hey, welcome to 12tone!
let me ask you a question: is rap music?
...yes.
it is.
unambiguously.
anyway, thanks for watching and thanks to our Patreon patrons for… *sigh* alright,
fine.
let's do this.
people have been arguing that it isn't since before I was born, but it's been popping up
again lately on social media, and since knowing things about music is literally my job, I
figured it was worth weighing in.
now, often, this claim is presented not as part of a larger argument, but just as a self-evident
fact, and if that's your view then I'm not sure there's much I can do to convince you
otherwise.
music is subjective, after all, and if your whole argument is "it's not music" then the
best I can do in response is "yes it is".
but it's also not uncommon to see arguments based on the composition of the music itself,
and that's where we enter my domain.
probably the most common of these is that music is defined as the combination of harmony,
melody, and rhythm, and since rap is missing some of those elements, it's not, technically
speaking, music.
I should note that this isn't a definition that most music theorists I know would endorse:
ours tend to be a lot less prescriptive, because music is a complex phenomenon that means different
things to different people, especially across cultural boundaries.
but I don't want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole, because arguing about definitions
is super boring, so instead let's see how this one applies to rap.
I'll start with the easy one: rap has rhythm.
this is something even its harshest critics will usually concede, so I won't spend too
much time on it, but I think it's worth emphasizing because modern rap is some of the most rhythmically
complex music happening right now, at least in the world of pop.
like, look at the concept of flow: it's essentially a marriage between rhythms and rhymes that
often transcends the underlying meter of the piece.
if you want to read more about it, I've linked to a great paper in the description, but let's
move on to a more controversial claim: rap has melodies.
and no, I'm not just talking about the songs where the hook includes a singer.
see, here's the thing: the human voice is naturally melodic.
almost anything you can do with it has a definite pitch of some sort, and speech is no exception.
in English, my voice raises when I want to emphasize something, and at the end of a sentence,
it goes down.
this is called prosody, and it's why monotonous speaking sounds so irritating.
we're used to hearing those contours, and we miss them when they're gone. of course,
speech is different from singing: it relies more on approximate pitch, with vague shapes
rather than precise notes, but just because it's not singing doesn't mean it's not melodic.
this may sound like a minor technicality, but it's not: given how important they are
to communication, I'd argue that mirroring human speech patterns is, like, the point
of melodies.
or a point, anyway: again, music is complicated and the same tools can do lots of different
things.
but what rap does is it really focuses on that one aspect of melodic structure, adding
percussive elements and articulations to emphasize its speech-like qualities.
make no mistake, though: both the contour and range of the line still matter.
there's a lot more to rap than just talking.
we can even compare it to techniques like patter singing, where melodic complexity takes
a back seat to skills like speed and enunciation, or to the operatic concept of sprechgesang,
which also employs approximate pitch in order to deliver dialogue naturally without losing
the musicality of the performance.
there's links in the description if you're curious what those techniques sound like.
so yes, rap has melodies.
they're just spoken ones.
which brings us to the final piece: harmony.
does rap have chords?
well, some songs certainly do: Common's The People is a good example and a great song.
but here's where I do need to go back and challenge the definition, because the idea
that harmony is a fundamental part of music is a deeply European invention.
someday I'll make a video about how Christian plainchant evolved into modern harmony, but
for now what matters is that many musical cultures didn't follow that same path, and
before Europe colonized the world, most music was what theorists call monophonic, which
means it was just a melody by itself, or accompanied by some sort of percussion instrument.
for a lot of the world, chords are a relatively recent addition to their concept of music.
so, with that in mind, I could grab any number of examples from other cultures to demonstrate
that music doesn't need harmony, but instead I'll pick something a little closer to home:
We Will Rock You.
you know, by Queen.
yes, the guitar at the end plays some chords, but for most of the song it's just a single
voice or, in the chorus, a melody doubled in octaves.
the only other accompaniment is the percussive stomp-clap pattern, which doesn't add any
harmony either, so if you're gonna stick to this definition then the song doesn't technically
become music until the last 30 seconds or so, and that's not something I think most
folks would agree with.
but that's not the only argument people use: another common target is the use of samples,
or short excerpts from other songs, usually looped indefinitely to create a backdrop for
the artist to rap over.
now, again, it's worth noting that not all rap songs use samples: many of them feature
originally composed beats that were written specifically for that song.
but I won't deny that it's a common practice in the genre, and the three main complaints
about it are that it's repetitive, that it doesn't use real instruments, and that it's
just reusing someone else's work instead of creating new music.
let's start with repetition: these sorts of loops are reminiscent of a classic technique
called an ostinato, where some parts of an orchestra, usually the bass, plays a short
repeating pattern while other parts grow and develop on top of it.
Pachelbel's Canon in D is a good example of this, but for something a little more recent,
let's talk about The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony.
ignoring the vocals, the whole song is just a two-bar loop.
they bring instruments in and out to help define different sections, but they're all
playing exactly the same thing and they never stop.
ostinatos have been around since at least the medieval period, so it seems more than
a little unfair to say that rap isn't music for doing the exact same thing.
next, let's look at the real instruments argument.
this is, in effect, an appeal to virtuosity: it says that in order for something to be
music, it must take technical skill to create, and on this one, I can't really argue historical
precedent.
after all, for most of history, all music was performed live on physical instruments.
however, it's worth noting a couple things: first, for most of history, we had no other
options.
recording technology didn't really exist until the 1870s, with the invention of Edison's
phonograph, and it didn't really take off until a decade later, with Berliner's gramophone,
so it feels unfair to judge modern music by the technological limitations of centuries
past.
second, early samples were in fact manually produced, played on turntables by DJs who
would have to jump back and forth between multiple recordings of the same track with
precise timing.
this isn't usually true anymore, but it's worth recognizing that loops are an automation
of a real, physical process, just like, say, MIDI is.
if this (bang) counts as music even though I programmed it on a computer from recordings
of individual piano notes, then samples should too.
and third, I think it's a mistake to view virtuosity as the defining feature of music.
this part is just my opinion, but I tend to think that music is about emotional expression,
not technical skill, and artists should use whatever tools they have access to in order
to make the song they want to make.
and yes, that means I don't have a problem with autotune either.
tools are tools, and we should judge artists not on whether they use them, but on how.
which brings us to the last critique: that it's just lazily reusing another artist's
work.
let's set aside for a second that that doesn't make it not music, it just makes it someone
else's music, and instead let's focus on the history of borrowing in art, because it goes
back a long time.
recontextualizing other people's musical ideas has been with us for basically as long as
music has, but one of the most ubiquitous is Dies Irae, a Gregorian hymn about the Final
Judgment.
the first bar sounds like this (bang) and that melody has been, um, borrowed by many
composers to signify concepts like death and the supernatural, including Brahms, Haydn,
Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff…
look, Rachmaninoff really liked this melody. and it's still in use in modern film scores,
including The Shining, Dracula, and Nightmare Before Christmas.
the point is that taking pieces of old music and using it to create new music has been
a thing forever.
the only difference is that now that we have recording technology, we can use the literal
recordings too.
but it's still recontextualizing: check out I'll Be Missing You, Sean Combs's tribute
to his dead friend Notorious B.I.G., which samples the Police's Every Breath You Take
to tell a completely different story.
so why does this matter?
I mean, like I said, I tend not to be prescriptive in these videos.
I'm not here to tell you what to think, I'm just trying to show you different perspectives
and ideas, so why is it so important to me that you believe that rap is music?
well, this is one of those times where we have to recognize that music theory doesn't
exist in a vacuum.
our ideas about music are shaped by our experience of the world around us, but they also shape
those experiences.
it's a kind of feedback loop, which means that the theories we put out there can have
real, material consequences, and in the case of rap, a genre pioneered by and largely associated
with black people, it's not hard to imagine what those consequences might be.
to be clear, I'm not saying that if you don't like rap you're a racist, but what I am saying
is that refusing to accept it as music represents a devaluation of the concept of African-American
art and expression, even if that's not your intent.
and while rap is far from the only style invented by black musicians, it's worth recognizing
that rock, disco, and even jazz all faced similar backlashes when they first showed
up.
like, really similar.
I've linked to a short PBS documentary about that in the description.
so even though you may just want to have a nice philosophical debate about the nature
of music, that debate can cause real harm if you're not careful about the cultural context
surrounding it.
besides, there's much more interesting things to have that debate about than rap: I'd recommend
starting with Cornelius Cardew's Treatise.
now there's something that may or may not be music.
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