May 7, 2004

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

n 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.