day and, what is more worrisome is that female hip-hop and R&B artists take this as a given. It has become mandatory in a way that powerful women with strong voices and enough talent to make ones hairs stand up on the back of the neck with only syllable, have to have a certain image if they want to sell records. One example of such a woman, one of whom you would think no longer needs this image (if she ever did), is R&B artist Beyonce. Another disadvantage of videos has been the reduction of the emphasis laid on orality:
video commodification of artistic ideas has, in the end, compromised unfavorably the ability of, and the need for, the rap artist to convey through his or her art those images the rapper most wants to transmit to an audience, and it has also affected raps emphasis on orality (298).

III.

Jazz and Hip-Hop

So far we have seen how jazz and hip-hop developed independently. This part of the paper will deal with the common ground the two share, what distinguishes them one from the other as art forms, and how they can be sensed in other types of art.

Unquestionably, both jazz and hip-hop are manifestations of Black Art at core. They did not simply appear out of thin air, but emerged as a response to oppression, violence, violation of rights and, at core, they remain largely misunderstood by those who do not share the same background: the emerging music of jazz, which, upon its emergence, was as misunderstood as hip-hop is today (299). Not only do they convey the same type of anger targeted at American society mostly (and in different manners, it is true), but they, as art forms, generate from a similar Afro-American musical, oral and visual background and, moreover, they manifested similarly in the streets, by having band battles or cutting contests. However, even if hip-hop battles still exist, it seems that recognition gained in battle no longer suffices, which is perfectly understandable: it does not feed one, not put a roof over ones head. Recognition from the white society, on the other hand, can do that. So, more and more hip-hop artists choose to invest their time and energy, not in battles, but in going door to door from one record to another, trying to impress agents in the hope that this could land them a contract deal. And, if it does land, what does this contract mean? As we have seen in the media, there is already

a more-or-less well established pattern: the hip-hop artist releases a song, a video and, later on, an album, which mostly describe the life of the black youth in the ghetto, with emphasis on violence he or she has been subjected to so far. The following record(s) most commonly describes life after gaining fame and the videos feature expensive cars, as-naked-as-possiblevoluptuous women and opulent outfits. Should the artist survive in the business after this, a come-back is made alongside, most of the times, a young pop or R&B female artist. Examples of artists that I have seen following this pattern all through my childhood and up to now are Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, just to name a few. I suppose this is what Maulana Ron Karenga would call art for arts sake, which paradoxically cannot exist, because all art reflects the value system(s) from which it comes (296). The above mentioned non-existing art seems to be nothing more than a fabrication for the media. Media wants what sells the best and, right now, violence sells and sex sells. So commercial hip-hop nowadays, this media dream whose purpose is strictly financial, is what I will call black art in a white mask. It is still hip-hop, as we see it today, but the poetry in it is forever lost, not because white people are incapable of making poetry, but because they failed (or wanted to fail) to see the poetry in hip-hop, as it originally was. If there still is poetry in hiphop, it is most likely to be found in the streets, not on TV. What about Jazz? Has it been corrupted by the media? As mentioned before, jazz owes its first encounter with international fame to the types of mass media that were available at that time, the most important being the radio. Only later on could jazz performances be filmed, but we could hardly speak of anything even remotely close to the manipulation of image we have in music videos today. Jazz too has been corrupted, however. It was so appealing to audiences everywhere, that musicians all around the world tried to copy and imitate that style, but they

were unable to capture the spirit of African American original jazz. Thus, jazz evolve in style and eventually became an accessible genre to all musicians, regardless of their cultural historical backgrounds. This mlange which we call jazz today is what I see as grey art, a mixture between black, white, yellow, and whatever else may be possible. It has become universal in a way. In this case, why should hip-hop be black art in white mask and jazz grey art? Especially since there are white Americans (such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem) and people all over the world who tried to imitate hip hop too. My guess is that the fault lies precisely in the images manipulated by the media described above. In the 1910s-1920s, Parisians first heard jazz unaltered, coming directly from the source, and they took whatever they made of it, and tried to imitate. Hip-hop artists around the world nowadays, on the other hand, try to imitate something that has already been corrupted, so they do not really imitate true hip-hop art, but a manipulated image fed to them by the media. In the end, hip-hop is still rather recent, and there are many opinions voiced around the subject, not all of them agreeing necessarily. Cornel West, for instance, believes in the importance of hip-hop for young African Americans, but sees the violence, misogyny and homophobia in them as mirrored images of what happens in the society at a larger scale (24). It makes me wonder, though, is not this mirrored image a product of the violence, misogyny and homophobia promoted in hip-hop videos in the media? Are we not running round in a vicious circle?

IV.

Conclusion

All in all, I strongly agree that both jazz and hip-hop are manifestations of Black Art Only originally, though, they are black only at heart. While contemporary jazz has lost its black flavor, in hip-hop it can still be found in its street manifestations. They both played an important role, culturally speaking, and media has affected both of their trajectories in a way. For jazz, media worked wonders, the radio helped jazz become the metaphor for the American idea of democracy (Taylor, 1) of the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, I do believe that the simple mentioning of the fact that the American Dialect Society named jazz the Word of the Twentieth Century says a lot about the strong impact it had on people everywhere. Needless to say, it influenced many other art forms, literary, visual and so on. Toni Morrisons novel Jazz, just to mention my favorite example, despite not even mentioning the word jazz apart from the title, is structured like jazz music and even the use of language has the same cadence as jazz music (Grandt). In the case of hip-hop, media both gave and took away. I feel this genre is a bit more problematic than jazz, probably also because it is a lot more recent. Despite hiding its true nature behind a white mask, hip-hop as it is still found in the streets also managed to inspire artists in other areas, filmmakers, graffiti artists and tattoo artists, just to mention a few. To sum up, perhaps categorizing art forms by color as mentioned in the title of the paper is not necessarily a good thing. Calling Black Art something which is not, however, can neither be good. Some distinction must be made between the original and what that meant for very many people, and the corrupted (either positively or negatively) replicas perpetuated by the images promoted by the media, or by unfounded imitations.

WORKS CITED

Gladney, Marvin J. "The Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop." African American Review 29.2 (1995): 291-301. Print.

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Morrison, Toni. "Blues, Love and Politics." Interview by Cornel West. The Nation 24 May 2004: 18-28. Print.

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