The Long Run

by Greg Tate
Vibe
February 1997

What's a career in hip hop? Two years if you're lucky, two decades if you're Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash. The general rule, though, is, two albums and you're out. The few long distance runners in the game aren't necessarily around because they're still delivering dope music to the masses; their longevity often has less to do with song craft than with MTV and movie roles that keep them in public view.

True artists are supposed to experiment, to challenge themselves and their audience. But hip hop artists are seldom encouraged to step out of their comfort zone and put aesthetic development ahead of clocking loochie. For this reason, a lot of once brilliant MCs and producers end up cranking out sad imitations of their past work. What might be missing in hip hop is artistic models for mugs to draw strength from whenever they want to change their pitch up and smack they bitch-ass, afraid-of-evolving selves up. We're going to attempt to remedy that situation.

Attending a Santana concert recently, I realized that I've been listening out for Carlos Santana's distinctive guitar strokes for a quarter century. This epiphany set a brother to wondering: how is it that certain artists manage to stay fresh for decades when others can't maintain their creative flame beyond that first flash in the pan?

Consider Miles Davis, who revolutionized the sound of modem music at least five times in his lifetime. His creative muse was like a demon on his shoulder that periodically made him get sick of his own sound. When it came to taking artistic and financial risks, Miles was the king, even when taking those risks left him ass-out, looking like he'd lost his ever-loving mind. According to piano master Keith Jarrett, Miles would rather have a bad band playing horrible music than a band of great musicians playing something he'd done before.

Miles used to tell his musicians that he paid them to practice on the bandstand, to go for something beyond what they knew. Out of this philosophy came such milestones (bad pun intended) as Kind of Blue, Nefertiti, Bitches Brew, and Agharta, and master improvisers in the order of John Coltrane, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock. You don't get music that inspired unless you're ready to do the wild thing again and again and again.

As much as mugs want to compare hip hop to jazz, hip hop artists have rarely approached their jazz brethren when it comes to artistic integrity. Keeping it real by definition can't be all about the money. There has to be a code of honor in art that puts the creativity ahead of the cash register, or it stops being art. In jazz, if you can't play, you don't work. But in hip hop, wack-assmuhfuhs never seem to lack for or fools willing to put them on. How you separate yourself from the pack is by becoming more interested in creative growth than celebrity. It's a hard task, but rest assured, it's been done before.

Some people operate under the illusion that once they make it, they'll get back to music for music's sake, but it doesn't work like that. Once you lose your artistic nerve, it has a way of never coming back. If on the other hand, you grow bigger cojones as time marches on, you won’t need hits to stay relevant. George Clinton, Ornette Coleman, Miles, and Coltrane get major props to this day because they never stopped growing. By contrast, many hip hop artists turn tail and retreat, whining about fans or the competition when the subject of expanding horizons comes up.

If I was a young hip hop artist hoping to remain creatively fertile by the time I hit 30, I'd be collecting tips from the likes of Santana. Instead of Xeroxing the Latin rock sound he introduced to the world at Woodstock, he began investigating Coltrane and Miles. In the late '70s his records became more daring and jazz inflected, finding trim collaborating with musicians who forced him to step up his game, such as John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. These gambits cost him sales and fans, and even dismayed bandmembers, but for Carlos, as for Miles, stagnation equaled death.

Witness one of Santana's three-hour concerts and you're struck that he saves all his big hits until the end. His audience come to hear him play his sweet, stinging guitar lines, worshipping every note as if he were a major jazz god. On the charisma level, he's that rare instrumentalist with the erotic appeal of a Marvin Gaye. Not to get all mystical about it, but Santana is clearly in touch with whatever the real source of creativity is (which ain't your washboard stomach or what's in your jockstraps, kids).

Joni Mitchell is another story, but relevant and related. This Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee-whom the powers that be finally canonized last year has always gone her own way. Coming out of the Bob Dylan-era folk boom, Mitchell found early acclaim as a distinctive vocalist and composer. She's got more African-American fans than maybe even she realizes and has been a major influence on black artists as diverse as Cassandra Wilson, Seal, and the Glyph Formerly Known as Prince. Mitchell is also someone who's made a career of putting musical progress ahead of the ring of the cash register. (She has two new albums out, a Hits record of her singles and a Misses record of the songs she wished had been singles.)

There's a lot in Mitchell's music for hip hop musicians to learn from, particularly the quality of her lyrics, which match the inventiveness of the best rap writing but which delve deeper into the realm of personal feelings: "Help me, I think I'm falling in love again / 'Cause I've seen some hot, hot blazes / Come down to smoke and ash / We love our loving, but not like we love our freedom." Like De La Soul, Mitchell the writer puts you on notice about the oceans of metaphoric juice corked up in the English language.

Like most rappers, she writes about herself being at war with society and the industry, but she gets way more naked and unflinching when it comes to that cold, hard look in the mirror: "Stoking the starmaker machinery / Behind the popular song / I deal in dreamers and telephone screamers / Lately I wonder what I do it for." If hip hop is going to remain a form of exploration and expression, more brothers and sisters are going to have to follow Joni Mitchell's example. Why settle for right now when you can have eternity?