It Takes A Thief

This weekend I watched a television series on the history of hip-hop. They got to the part about the Beastie Boys and that got me thinking. Apparently, a lot of black kids kind of resented the Beasties for being white, but they recognized the skills and accepted it. This was a MAJOR breakthrough because it made the music accessible to white kids for the first time, which was the first step toward making hip-hop commercially viable to the big dogs in the recording industry.

Anyway, the Beastie Boys brought hip-hop to the mainstream mainly by combining rapping and loud rock music, i.e. "You Gotta Fight(For Your Right to Party)" and "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn." I started thinking about this and how similar it was to Ray Charles combining blues and gospel to create soul, and more importantly to this story, how Elvis combined blues with a country twang and "created" rock n' roll.

I say "created" because I have always and still do maintain that Elvis was a thief. Listen to the blues records that were popular with blacks at the time and then listen to Elvis' first recordings. Fact is, early rock n' roll was EXACTLY the blues, except performed by white people. Exact same chords, exact same changes, exact same tempos, EVERYTHING about blues and rock n' roll was identical except for the subject matter and the color of the skin of the person singing it. This really pissed me off for a long time because I never saw the connection before. I belong to the first generation to "get" hip-hop. I and everybody my age literally grew up with the music, through its every permutation, its entire metamorphosis into the monstrous force it has become in not just American music, but American culture as well. Much the way, to my chagrin, Elvis brought the blues to white kids, who embraced and took the music in their own direction.

The reason I say Elvis was a thief is because he got famous singing other people's songs. "Hound Dog?" Big Mama Thornton's biggest hit. But most of you have never heard of Big Mama Thornton because ELVIS WAS A THIEF. Or at the very least, his producers and songwriters were thieves. That's right, it wasn't until relatively late in is career that Elvis actually wrote his own songs. Even the songs that were written for him were pretty much just plaigerized from old blues tunes, with new "white" lyrics added. But given this latest epiphany of mine, maybe he was really doing the rest of us non-southern-non-blacks a favor by bringing this music to our attention.

I still don't like Elvis' music, I still don't really respect him at all, I still like to say "Elvis was a thief" to people, but I have to admit I might have unfairly judged the man at first. I now realize he was really just the right guy at the right time in the right place. The stars aligned and blessed this particular guy with a random series of events beyond his own control that made him what he became and still remains in many people's eyes, "the King." I still maintain that he was a thief, capitalizing on the hard work and creativity of infinitely more deserving and exponentially more talented black musicians, but I may have to take a little bit of the edge off of that one. Someday. But I guess that in a euro-caucasoid American culture, dominated by whites since forever, sometimes it takes a thief to bring us together.