UNGH...awright...yeah....

How should a white person listen to hip hop?

I saw the new Dave Chapelle "Block Party" movie the other night. It's a loose, good-natured documentary about Chappelle putting on a hip hop concert in Brooklyn for an audience that commingles native New Yorkers with people from his adopted hometown in Ohio. The performances are extremely exciting, full of a raw energy and gutsy showmanship that has to appeal, on some level, to anyone who likes live music.

I seem to give listening to hip hop another try every few years. Fresh from reading some critic's gasping, eye-watering approval of such-and-such's contribution to hip hop, I spring for a 'classic' album and pop it into the CD player with nervous anticipation- will this be the one where I'll 'get it'? Hip hop, after all, is clearly here for an extended stay -- its era has already outlasted the heydeys of ragtime and swing and bebop and ska and disco -- so I figure I ought to try to understand what's going on. Nobody wants to be the equivalent of the snob who turned up his nose at Jelly Roll Morton in 1920 and suggested it wasn't 'real' music. Also, it's not like I'm some kind of classical music or rock purist- I love calypso and gamelan and jazz and Serbian brass band and enough other stuff to think I'm open-minded and have enough musical horse sense to know what I like.

So far, though, my experiments with hip hop have never worked out. I can appreciate hip hop classics like the works of Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and Rakim, but it's always from a musicological distance and my heart isn't quite in it- it always felt like 'homework'.

This time, though, freshly enthused by "Block Party", I asked friends to file-transfer me some albums by the musicians in the movie and dropped $5 on a used Wyclef Jean record at Rasputin's. So, how is it working out?

Better, I guess. I find myself listening to the music fairly regularly, but it's still 'homework' in the sense that I'm consciously immersing myself in it, trying to figure out how it relates to me as a musician and listener. Also, I find that when I'm driving around listening to it I feel like I'm participating in a socially loaded activity. I'm very conscious that most white people seem to listen to hip hop as a piece of cultural ornamentation, and I honestly wonder how they can do it. So much of the music is implicity or explicitly about the 'black' experience. Dead Prez rail against the government - I can get behind that - but that anger is bound up in a general anger at 'crackers'- and that's me. I'm not a rich white man in a blue suit sitting behind a desk in Washington, but I'm a white guy - no getting around that - and excruciatingly aware that Dead Prez hate me.

With Wyclef Jean, there's a similar weird gray area. I love calypso and ska, and he draws heavily from Caribbean music, but the album I got - "The Carnival" - is incomprehensible to me. So much time is spent on introductions and weird little in-song skits and postludes that it sometimes feels like there hasn't really been a 'song'. It's like a weird large-scale collage built around the concept of Wyclef being on trial for something, a conceit that fades in and out and seems to have little bearing on the songs. Am I supposed to listen to it all at one sitting? Am I supposed to hit >> until I get to the songs I like, even though those are usually filled with pockets of dialogue also? What are most hip hop fans' expectations? Is this considered a necessary feature of the genre?

I ask because this approach to content seems extremely common in hip hop albums. Kanye West's 'Late Registration' is often interrupted by skits that, while kinda funny the first time, soon lose their novelty and grow increasingly annoying. Mos Def has a similar weakness for introductory speeches that start to feel stale. Are hip hop records meant to be disposable? Is this in the very nature of a music medium which relies %90 on words rather than melody? I mean, nobody expects a book to be infinitely rereadable.

Another thing is that rap has a density that I find exhausting over time. There's so, so much speech that the sheer volume of words becomes oppressive. Do rap fans listen to all the words for content? I figure they must since the musical content tends to be based on a looped bassline and snatches of sung chorus- listening to the 'flow' is interesting but is different from the arc and shape of a pitched melody.

Does anybody else have an opinion on this? Hip hop fans? People who hate hip hop?