To the Break of Dawn

A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic

William Jelani Cobb

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814717257
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Ethnomusikologie

2007 Arts Club of Washington's National Award for Arts Writing - Finalist

SEE ALSO: Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting.

With roots that stretch from West Africa through the black pulpit, hip-hop emerged in the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and has spread to the farthest corners of the earth. To the Break of Dawn uniquely examines this freestyle verbal artistry on its own terms. A kid from Queens who spent his youth at the epicenter of this new art form, music critic William Jelani Cobb takes readers inside the beats, the lyrics, and the flow of hip-hop, separating mere corporate rappers from the creative MCs that forged the art in the crucible of the street jam.

The four pillars of hip hop—break dancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping—find their origins in traditions as diverse as the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira and Caribbean immigrants’ turnstile artistry. Tracing hip-hop’s relationship to ancestral forms of expression, Cobb explores the cultural and literary elements that are at its core. From KRS-One and Notorious B.I.G. to Tupac Shakur and Lauryn Hill, he profiles MCs who were pivotal to the rise of the genre, verbal artists whose lineage runs back to the black preacher and the bluesman.

Unlike books that focus on hip-hop as a social movement or a commercial phenomenon, To the Break of Dawn tracks the music's aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic evolution from its inception to today's distinctly regional sub-divisions and styles. Written with an insider's ear, the book illuminates hip-hop's innovations in a freestyle form that speaks to both aficionados and newcomers to the art.

1

The Roots

It begins with the words: mic check. The MC counts it off, one, two, one, two, before running down his pedigree: I go by the name of the one MC Lingo of the mighty Black Ops and we came here tonight to get y’all open … In the MC’s ritual, the next task is the demographic survey—Is Brooklyn in the house?—even though he knows the answer; always knew the answer ’cause the answer is always the same. Brooklyn is as ubiquitous as bad luck. There’s a cat behind him on the ones and twos; his head cocked to the left, headphones cradled between ear and shoulder. He has the fingertips of his left hand resting on a 12” instrumental, the right on the cross-fader. His MC gets four bars to drop it a capella, after that he comes behind him with Michael Viner’s Apache. A measure beforehand, he’ll idle with some prelim scratches to let the crowd know what’s coming next. And if his boy got skills enough, if the verbal game is tight enough, that right there will be the kinetic moment, that blessed split-second when beat meets rhyme. The essence of hip hop. Come incorrectly, though, and the heads in attendance will let you know that too. In hip hop, subtlety is considered a character flaw. In hip hop, it is a moral wrong to allow a wack MC to exist unaware of his own wackness. The DJ hits with the track, the MC wraps his tongue around a labyrinth of syllables, and don’t have to chase his breath. We came here tonight to get y’all open … He knows when it’s done correctly because the heads start to nod in affirmation.

ORIGINS OF THE BOOM BAP

For those still concerned with the terms laid down by Webster, art is defined as this: 1. Conscious arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movement, or other elements in a way that affects the aesthetic sense: 2. A specific skill in adept performance, held to require the exercise of intuitive faculties: 3. Production of the beautiful. The MC, despite the grumblings of various antique-aged gripers, is a modern incarnation of the black verbal artist, whose lineage runs way back to the black preacher, the bluesman, and the boulevard griot. Some critics, detractors, and, in the tongue of the boulevard, haters, would have it that hip hop fell from the sky—untouched by any preceding black art form. We’re to believe that the backward sex politics, the materialism, the violence that characterize some hip hop are unique products of post-civil rights black culture and that the art—if it can even be called that—bears no resemblance to the now-classic forms of jazz and blues. We hear such nonsensical claims from artists like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, who, as jazz and blues heads, know better—or really ought to.

Their music began in the gutter. The sounds rumbled up from the terrorized Delta topsoil and the people the color of it, the music of the bayou ho’ houses now gone Lincoln-Center respectable. Rock and roll, now enshrined as a sacrament of the boomer generation, derived its name from the black street-corner terminology for sex. And hip hop grows from that same seed, germinating in those same urinated alleys, only nine hundred miles further north. The hood, the barrio, the broken precincts of the city breathed life into hip hop in the 1970s, but from top to bottom, the music was in communion with older principles not only in terms of its politics, but also its aesthetics.

For the unschooled, the concept that hip hop even has an aesthetic is alien; that there is a sonic distinction between the great MC and his wack counterpart is lost on most of the consuming public and the genre’s detractors alike. Because hip hop is discussed most often on the level of commerce and politics, but rarely on the level of art, it’s easy to miss the fact that the form has its own aesthetic, its own standards and measures—this aesthetic is idiosyncratic and unique, but is also built on earlier forms. At its core, hip hop’s aesthetic contains three components: music, or “beats,” lyrics, and “flow”—or the specific way in which beats and lyrics are combined.

The heart of the art of hip hop is how the MC does what he does—the specific catalog of trade trickery he uses to get his people open. And just as the MC is at the center of hip hop, his tools—verbal craft, articulation, improvisation—are at the center of black cultures. The pedigree runs deep. It connects that dreadlocked, mic-gripping orator to the tradition of black verbal gamesmanship that starts with the black preacher, whom Du Bois reckoned with in Souls of Black Folk as “the most unique personality created by the Negro on American soil.” Zora Neale Hurston identified the preacher as the first black artist in America, the poet who made helped make the absurd world intelligible.

Our preachers are talented men even though many of them are barely literate. The masses do not read literature, do not visit theaters, nor museums of the fine arts. The preacher must satisfy their beauty-hunger himself. He must be a poet and an actor and possess a body and a voice … It is not admitted as such by our “classes.” Only James Weldon Johnson and I give it praise. It is utterly scorned by the “Niggerati.” But the truth is, the greatest poets among us are in our pulpits and the greatest poetry has come out of them. It is merely not set down. It passes from mouth to mouth as in the days of Homer.

James Baldwin, boy preacher emeritus, copped his long, elegant, multi-claused sentence style from the oracular rhythms of the black church and broke this down for all posterity when he said:

The Black preacher, since the church was the only Civilized institution that we were permitted—separately—to enter, was our first warrior, terrorist, or guerrilla. He said that freedom was real—that we were real. He told us that trouble don’t last always. He told us that our children and elders were sacred, when the Civilized were spitting on them and hacking them to pieces, in the name of God and in order to keep on making money.

Recognize that the African, stolen and shackled, scorned and rejected, was dropped into a textual culture from an oral tradition where articulation was paramount. Circumstance and eight weeks on the Atlantic had placed the inheritors of highly inflective West African tongues into an environment of linguistic hostility. Not only were their indigenous languages derided and outlawed, but the very nature of the creole English they spoke was cited as a mark of inferiority. And it is unspeakably difficult to be a poet in a language that is hostile to your existence. Even more, one can only speculate at the vast ideas and shades of meaning that the newly enslaved could find no way to express in the slave-master’s vocabulary. The old maxim teaches that “art is a technique of communication,” but the converse also holds true. It was for this reason that the black preacher, the only individual granted even limited vocal carte blanche, would emerge also as the ancestral black artist.

And given that relationship to the spoken word, literacy could easily be secondary in the preacher’s art. Articulation in a foreign tongue—one that was learned in bondage and taught solely as a means of conveying orders—is in and of itself a form of mastery. A slave exists to obey commands, but only a human commands language. American law and American deed defined the African as a non-entity, the extension of the master’s will and possessor of nothing, but an articulator owns language—and a share (however small) of the ideas that those arrayed syllables represent. It was no coincidence that a slave holy man’s apocalyptic vision of black angels slaying white angels in the sky prefaced the uprising that planted fear in the slaveholding soul. Nat Turner. August 21, 1831. Fifty-seven of them—man, woman, and infant—left dead in his wake. A sermon of sorts.

The African, enslaved in a land of strange deeds and customs and shackled into a new language, made speech into a metaphor for identity. If English vocabulary was mandatory, its grammatical roots were to remain West African and the lexicon spiced with the unforgotten words from home. The evolution of that creole may chart the evolving new world identity, but the issue at hand is how that ebonic fusion came to be used. The well-spoken word, in ways both subtle and vast, undermined the decree that the African was to possess nothing and thus preceded physical freedom. So, straight up: the preacher’s central task was to open his mouth and rip it the best way he saw fit as a confirmation of the collective existence. The verbal strategy, the specific catalog of trade trickery employed by the preacher, laid down the parameters for his vocal heirs four hundred years down the line.

Listen for a minute and it becomes clear that the rapper is evaluated by many of the same criteria as the preacher: use of voice, timbre, timing, reference, and sub-reference. The preacher uses amen as a verbal stopgap the same way the old-school rapper used catch-phrases like “Yes, yes, y’all” or “It don’t stop,” etc. The preacher earns his or her keep by the call and the response; the rapper lives and dies by his skill at getting the crowd open. Generations of black secular singers have claimed the church as their first training ground, but what has gone unrecognized is that the rapper is their counterpart—the secular preacher, the sanctified exhorter whose skills have passed by cultural osmosis from the pulpit to the boulevard.

This is not to say that early MCs copped their styles directly from the local South Bronx preacher in the way that soul singers fell back on what they learned in choir practice. A host of verbal intermediaries exist between the preacher and the MC. But when you cut through all the begats, the preacher and the MC retain their family resemblance. Example: Melle Mel’s percussive rah at the end of his verses is only degrees removed from the preacher’s percussive huh—employed as an oral semicolon or period in the sermon. Or check Nelly’s flow on the confectionery “Hot in Herre,” Snoop Dogg’s trademark drawled-out vowels, or Bone Thugs’ fluid mic vocalism and their common, deliberately sing-songy cadences, which immediately recall the Baptist tradition of hooping—tap dancing on the perimeter between speech and song in a sermon.

The Reverend C.L. Franklin pointed out that the best hoopers were preachers who could also sing well—this from a man whose daughter Aretha would become the greatest soul singer of all time. The best MCs do not necessarily sing well, but absolutely possess a singer’s understanding of time, nuance, and interpretation. Hooping—accompanied often by fragmentary organ riffs, or samples—is essentially a form of unrhymed rapping. Utilizing timing, meter, and inflection, it’s the sermonic equivalent of the blank verse in Shakespeare’s plays—rhymeless poetry presented in a prose format.

History is like viewing of a movie for the second time and gaining a vast new world of insights into the plot. Those who make history may or may not be wise to the full dimensions of their accomplishments because their lifetime is only the first screening. From the gate, the ancestral b-boys created a new musical history—even as they drew upon art that was already in existence as a resource for the art that they would create. In short, this “new” musical history was not and could not have been a clean break from the old one. MCing may have begun as a musical ad campaign for the deejay who ran the show, but the fundamental concept of pairing the rhymed verse with the hypnotism of bared percussion had been laid down way before that.

Of those multiple millions of Africans snatched from their indigenous contexts by the transatlantic slave trade, only some 6 percent arrived on the shores that would become the United States. Meaning that 94 percent of that displaced humanity found themselves immersed in the agricultural brutalities of Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, Trinidad, Barbados, Surinam, Columbia, Haiti—the scattered localities of common bondage. Those same language dynamics played themselves out in each of these places, creating a network of African-derived patois and political implications for the spoken word—which explains in extreme shorthand how dancehall and hip hop could come into existence as cousin cultures.

The African American and Caribbean American teenagers who found themselves building a new culture up in the South Bronx in 1974 shared four centuries of collective history that gave context to the art they created. They had come from the same boat, having merely departed at different stops. Nor was the fact that so many of the early b-boys were of Caribbean descent coincidental. The cornerstone deejays Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa are both of Jamaican descent and Grandmaster Flash is of Barbadian ancestry. Nor is it coincidental that the Caribbean had long established its parallel tradition of “dub poetry” or syncopated rhyme verse accompanied by percussion. Listen to the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson or Mutubaruka and the imprint of this tradition on hip hop becomes undeniable.

You could trace hip hop’s roots back to scat, which gave literal expression to the concept that a sound could carry meaning irrespective of its relationship to formal language. You find hip hop in the poetry of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, the black bards who went from the Negritude literary movement they founded to formal leadership of their people in Senegal and Martinique. Hip hop’s ancestry is James Weldon Johnson, the first black president of the NAACP, writing the lyrics for the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” It is Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, the two colossal opponents of colonialism in Africa, both articulating the cause of the dispossessed in poetic verse. And Amiri Baraka’s leadership in the Black Power political campaigns of Newark in 1972. The point is this: the art is the politic.

The relationship between the preacher and the rapper is one of both form and content. Think about that for a minute and you can damn-near write a sermon based on Mos Def’s jewel “New World Water.” It’s impossible to ignore the prominence of water as a primary motif in black spiritual culture—from the debilitated Gospel pleas to be “washed white as snow” to the rebellion-coded double entendre “wade in the water,” which referenced both baptism and escape routes from slavery. En route to issuing an injunction against the waste of natural resources, Mos Def drops the observation that “Fools done upset/the old man river/made him carry slave ships/and fed him dead niggers”—a line that echoes Amiri Baraka’s reminder that “there is a railroad made from human bones at the bottom of the Atlantic.” The water of the alleged new world was precisely what divided Jamestown from Benin, Santo Domingo from Oyo, Sao Paolo from Kannem Borno. And that same water is the eternal resting ground of black millions lost to the middle passage. Waters being fed dead Africans—cruel irony for descendants of cultures who understood that all life derived from and began in water, centuries before Western empirical intellect was made wise to that fact. Black folklore tells us of people who could walk on water—Africans who surveyed the new world real estate and opted to take the long haul back home by foot.

To the enslaved, though, to the African landlocked into American servitude, the waters rippled differently. For them, the spirituals’ reference to “Crossing the River Jordan” functioned as a triple entendre: biblical allusion, figurative expression of crossing the meridian between North and South, and as literal direction toward an escape route. Forbidden to seek communion and connection with water-associated Orisha, Yemoja, Olucun, or Oshun, baptism was left to function as spiritual substitute—and became a factor in the Baptists’ early success in recruiting black congregants.

Public Enemy made this link explicit with the preamble to the sonic anarchy of “Rebel without a Pause” by sampling Jesse Jackson preaching Brothers and Sisters, I don’t know what this world is coming to … then comes an explosion of baritone and brimstone. And by the time you hear Chuck-D’s “Up you mighty race” lyrical polemics, the point has been made: the rapper is finishing Jesse’s sentence, literally picking up where the preacher left off. You could riff on the line of reasoning with the explicit biblical reference that Lauryn Hill brought to the table with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or the rough-hewn, avenue Christianity espoused by the late Notorious B.I.G., but the point is that the MC exists inside a broader, older vocal tradition. For the rappers gone sacred—Run and Mase, now turned Reverends Run and Mase—trading in throwback jerseys for pastoral robes mirrors a pivot that soul singers have been making for decades. And in so doing they’ve essentially put in for a transfer from one branch of black verbal art to its ancestral root. DMX’s gravelly preacher-voice recalls the old traditions, from back in the times when men of God were still called exhorters. His debut It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a seminar on the asphalt theology of the millennial street hood. No question, the rapper had turned exhorter when he offered an a capella prayer as the sixteenth track on his debut release:

You give me word and only ask that I interpret
And You give me eyes that I might recognize the serpent

There is an apocryphal tale that tells of DMX buying a Brooklyn church out of its back-tax debt, offering a blessing to the house of the Lord. The truth ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Microphone Check
• 1 The Roots
• 2 The Score
• 3 Word of Mouth
• 4 Asphalt Chronicles
• 5 Seven MCs
• Conclusion
• Shout Outs
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author