Bob Dylan On Gangsta Rap
I love folk music from my grandparents’ time or earlier, songs about grizzly murders, the civil war, crops wiped out by the dust bowl, hobos riding rails, coal tattoos. The Anthology of American Folk Music and the KDHX show No Time To Tarry Here are my touchstones. These songs’ audio quality is poor, but they’re better than history books, exposing the hopes and fears of people living in a much-poorer America. Yet despite their age they also somehow tell you more about life today than the news. Folk music is the straight dirt.
This music was the driving inspiration for a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who came to New York City in 1961 to find his hero Woody Guthrie, who had been committed to a New Jersey psychiatric hospital. Guthrie told Dylan he had a box of un-recorded lyrics at his house in Queens, which he was welcome to record, but when Dylan arrived Guthrie’s wife wasn’t there, just their young son Arlo, who didn’t know where to find the box. So Dylan gave up, and the songs were recorded decades later by Billy Bragg and Wilco.
This I learned from Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles, Volume One, which I finally read. My dad disliked the book, calling it “rambling,” but it greatly inspired me. Yes the story isn’t linear, and Dylan’s prose goes off in all directions, but it vividly recounts some touchstone moments in his life:
His arrival on the Greenwich Village folk revival scene of the early 1960s, playing at venues like the Gaslight Cafe, under the tutelage of performer Dave Van Ronk. I’m almost certain Dylan’s account inspired the Coen Brothers movie Inside Llyewyn Davis.
The recording of Dylan’s 1989 album Oh Mercy in New Orleans with the producer Daniel Lanois, to whom he was introduced by Bono.
He and Lanois butted heads throughout the recording, and I’m not a big fan of the album, but it’s an interesting peek into Dylan’s middle years and musical inspirations. One of those inspirations was…gangsta rap! I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering that hip-hop is modern day folk music, but this section thrilled me:
Danny asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T…A few years earlier Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A, Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who knew that world, been born and raised with it...be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came—there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s how I honestly felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.
I’m not exactly sure what a “chopped topped head” is, but I find this passage moving. It convinced me that people will still be listening to Doggystyle in 100 years, just as we listen to Robert Johnson now.
Speaking of memorializing gangsta rap, a Ruthless Records fan named Steve Hugi just launched a campaign to get a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame for Eazy-E. To me that sounds like a great idea, especially considering Eazy’s first recordings were printed by Macola Records in Hollywood, on Santa Monica Blvd. From my oral history of that time:
Run by a 50-something Canadian named Don Macmillan who played golf and lived in the distant suburbs, Macola pressed up vinyl records and served as label and/or distributor for many of the biggest names in ’80s West Coast hip-hop before they became famous…Macola didn’t censor their artists, releasing hard-edged early music from Eazy-E and N.W.A at a time when no one else would take them seriously….Macola was a whimsical, disorganized dream factory, one that sold millions of records, launched dozens of careers and propelled one of the most influential and enduring movements in music history: hardcore hip-hop.
This process resembles how much American folk music was originally recorded, and Macola was also where Eazy met Jerry Heller, the controversial N.W.A manager who would take the group to great heights. In any case, I recommend contributing to Hugi’s GoFundMe to get Eazy his star.
Finally, I want to remember the life of another folk and rap fan, John Nova Lomax, the Houston-based journalist and critic who died yesterday at 53. The Houston Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby has penned a thoughtful memorial.
Lomax was executive music editor at Voice Media Group, and he was originally introduced to me by my editor Tom Finkel as a writer with “a pedigree.” Indeed, he was the great-grandson of John Lomax and great-nephew of Alan Lomax, who together almost single-handedly recorded, catalogued, and re-popularized the folk music of the early 20th century. Nova Lomax’s father managed Townes Van Zandt, and his Facebook feed had old, sepia-toned Van Zandt photos.
I succeeded Lomax as executive music editor, and we both wrote books about dive bars, I about the best in New York, he about the best in Houston. He was in the process of writing his when I visited him down there in 2009, while reporting my next book Dirty South. His reporting was complicated by the fact that he didn’t have a car, and wasn’t drinking; he’d recently lost his license because of a DUI. Still, he was an incredible raconteur, telling me about his family’s experiences shepherding artists from Lead Belly to Steve Earle.
He was also a great gangsta rap fan, and painted a vivid picture of Houston’s sui generis scene, which cultivated influential artists and personalities including Scarface, Z-Ro, and Big Moe.
RIP John Nova Lomax. Thanks for helping me understand the glory of outlaw music and its ability to function as a time machine.
The Coen Brothers' movie was inspired by Van Ronk's biography, The Mayor Of MacDougal Street. Worth a read! It's a more detailed account of the times than Dylan's poetic chronicles.
I'll miss JNL too.