Listen up, kids; today's talk is on cultural relativism and how such ideas affect contemporary popular music, with particular reference to "urban" music. There is one skool (dig that funky spelling) of thought which has it that expressions and acts of malevolence towards, for example, women, are acceptable to the degree that they are accurate representations of the culture from which they originated. This is quite patently bollocks and is the sort of thinking (mostly emanating from academia) that leads some people in the West to believe that female circumcision among some African tribal groups is a time-honoured indigenous "tradition" and as such should be allowed.
Musically speaking, the same attitudes seep through coverage (invariably by white people) of gangsta rap, whereby the glorification (or rather the "bragification") of drive-by shootings and the reference to women as bitches and whores is seen as being "real" and "authentic" and ever so "street". Such condescending attitudes towards "urban" (a polite term for black music) music only obscure the wealth of real talent within the genre, such as NWA (1989's Straight Outta Compton is a classic).
Something of a rap supergroup in their day, they numbered Dr Dre and Ice Cube among their members. The former is rightly hailed as the chief instigator of West Coast gangsta rap. If all you know about gangsta rap is the internecine warfare between the East Coast and West Coast branches (a war which has already claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. in tit-fortat attacks), you're really missing out the real story and confining yourself to newspaper headline coverage of the movement. Black men killing each other - the papers (shamefully) can't get enough of it.
Starting with NWA, the now-defunct group still hold a record of sorts for being the only band to receive threatening letters from the FBI, which had a lot to do with their track F. . k Tha Police, which was written in response to the Rodney King affair. In Britain, the Obscene Publications Act was dug up to seize copies of their Efil4zaggin album (it's Niggaz 4 life spelt backwards). Despite their ultimate "bad boy" reputation they were embraced by white suburban America (probably to piss off their teachers) and they sold about eight million records before disbanding. Dr Dre would go on to even bigger success with his debut solo album, The Chronic (which was lovingly named after a particularly strong strain of marijuana). G-Funk was born (an updating of P-Funk), and Dre was quick to acknowledge the influence of funksters like George Clinton on his work. The album went on to spend an astonishing eight months in the US Top Ten, and Dre took the opportunity to seek out and produce other "urban" acts. His work on Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggy Style helped the album break all known records for a debut album (until Alanis Morrisette descended amongst us).
In between all of this he set up the infamous/famous "Death Row" record label with Marion "Suge" Knight, discovered Tupac Shakur and was sentenced to house arrest and fitted with a tracking device because of various acts of violence - none of them particularly edifying. Back with his first new album in four years (though in the meantime he has produced Eminem's Slim Shady) called 2001, it's a dizzying work of funk beats and laconic rhyming. You'll really have to make your own mind up on the lyrical content here, but if it's the original Gfunk thang you're after, Dr Dre is your only man. And it makes Will Smith sound like Daniel O'Donnell.
2001 is on the Interscope label.
Somebody e-mailed in, pointing out how the last two headlines on this column were both taken from Neil Diamond songs (Song Sung Blue for the Red House Painters and Beautiful Noise for The High Llamas). You, sir, alone, will now have realised that I have completed a hat-trick of Neil Diamond headlines. It's all to do with a £20 bet - which I'm now off to collect. Cheers.
bboyd@irish-times.ie
