Nov 03 2007
Hip Hop Love Songs
So the other day I saw Common on TV here talking about his latest single. He was trying to justify it, and noted that hip hop is not about love songs. Of course, there’s a long history of hip hop trying to distinguish itself from soul, R&B, and the blues more generally, and one of the distinguishing features is the abandonment of the love song. Chuck D famously noted to R & B DJ’s that “your general subject, love, is minimal: it’s sex for profit” (Public Enemy, “Caught, Can I Get a Witness). Similarly, Ice Cube derided the state of black radio in the early nineties – with its almost ostensibly inordinate devotion to R & B and soul love songs – and positioned these directly against the “reality” that rappers were discussing:
Tune in to the radio, listen for a minute
Yo G stick a fuckin tape in it
Cuz all the radio do is gangle
That R & B love triangle
And when you’re out there kickin it with the brothas
You don’t care about lovers
You wanna hear a young nigga on the mic going buckwild
Throwin and flowin and showin new styles (Ice Cube, “Turn off the Radio”)
That song also has the great lines “No it’s not a threat but a promise/ I’m as/ crazy as they come see/ Mama didn’t love me.” And thereby the circle is closed. So Common seems to be right. At the same time, I think there are some interesting love songs where hip hop writers weren’t so concerned about distinguishing themselves from soul and R & B. Here are two of my favorites, though the first is a “love song” only in the ways many blues numbers are love songs, while the second mimics and repeats a number of soul tropes (it could as easily be Barry White as Rakim). I’d be curious to hear about others.
(Mos Def, “Ms. Fat Booty”)
(Erik B. and Rakim “What’s on Your Mind”) – No Video, but you can’t miss the great lines “I saw her on the subway on my way to Brooklyn/ “Hello good lookin’, is this seat tooken?”
Good question, yo… yo…
There are a lot of love songs to God in the spirit of John Coltrane’s album “Love Supreme” — stuff by Mos Def, Tribe Called Quest, and others. Public Enemy, whom you mentioned, has several love songs to the revolutionary sisters and brothers. Kanye West has a love song to his mother, “Hey Momma.”
But romantic love? That sex-for-profit, heteronormative, capitalist sublimation of real social relationships? Hmm… that’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to call Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” or any other misogynistic, dick-less posturing a love song.
But how about Salt-n-Peppa’s “Brand New” album? Some of the songs on that are groovey in a soulful, romantic, Aretha-Franklin-sort-of way.
I got a good thing
And in full swing
I show this in gifts, words or letters
But even without those three
Eye know you’ll be close to me ’cause
Eye know I love you better
yeah, i suppose de la soul fall into that category of rappers who do they own thing, obviously!!!
and of course, this dmx track fits into the love for otehrs, family and teher arwe many raps about that..i knew that already, but this love gives me the chills so here it is!!
in my replies i can’t post youtube videos..whats up with that
I mentioned this to Maya, and she suggested Talib Kweli’s “Love Language.” I like it. It’s got a bit of the preachy didacticism that all Kweli’s songs have and that sometimes annoys me (perhaps because he’s so… liberal), but I don’t mind it on this one, and the backup vocal by Les Nubians is sugar. (And that reminds me, though they are an R&B/hip-hop hybrid and not really hip-hop, Les Nubians would have some love songs for you, and in French!!! Ooooh, French!!!)
I was also thinking about why writng a hip-hop love song would be difficult. All I could come up with is that Hip-hop tends to be a critical, meta-discourse. Whereas pop songs are lyrical (like Virgil’s Bucolics), hip-hop is critical. So, Kweli’s Love Langauge is not really a love song, but a meditation on what the word love means and what the “situation” of love is.