On the last night of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of black America reaching the promised land of freedom. What he didn’t say is that there’s more than one way to get there.
Or that one route necessarily excludes another.
With regard to the African-American experience at least, that’s a relatively new understanding.
When W.E.B. DuBois the American dreamer and Marcus Garvey the black nationalist clashed 70 years ago, it was clearly understood that there could be no common ground-a fact underscored by the personal animosity between the two men.
But 40 years later, in the public debates between King and Malcolm X, there came to be a certain amount of mutual respect. And 30 years after that, some scholars wonder if the two men didn’t actually complement one another. Some say white Americans were moved to embrace Martin’s reason only after facing the alternative of Malcolm’s rage.
I bring up these opposite numbers in black history to discuss opposite numbers in black music-the politics of rap as reflected in two ambitious new albums, “Zingalamaduni” by Arrested Development and “Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age” by Public Enemy.
A.D.’s album hit the streets this month. P.E.’s, originally scheduled for release in July, has been bumped to sometime in August. It seems doubtful on first glance that any two groups seeking the same end-racial uplift-could be more philosophically opposed in their methods or approach.
Arrested Development raps a song of struggle and redemption, presented in a style that is gentle, inclusionary and reminiscent (even though A.D. doesn’t like the comparison) of the flower children.
Lead rapper Speech is an unabashed idealist. “Zingalamaduni” opens with a sunny morning on WMFW (We Must Fight & Win) Radio. Before the album is five minutes old, Speech has exhorted us to network, recycle, eat health food and understand that “Africa and the Caribbean and the Europeans and the Asians and the Australians . . . we’re all in this together!”
If you had to sum up the group’s ethos, that would be it. Unity. The black struggle as part of the larger “human” struggle. Hands across the divide.
By contrast, Public Enemy raises hell and keeps the devil awake.
The group thrives in an atmosphere of sweaty desperation and knife-edge paranoia. Thus, as we enter the new “Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age,” we learn that it’s the last day of 1999, David Duke is president of something called the United World States of Europe America and has declared war on the last-ditch effort to unify the African diaspora.
It’s the setup for a bracing jolt of the righteous rage that is P.E.’s stock in trade-a cathartic, cleansing tirade that boils forth, self-aware and proud.
The formula is familiar enough: Chuck D’s speed raps, Flavor Flav’s not-quite comic relief and Terminator X’s thunder beats and cyclonic soundscapes. To listen to them challenge Eurocentric barbarity, as in “Hitler Day,” is to be confronted, confounded and compelled.
But the children of Europe are not the only-or even the biggest-target of P.E.’s ire. “Muse Sick” finds the trio on the warpath against the gangsta mindset (drugs, guns, nihilism) that has infected young black America.
In “Whole Lotta Love Goin’ On in Da Middle of Hell,” for example, Chuck ridicules “studio shootouts” and asks, “Yo, my brother, can you spare a crime?” In “Bedlam,” he’s “good enough to know no endo, threw it out the window, along wit tha Super Nintendo.”
He’s said similar things before but never with this sense of hope-to-die urgency.
That’s the bravest thing about “Muse Sick,” the determined way it flies in the face of a gangsta philosophy that has somehow sold the notion that a blunt and a 40 (marijuana inside a hollowed-out cigar and a 40-ounce jug of malt liquor) are tools of rebellion.
Chuck, whose credentials as a rebel have never been questioned, keeps returning to that topic as if he can’t let it go. In “What Side You On,” he rants:
“In the brain game, I’m keepin’ my head clear,”
“In 33 years, so what”
“I never had a beer”
“I don’t know what I’m missin”
“I’m not dissin”
“But I know I ain’t ass-kissin’.”
The subtext of “Muse Sick” is that it’s too late in the game for posturing and way past time young black America gave up its self-loathing, self-destructive ways.
Perhaps the most satisfying song on that score is “So Whatcha Gone Do Now?,” a prowling, feline track in which Chuck brings a rumble to “the corner of Blunt Ave. and 40 oz.” and scores gangstas for “talkin’ that gattalk.”
The track ends with a collage of voices debating the word “nigger” before a tiny boy settles the issue with a proud declaration that he is a “black and bootiful” man.
For all its cutting edge rage, P.E. believes a very old-school notion: that there is something deep and proud in black people that gives them a spirit beyond spirit. Or, in the words of a chant led by Flavor Flav, “What Kind of Power We Got?”
The answer? “Soul power!”
The difference between rap’s two best and most visionary acts is stark. It’s the same difference that was between Garvey and DuBois, between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Namely, how best to fight this battle, how best to be this two-headed creature, African and American.
And shall the creature wage peace, or war?
For all that, “Muse Sick” is ultimately a lifting, liberating experience. And although “Zingalamaduni” has yet to grow on me, I get that same feeling from A.D. at its best (the “Three Years, Five Months and Two Days in the Life” and “Unplugged” albums).
Prophets of rage, prophets of redemption, coming from different directions and winding up in the same place?
It’s not impossible.
Opposites do more than attract. They need each other in order to define each other. So maybe Malcolm did help Martin to achieve his agenda, and Dubois inadvertently sharpened Garvey’s rhetoric. And maybe, once you get past superficial differences, P.E. and A.D. are more alike than not.
It’s telling, don’t you think, that one of Speech’s favorite groups and biggest influences is Public Enemy.
I’m reminded of something I once heard about two true opposites: Martin Luther King and Eugene “Bull” Connor, King’s nemesis in the infamous Birmingham campaign of 1963, the man who turned the dogs and fire hoses loose on unarmed marchers.
Birmingham Sheriff Melvin Bailey, musing on the conflict between the two strong-willed men, once told me, “Opposing forces, just like negative and positive wires to a light switch-one can’t get there without the other. They’ve got to make a confrontation. They’ve got to cross them wires. And out of it comes either light or darkness.”
