Introducing: Gefilte Fresh

Gefilte Fresh (formerly MC Mitzvah) is the founding member of the seminal Hebrew Hip-Hop Crew K.W.C. (Kikes with Chutzpah), dedicated to doing exactly what 2 Live Jews did 20 years ago--making terrible Jewish jokes in a Hip-Hop idiom (as well as apparently reppin' the JNST, as in their breakout hit "Fight the Admin", in no way modeled after Public Enemy). To put him in his own words:

My Bubbe used to make me gefilte fish / now my homies, they call me Gefilte *Fresh* / some know me as a culinary terror / from the old country era / but my rhymes will show you, how they're in error. / They've never known the good stuff / only bitch-ass emcee's claimin' that they hood 'nuff / --whether up at the mic / or in the kitchen / Gefilte Fresh cooks it up, hot like a mission / to Mars / and all the haters out there are gonna' start seein stars / when G-Fresh, and his smokin' crew / lay it down K.W.C. style--then you might have a clue.

Drop the mic.

All facetiousness aside, though, I've never had much of a relationship with Hip-Hop. As a kid, I never even really listed to music--I never really liked any modern pop styles, and never really hung out with anyone who did either. It wasn't until a chance encounter with the soundtrack to The Big Chill, the classic Baby Boomer nostalgia film, introduced me to Soul music (which I originally thought was "Jazz") that I even started liking music at all (I listened to that tape so many times I can't hear Marvin Gaye's I Heard it Though the Grapevine or Smokey Robinson's I Second That Emotion without being taken back to it). Later, as an angsty teenager, I enscewed the aggressive masculinity of Hip-Hop for the nebulous interioirty of Dylan--I wasn't drawn to outward rebellion, but more towards a dark and brooding lonesomeness, a self-imposed exile in which echoed the haunting songs of a mad prophet whose voice seemed to contain within it the end of everything. Dylan lives in his own little universe and it's easy to get lost there.

From Dylan I would move into Blues and Country music (and a little bit of Rock and Folk too), the real sites of my expertise. Eventually I would even come around to real Jazz and Classical music, however, Hip-Hop remained outside of my purview. It wasn't until I began to be able to articulate the cloying whiteness of my upbringing, that I began to want to look into things outside of it, into things that it had disparaged and declared dangerous (I come from the sort of wealthy white neighborhood where walking while being ethnic is a crime--despite, or perhaps even because of, “liberal” pretensions, hysterical fear of contact with brown people is endemic, becoming even a much hated part of myself. We like them fine, just not in our backyard). Coming to a place where Hip-Hop wasn't an object of revilement, it took a while to acclimate myself, and I think my interest in it was sparked primarily by two classic "golden age" groups--Public Enemy and N.W.A..

At first I didn't quite know how to take their music, but there was something about Public Enemies attitude that deeply attracted me to them. They talked back to the sort of obnoxious self-satisfied white people that I had lived my whole life around, and it was compelling. They spoke out in a way that challenged the most fundamental injustices that powered that world and that everyone there took for granted. As a cultural critic, I was deeply attracted to that power. Then there was N.W.A., who spoke to me on a much different level. Before I hadn't really liked the sound of Hip Hop—I had no way to get at it, I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with it. But N.W.A., with there James Brown samples and expressive flow, was funky in a way that I understood and could grok, in a way that lead me to be much more receptive to the entirety of the Hip-Hop world—perhaps there was something to this stuff after all.

In this class, I will be more relying on the expertise of other to teach me about the world of hip-hop--what I brig to the table is very different, so I approached my mix a lot differently than the rest of the class. Since I don't really know very much Hip-Hop, I decided to curate a short list of things from my knowledge base that I thought create an interesting dialogue with it--something that I will be working on significantly over the course of the semester. Starting off the mix is some classic Soul and Blues numbers that a very much connected in some way or another to the roots of Hip-Hop.

Ball of Confusion, The Temptations/Inner City Blues, Marvin Gaye: These two pieces are both “message songs” from the late era of Classic Motown. They both combine funky beats with socially conscious lyrics about the problems accompanying the end of 60's. Both speak very strongly to the roots of socially conscious Hip-Hop, as they lay out a series of grievances against injustice in America in a musicianly and lyrically sophisticated fashion. In addition, they both speak very strongly to the growing problems of post-civil rights urban Blackness, from which Hip-Hop would be born.

Money, Barrett Strong: Money takes us back 10 years before Ball and Inner City, to the founding of Motown in 1959. Although it is realsed on the Black-pop Motown label, Money shares more in common with its hard edged 50's R&B counterparts than it does with later Motown pop hits like “My Girl” or “Please, Mr. Postman”. Money speaks very strongly to the Hip-Hop tradition of talking back—from the Message song to the Diss track to the “Crew” which takes turns with verses, this back and forth is central to Hip-Hop culture. Money is a sassy response to the traditional love song, with its platitudes about “no matter how poor we may be, we'll always have each other”. Money turns that formula on its head, rebuking it with a tongue-in-cheek embrace of crass materialism: “Your love gives me such a thrill / but your lovin' don't pay my bills.”

Bad Like Jesse James, John Lee Hooker: Bad Like Jesse James speaks to the Hip-Hop idiom on many levels. While an anomaly for a Blues piece (which are rarely so aggressively violent), it is one of the finest early examples of many currents that would go into the shaping of Hip-Hop. Firstly, people talk about the relationship between beats and lyrics but this isn't only true for Hip-Hop, in fact, in the sophisticated back and forth we can see on this track, between Hookers titch and complex vocals and his sophisticated guitar picking. As well, it is an excellent early example of the performative “badness” associated with Hip-Hop culture, whereby one establishes one's masculine chops through braggadocio regarding ones “stone cold ruthless” ways.

Backdoor Man, Howlin' Wolf: Backdoor Man also has a lot to do with the masculine braggadocio, but this time in the sexual sense (one much, much more common to the Blues idiom). The Wolf tells the world of how his sexual prowess is so great married women swoon all over him (increasing his accomplishment because of how he unmans his “rivals”). Don't tell me the overlaps aren't obvious.

We now come to what I see of the most interesting aspect of my dialogue with this course. Perhaps even more common as an than "I like all types of music but Hip-Hop" is the ever-ubiquitous "I like all types of music except Country". Hip-Hop is not the only American musical style with racialised underpinnings, although the racialization of country is much less overt (as it is with all things White--its whiteness hides in plain sight). In this course, I would not only like to explore the operation of race within Black spaces, but within White ones as well. I choose three songs to introduce some of the ideas I will be looking at.

(Listeners in this class will probably not enjoy the Country music very much. However, if you can get over that immediate visceral disgust, you may find the experience valuable, if not necessarily entertaing.)

Country Blues, Doc Boggs: This song is a classic Appalachian mountain ballad, with roots in folk song going back hundreds of years. I included it to indicate the way in which themes of poverty and violence are not new to the White or Black vernacular musical styles in the United States. Long before Gangsta' Rap came out raw from the ghetto, marginalized communities, both Black AND White, in America were expressing themselves in very similar ways. Also interesting about this track is the cross-pollination it shows with African-American forms of music making—the banjo is a traditionally African-American instrument, however, by the 20's when this was originally recorded, it had become integral to many forms of White music making.

Okie from Muskogee, Merle Haggard and L.A. Blues, Tom T. Hall: I choose both of these songs to close out this set for the way in which they highlight Country musics place as a symbol of a certain type of rural Whiteness—one we might almost see as diametrically opposed to the intense urban Blackness of Hip-Hop. They both express an extreme ambivalence about urban lifestyles and people, creating by contrast a sense that the “true America” rests not in our unmoored and directionless cities, but in the hardy and strong White back-country. Yet there is more at work here than simply a subtle racism—by the 70's when both of these were released, rural (especially poor) whites had become themselves a marginalized group within American society (think about peoples answer to the question about musical taste—there is not only a desire operating there to distance oneself from overt Blackness, but from certain strains of Whiteness as well). Songs like this can also be seen as an attempt for them to legitimize there identity in a society that increasingly sees them as inbred imbeciles worthy only of contempt.