If Rap is food for rat-a-tat, rattle on

My friend’s son, a young man of 22 years is into rap music. His parents are bewildered and worried over his future as he is intent on making a profession out of rapping. The parents have set up a small music workstation in their modest apartment and spent their hard earned money in getting him samplers, drum machines, synthesizers and whatever else he needed for recording his compositions. When they met me a couple of days back, they looked disturbed as they could not make anything of his musical compositions which  he was sending to different music producers in the hope of getting an opportunity to cut an album or an entry into the Bollywood and Kollywood worlds. They told me that that their son was confident of rising high in this field and would not exchange his love for the rapping profession for anything mundane and pedestrian. I liked the pluck of the young man though I knew, for any young man to rise up in this field, (as is the case with all other creative fields), he needed a godfather or huge financial support unless he was unusually gifted,  a musical prodigy like A.R.Rahman or the late Mandolin Srinivas. Even though I am reasonably conversant with trends in modern art, literature and music, my knowledge has not advanced to these contemporary Hip-Hop/Rap genres. In fact I have only a limited understanding and limited appreciation of atonal music that was popular in the first quarter of the 20^th Century with composers like Schonberg, Debussy, Stravinsky and a few others. I could empathize with the anxiety of the parents whose knowledge of music was much less than mine- almost confined to the Carnatic music of the South without an exposure to the classical music of the North, leave aside contemporary Western (and Indian) popular music.

Rap music is certainly not music to the ears of the older generation to which I belong – especially to the generation that had been brought up on classical music which is essentially homophonic with its strong emphasis on balance, beauty and elegance. Classical music with or without words stresses on deep-felt emotions such as love, devotion, peace, tranquility etc.  Though there have been a few changes in the composition of lyrics set to the classical tunes, the classical trend has always been to harmonize words, rhythm and the melodic modes( known as “raga’ in Indian classical music). There is no privileging of one over the other as words are as important as the Taal and the Raga –the rhythm and the melodic mode. Being over a thousand years old, Classical music has evolved into a strong, robust genre  moving from medieval to renaissance to baroque, to classical to romantic, to atonal, to neo-classicism, neo-romanticism, minimalism etc  without losing its inherent homophonic quality. Rap music on the other hand does not lay emphasis on harmony and melody, where the lyrics are on the spur compositions that are often personal, at times vulgar, annoying and inappropriate, programmed to beats and rhythms and does not lend itself easy to decipher. Kolaveri from Kollywood brought rap onto the film world and has since been adopted by many young enthusiastic rap singers.

The emergence of “rap’ in the world of music is similar to the advent of modern art that emerged in the first quarter of the 20^th century, when viewers were dumbstruck as they could not unravel the meaning and mystery of the new paintings. For many of us of the older generation it was like allowing a chicken to run around a canvas with its feet dipped in many coloured ink. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a scandalous work portraying a porcelain urinal was according to the artist, meant to shift the focus from the physical art to intellectual interpretation. The experience of a distasteful work of art, he said, was intended to move from mundane reality to the higher echelons of intellectual engagement. In a powerful defence of modern art, Jose Ortega y Gassett , the Spanish philosopher says that 20^th century art unlike classical art is of  “no transcending consequence, of no pretenses “ and replicates Duchamps’ view saying  ““art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect” and frees art from human or divine  interest . Art is seen as a mental pattern, an intellectual process, “art-as art as a concentration of art’s essential nature” and not as representing human nature.

Rap music where words do not signify anything is very much like modern art except that it does not and cannot provide ‘intellectual engagement’ as explained by Duchamp. The beats can make you tap your feet and you are so swayed by the beats and the rhythms that you seldom seek meaning in the words. Kolaveri is a good example of rap music as the new young audience was swayed off its feet by the beats to which the volubility of words provided the added assonance. If purists don’t like it, the fault lies in their attempt to seek meaning where there is none. When someone asked what the song Kolaveri Di meant , the composer said “(It’s) the tune (that) came first. Once I came up with the tune, Dhanush heard and sang the words. The entire process was over in 20 minutes”. Rap music is music for the beats, music for dance, music for collective psyche to experience a universal high-what Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious or the collective instincts which are universal and predates the individual consciousness. So there is a collective form of pure liberation as the audience is on its feet swaying to the rhythms that mesh up with words without attempting to understand its meaning. To look for spiritual transcendence ( this conflicts with Jung’s attempt to equate collective unconscious with primordial spiritual instincts) in rap music is to misread the zrap. Even at the cost of offending the modern lovers of Rap, the truth is rap is a diahorrea of words that follow in quick succession to add to the sound of the beats and rhythm.

The new generation is alive to this hip-hop music. This newfound enthusiasm may not last for long time. Rap will be a period music and is to be welcomed today as a harmless substitute for the more dangerous versions of euphoric state induced by alcohol and drugs. It serves no purpose to compare it with classical music like comparing oranges and apples. It is apt to recall what Samuel Beckett said when he was asked to explain the meaning in his plays. He replied:“"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And let them furnish  their own aspirin."

I realized the extent of generation gap exemplified by the hysteria of  Gen X,Y,Z  over Rap that would last till the Rap gets wrapped up with the emergence of a new genre from Gen Next. To adapt Beckett again, Rap is “nothing to express, nothing with which to  express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." If Rap is food for rat-a-tat, rattle on.