Tricia's "Noise"...

When I sat down to read Tricia Rose’s piece on rap music, I wasn’t sure what, precisely, I expected. The first few sentences pulled me in and I found myself subject to the intriguing points made about rap music and its derivatives. I have studied a good deal of African American/African culture over my past years here at WSU. These studies were both purely academic as well as related to Work and Projects that I have been a part of. One of the topics that have come up a number of times throughout my endeavors is the underlying and nearly constant “rhythm” of African people. In my first show here at WSU, I was part of a play called The Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of God, directed by a woman named Aku Kadogo. She has had extensive experience with different peoples across the globe, having travel so much for her work and she brought her knowledge with her into that production as we brainstormed for the underlying meaning of the script, the rhythm of the work, etc. In her lectures, she would make a point to refer to that same “rhythm” of the people she has studied. Each ethnic group, she stated, had a different sense of melodic living, a way that their very existence created their own personal dance of life. This reading brought that to mind immediately. It spoke of rap music’s harkening back to African drums, call and response and the varying uses of tonality in voice and rhythm. Watching my director do her work, even simply moving from one point to another, is as if one was watching melody and rhythm embodied in a visible entity. That thought and realization inspired me to watch other people much more closely and, indeed, every person has a repetitive flow to their gait as they walk through life, a sort of rhythmic beat. I’ve said all this to preface my comment on the idea that rap music isn’t music at all, but noise. Of course I join the ranks of people who defend rap music in that, in my opinion, music exists autonomously, without the need of human analysis or control. Music needs neither to be created or control, but exists in the very ebb and flow of life on earth. So, by virtue of being of the earth, and of musical creatures, rap is automatically music, just, perhaps, a kind of music some people cannot hear, in a register to low to recognize.