[Dixielandjazz] The Words vs. The Music

[Stephen Barbone]

Some surprises here for those who read it on a slow Friday. Not
Dixieland, but certainly many parallels may be drawn about "the age-old
battle over the relative importance of words and music" in OKOM.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

May 7, 2004 - NY Times

REVERBERATIONS - By JOHN ROCKWELL

The Words-and-Music Equation: More Than a New Math of Rap

   In college I had a Sunday-night opera radio show, and my introductory
theme was the string sextet that begins Richard Strauss's last opera,
"Capriccio." It's pretty music — beautiful, even. But it's music, not
words. A point worth making, since the central issue of the opera is the
age-old battle over the relative importance of words and music.

In the opera, there are flesh-and-blood characters to animate the
underlying ideas, but (as a German opera) it's the ideas that count:
whether operatic music supports the words or the words just float on the
surface of the music, providing emotional cues but then getting out of
the way. Since Strauss composed this opera and since the conductor
Clemens Krauss wrote the libretto with Strauss, and since the opera
begins with my lovely
string sextet and ends with a gorgeous scene with French horn solo, the
balance might seem decisively tilted toward the music.

And so, in one giddy leap, to contemporary commercial American popular
music: one of my most cherished beliefs as a rock critic, to which I
clung even when the evidence to the contrary seemed almost overwhelming,
was that what made (and makes) a pop song popular was the music, not the
words. Rock critics all around me would subject lyrics to exhaustive
analysis, usually quoting Keats. Me, I liked the tunes and the rhythm
and the
hook ("It's got a good beat; I'll give it a 10"), and then only later,
if at all, I'd get around to paying grudging attention to whatever story
was being told or metaphor being belabored.

It wasn't that words were unnecessary: people need words to tell them
what to feel, just as today they seem to need videos to provide pictures
of what's going on in a song. They need pointers, but they'll pay
attention to a song only if the music has first compelled that
attention.

Even as I clung to my theory, though, I had to recognize that in some
songs the words really were important. Bob Dylan's long narrative
ballads, for instance. Yet for all the ingenuity of his images and his
wordplay, what made Dylan popular was as much his scruffy theatrical
personality, his sneering articulation of the words and notes, his
furious guitar and harmonica playing, the pungency of the Band and the
sheer, anthemlike conviction of his choruses ("This Wheel's on Fire"
being the most awesomely apocalyptic, for its music even more than its
biblical verbal imagery).

If Mr. Dylan's words ruffled the calm surface of my certitude, imagine
how I felt when rap established itself in the 1980's. Here was a pop
music genre that seemed to rely almost entirely on words: on clever
end-rhymes and internal rhymes, on extravagant boasting, on sheer
tongue-twisting verbal trickery. How did my music-über-alles theory
stand up to that?

Pretty well, actually. To be sure, some successful rap "songs" rely so
heavily on verbal brilliance and dramatic characters that one simply
must pay attention to the story: Eminem's "Stan" is a fine recent
example. But "Stan" (which tells the tale of an increasingly deranged
fan feeling rejected by a pop star and crashing his car into a river
with his pregnant girlfriend trapped in the trunk) is hardly all words.
There is the haunting choral lament by Dido, the English pop singer.
There is the musical quality of Eminem's declamation. And there are the
ever-present hooks of Dr. Dre's production.

My 15-year-old daughter, the rap fan, claims I turned her on to the
stuff, which is flattering, but she is really my mentor now. She loves
Eminem and 50 Cent and Nas and Nelly and Ludacris and the others. She
thinks OutKast's Big Boi is good but not so good as her favorites. And
she confirms (independently, without paternal prodding) that what she
hears first in a new rap song is the beat and the other aspects of the
music, and when those grab her, she starts paying attention to the
words.

To be sure, the music of much rap is minimal compared to, say, a Frank
Sinatra ballad or George Martin's productions for the Beatles. In the
eternal roundalay of melody, harmony and rhythm, rhythm has seized the
spotlight. But that is merely a reflection of the steady evolution of
20th-century popular music, led by black music, that starts out
underground and eventually conquers the mainstream.

It isn't just rhythm that defines rap's music, though: throughout its
history rap has reached out to summarize and reinterpret black pop's
past. I remember a Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five show I
reviewed at the Peppermint Lounge in 1982, in which I was struck back
then by rap's "links to black popular music of the last 30 years,"
meaning back to the early 1950's.

And now we have OutKast's "Love Below"/"Speakerboxxx" double CD, which
has been at or near the top of the charts for months. In a previous
album, OutKast thanked an entire litany of pop predecessors, from Curtis
Mayfield to Bob Marley to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Kraftwerk to
Jimi Hendrix and Earth, Wind and Fire, as if to lay claim to a legacy.

On this latest set, "Speakerboxxx" is more Big Boi's, and hence closer
to unadulterated rap, although even here the musical elements claim
one's attention. But it is "The Love Below" by the other member of this
duo, André 3000 (his real name is André Benjamin; Big Boi's is Antwan
Patton) that confirms that rap represents no real refutation of music,
that it has never really broken from the broad tradition of black pop
music in the first place.

The musical variety here is dazzling, and surely handled throughout.
There is rapping and singing, orchestral music and electrified
instruments, electronic beats and turntable scratching and sampling of
every sort.

In Strauss's "Capriccio," the Countess must choose between two lovers,
one representing words and the other music. She finds the choice
impossible and, in pop as well as in opera, that's ultimately true. Yet
for me, in all song, it's ultimately the music that counts. Music's
emotions may be directed and focused by words, but it's the musical
emotions that dig down deep. Even in such a seemingly word-driven genre
as rap.