A second listen

Professor [Anthony] Kelley’s April 1 column “A melody? Word.” bears more than a whiff of both elitism and you-kids-get-off-my-lawn stodginess. To be sure, crafting a stirring melody is one way to demonstrate musical prowess. But suggesting that it’s the only way is not far from saying that orchestral music is somehow more musical than, say, the White Stripes’ minimal guitar-and-drum arrangements. Complexity and difficulty of execution are not the only currency of music. To suggest otherwise is to invoke the conventional lowest-common-denominator musical views of a safely suburban middle-class America that has rendered “American Idol” a weighty authority in matters of musical taste. That Kelley—who, judging by his credentials, really ought to know better—would cite the show in support of his thesis ought to demonstrate to any reader that thesis’ essential poverty.

Hip-hop—like all other forms of music—is not a monolithic and undifferentiated whole. To hear Kelley tell it, hip-hop artists simply loop “compositions written by other people” and talk over them. And certainly there are some artists who do this. (P-Diddy, I’m looking at you.) This kind of remixing—making the audience hear an old song in a new way—provides its own valuable and important musical challenges to the listener. But more to the point, there are many hip-hop artists who compose original melodies. Kelley himself points to Jay-Z’s backing tracks—but these are not, in Kelley’s estimation, enough to make Jay-Z a true musician, just more like one. The truth, of course, is that, “here in the West,” we have a proud, millennia-long tradition of treating the poetic spoken word as music. Homer and Virgil couldn’t even get three words into their most famous compositions without referring to their art as singing.

I urge Professor Kelley to listen—actually listen—to some Eminem, Kanye or old-school Snoop Dogg. The melodies may be unconventional; they may not be Bach or Ben Folds or the Beatles, but melodies they are. They may be sung or they may arise out of the interplay of the vocalist’s voice rising and falling against the backing music. If Kelley can’t hear them, it’s not because they’re absent.

Josh Mitchell

Law ’11