What if Rap and Punk Were the Same Thing?
Hardcore music’s not-so-wide cultural divide
There is a genre that is unique among modern popular music. It is louder and harsher than music as we knew it for most of the 20th century.
It is founded on strong, repetitive 4/4 bass lines that drive simple rhythm sections. It focuses less on melody and more on lyrical rhythms, turning the human voice into a spoken-word percussion instrument. It follows a basic “hook, verse, hook, verse, bridge, hook” structure, the verses being said lyrical percussion and the hooks being either more rhythmic poetry or a brief melody.
It has a history steeped in a counterculture of the oppressed, living in urban areas with no jobs or income to pay for expensive methods of creating music. It is made by musicians who adopt angry, uninhibited and often satirical masks and personas in order to portray a “no cares, no future” aesthetic while in fact using music as a means to escape from poverty.
Am I talking about rap? Or punk?
I’m talking about both.
An Issue of Classification
Genre is a difficult term to define or simply explain. Musicology approaches genre maximally, positing that the three largest genres are art music, popular music, and traditional music. However, is folk not both traditional and popular? Is electronica not both popular and made to be art? Was Franz Liszt not both a classical composer and a popular musician in his own time?
Today, we classify and sub-classify our music endlessly: trap, folktronica, space rock, witch house, electropop, et cetera. It becomes almost impossible to explain a genre any way other than exclusively. CHVRCHES are called electropop because they are neither pop nor electronica, but something else. A$AP Rocky is called cloud rap because while he is rap and chillwave, he mixes both to become neither.
In their infancy, rap (as hip-hop) and punk were defined in the same way. Punk was called punk because it was neither rock and roll nor heavy metal (Led Zeppelin, not Iron Maiden you dope), and it needed a name. Hip-hop was called hip-hop because it was neither rock nor funk nor dub, and it needed a name. The inclusive definitions came later; in the beginning, all genres exist because by existing they exclude themselves from that which already exists.
Suppose we approach the issue of genre from the other direction. Suppose that, looking at the past rather than the present, we could single out structural qualities and use them to create the true definition of a genre. Divorced from skin color, sound quality, scene or history, hip-hop (and therefore its more prolific offspring, rap) and punk share every important defining factor: heavy basslines, repetitive and melodically simple or devoid vocals focused on internal rhyme, minimalistic instrumental hooks, and lyrics about nihilism, social concern, poverty and oppression. Using a framework of genre that focuses on definitions rather than subjective agreement, the two genres are technically different branches of one still-unnamed tree.
Rockwarts, A History
Of course, today’s rap and punk sound different more often than they sound similar. Besides the fact that rap uses keyboards and 808s where punk uses rhythm and bass guitars, both genres have seen more sub-genre proliferation than perhaps any other genres in the history of music. For example, one could argue that Kanye West and A Tribe Called Quest are almost nothing alike, and yet we call both rap, because they both follow a similar structure and form. Similarly, Black Flag and the Clash sound almost nothing alike, but we call both punk. Modern rap and punk have grown apart because they themselves have grown more diverse despite their shared forms and structures, but this shouldn’t deter us from classifying them under the same genre. We can agree that The Clash and Black Flag are similar because they share the same influences in The Stooges and The MC5. The same goes for Kanye and Tribe in respect to Afrika Bambaata, The Last Poets and The Sugarhill Gang.
By the same logic, more proof for the shared structure of rap and punk should be found the further one digs into their respective histories. For instance, compare the rhythm and tempo of The Last Poets’ “On The Subway” to the tempo and rhythmic chanting in the bridge of The MC5’s “Starship.” In another example, pay attention to the lyrical and melodic simplicity of Funkadelic’s “Can You Get To That” (on an album important to the development of the rhythms that would become hip-hop) to the two chord structure and melody of The Velvet Underground and Nico’s “I’m Waiting For The Man.” Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Down at the Rock and Roll Club” practically is a rap song, based on its minimally melodic refrain and spoken verses. Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” doesn’t actually have a genuine melody; Ig’s singing is essentially a two-note rap over a very short guitar hook.
As the two genres were emerging into their own entities, there were moments where neither seemed exclusive of the other. Blondie’s “Rapture” features Debbie Harry spitting a few rudimentary bars. Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc were often seen in the same bars and clubs where punk and new wave acts performed, and vice versa. Bad Brains mixed reggae and punk styles to become one of the most influential punk bands of the ’80s, and often rapped fiercely through entire albums.
The Beastie Boys released a punk EP long before they ever started their rap career, and they released another called “Aglio e Olio” when they realized they had written too many hardcore songs for their album “Hello Nasty.” Most notably, the Beastie Boys dug into their hardcore roots for the guitar parts on “Heart Attack Man” and “Sabotage,” both on the landmark “Ill Communication.” Tribe sampled proto-punk icon Lou Reed in their best-known song, “Can I Kick it?” Rage Against the Machine completely disregarded the imagined separation between the genres by having frontman Zack de la Rocha rap over some of the heaviest hardcore punk ever recorded.
More recently, punk and rap have again dipped their toes in the other’s respective pools, creating some of the best music of the past few years by finally culminating a genre merging that should have happened back in the early ’80s. Kanye’s “Yeezus” takes heavy cues from house, hardcore rap and soul, but perhaps the most important song on the album is the raucous “Black Skinhead,” a song that sounds as much like a chain gang spiritual as a minimalist noise rock anthem. Titus Andronicus, especially on their albums “The Monitor” and “The Most Lamentable Tragedy” borrow from rap the practice of rapidly referencing a multitude of cultural, historical and musical figures in their lyrics. FIDLAR’s “Cheap Beer” is another modern punk song that relies entirely on rap, the vocals having no melody whatsoever. Most notably, artists like Death Grips, clipping and Tyler, the Creator have adopted a devil-may-care DIY aesthetic that has been absent from both genres for nigh on two decades. There’s a new generation of rappers/rockers that are responding to modern inequality the same way the hip did 40 years ago — with sweet, sweet socially conscious noise.
Are You Serious?
I know what you’re thinking. “Are you crazy? Rap and punk sound so different, and spent this past decade being as different as possible. Trap and G-funk and southern rap aren’t even close to sounding like post punk and pop punk and post hardcore.”
To which I respond, you’ve delved back into the sub-genre problem, which is besides the point, because trap and G-funk sound more different from each other than hip-hop and punk did in their infancy.
More importantly, does it really matter? It depends on who you ask. Musicologist Peter van der Merwe asserts in his 1993 book “Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music” that genre and style are the same thing. According to him, a genre is a group of music that shares a certain style or “basic musical language.” He thought that in many cases, including Irish keens and African Watutsi chants, more similarities than differences could be found. He also concluded that most previous studies of “black” versus “white” music were too restrictive in defining both, disregarding the way the two have interacted and often been shared sources for newer genres. Van der Merwe gives the blues as a prime example of this logical folly, and contends that much of what we consider American music is an “Africanization” of British folk music. By his measure, “black” and “white” music are in no way separate in North America.
Having shown that punk and rap share the same basic musical language, by van der Merwe’s standards, they’d fit into the same genre, regardless of the differences in superficial sound or surrounding community.
Another musicologist, Allan F. Moore, would argue that genre is separate from style, and encompasses a larger range of qualifications. In an example he gives, “white metal” is a genre apart from “heavy metal” because the former focuses on evangelical subjects rather than secularism and the demonic, even though both often deal with apocalyptic subjects and share an indistinguishable musical style. By his measure, punk and rap would be different if they have had, at any time, different scenes, histories, initial influences or sounds.
How About We Share the Pain For Once?
While they don’t share all influences, punk and rap do share a great deal: reggae, ska, black rock, funk, new wave and dub. Their histories, as shown above, are deeply intertwined. Their sounds, though divergent now, have criss-crossed paths throughout their development. And anyone who pays attention can see that rap and punk share nearly identical lyrical content.
Both genres are often about poverty, disenfranchisement and oppression. Biggie Smalls was a strong advocate for the image of the drug dealer forced into a cycle of poverty. In a modern example, ScHoolboy Q’s major label debut “Oxymoron” is a concept album about balancing poverty, fatherhood, and dealing oxycontin. The hit album brought his tragic struggle with drugs and gang culture to a national audience. As philosophers Steven Best and Douglas Kellner wrote in 1999,
“rap articulates the experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In this cultural context, rap provides a voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed, and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized.”
Punk very often serves an identical purpose. Songs like “Career Opportunities” and “God Save the Queen” sarcastically and nihilistically lament British class struggles in the late ’70s. Songs like “Bullet” and “Holiday in Cambodia” use shocking imagery to lambast the government and force blind eyes to look on tragedy and death. Whether intentional or not, DMX achieves something similar through braggadocio in many of his songs, force-feeding the masses the culture of violence to which he’s had a front row seat all his life.
If the Shoe Fits
What’s left, then, is community. The scenes surrounding rap and punk are, obviously, separate. They skirted one another in New York in the late seventies, but that hasn’t been the case since. Is it possible that this is because punk is music for disenfranchised white kids while rap is for disenfranchised black kids? That’s certainly how they’re branded and advertised — not using skin color, but using iconography that is recognizable to those respective demographics.
Rap often utilizes gang imagery where punk appropriates western military imagery. Both attract the same demographic — young, voiceless, troubled youths. Yet, because of outside social factors, an inner city black kid who feels unheard will recognize grafitti fonts and crucifixes while a suburban white kid who feels unheard will recognize ransom notes and army surplus jackets. These countless youths straining for a voice only seem different because of skin color, and are only further divorced from one another by the imagery they adopt, which they get from the music they listen to. By this simple choice of similar yet different imagery, two communities that share the same angry and vengeful attitude inadvertently participate in a vicious cycle of separation and differentiation.
Even by Moore’s standards, punk and rap overlap in sound, lyrics, history and influences. The defining difference is community — two communities that could and would be identical but for race. In the end, race is the only thing that separates rap and punk, and it’s the only thing that has ever separated them.
We Must Choose, Brothers, We Must Choose
Even the experts don’t know exactly what a genre is. The concept is so intrinsically tied to the popular consciousness that the definition is constantly changing and morphing depending on what the people decide to call which songs and artists. So it’s up to you — whether you agree with this theory is the deciding vote for whether the theory holds any water.
This isn’t the first time someone has compared rap and punk, and I don’t expect a new umbrella name for hip-hop and punk to appear in iTunes tomorrow. I’m also not diminishing the long and arduous trials of both rap and punk to establish themselves as legitimate genres that demand respect and attention. I’m just posing a simple question: if the world was less culturally divided along racial lines, could punk and rap have merged into one scene, and therefore one genre? Could it be possible that they were destined to be one genre, and instead were torn apart by our unjust world? And after so much time spent apart, could a new vanguard of artists finally bring the two at least a little bit closer together, even as we become aware that racism isn’t over in America? Who knows. We here at Overture will keep contending that the two are inseparable twins, and are hoping that maybe we’ll live to see them join in harmony as they did so long ago in those dingy New York clubs, back when both were nameless and new and anything was possible.
