It figures that the profoundest patch in the history of rap/hip-hop, since its birth, would happen exactly during the two years when I was socked away at a midwestern grad school. I left Brooklyn for Iowa City to the strains of "Welcome To the Terrordome"; the movie version of Boyz N The Hood came a month after I graduated and headed to California. Between 1989 homecoming and 1991 commencement, the world changed from Black Nationalism to gangsta.
I continue to think this wasn't as much of a volte-face as some have claimed; it strikes me as rather notable, in fact, that the focus on having things, on possession and dispossession, remained constant. What flipped was the stance toward these fixed ideas, from the tribulations of living in a land where the property and power were always elsewhere, to the long folktale of getting and having these things. The song remained the same, except fantasy replaced factuality. This split is already clear in "Rapper's Delight," shifting awkwardly between quotidian accounts of dinner down the block and the high life of Big Bank Hank. These two modes would be played out in series, and really 1990 was when the latter superseded the former. "No more props I want property," Rakim said, and the story pivoted on that point....
I don't think it's any coincidence that this period, 1989-1991, is the height of the culture war against rap/hip-hop: the time of Billl Bennett and Charlton Heston, of C. DeLores Tucker, of court judgements against unpaid sampling, of the generalized pressure (what's up, MTV?) to prove you were a real musician by cashiering the very things that rap was made of, and playing with a "real band." History, one might say, is the history of making politics turn away; one can't blame fantasy and aesthetics for filling the absence.
But I digress. I had meant only to set the context for understanding my favorite nobody rapper. His name is The Jaz, though he has also been known as Big Jaz and perhaps Jaz-O, though that may be someone else. Allmusic.com is, for once, not so sure. What is certain is that he was a New York rapper of some local repute and no national presence who made a disc released on July 16, 1990 that is one of the great unremembered hip-hop reccords. It's called To Your Soul.
Song after song is quick, serious, deeply musical, with playful lyrics that come at varying speeds, sometimes blunt and heavy on the beat, sometimes syncopated and sudden, looking for a way to slip past any defense. It's a kind of style-shifting that would become common later, virtuoso and then familiar and then just one of the ways hip-hop sounds. But in 1990 it was fresh, and it was the problem.
Or it was an evocation of the problem, which is that The Jaz didn't know who he was. He didn''t have a clear style, or a sure point. He was right in the middle, see, and he wasn't the only one: Ice-T had been juggling the roles of social critic and hustler long before PE slammed into NWA, and Ice Cube was just then reversing the trajectory of the narative from sunroof-down-diamond-in-the-back to working with the Bomb Squad. "Once Upon A Time In The Projects" says it all, the way social reality and the gangster's fairytale hept hemorrhaging into each other. And The Jaz didn't know if he was a Nation of Islam radical (there is this long Q'n'A at the heart of the record called "Flag of the Mahdi") or a thug: it turns out he keeps a great whte shark in his swimming pool. I'm 6'3", 210 and I keep funds comin' in, he announced, this year the Max, next year the Benz. It's just at the edge of that exaggeration that would buy and sell the decade. And meanwhile, the beats come from all over but especially from Prince Paul, who just then, at a musical level — because I will still tell you that the Bomb Squad sound wasn't music, it was politics for the ear — was the best producer in the game, Mark the 45 King included. Check the next line it seems so sensible: for the dope beat you seek the Prince Paul. That's what the Jaz said, except because of the rhyme word in the set-up, it sounds like the punchline is "you seek the principle," and that makes sense, because what it Prince Paul after all but the very principle of the dope beat?
That's from the song "It's That Simple," one of the two standouts along with the title track (for which he sings one quotation of Marvin Gaye that still gives me shivers for its suddenness and audacity and for all that for its seeming inevitability). "It's That Simple" is almost a duet; The Jaz's sidekick/protegé/water carrier gets a few lines and a writing credit. The two voices, actually, sound almost identical as they start the song trading phrases, now finishing each other's sentences, now calling and responding, impossible to know which one is saying what:
Let's begin with the beginning the start
Let's get deep within it the heart
Partner? Yeah You got a partner? No
Don't be sarcastic partner OK partner let's go
Who's superior? Opposed to who? The inferior
We are the two in prior criteria
...and as it veers toward utter confusion it suddenly unfurls into a dazzling sprint:
You mean we're in the barrier of the better area causin' havoc and hysteria?
and then both voices, filled with certainty: Yeah, whatever: friends, we're in there.
It's as dazzling as any sequence on record, playful and deft and in love with the sounds that syllables can make, and in the end perfectly good-natured: boasts not against each other, but on each other's behalf. Hear it once and you'll remember it for years.
It's quite remarkable how similar voices are, and how alike they looked: the protegé was more like 6'4", and had almost the exact same name — another thing that makes the record confusing. When The Jaz namechecks his boy, it seems like he might be talking about himself. In one place he wonders who else is poetic as the J - A - Z; at another turn, he suggests play the track with ease, J - A - Y - Z. Becazuse that's who the watercarrier is: Homebase Brooklyn: break, ya get bent; Jaz and Jay-Z represent. And this is as uncertain a moment as one can imagine. Summer is turning to fall. The future is up for grabs. Nation time is ending. Dre and the other architects of G-Funk are perfecting their game. You can still do the Humpty Dance. Exactly half the century so far has been before The Bomb, and half after. The Berlin Wall is down. The ravers are sampling like sampling was always cool. There are tanks in the Kuwaiti desert, and the Airborne is in Saudi Arabia. In a few months, Rodney King will be beaten almost to death, on videotape, by three LA cops. Everything, later, will seem to have been happening at once. A star is busy being born...
Posted by jane at December 1, 2005 10:24 PM | TrackBack