Even before I had actually heard any of it, rap interested me. Just from seeing it described in print (even by the numerous hostile) its long game was obvious to me, and also that it ultimately could not be just “spoken word” with music. It was some time before I began to hear records that sounded like what I expected rap to sound like, which is not to say that I could have imagined how the first hip-hop record I loved would actually sound. "Follow the Leader” broke through to me like nothing before it because (in Jay-Z’s precision terminology) the “rhythm argument” in Rakim’s flow, keyed to Eric B.’s constantly self-destabilizing beats, presented an immediate right brain problem: It was music I heard as music rather than a rhythmic verbal flow that I heard as words first and then had to go that extra inch to process (and thus ultimately hear) as music. I might have hit that sweet spot with The Treacherous Three and, in their initially austere way, Run-DMC when they first emerged, but both (and Public Enemy) always impressed me more than they confused me; and the latter is what I need great music to do.
Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
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