Rap and Rock: Listening to Each Other’s Music

     Melvis Acosta is a journalist, friend and former student of mine. (He helped Neil Offen and me set up this website.)  Both Melvis and I happen to be serious, exuberant, music lovers. But—there being a half-century between us—we are serious and exuberant about very different kinds of music. So we decided—in the name of open-mindedness, conciliation and respect—to each give a serious listen to an album selected by the other person, to which we had not before listened.

     I proposed that Melvis undertake Bob Dylan’s 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. Melvis suggested that I dive into To Pimp a Butterfly from 2015 by Kendrick Lamar. This was before the recent Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, and before Lamar’s recent Grammys triumphs. And we are posting this just before Kendrick Lamar’s performance half-time at the Super Bowl.

     Here is the online conversation that ensued.

— Mitchell Stephens

Melvis:  Turns out our albums ranked right next to each other on the “Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list in 2023. To Pimp a Butterfly as number 19, Highway 61 Revisited as 18. Crazy coincidence.

Mitch: The truth is I was blown away by the Kendrick Lamar record. But, I’ll note, that when Rolling Stone first chose “The 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time” in 2004, “Like a Rolling Stone”—the single from Highway 61 Revisited— was number one.

Melvis:  I really liked “Like a Rolling Stone”—one of the more straightforward songs on “Highway 61.” It captured the schadenfreude you feel when a snob is humbled.

      But It is probably not my favorite song on the album. I like the weirder tracks: the surreal ones that incorporate historical figures in random-seeming scenarios, with absurd things just happening on this random stretch of road.

      The album felt kind of like a David Lynch film at times with absurd things just happening. “Jack the Ripper” as “the head of the Chamber of Commerce” is such a random and striking image.

Mitch:  “They're selling postcards of the hanging.

             They're painting the passports brown.

             The beauty parlor Is filled with sailors.

             The circus is in town.”

      Yes. All this surreal poetry coming out of the mouth of 24-year-old Bob Dylan—a 24-year-old who had already released five other record albums. And Kendrick Lamar was only 27 when “Butterfly” was released. His second album.

Melvis:  But he had released mix tapes before that.

Mitch:  Lamar, too, has some amazing lines on To Pimp a Butterfly. “Oh, America, you bad bitch. I picked cotton that made you rich.”

      And this line might be my favorite,” Look both ways before you cross my mind.”

Melvis: I want to note some of my favorite lines on the Dylan album. Here’s one verse:

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son."

Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin' me on.”

God said, "No." Abe said, "What?"

God said, "You can do what you want Abe, but….

The next time you see me comin' you better run."

God said, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

Out there on Highway 61.

Mitch:  Oh yeah!. And when I got into a readings-in-great-literature course freshman year of college, I proudly quoted it during a discussion of Genesis. The teacher, apparently was not impressed with the depth of Dylan’s analysis. He just looked at me and moved on. But I do feel, and should have been able to say fifty-some-odd years ago, that the mix of pathos and duty with hipster jive here is quite effective.

Melvis: Here’s another I loved: “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you Mister Jones?”

Mitch:  Mr. Jones is a rather unattractive caricature of a journalist, no?

Melvis:  That song, Ballad of a Thin Man, was so confusing to me. I didn’t understand it at first, but I liked it. I thought the “thin man” was a man hallucinating on drugs. But yeah. And I don’t have an issue with the occasional funny dig at journalists. I thought the song was pretty hilarious.

      And a lot of the absurdity in Dylan masks the deeper themes, if you don’t look out for them.

Mitch:  Yeah, “masks.” Bob doesn’t reveal himself much, although the man who is “lost in the rain in Juarez” in “Desolation Row” is certainly going through a depression.

      Kendrick seems more open about his various psychological instabilities. Maybe that’s because we live in more open times today.

      What did you feel were Dylan’s deeper themes?

Melvis:  Characters resigned to their situations, and being powerless to stop the terrible things that are happening around them. There seem to be allusions to the Vietnam War.

      And I think a lot of it is about working-class America. There’s one song, “Tombstone Blues,” about his mother being in a factory, and she “ain’t got no shoes.”

Mitch:  I read that line about lacking shoes as more surreal than tragic. But you may be onto something. Both Bob and Kendrick seem most comfortable at the deep end. They were bright, curious, alert young fellows open to, soaking in and struggling with what was around them—political, philosophical, personal and artistic as well as musical.  

      Dylan was clearly influenced by the jazzy, word-drunk effusions of the Beat poets. Here’s Allen Ginsburg, from his poem “Howl”:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
        madness, starving hysterical naked

      A proto-music video Dylan helped make for a song on his previous album—a film in which Ginsburg appears—makes that debt to the beatniks clear.

      And, at his best, Dylan could cobble together a stanza—and here the subject clearly is depression—about as good as any of those Beat poets could fashion:

            Right now I can't read too good
              Don't send me no more letters, no.
              Not unless you mail them
              From Desolation Row

      However, I must admit that the 1940s, driving be-bop in the 2015 Kendrick Lamar song “For Free” (caution highly explicit lyrics) on To Pimp a Butterfly is jazzier and more word-drunk than anything Dylan has ever crafted.

         How do you think Dylan’s lyrics differ from rap lyrics. Both certainly stick to rhyme?

Melvis: I think a big difference between Dylan’s lyrics and those of Kendrick and some other really skilled rappers, is that the rappers seem to be riding the beat. Like their flow is connected perfectly to the instrumental. At times Bob Dylan feels like he’s talking and there’s a band playing behind him.”

Mitch:  Interesting. While I love the tunes on Highway 61 Revisited. I can see—hear, actually—that criticism.

      While Dylan brought something mostly new and rather revolutionary to pop song lyrics—seriousness, poetry—his taste in music has, I have to admit, been mostly retrograde. His great move forward in 1965 was back to the blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

     Indeed, Lamar has been a great adventure for me musically. I loved, for example, the propulsive, chug-a-chug drum-and-bass of his “King Kunta,” which seems powerful enough in the video to pull a whole neighborhood through time.

      Some bigtime blues guys played on Highway 61: guitarist Mike Bloomfield, for example. I see some bigtime musicians played on Pimp a Butterfly: the pianist Robert Glasper, for example. Dylan’s musicians did what they wanted. And that works great here: they all were exploring this new musical territory with him. But my sense is that Lamar’s musicians do what he asks them to try.

      Lamar’s songs, in other words, seem produced—arranged, assembled, worked out. Dylan—to the frustration of many of his producers—seems satisfied if they are just played.

      In some ways, a more apt comparison for Lamar—musically—would be the Beatles, when they were making Revolver.

      And I should acknowledge my amazement that Kendrick Lamar is able to rap so really, really fast. Is there a name for that?

Melvis:  There’s probably a name for it, but I just call it “rapping fast.” Some rappers rap fast just to show off that they can, but I feel like Kendrick actually has a purpose when he does it.

Mitch:  There don’t seem many borrowed snatches and riffs, which I associate with rap, on this record.

Melvis:   There are. The samples and quotes on the album go way back. Some are from the 1970s. This video collects them. But Kendrick changes, alters a lot of them.

Mitch:  I expected to hear a lot more nastiness from Kendrick, especially since there have been all these very public feuds—between Kendrick and Drake in particular.

Melvis:  I don’t think Kendrick is mean. Eminem was the dude who just randomly attacked everyone.

      But rappers do this all the time. It’s one of the most fun aspects of hip hop.

      And Kendrick attacks himself more than he does anyone else, honestly. Calls himself a hypocrite. Talks about not being there for his family enough.

Mitch:  Back in the late 20th century, postmodernists often championed the power of pastiche—the assembly of unlike elements—in painting, theater or other media. I kept waiting for that technique to find its way into rock ‘n’ roll music, where I thought it would be particular effective as a way of capturing, often through irony, some of the twists and tangles of our postmodern lives.

      Well, pastiche had apparently found its way—with great effect—into hip hop. I had just not been listening. It is all over this record.

      If you click on Lamar’s videos, do be prepared for some scantily clad women and braggadocio. That is often, as we know, a feature of the genre—a genre he is involved in critiquing and changing.        

      And I am happy to acknowledge Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly as a world-class pastiche master as well as a record maker of the highest order.

Melvis:  And I want to make it clear that, while I think this is his best album, the ones before and after this are still incredible.

Melvis:  The album after this one. Damn., won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. It was the first non-jazz or classical album to do so.

Mitch:  And, of course, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some support in these two awards for the obsession we each have with one of these guys and the value of also listening to the other one.