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| Photo by the incomparable Annie Ray. |
Tears a little more off my bones
And you could never guess, you could never guess
You could never guess where I come from, no
--Astronautalis, Thomas Jefferson
It's redundant to make the argument music "x" is not color "y", but beneath this cursory observation is a lot of difficult to unlearn expectation. I mean...Rap grew up in our collective view. From the music's humble street corner youth to today's cash soaked mega-genre, we've learned the sound with black men at the vanguard. Historically speaking, Rap is one of the few commercial genres with deep African American root that hasn't been stripped of its blackness and sold back to white audiences with white faces. Most telling of all? I've never heard anyone referred to as a "black rapper", while Riff Raff, The Beastie Boys, Slug, Aesop Rock, Eminem, and Astronautalis have all been described as "white rappers".
A huge part of Rap's identity--and most any genre--is based on connotation and ritual. We grow attached to what first moves us. We mimicking the behaviors gleaned from songs and music videos. We sublimate these ideas into our persona. After awhile, the most marketable conventions emerge, and a genre begins to cannibalize itself. It's easier to play to our expectations then dare to upset the apple cart. As much as this does to diminish the sincerity of the sound, it does even more to cement our idea of what rap "is" and "should be". Rap has more facets than you can dream up stupid sub-genre names, but even indie rap and intellectual hip-hop suffer genre-fication (Oh, you're weird and you rap in a surreal, non sequitur style? Whoever heard of such a thing...). This burden is then passed on to anyone who dares to filter a familiar genre through a lens formed outside these expected tropes.
This falls twofold to white rappers: travel the well worn paths of the music whose influence lead you to this moment--don't be derivative--don't be a novelty--but be sure and put enough ice'n'hoes on so we can sell it to the kiddos. To that end, part of disservice white rappers have done themselves is too often resting on Rap's most trite conventions. I have no doubt Paul Wall grew up in the struggle, but he does little to expose his experience in a new light. At one point, the Beastie Boys bought in to a lot of macho posturing. Eminem kowtowed to an unproductive culture of ultra-violence. Even the more high minded MCs regularly fall back on political discourse, but politics exist at arms length--a broad stroke version of our discontent. This is where I feel Astronautalis has done so much to throw his shoulder into the genre's entrenched walls. He raps about, you know...stuff.
For those who don't know, Astronautalis is a thing that exists. Astronautalis is a musician. He was born in Jacksonville, relocated to Minneapolis (the most sneaky cool town in America), and makes the rap-talk music. Well, he makes music music, but he boasts an undeniable gift for rhymes. He is not the first white rapper, nor is he the standard bearer for the rap game's pigmented anomalies, but Astronautalis is more important than that, he's Astronautalis.
He raps about his stuff. It's not just an aversion to the pitfalls of point-at-the-camera-count-my-stacks-call-a-bitch-a-bitch-then-twist-one-up content, it's the greater sense that this is not the story he's made to tell. A page torn from a history book. Light and fog draped across an ethereal grove of trees. A lost photograph of something so ugly, it stunk with beauty. The way her hair fell just so (which, seriously, some chick must've ruined this cat. That, or he runs through creamy skinned hipsters like I do their unrequited affections). This is the world tattooed to his fingers and then wrapped around a mic. It feels like the truth, but at the very least, it's a factual account of a world where there is no incentive to lie to yourself.
As simple as it seems to convey, art is a vacuum where truth dies infinite, horrific deaths. It's hard to be honest. It's frightening to lay yourself naked for the world to see. It's a complicated journey to know one's self, and even more difficult to articulate this experience through an artistic medium. But with this weight on your back, and a determination to distill it into corporeal form, honesty becomes a phenomenon bigger than genre. This is not a trait limited to color, or ethnic identity, but with enough perspective on life's absurdities and ebullience alike, anyone's feet can hit the ground.
Astronautalis embodies this, and what I've tried to clutch at from word one: music is indifferent, but truth only knows its own master. Bix Beiderbecke new it then, and EL-P knows it now. Twelve bar blues can't know the color of your skin, jazz chord progressions are incapable of prejudice, fat beats hold all men alike, but their power is not unlocked through technical excellence alone. Something sincere is meant to filter through their porous strains. When an artist has the audacity to combine the two, a powerful catalyst is born. Astronautalis has not redefined the genre, he has just been bold enough to squeeze the scope of his authentic experience into the craft.
Astronautalis emerged from the lab with the shade of his world cupped in his hands. Drums spill out in columns of black clouds. Graveled intonations echo around Sisyphus. The lilt of electric piano fills battle worn muskets. Love like empty whiskey glasses stained with lipstick weaves through delicate washes of feedback. A flesh and blood breadcrumb curls through topography of howling refrains. Collect the raw bits. Arrange them in a way that makes sense. Delineate your memories as you trace the lines of his own, and something larger then the creation is revealed: the form of the realness. A sentient truth whose gravity holds the universe together. It's not the whole truth, or perfect truth, but flensed of race, genre, back track, and language, it is his truth, and it's potent enough to resonate in even the most anemic human core.
