“People’s Instinctive Assumptions and the Paths of Narrative”: A Response to Justin Williams

[1] Justin Williams has presented a number of thought-provoking points in "Beats and Flows," beginning with an accurate and thoughtful enumeration of my underlying assumptions. Let me begin by describing the genesis of my earlier article, "Aspects," in order to shed some light on the reasoning behind some of those assumptions. Carl Dahlhaus noted, in a different context, that "subjective judgment provides the psychological premise and point of departure for the discovery of rational explanations" (Dahlhaus 1983, 3). Thus, my inquiry into text/music relations in rap was motivated by the observation that some rap lyrics seemed to integrate so well with their accompanying musical tracks. This observation, along with my attendant frustration with the relative lack of "close reading" in the scholarly literature on rap, led to my investigation of how the interactions between text and music might be more rigorously described. In doing so, I hoped to share with the scholarly community a potentially new way of listening to rap, one based on an inversion of what I assumed to be a typical mode of listening to texted music. I summarize all this here because some of the misunderstanding between Williams and myself is based on the chronological layout of "Aspects," which only arrives at many of my subjective judgments after the presentation of my rational explanations for those judgments. Thus, much of the following discussion is intended to clarify the origins of my arguments, not only in order to bridge the gaps between mine and Williams's opposing positions, but also to define those gaps more clearly, in order that future scholars might find in them substantial areas for exploration.[2] I have divided the following response into "General Points," addressed to some of the over-arching themes in Williams's response, and "Specific Points," addressed to some of our smaller-scale differences.General PointsI. "Rap Music"[3] One of my assumptions, as Williams implies, was the existence of a single genre of music called "Rap." I therefore used my analyses of works by two specific, and rather eccentric, groups of rap artists to draw conclusions about the compositional process of rap music in general. As Williams correctly notes, "rap styles are more varied than the article suggests" [par. 18], and my conclusions run the risk of presenting an overly simplistic view of a genre that comprises an enormous variety of sub-genres and styles. It is true, for example, that one can hardly use the music of A Tribe Called Quest to describe standard rap practices (if one can speak of "standard practices" at all), even for the time during which the group was in its prime.[4] In fairness, however, I should point out that Williams seems to make the same sorts of generalizations. The rap artists that Williams references indicate as much of a bias on his part towards late-1990's/early 2000's rap (Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye West), as my own bias towards rap that was popularized a decade earlier. Preferences for a given style are not problematic, but Williams, like myself, seems to generalize his observations to "Rap Music," sometimes ascribing to this fictitious genre characteristics that do not hold true for all rap, especially early rap (for example, his assertion that "rap music is composed for the studio" [par. 15]). His trend towards generalization is most obvious in his response to my parenthetical note about the minor mode, discussed further below. Here, he aims to demonstrate that minor-mode accompaniments, such as the one to "Children's Story," are normative for rap music-then justifies this assertion by referencing the Billboard top ten from over 20 years after "Children's Story" was released. True, 20 years does not seem like sufficient time for significant changes in stylistic norms, especially for musicologists and music theorists, who are accustomed to generalizing about entire centuries. But since Williams takes care to point out the explosion of styles that occurred even over the short period commonly referred to as the "golden age" of rap [cf. …