The pursuit of hip hop's primal roar
Piano Lesson
Lomax was a pioneer of field recording. Encouraged by his father John who made the first collections of cowboy songs in the early twentieth century, he travelled all over the South from 1930 onwards, gathering music and stories from the marginalized white mountain dwellers as well as the sons and daughters of black slaves. The fruits of Lomax's lengthy interviews with Jelly Roll Morton 'C originally made available on 78s 'C have been reissued as a lavish piano-shaped package which includes eight CDs, as well as Lomax's Mister Jelly Roll, a biography with edited transcripts from the interviews. ('The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax' are issued by the Rounder Label for '69.99.) This exhaustive material, although sometimes close to fiction, is as evocative of the essence of the jazz world as Mezz Mezzrow's equally fictional Really the Blues. Jelly Roll sat at a Library of Congress Steinway grand 'C a far cry from the uprights which he had played in New Orleans brothels and gambling houses 'C and talked and talked, only occasionally prompted by the young ethnomusicologist, whose prurient interest in sexual material is at times all too evident. It is a kind of sustained rap, meandering 'C if a little repetitively 'C above the steady piano chords that punctuate Jelly Roll's well-rehearsed spiel.
Storytelling and sermonizing are central to the African-American tradition, reaching back to the complex social and political role of the Manding jali or griot: repetition is central to the art, along with humour, bragging and downright lies. Rap is the latest in a line of African-inspired talking styles, and here, too, pleasure is taken in going over the same ground almost ad nauseam, albeit with slight variations. In Triksta, Cohn describes his attempt to break into the New Orleans rap scene as a producer. Infected by the genre, Triksta is burdened by a kind of circumlocution: entertaining but irritating with repeated choruses and refrains born of frustration. Equally true to the form he loves to hate, a genre not dissimilar from the street-speak of New Journalism, Cohn spits out his words with a keen sense of rhythm and pacing: 'in New Orleans rap', he quips, 'it is a great surprise for anyone to do exactly what they promise. Ma?ana doesn't cover it: tomorrow never comes'. Courting clich' like a seasoned rapper, but always alert to the possibility of irony or ambiguity, he describes one of his artists, Jabbo, as 'a man of constant sorrow. Women troubles, money troubles, acts of God 'C though the black dog took many forms, it was always on the prowl'. Cohn's story is one of almost complete let-down and frustration.
Unlike Lomax, who always, somewhat patronizingly, thought of himself as an intrepid explorer and discoverer of hidden treasure, Cohn carries the karma of accumulated white guilt to extremes. Describing himself as a 'grey-haired scribbler in black suit and hat' and a 'half-assed fantasist playing out my senile hunger', Cohn is the white man as victim of his own misplaced fascination with black culture, bound by his genuine love of the music, but destined to fail in his quixotic attempt to make it in the music's own very culture-specific terms.
Cohn's personal story of severely halting creative involvement in rap is not as interesting as his often evocative description of New Orleans, 'this fucked-up town', with its 'flashes of pagan joy and an incurable melancholy at heart', and the musicians he meets: Jabbo, Soulja Slim, Choppa, Che, June B and others. Rap, as Cohn points out, is 'born of rage. The world had its foot on your throat and hip hop was a howl of defiance'; but success undermines the 'authentic primal roar' that makes for rap gold. Hip hop is not what it used to be.
There has always been posturing, a show of violence as well as its actual manifestation, the play-acting and real stuff both reflections of a deep-seated sense of inferiority. The future, Cohn claims, is 'rebellion made family entertainment': formulaic anger, co-opted by the forces of fashion and economics.
Against his better judgement, Cohn is something of a purist. He is seeking the authentic roar, with its roots in the spiritual and ethical quest central to so much African-American (and American) culture, but the sentiments expressed in hip hop also speak more plainly to his own despair, to the inner wasteland of a disenchanted and uprooted Jew from Derry. He feels far more affinity with it than with anything a white rocker or singer-songwriter might produce. Lomax, more of a folklorist than a spiritual seeker, enjoyed charting the creolization of music that began in New Orleans, and resounded through the South, where Scots-Irish, English and African cultures mingled so creatively. Cohn is not interested in the sweep of cultural history, but in his own salvation 'C while realizing that no such thing exists and that he must content himself with a few moments of tangible magic in a booming bass line. There is something at once appealing and faintly repulsive about Cohn's mix of narcissism and self-hate. But there is enough self-knowledge, not least in his assumed role of 'Triksta', one of several masks he dons to smooth his way through the minefield of black racism and mistrust, to make the story more than one-dimensional and fleetingly inspired.
New Orleans's attraction for both Lomax and Cohn derives in large part from the city's continually shifting identity and entropy: a place of incipient decay, caught between worlds and between races, never dominated by Southern plantocracy, but maintaining links with Africa through the drumming that was permitted within the confines of Congo Square, and the practices of animism and sorcery. Long before hurricane Katrina, economic forces had almost entirely transformed New Orleans from a vibrant multi-cultural community into something much less appealing, in which the heritage industry struggled on, blind to the ever-increasing poverty and internecine violence of most of the black neighbourhoods. Cohn evokes the endemic murder almost casually, mirroring the black community's own tragic resignation. And yet, violence and murder are not a recent addition to New Orleans: they are as fundamental to blues and jazz as drugs and collective improvisation. Jelly Roll, as aware as anyone of the seductive power of brutal death, sings a song for Alan Lomax in which a woman threatens: 'I'll cut your throat, drink your blood like wine' 'C the swing of black poetry serving the culture's tortured soul.
Just as Jelly Roll vehemently (though not entirely truthfully) claimed to have invented scat-singing and jazz, rappers habitually boast about their physical or sexual prowess. This braggadocio hides an almost unbearable vulnerability 'C the product of a fragile sensitivity crushed by centuries of oppression. It is a miracle that feelings buried under all this should still fuel so much creativity, and not all of it focused on murder or misogyny. Nik Cohn realizes that no amount of pretending at being 'Da Triksta', the unlikely rap impresario from Derry, can save him from the distance that his fan's passion imposes. But he does get closer than most white writers to the pulse of the African-American heart.
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