A few days ago I read this beauty right here. And responded thus. Which got my wheels to turning.
After a Cream- and Led Zeppelin-listening binge for a couple weeks last month–il faut, friends, il faut–and after subsequently bringing it back home by listening some of the artists whose songs they covered , I got to thinking about a certain miracle embodied by the rise of British Blues-Pop in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as by mainstream American Rock n Roll. I’m talking about the miracle by which the words of poor black men and women of the Southern United States ended up in the throats of the unlikeliest folks from all over the world.
When I hear an Englishman like Eric Clapton singing in the accent of a sharecropper from Mississippi, I don’t necessarily see it as mimicry, though I realize by turns that it can be taken that way. It can also be seen as someone using the best language that has been provided him to express a certain human pathos. Mainstream American rock n roll, and everything influenced by it, has come to involve people very far removed from the experience that created the accent in which they’re singing. Without exception, singers of what’s been named “soul music” around the world–Amy Winehouse, Adele, and Joss Stone being the most recent British incarnations of the phenomenon–find it necessary to adopt a Southern American accent, and usually African-American dialect, even in order to sing their own original songs in that style. It’s really something to take a silent moment to ponder. There are of course grave issues of plunder and exploitation to be explored, but here I want to take time to see it from a different angle.
Why have blues and hip hop offered the world this particularly well-resounding language? I can only begin to know, but I suspect it has to do with the unique turning point to which the world has been arriving; that we now find ourselves having to synthesize ancient memory with modern experience, before the road becomes a dead end.
Many Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, mention Fualkner as a key influence. It has a lot do with the South’s experience of itself not only as tropical but as marginal. This is also an important reason why the foundational elements of a US pop culture that has been shaped into the first front of our global imperialsm could only have been forged in the American South. The South of the United States is a crucial resevoir for humanity. It has been not only a place where much of the violence on which our culture depends could be committed out of the center’s sight, like some slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, but a place where a vibrant pastoral human culture could flourish in ways that are deeply silenced elsewhere in the country–ways resonant with much of human life outside this country . The South is of America, but does not share a full portion of that privilege. Pure economics illustrate that to this day.
It’s equally important to remember that before the rise of Southern hip hop, American hip hop artists from every part of the country found themselves rapping with a New York accent. Because New York had forged the art form, it was necessary adopt their language in order to use it whether you were from California or DC. Although I know there has been an international aspect to hip hop from the beginning–can’t forget an essential Carribbean element present both in its early performers and their sounds–I would argue that it was only after artists began to stretch the syllables of rap out into a southern drawl that it could begin to find root outside of the Western Hemisphere (its first and third worlds) and the “developed” world abroad, to become a form that artists could use, with heartfelt authenticity, to reach for power that had been systematically denied them. Groups like Outkast told mainstream hip hop: “We are outside the center, but have made rap our own.” It’s provided an important model for artists around the world do so.
My feeling today is that South is that from which we all come and to which we are all returning. It’s as true within the US as anywhere.
I love this perspective. I have heard that copying and adapting form is indeed a high compliment to that which is copied, mimicked. Your analysis presents a similar view. I shall hold in high regard those who compliment the south by their voices.
Thank you very much! I know that there is a much more difficult side to the conversation–”stole” can in many cases be used just as accurately as “covered” to talk about the relationship of some of those artists to the blues, and the movie that shares its name with this post is just one demonstration of this very complicated exchange of cultures–but I did wanted to honor the American South as a place that created this language that turns out to be widely applicable on a global level, and am glad you feel me!
THANK YOU FOR DIGGING UP THE ROOTS OF THE SOUTH.AND FOR THESE ROOTS SOME OF US STILL FOUND OUR SELF IN THE SOUTH. LETS US KEEP THE TREASURES.
This seems to be well summed up in the Chonkyfire clip from the ’95 Source Awards, where the crowd actually starts to boo 3 stacks before he speaks. The South maintains a rugged, wild existence within the American landscape where everything is overgrown(maybe to peril) and artistic expression finds rich soil quickly. The South does have something to say, but too true/authentic to find its place among Pop circles. Even the history of the South has to be fully embraced before this country can move into “the Dream”. Marginalized cultures don’t reorganize center but change the way we think about the “center”.