I got mad rhymes but still it’s mostly the voice— Gang Starr
Lyricism is dazzling but it’s tone that makes me fall in love. Future’s musky mutterings about lean remind me. He has little to offer narratively but his ruined vocal cords, deep as a crop burnt to increase demand and save the farmers money when the land is so fertile it’s redundant, chop and weld his speech into oracular brooding. Its barrel and baritone is so addictive you make excuses its topical toxicity and vapidness. You begin to realize that depth is just the void when it’s savored and given a soul. Codeine and hoes over and over turn into the new prayers for passive resistance, codes for the less frivolous fixations that the radio frowns upon. The grit of Future’s voice is its own de-scheduled narcotic, it places you in a trance, it has witnessed more than language can hold. The word is a unit of containment, beneath it is the witness seat gripped by the nervous palms of he who refuses to speak but grunts and grills himself in that stillness, interrogating silence with silence to repent for being broken by what he pretends to avenge.
Future is a version of Billie Holiday who we don’t associate with blues because there’s a defunct bias that tells us tenderness and lament must be literal or that a rapper and a jazz singer aren’t harmonizing across eras. Gil Scott Heron and Etheridge Knight are similarly destroyed into perfection by liquor, crimes of passion and obsessions with poetry. Their throats scrape at words in search of the point where bitterness abandons itself for escapism, where it’s so horrific it’s exhilarating. They are raked across the language they dig up and chisel and become sculpted by those incisions, become beautiful and impossible to reach as speakers, in a territory you have to earn your way into. They are the fugitive who pretends that he ran away for fun, and not in terror and abjection. To pretend that hard he has to get high. To get that high, he has to grab you by the knot of fear in your throat and pull you up with him. You find yourself humming along to nobody’s crying cause nobody knows what to say or taped to my cell wall are 47 pictures, 47 black faces, I know their dark eyes, they know mine. The alibi for these long distance runners who traverse an epic every three minutes, is language itself and the crime is mastering a language whose most rooted habit is your enslavement, and letting it make you and let you dance to its cadence. It may be impossible to testify your way out as rhyming makes you more and more attached to the conditions you use it to exorcize— the rhyme or rhythm’s symmetry makes those conditions memorable and eternal as patterns so that their shapes cannot be unlearned. Lauryn Hill’s aggressively rhyming sorrow helps women memorize every angle of heartbreak and even pursue the ones that flatter the egoic need to suffer and overcome like a phoenix. These skills are also traps, poetic gifts are ultimatums that demand you use them or be ruined by atrophy.
Miles Davis’s voice after he got surgery on his vocal cords and was warned to not scream until they healed, but screamed anyways, was timid and hesitant with a detached southern drawl concealed by nonchalance and petulance. He sounded sharp and reticent until his gutted and gated chords turned that slight shrill into shred and seethe. He began to sound like someone coming back from the dead and he came back over and over, crow black, anti-social and the life of the party, he returns still with that same insistent whisper. It’s as if he played hushed and muted tones on the trumpet so well, for so long, that a divine will conspired to inflect his speech with that same agonized restraint. On the trumpet it’s erotic and seductive, on the voice it’s weathered and grotesque but because he’s Miles and carries himself like the most successful bourgeois gangster on earth, the seductiveness prevails. He sounds dangerous and invaded with orders from some angel-demon. His is a speech pattern that makes you want different things out of speaking and lean toward them without knowing why, without even realizing you’re leaning into a sound you intended to denounce. Miles is proof that aura precedes voice, and that tone is about the way someone moves and carries himself first, and what they emit beyond that lucid withholding second.
MF DOOM’s voice, his aura: vulgarity and intermittent mysticism, humor and interrogatives that cover for the pain from which the best jokes are derived. He claws at you to keep from whimpering, wears reflective metal on his face to keep from meeting your gaze, and the slanted hiss that he can access from behind the mask is drastically disarming. A blameless smooth criminal of the word, he plays so well it’s serious. Goofiness becomes dire, giddiness is intensity here. His voice harbors the rules to game you may never be invited to join, a scheme, what Sun Ra called the scheme of words. And DOOM samples Sade, a woman with a voice so deep and sultry it sounds augmented by Hollywood or trouble. When interviewed once she explains how kids at her school called her a nigger and she went home and reported to her mother. Her mom asked: are you ashamed of being black? And she replied no, I’m proud to be a nigger. In Sade’s tone and range, the clumsiness of turning an insult on its head by restating it is transcended by ordained tonal beauty. It makes me wanna say it with her. We get into chorus. Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky, of the cosmos, speaks through her and the word nigger, becomes a glorious reminder of the power of negations to prevent you from existing on another’s terms. I’m proud of her, just for having the speaking voice that she does.
For a while, the voice was our only means of touching. It was intimate and terrifying. It was echoey, acidic, winged with knives for feathers to get us somewhere as we scurried in place. It was rough and muttered, and a catch all for love was willingness to shut up and listen. My love of destroyed voices began with my father’s. A pit of gravel interrupting oceanic hurl. I don’t remember being told, or coaxed into quietness but I do remember a reverent playing with silent objects alone for hours, a sturdy plastic Fisher Price™ sink in particular, I pretend the blank faucet was back up singers while he recorded songs and ideas for songs to his 8 track. Sometimes he improvised and sometimes he recited lyrics he had committed to memory. Sometimes he was committed to asylums of the mind and sometimes he was free. In each instance he was the same man tonally, exploring his range rather lucid or abridged by what was called madness. It was particularly important, since he could not read or write, for him to speak like this. Which brings us to Mingus, literate but able to retain a childlike authoritativeness that textures his recorded speech, and a projection that comes off as trained or disciplined into him. He shouts polemic lines about the atomic bomb and its inventors shiver. He discusses his version of chivalry and the concept is restored. What all these ruined speakers share is sincerity, which cannot be faked or retracted. It’s better to be sincerely evil or rude or crazy or criminal, than fraudulently virtuous and candid and ingratiating. When will we collectively realize this? When will we master the ability to detect the difference between contrived and natural inflections?
You don’t know anything about a person until you’ve heard them speak aloud, even if the speech is strained or stammering, even if unintelligibility is its dominant characteristic, even if the manner is so eloquent it negates itself and amounts to nonsense. The most abhorrent speakers are the smug ones, the most endearing speak in tongues. Future is both, and so the future is, sure of itself, proud of its shambles. Most rappers should quit just because they don’t sound like this, or worse because a coat of smoothness obstructs their confessions, begging for compliments. The best voices in rap and the blues tradition want to be blamed for how they sound, not praised, they speak out to punish and humble you for not knowing how to access that deepest blue without them.
Another excellent article. To me Gil Scott-Heron, like Cohen, is someone whose voice improved the more weathered and less agile it got. He could be reciting the phone book on I'm New Here and his voice would still carry the wisdom of the ages.
People always say Dylan writes great lyrics but can't sing, whereas to me the way he sings on Blonde and Blonde and "Love and Theft" adds a million layers and insinuations that aren't there on the page. I reckon they'd be among my favourite albums even if I didn't speak a word of English.