‘The Tourist’ - A Hip Hop Essay by Texture

Guest writer Bram E Gieben aka Texture (Host of the ‘Strange Exiles’ podcast) discusses the past, the present and the future of Hip Hop from his unique vantage point

I know nothing about hip-hop. Maybe I used to know a little, but watching Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Forbidden America: Rap’s new frontline, it became apparent to me how old and outdated my ideas about the culture have become. The story of LPB Poody struck me the most - in one sequence, Theorux visits the young rapper as he returns to his Florida neighborhood, wary and watching out for violent reprisals to his beef track Address It. The palpable threat of death hung about the scene in a way I found unsettling. The stakes for this young rapper were literally life or death, and he accepted that. It was about as far from whatever the fuck I think hip-hop is that I have ever felt.

I know nothing about hip-hop. As I watched the interview, I felt like Theroux. A tourist, a bystander, an observer of a life I could never hope to truly understand or appreciate. Like Theroux, I am a huge fan and devotee of hip-hop music and culture, but I had to ask myself the question. Can I ever be more than an observer or watcher of the pain and suffering and violence in the experiences hip-hop often portrays? These days, I’m not so sure. I try to be a good guest, like the song by Your Old Droog says. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. What I do know, I learned from study and observation. I’ve been lucky enough to be welcomed, as a rapper and a critic, into some hip-hop circles. I try to stay aware that I’m a guest in a culture I cannot and should never lay claim to. I have to try and respect that culture. In the song, YOD says it’s not about the colour of your skin, but how dope your rhymes are - and that’s a statement with which I am certain many hip-hop artists and fans would agree. But he prefaces it with a disclaimer in the sample - a white rapper is a guest in a culture that has black origins, and its history and aesthetic is defined and owned by black people. We have to acknowledge that to enter the house of hip-hop.

I know nothing about hip-hop. It was Kanye that tore it for me - a genius producer who became the biggest star in the world without really having much more than the occasional average, kinda-good-enough raps. Whose celebrity, ego and public scandals overtook his talent to the point of obscuring it. There’s a long history of bragging and living large in hip-hop’s history and imagery, but Kanye turned it all into an empty spectacle. Around the same time, I visited New York, and took a Hush tour focused on the history of rap. On the one hand, it was amazing to see the names of streets I’d heard about in verses by Nas and Rakim. It was amazing to be able to talk to our host and guide, Grandmaster Caz. He was an original member of the Cold Crush Brothers, a seminal golden age crew with roots going back to the 1970s. He was a brilliant guide to the historical roots of a genre I’d dedicated years of my own time and research to. Nonetheless, the tour was also the ultimate example of me as a tourist, a spectator. As a young artist I know would tell me years later, I would never truly understand what it’s like to live in the Marcy Houses in Bed Stuy. I would never be able to walk the streets of Harlem as anything but an outsider. I had to admit it, he was right - my passion for hip-hop, my knowledge about it, didn’t make me any less of a tourist. A person of colour shouldn’t have had to point this out to me. I should have understood it myself.

I know nothing about hip-hop. The hip-hop happening in the aughts, with the face tattoos and the autotune, didn’t just leave me cold. It left me actively repelled. What the fuck was this? Choruses that sound like Blink 182, cut to autotuned verses made up of mumbled syllables? I completely swerved Lil Peep, xxxTentacion, Mac Miller, and anything else with even a hint of vocoder and sung lyrics. I gave up listening to anything with a chorus. I thought the whole aesthetic, the lyrics and the style of this era of music was not “real” hip-hop, whatever that means. I was happy to spout the commonplace that xxxTentacion’s domestic abuse confession, or Peep’s overdose, was somehow proof that they were lesser artists, or in some way a threat to “real” rap. I see now how hopelessly out of my lane I was, to think that. It’s not up to me what’s real or what’s not in hip-hop, I don’t get to make that call.

I know nothing about hip-hop. I didn’t know anything then, and I didn’t care, because that was commercial rap, and it was dead to me. I was too busy running an underground label of my own, and listening to rappers nobody else in my orbit had really heard of, save for the musicians I collaborated with. My most beloved albums of the aughts were things my friends and I released, or fucked with, like All Urban Outfield’s classic Crypto, and Penpushers’ Void Engineers. We were releasing crazy stuff like CHURCH OF WHEN THE SHIT HITS THE FAN and performing hour-long free-form acapella rap shows as Chemical Poets. We were rappers, and we didn’t really question it. Too busy making hip-hop.

I know nothing about hip-hop. That became clear to me as I saw the autotune style embraced by a lot of contemporaries and international artists who took the pioneering blueprint of Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak and broke it apart, reconfigured it, put it back together in weird shapes - from Arca to Fifty Grand to Scotland’s eyesluvsu. I saw how the approach to pop, and even nu metal by millennial artists was exactly what I did with 90s hip-hop, rave, and industrial music. They took it apart to see what made it tick, pieced it back together with bits in weird places. Without Kanye, would something this strange have come into being, could it have survived in the world? I’m not sure.

I know nothing about hip-hop. Like any music, what it sounds like at the time and how it hits you a few years later can be wildly different. I reserved particular contempt for Lil Peep, for me he was emblematic of the dilution of hip-hop, and the move away from lyrics towards a kind of spectatorial hyper-celebrity culture. Then one day I just… got it. I heard how the complexity in Peep’s writing was often in stating something simple that hid a whole complex world of pain and experience. That his genius lay as much in how he recorded and mixed his lyrics as what he said in them. I know nothing, and I was wrong, and this is brilliant.

I know nothing about hip-hop. These days I am slow on the uptake, behind the curve. I think I understood everything up to and including grime, but drill leaves me feeling very alienated. Perhaps in the way, old school rappers of the golden age felt alienated by gangster rap? The explicit focus on violence and money is something that makes me uncomfortable, and I wonder if the direction drill indicates for hip-hop is something wiser heads should speak up about. I think the truth is, I am just getting old. There’s nothing in drill lyrics that should alienate me any more than the violence in the lyrics of Mobb Deep or Schooly D. It just appeals to me less than it used to - or perhaps I’m a little more aware that to be a fan of it makes me a tourist, a voyeur, to music that describes very real societal problems with inequality, deprivation, and racism. Again, it just took me a while to catch up to London drill. In the end, it was the wordplay that drew me in - the strange codewords for drugs, stabbings, money, sex. I wanted to decode it all.

I know nothing about hip-hop. It’s 1994. I’m an indie kid, wearing a t-shirt with some 4AD band on it, for argument’s sake lets say it’s Belly. The kids in my registration period think this is some funny shit because I’m still packing puppy fat, and they know I’m sensitive about it. My friend Niall, who’s been an indie kid since I met him in first year and introduced me to the Throwing Muses, leans over and passes me a tape. The cassette is clear plastic, the insert is a blue card. Niall’s a talented artist and has carefully lettered the song titles for side A and side B in fat graffiti capitals. Souls of Mischief - 93 til Infinity is on one side, and The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II is on the other. Niall would later go on to win the UK DMC turntablist finals in 1999, and join the Scratch Perverts.

I know nothing about hip-hop. Well, not exactly nothing - I had a similarly revelatory cassette-based experience in 1988. That was my sister, and the album was De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. I am pretty sure you could give that record to anyone and they’d love it, but it did awaken something in me. But my love affair with hip-hop really started with Niall’s tape. The intricacy of the lyrics, the storytelling, and the beats were all hypnotic. I was hooked. It opened up a world for me which now, in hindsight, I see was an escapist one. As the 90s unfolded, I kept up with hip-hop even though I was busy being a weekend raver, or listening to the dying embers of grunge. It was an incredible time to be a hip-hop fan. I didn’t know I wanted to write raps until I spent an evening tripping on acid, rhyming along to Kool Keith’s entire Octagonecologyst album. Then I heard Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus, and it was all over.

I know nothing about hip-hop. But I knew that El-P’s dense, science fiction-derived raps and braggadocious swagger spoke to me like nothing else. A particular line of his got stuck in my brain like a splinter: “Even when I say nothing it’s a beautiful use of negative space.” The first line of rap lyrics I wrote was a response: “Constantly inspired to make negative space beautiful I put it to use.” Late 90s and early aughts rap, particularly the Def Jux, Rawkus and Stones Throw labels, were at their creative peak (lots of it powered by underground superproducers like J Dilla, Flying Lotus, Madlib, and El-P himself). That era of rap was incredibly lyrics-focused and experimental, and at the time, people who listened to it (myself included) would often be proud to reel off the mainstream rappers for whom they had contempt. So-called ‘backpack rap’ (nobody liked that term) was seen as socially conscious. Looking back now, even the wokest artists were egregious offenders when it comes to progressive politics - none of them immune to rap’s pervasive misogyny, or to spouting homophobic or transphobic opinions in a rhyme.

I know nothing about hip-hop. The idea of rap as a kind of egalitarian Bushido code, completely focused on lyrical excellence, was definitely something I swallowed whole. I studied, going back to the original golden age artists and finding incredible lyricism from the early pioneers. I got into Cold Crush, bought all the Sugar Hill 12s, and read everything I could find about hip-hop’s early days in the Bronx. I listened to cassettes, and later mp3s of the Stretch & Bobbito show, and scoured the nascent internet for mixtapes. I studied the 5 Percent Nation, tried to decode the references to supreme mathematics in Wu-Tang and Jeru The Damaja. I read all the hip-hop glossies, and even succumbed to some of the more commercial end of rap as the millennium dawned. I must have worn a groove in Forgot About Dre, I dropped the needle on it so much. Just as I’d come round to Lil Peep a decade or so later, I would also come around to the majority of the music that I deemed too commercial, and therefore “not hip-hop” in the silver age of the 1990s and early aughts. Stuff that sounded like fluff, with throwaway lyrics, now sounds like absolute gold to me. Perhaps we were spoiled for choice, perhaps I was just young and annoying and full of opinions back then. Perhaps I have never fully understood hip-hop - just a version of it, a subsection that existed for a short time at a point where I was open to certain influences. All I know is, as much as I was right that El-P is fucking dope, so is Ma$e. I’ve accepted it.

I know nothing about hip-hop. By 2005 I was writing about it for The Skinny Magazine, and over the next 8 years I’d spend as much time as I could interviewing my US heroes (yes, I got to talk to El-P - yes, I fanboyed the fuck out). I was also pushing new voices in Scottish hip-hop. While the genre pre-dated my involvement by a couple of decades, it was nonetheless a pretty new thing for many Scottish artists to see themselves covered in print, or interviewed at length. I championed Stanley Odd from the start, and even before that, when Solareye’s band was called Disciples of Panic Earth. I highlighted artists like Profisee of Great Ezcape, Livesciences, Yush2k, Penpushers and Hector Bizerk. It felt great to be promoting, making and championing Scottish rap. I was one of the first to cover Hector Bizerk in print, and pushed for wider recognition of artists like Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey. But the sad truth of it is, the most read, most clicked article I wrote at The Skinny was a one-star takedown of Eminem’s dire Marshall Mathers LP 2. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. I clearly remember a 90s-era New York producer (who I won’t name) telling me at the time that hip-hop was only ‘real’ by definition if it was made in the Five Boroughs. To this producer, everything from Outkast to MC Solaar was just inauthentic, a hip-hop derivative. Essentially trash. To me, hip-hop, especially as a production method - the sample, the hook, the break, the rhyme - was an inevitability, a cultural form that could only have spread like a pandemic around the world, mutating into different variants. It was like punk rock - this is an 808, this is a sampler. Go make rap. Nevertheless, I also kind of respect the purism of his opinion, as someone who witnessed the birth of the genre within the culture of a single city, a single moment.

I left The Skinny for a bunch of reasons - one was that I wanted to focus on making music, not writing about it. Another was a growing sense that anybody who made it out of Scotland’s ultra-underground hip-hop or club culture didn’t really tend to look back. I had interviewed the likes of Rustie over the years and talked to label bosses, gig bookers and festival promoters. They all had a reason not to book, sign or promote Scottish rap. Reasons ranged from a pathetic middle-class suspicion that rappers meant fist-fights at your show, to a cringe-induced inability to listen to rap in a Scottish accent at all, to strong convictions that the work just wasn’t good enough. I kind of respect the last opinion if it’s deeply held, but at the time, it wasn’t Danny Brown I wanted to hear on a Rustie beat, as dope as that collaboration was. The rappers he was interested in did not come from Paisley or Govan. He found them on DatPiff and Hot New Hip-Hop.

I know nothing about hip-hop. No artist coming out of an underground scene owes anybody still down there a hand up. The idea that a rising tide lifts all boats is meritocratic bullshit. I don’t want to call anyone out for failing to platform, feature, or respect Scottish rap artists over the years. All I can say is that there are producers, bands and DJs who could have chosen to, and didn’t. That’s one hundred percent their prerogative. I’d just have been interested, as a critic, to see what music Rustie or Hudson Mohawke might have made with a talented Scottish rapper. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. Things have changed a little, perhaps even a lot for Scottish rap. Artists like Shogun, Oakzy B, Sean Focus, Chef and Bemz are not only doing big numbers on independent platforms like YouTube, they’re getting love from public radio in the form of the excellent BBC Introducing show hosted by Shereen Cutty and Phoebe IH. Producer Steg G has recently produced a live spectacular called Live Today, with orchestral backing, featuring the talents of older heads like Solareye, and championing young emerging rappers like CCTV. Solareye’s Stanley Odd are a touring band with festival pull and UK-wide (and beyond) recognition. The Girobabies / Jackal Trades are local heroes mixing rap with punk and rock, and taking their show to festivals and big venues across the country. In his other life, Dave Hook has become a respected academic in the emerging field of hip-hop studies. A recent book on the story of women in hip-hop by Arusa Qureshi has gathered worldwide acclaim. Kryptik of Delivery Room covers rap (including Scottish rap) for Wordplay Magazine. The knack for tapping commercial and cultural potential is here; the industry has arrived for Scottish rap. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. There are young artists making Scottish drill and trap now, and every other kind of hip-hop-related genre, from R&B and soul to Afrobeat and garage. Channels like Yona Mac, Scottie Media and up2stndrd have no real need to engage with the legacy of Scottish rap - there’s an endless tide of new talent, new voices, and new perspectives to cover. Scottish hip-hop is still taking on issues of class and inequality, whether lyrically, or in the form of activism and community engagement. Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey’s book Poverty Safari was an international best-seller, and used his journey as a rapper to talk about inequality and oppression. Scottish rap remains an incredible way to highlight and platform marginalised voices. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. The media is finally looking for Scottish hip-hop to cover, and it’s even looking beyond the central belt. The debate over accents and authenticity is an actual debate now - it isn’t a topic that gets you laughed out of the room. There are underground outlets too, from Steg G’s much-missed Butter sessions in Glasgow, to Delaina Sepko’s show Beats and Breaks on Sunny Govan, to the newly-energised blog and podcast at Hip-Hop Scotland, not to mention this blog’s parent show, You Call That Radio, and the increasingly high-profile Scottish Alternative Music Awards, who have long had a ‘best hip-hop’ category. Female emcees are better represented than ever before - hip-hop is still a boys’ club in ways that need to be addressed, but artists like Empress, SAY Award-winner Nova Scotia The Truth, Empress, Sweet Rogue and others look set to eclipse their male counterparts in terms of broad appeal and star power.

I know nothing about hip-hop. But I know artists still feel under-represented, for a number of different reasons, even with the growth of independent shows and opportunities on commercial radio. There’s a sense that the coverage of Scottish hip-hop, and the opportunities for growth and development, are unfairly shared out. Even the videos of Scottish artists I’ve included here represent only a fraction of the country’s talent. Coverage, gigs and opportunities, representation - these things are all jealously coveted and fiercely pursued. Perhaps that’s inevitable when the money shows up. Any commercial attention given to an underground genre will attract A&Rs who tend towards the mountain-climbing, guitar-playing, suits-and-ties type. These are good conversations, but I don’t feel like I have much to offer to them any more. I’m wary of a hip-hop aesthetic where the rough edges get polished up, or pushed aside. I want the emotional honesty of a rapper like Spawn Zero or GLUCO, and the gallusness of Louie from Hector Bizerk. I want the uncompromising realness of MOG, and the boundary-pushing experimental pop and bruising lyrics of Miles Better. I’ll accept nothing less.

I know nothing about hip-hop. It’s not my job to say that I don’t like the more commercially-oriented sounds artists embrace. Not my job as a hip-hop fan, a critic, or a white rapper. My contribution on any count is surplus to requirements. What the fuck do I know? All I can say is that it feels like a huge waste of potential and opportunity to suddenly shine a light on Scottish rap but exclude certain people from the conversation - artists who are too problematic, too underground, too strange, or even too Scottish. I feel conflicted, because I want to see hip-hop from Scotland, and Scottish artists, succeed and get paid. But I feel uncomfortable if that success excludes some of the people who built Scottish rap from the ground up. If we didn’t have artists like Bohze, Physiks, Loki, Ashtronomik, Profisee and others, there’d be no chance for young emcees. There would be nothing to build upon. Scottish rap wasn’t suddenly born when the industry noticed its commercial potential. It’s been here all along.

I know nothing about hip-hop. I was born in England, I sound English to most Scottish people, so to all intents and purposes, to some I’ll always be an English cunt. I don’t feel and so can never be Scottish, even though I’ve lived here since 1991. My own identity and my raps have never been about Scottish cultural identity, which makes me an outlier, and I am both aware of and at peace with that. In terms of cultural appropriation, it would be utterly dishonest and disrespectful of me to try and represent myself as culturally Scottish in any particular way, let alone indulge in some burlesque of working-class Scottish culture. I did not endure poverty or deprivation growing up - and Scottish hip-hop is a working-class artform in just as vital a way as hip-hop as whole is a black artform. For me to pretend I’d lived a life or had experiences like Loki or McRoy or Shogun would be absurd. The suffering I write about is existential, speculative, symbolic, internal. Nonetheless, Scottish hip-hop has welcomed me, and embraced my weird take on it, even if I don’t feel like I am a part of it. I’m happy to continue to champion it. But is even that presumptuous on my part?

I know nothing about hip-hop. I’m uncomfortable being a gatekeeper - I’m not sure I could (or should) still write for The Skinny, or decide who gets a menchy and who gets a dingy. Those questions are even more loaded now - as a society we’re having conversations about race, class, gender and culture that would have been unimaginable as recently as the aughts. The representation of culture, and the respect for its boundaries, is a live issue now, and arguably you cannot engage with hip-hop culture unless you address it. It’s not about who’s the best rapper anymore, and that’s difficult for me to accept on some level. Maybe it never was. But back when I did believe in it, that philosophy felt egalitarian to me. Sadly, some artists of colour I speak to in the Scottish scene have not always felt that this was anything except another meritocratic illusion. Within a very Scottish, very white hip-hop context, they felt marginalised at times. I hope that’s changing for them now.

I know nothing about hip-hop. Was the era where ‘best rap wins’ more or less egalitarian? Which voices did it platform and which did it exclude? I can’t answer that comprehensively. These were my blind spots too. Perhaps the contempt for Scottish rap outside of Scotland, and its complete sidelining for years by all media, left it free to become a hotbed of talent and innovation. Maybe that drove us to the point we’re at now, where the potential is finally being seen amidst what constitutes an artistic renaissance in the genre. Free from cultural cringe, actually liberated by its exclusion to accelerate artistically and aesthetically, the Scottish rap scene may have long seemed impenetrable. It was, as Hector Bizerk’s Louie once said, “the illegitimate artform.” Is that still true? If not, what has it become?

I know nothing about hip-hop. My aesthetic and approach are abstract. I have no ‘real’ to draw on, my experiences have been mostly prosaic, and I have no ambition to live a life of yachts, money, and plastic surgery. I rap about things I find lying around in my imagination, and in my anxieties. I make raps that are confabulations of speculation and abstraction. I am unhealthily obsessed with vocabulary in a way that is probably intellectually pretentious as fuck to most people. I don’t make backpack rap, I make science fiction theory rap. I am not an emcee, I cannot freestyle. I have never battled anyone in my life. I can tell you all about the five elements of hip-hop, but this is just me repeating back to you the things I have read. 

I know nothing about hip-hop. The culture I grew up in knew even less. I wanted to write my own academic paper on hip-hop lyrics back in 1999 at Bristol University, a uni famously founded on the profits of the slave trade. They had no black lecturers in the English Literature department. I insisted and wrote my dissertation on the roots of hip-hop culture in the crime novels of Chester Himes. In 2019, the uni hosted a caucus on hip-hop and literature, which Scotland’s own Doctor Dave Hook attended. Times change. The hip-hop I would begin to make 10 years later would be anti-capitalist, anti-commercial, anti-authority. I believed the whole idea of marketing hip-hop should be anathema to someone who is a lyrical purist. I wanted to fucking represent - not just my own artistic instincts, but the history and values of hip-hop, with respect and love. But in 1999, back in Bristol, I was still the drunk idiot who rapped the ‘n word’ aloud along with my Wu-Tang cassettes as I walked about the city - and perhaps inevitably, got a richly-deserved punch in the face for it. I learned something that day, about being a good guest. About who gets to say what, and why it matters. I think about that punch a lot. It taught me more than the books I read. Years later, it makes me feel uncomfortable that perhaps my whole interaction with hip-hop has been one of appropriation. That I’ll always be a tourist in it, or worse, a colonist.

I know nothing about hip-hop. I still listen to Scottish rap - you can check my playlists. But I am no longer comfortable being any kind of gatekeeper. That’s why this year, I want to open my radio show Auld Alliance on French station Radio KC up to anyone making hip-hop in Scotland. I want artists and label-heads and promoters to take the wheel and play whatever they want. The show was always meant to be a showcase, always meant to represent the Scottish scene. But it strikes me that it doesn’t really need me, or anyone, to represent it any more. It’s strong enough to speak for itself, and the voices it speaks in are more diverse than ever. I hope anyone who’s ever felt excluded or slept on gets in touch and takes over for a show. I want to know more. I still want to study and learn. Plus, my mates still make some really wild, weird shit. You’ll see a few of them on Radio KC too, I’m sure.

I love hip-hop. But I know nothing about it. It’s not up to me to define it, to say what it is or it isn’t, or what direction it should go in. That conversation, like many others, is now in the hands of people younger than me; people with different needs, opinions, tastes and expectations. I can’t pretend to represent them, because hip-hop will always mean certain things to me. It will always be about lyrics before it’s about image, or polish, or even representation. Call me old fashioned. The greatest moment in my personal hip-hop history took place in 1994, on the final episode of the Arsenio Hall show. 

There was a freestyle session featuring nearly two dozen rappers from nearly every one of the dopest hip-hop crews of the era. It was a moment when the underground touched the mainstream, perhaps even drove it - but this was also the final episode of Arsenio’s show. This was a cypher to mourn the death of opportunity for underground artists in the mainstream, rather than to celebrate it. Watch the clip now, and it seems almost impossible - the story behind the cypher confirms it. It’s full of rage, as well as lyrical brilliance - it isn’t a party, it’s a wake. There are no lights, dancers, or explosions. Just Pete Rock spinning breaks while a whole room full of luminous, fierce, raw talent waits for their turn to destroy the mic. They’re dressed in baggy jeans, sagging tees and huge hoodies. There are very few chains around necks. There’s just a sense of lyrics hanging in the air like thunder, just out of earshot, about to burst into the world with mesmerising intensity. I’ve been chasing moments like that since I first saw the clip.

I know nothing about hip-hop. But I know I love this. 

Texture hosts the podcast Strange Exiles and writes raps for This Is Not Pop.

You can also see him perform live at The Lost Launch Festival in Glasgow on May 28th alongside a bunch of other artists mentioned above.

Limited tickets are available over here: skiddle.com/e/36080699

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