Repetitive music getting good rap

By Howard Ho
DAILY BRUIN REPORTER
[email protected]

Courses, such as “History of Rock and Roll” or
“History of Jazz,” sound like pushover classes, where
listening to the Beatles is considered homework. Yet UCLA
musicologist Susan McClary and company are beginning to infuse
those popular classes with the kind of seriousness often associated
with classical music.

Her latest paper, titled “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures
of Time in Late 20th-Century Culture,” argues for serious
academics to include rap and other “simple,” repetitive
music in discussion.

“Even if I thought rap was completely devoid of musical
interest, which I don’t, it still has been probably the most
powerful single force in popular music in the last 15 years. That
means we have to take it seriously,” McClary said.

McClary lectured Monday on her paper to a small group of
students and professors as a joint venture between UCLA’s
musicology and sociology departments. On a small boombox, she
played musical excerpts from pieces she used as examples in her
paper. These included the works of Prodigy, Tupac Shakur, PJ
Harvey, Philip Glass, Bo Diddley, and Led Zeppelin.

The common feature of this music is repetition, which often gets
a bad rap for being muscially simple. Many theorists have explained
musical repetition as a dulling of the mind, as a cause of
immorality, and as a lower class aesthetic. McClary, however, makes
the case that repetition allows for certain musical effects that
are rather profound, a tradition that extends from
Monteverdi’s 17th Century works to rapper Tupac
Shakur’s songs.

“In Tupac’s case, repetition is an indictment of
gangster life that he finds himself trapped in, but the music
won’t really allow for any escape. If you had really complex
harmonies, you wouldn’t get that effect,” McClary
said.

Repetition as an effect has also been associated with rhythm and
dancing. The connection of repetition, rhythm, and body movement
create interesting combinations of how people find identity through
music.

“Rhythm structures the way we experience ourselves in
time. It can try to eradicate our consciousness of the body in
trance with very few pulses that make us move. Music that has a
repetitive groove is going to affect the body,” McClary
said.

While this view may seem like common sense to people who go
clubbing regularly, rhythm in music has long been taboo. Early
country music refused any accompanied drumming as a rule. Classical
music alienated people through intentional obfuscation of rhythm
and an overt focus on harmonic complexity.

While harmonic theories are quite advanced, rhythm has been
often ignored by academia.

Yet McClary argues that rhythm is very fundamental to the way
music affects people. While enjoying complex harmonies requires
some training, being able to enjoy an equally complex groove does
not.

“It’s always very slight nuances on either side of
the beat that kick the body into motion. You’re not even
aware consciously of what was being done, yet everyone in the room
knows how to move,” McClary said.

Since the early ’90s and groups like NWA and 2 Live Crew,
a rap group censored for its obscenity, rap has been seen as a
negative influence. But McClary believes that they don’t
represent most rap.

“All 19th century opera required that a woman be killed on
a stage at the end. That is much more troublesome than what is done
in a lot of hip hop, which is concerned with community improvement,
eradicating drugs, and critiquing gangster culture,” McClary
said.

“To say that all classical music is great and all pop
music is morally degraded is just unacceptable.”