City Desk: A City That Barks

At the same time, the natural rhythms of the human voice and the human performer have been driven out by a constant and unnuanced ostinato. Nor should we blame the old geezers for this. In the early days of their emancipation, rhythm was being discovered as a property of human life, a magic element that could be conjured from the inner reaches of the human body. Listen to the Elvis of “Jailhouse Rock,” or to any guitar solo by Eric Clapton, and you will hear what I mean. In the music of such great performers life is externalized as rhythm. Elvis relied on the micro-rhythms within his vocal line to infect the listener, and hardly needed percussion. Clapton defined the beat through the guitar solo, which the drums must then follow, not lead.

In modern pop songs the roles are reversed. Percussion does not obey the melodic line but commands it, and the drum-kit is fashioned into iron rail-tracks by the engineer. Hence the emergence of rap, from which the arts of melody and of song itself have been finally abolished. The words of a performer like Eminem belong with his art: They are a denial of music and of the human voice that speaks through music. The rap artist is really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and what speaks from his mouth is the machine.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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At the same time, the natural rhythms of the human voice and the human performer have been driven out by a constant and unnuanced ostinato. Nor should we blame the old geezers for this. In the early days of their emancipation, rhythm was being discovered as a property of human life, a magic element that could be conjured from the inner reaches of the human body. Listen to the Elvis of “Jailhouse Rock,” or to any guitar solo by Eric Clapton, and you will hear what I mean. In the music of such great performers life is externalized as rhythm. Elvis relied on the micro-rhythms within his vocal line to infect the listener, and hardly needed percussion. Clapton defined the beat through the guitar solo, which the drums must then follow, not lead.

In modern pop songs the roles are reversed. Percussion does not obey the melodic line but commands it, and the drum-kit is fashioned into iron rail-tracks by the engineer. Hence the emergence of rap, from which the arts of melody and of song itself have been finally abolished. The words of a performer like Eminem belong with his art: They are a denial of music and of the human voice that speaks through music. The rap artist is really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and what speaks from his mouth is the machine.