For the crowning Video of the Year award, Justin Timberlake was victorious, flanked by runners-up Macklemore and Robin Thicke. Macklemore won Best Hip-Hop video, beating out four black artists. But the category maybe most worth focusing on is Best Collaboration, which featured Thicke and Timberlake. They were nominated for working with, respectively, Jay Z, T.I., and Pharrell. Pink won in that category for her collaboration with Nate Ruess of sleeper-hit factory band fun.. What's worth noting, though, is the respect these artists were given for co-opting black artists into the black music they have made white. At its best, music can be a free space of collaboration without boundaries. Timberlake clearly has a deep love of R&B, evidenced often throughout his impressive career, and I don't doubt that there's a perfectly legitimate mutual respect between him and Jay Z that led him to include the famous rapper on his song. Thicke I'm more suspicious of. And then there's Macklemore, who in his mainstream success has no particular ties to blackness other than the black roots of hip-hop itself.
What these three artists represent, along with a certain newly infamous one I'll be mentioning shortly, is the way that black music is made acceptable and enjoyable to white audiences through white ambassadors. Robin Thicke has two black people in his song, and in an equal world that would make the song more black than white. But it's Thicke strutting and bragging and crooning throughout, with only Pharrell's whoops and T.I.'s subordinate verses to distract from his powerful white man's self-assertion. Blackness, for Thicke, is an exotic flavor. He has made black art his own, and his collaborators are indicators of the legitimacy of his take-over. This leaves white audiences free to enjoy the pleasures of his pop music with only momentary consideration of the blackness it's born of. This is true of Justin Timberlake too, with Jay Z being possibly the most significant black endorsement outside Barack Obama himself, and most of all of Macklemore. But where R&B always enjoyed a certain degree of respect, hip-hop has been labelled as dangerous just about since its inception. It's been touted for years by white people as signs of an impending black rebellion, an overthrow of the existing social order meant to install a new black supremacy. You wouldn't know any of that if you listened to Macklemore's various hits, and you certainly wouldn't hear of it in all the acclaim and popularity he's garnered. Because he's safe, you know. He's a good rapper. And by good, I mean white, and harmless. Just like the dreamy Timberlake and the teasing Thicke.
Black music, especially lately as black people begin to occupy ever more influential positions in our society, has a hard time gaining legitimacy. A good parallel case would be the rise of jungle in the UK in the early 90s. That lower-class largely black music was heralded as a threat to British society, with stray incidents of violence being cited as obvious signs of its danger. Eventually through circumstances both organic and external it was smoothed into the much "safer" Drum n' Bass, a genre largely practiced now by more affluent white producers. Certainly this has also been the case with rock 'n roll, as has been extensively documented elsewhere, but the whitening of hip-hop might be the most extreme example yet of this pattern. The path from N.W.A. to Macklemore would be virtually unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago, but it seems perfectly natural now. The precedents are there of course, but we're at a specific cultural moment right now where white people seem quite interested in the blackest of black music (and can even enjoy certain popular black artists) but are unwilling to immerse themselves in the world of black music proper. They need other, more powerful white people to cherrypick what they like about rap and hip-hop (primarily the hip-hop rhythm and rap's lyrical wordplay, I'd say) in order to present a "safer," more sanitized version to suit their tastes. This practice is the opposite of cultural cross-pollination. It is theft and an act of appropriation.
Is Macklemore evil? I can't say. I haven't looked into him much or even heard much of his work. For all I know he could be the world's most diligent student of hip-hop. It wouldn't be the first time a white artist falls in love with music outside his demographic. So maybe Macklemore isn't a thief and an exploiter. But his position in popular culture casts him as one, because I rather doubt that his fans are using him as an entryway into the previously unexplored world of real hip-hop (though if they are then that's great!). More likely, they're enjoying his hits while ignoring the culture from which they came.
I don't want to suggest that the only way to truly enjoy music is to understand its lineage inside out. Doing so can certainly deepen your appreciation and is plenty laudable in its own right, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying pop music simply as discrete pieces of art/entertainment. The trouble is when an industry studiously works to ignore a black artform for more than three decades but is happy to present the white conquistadors as the true standard-bearers of that artform and an uncritical audience happily agrees. That's what the MTV VMAs 2013 mean to America. We've created a framework of systemic marginalization that's reflected in the way we award white artists for taking all the credit for showcasing black culture to us. The narrative supplied to us by this award show could hardly be more indicative of our decades of cultural appropriation.
Enter Miley Cyrus. I don't really want to say too much about her, because anything I can say and want to say has already been covered beautifully by this (uncharacteristically) excellent Jezebel piece, expanded upon even further in this history, personal and universal, of black female exploitation. The Miley Cyrus problem is very significant to our culture in multiple ways, but the aspect I'll be focusing on is how her performance is the female version of what Timberlake, Thicke, and Macklemore represent. To start, it's damning all on its own that our cultural attention is on the music of those three men but the body and performance of Miley Cyrus, who is certainly a musician in her own right. But more importantly, the performance as it exists is a parade of white cultural appropriation of specifically black culture. Miley is even more interesting than her three male comrades because this appropriation comes from a deeply personal place of self-determination, and it seems that to Miley nothing is more personally desirable than embracing and becoming part of (visible, media-promoted, stereotypical) black culture. The fact that we allow her to do so indicts us as well as her. We're all complicit in this trying-on trying-off of black culture as long as we allow media narratives to sell us the process as exciting and attention-worthy. Whether or not we approve of Miley and her actions is beside the point. Barring some supernova of outrage and backlash, she will continue to exist and perform as she already has. This is the ultimate privilege, the ability to "be black" in public and get away with it, to become "black" and be white again in your private space. Simply being white allows white people to do things we and our media are quick to condemn when done by black people, including make music.
So let's work around to Tricky. I'll give you a little sketch of his early life as a means of understanding the experiences that are forever a part of him. He was born to a Jamaican father and mixed race English and Ghanaian mother. His father left his mother almost immediately to continue a life of womanizing, and his mother spent a few short years raising him before killing herself. Some say it was her inability to deal with her epilepsy (Tricky does, for one) while others opine that her heartbreak over being abandoned by Tricky's father drove her to suicide. It's impossible to know. Your best friend could commit suicide and you would still never know all the reasons that pushed them to it. From there Tricky bounced from home to home in his multiracial extended family, most notably spending a lot of time with his (white) grandmother who encouraged him to stay home from school to watch old horror movies. He'd developed asthma after learning of his mother's death and suffered frequently from it. Music and crime became twin lures in his life as he reached adolescence. He would commit petty crimes with friends and get in fights, often at clubs where he'd be confronted for wearing a dress. He ended up in prison once, briefly, for counterfeiting money. Other times he would write down lyrics and hang out with musicians, eventually falling into the Wild Bunch soundsystem that spawned Massive Attack, early cohorts in his musical career. He started out as a rapper in that collective before separating from Massive Attack to create more personal and autonomous style of music. He's said more than once that music was his way out of a dead-end life of crime, though he's also quick to assert that he never had much interest in all the machismo and violence of it. You get the sense, listening to him, that boredom and a lack of options were determining factors in that early flirtation with criminality moreso than any innate love of wrongdoing.
If you know Tricky at all, it's because you know about trip-hop. And you might have heard that he created it. And that's mostly true. I haven't had very much interest in exploring Portishead or Massive Attack, the other two progenitors of trip-hop, so I can't say when and how they influenced the 'scene' other than they were making similar music around the same time. Some of it might even be good, or even very good. I frequently see Massive Attack ranked ahead of Tricky on Best of the 90s music lists, so presumably they have some kind of talent. Tricky enjoyed working with them too, for what it's worth, until he didn't, for reasons that are still unclear to me. But while Massive Attack and Portishead carved their way through the music industry in their own ways, neither inspired quite the fascination and mythology that seemed to grow like a moss around Tricky. He was just so sui generis that there was no way of retroactively predicting his immense success, nor his subsequent experimentations. Because while Massive Attack and Portishead kept making trip-hop (probably, right?), Tricky almost immediately disowned the genre and his contributions to it.
Why? Well, lots of reasons. Some of them involve Tricky as a person, some involve him as an artist, and some involve him as a black musician in a white music industry. First, though, consider the word "trip-hop." Tricky hates it, but you can't deny that it's a punchy, evocative and communicative label. You know exactly what to expect, and it sounds exciting. Fresh, new. No doubt that was how people in the mid-90s felt as they read the ecstatic accolades of the man who had brought the bold new genre to the limelight. Hip-hop with an edge, with a dark side. Different from horrorcore probably, more disorienting and frightening. Something you can get really high to. And again, this is in many ways an accurate description of Tricky's debut album Maxinquaye. But just as the facts I've given you about his life don't tell you anything about the human being inhabiting the body of Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws, neither does the word "trip-hop" tell you anything about what it's like to experience Maxinquaye (named, by the way, after his mother, Maxine Quaye. The mythology builds itself). I'll get to that some other time, maybe in my next post about Tricky or maybe the one after, but here it's important to consider what happened when the music industry, music press, and music consumers got word of an exciting new development in music. Just as with rock 'n roll, just as with hip-hop, just as with jungle, it wasn't enough to experience it on its own terms. It had to be memorialized, it had to be expanded, and it had to be colonized.But where before there were numerous black musicians building up the sounds of rock 'n roll grassroots-style, where hip-hop was a sensibility coalescing into an artform and jungle was the result of several years of mutating electronic music, Tricky had created something completely new almost singlehandedly. Massive Attack and Portishead received no end of acclaim, to be sure, but Tricky was the mad genius, the renegade. Anyone who could create something so creepy and intoxicating couldn't just be left to his own devices. So everyone converged on this slight but fascinating man from Bristol, survivor of an impoverished childhood suddenly made famous through the music machine, the fame machine, and the whiteness machine. Because whiteness plays a part in this, make no mistake. Just as Macklemore pedals hip-hop in tune with the values of mainstream liberals (anti-consumerism, gay rights), Tricky unwittingly had given white people something with all the boldness and funk of hip-hop but with an intellectual and conceptual edge that made them feel sophisticated in their appreciation of it (hip-hop to this day is decried by white people as being shallow and superficial and unintelligent, which is their self-justification for not listening to it). It scared the hell out of them and they loved it. Trip-hop spread, safely adored by white people and so already culturally permitted to be 'developed' further. In a weird way Tricky was hardly needed anymore at this point, as trip-hop would continue growing worldwide with or without his input. But since he'd done us the favor of providing us with what we didn't even know we wanted, it was worthwhile to wait on his next move so that we could further enshrine him in the fast-developing trip-hop canon.
But Tricky wasn't called Tricky for nothing. He was never going to allow himself to be a mere pawn in this game of supply and demand. So he went and forged a career no one could have seen coming, abandoning trip-hop and all its empty promises for what made him happy, which was creating unique music with the help of others. He abdicated the throne and left the leaderless cult of trip-hoppers to descend into derivate irrelevance. Today trip-hop is a joke, a hipster cliche, the soundtrack to dinner parties too cool for pop or jazz. It's white music in the worst sense now, meant to pondered over and admired rather than considered and understood. Everything personal and shocking and unexpected about Tricky's pioneering artwork evaporated almost immediately in the legions of imitators, leaving behind a desert of stale beats and "interesting" instrumentation that's anything but. Trip-hop's a ghost town now, and the musical conversation has all but left it behind at this point (embracing instead "cloud rap," which is like trip-hop but without the fear and paranoia trip-hop became famous for). I'm pretty sure Tricky saw it coming too. Some people hate him for abandoning us at the height of his dark powers, but to take such a viewpoint assumes that his only purpose as a musician was to stimulate and excite us as white consumers. I have a feeling everyone who only likes Maxinquaye (and/or one or two of its immediate successors) and says he lost his touch afterward are those people. Because he's spend almost two decades now sharing and growing, and it seems foolish to consider him only as a historical/musical fluke, though that he surely also is.
Wrapping up: Tricky exists because we allowed him to, because we needed a Tricky. And I say Tricky because Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws certainly didn't exist with our consent. By all means, by all likelihood, he should've rotted away in his old neighborhood ghetto. It was only when he had something to offer us that we paid him any attention. We gave him fame and he had the gall to ignore our requests for more of what we wanted. But he was still famous, because once you've been famous you stay famous, even if only as a curiosity. And that's how he exists to a lot of people at this point: the once-mighty king squandering his unbelievable talent away in obscurity. He's still Tricky, but he's only distantly the god of trip-hop now. But buried under that official legend, the legacy we've written for him, there's the actual man and his music, and the life he made for himself after being alternately enabled and absorbed by the white hegemony. And in my humble opinion, what remains is one of the most incredible human beings to ever exist, as well as one of the few artists I feel comfortable calling a genius. More on that later. For now, just remember that the entertainment industry is a weird and powerful thing. A Moloch that consumes black artists for white pleasure. And in Tricky we have one of the few to beat the monster into obeying his will, if only for a little while. They say capitalism will sell you the noose to hang it with, and with Tricky that was very much the case. I'm excited to bring that story to you.
(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)
