Flow like a superhero, sting like a Killer Bee: The Hip Hop--Comic Book Nexus

Jason Lee Oakes – IASPM-US meeting, Chapel Hill, 2014

On the classic 1995 —pictured here in the center square with cover art by Milestone Comics’ Denys Cowan—the GZA weaves together dense narratives that explore a unique space between urban street stories and mystical Eastern exoticism,

(something like the rap equivalent to Dr. Strange from the Marvel Comics universe). The central concept of the album, quoting GZA himself, is “being lyrically sharp, flowing like liquid metal,” with his words likened to the fabled head-chopping liquid sword of the title.

The theme of my paper today is the shared liquidity of hip hop and comic books—and the liquidity between them. Comic book references are omnipresent in hip hop lyrics, and sometimes serve as basis for entire personas, alter-egos, and concept . Take for example Jean Grae, MF Doom and his many offshoots, Ghostface as Tony Starks,

Jay-Z’s Kingdom Come, ’s (his project with 7L and ), and so on. These crossovers reach back to the earliest days of hip hop, such as when

Superman makes appearances in “To The Beat” by Lady B, “Funk You Up” by the

Sequence, and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” Taking it to the visual realm, hip hop’s founding fathers— Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa

& Soul Sonic Force—often dressed like a band of otherworldly superheroes.

Taking it back to very birth of hip hop itself at Kool Herc’s house parties, one finds

Clark Kent incarnate. According to Herc’s sister, Cindy Campbell, Clark Kent was one of the first b-boys, a young man who “wore glasses and looked like Clark Kent,” who ruled the floor with “a dance he did called the Superman, like he was flying, actually dancing and flying.” This ability to transmutate, creating a powerful alter-ego through transcendent fantasies of power, is perhaps the key link between comics and hip hop from which all other their similarities stem.

In an interview published last year, Fab 5 Freddy described his childhood love for comic books and for the first major black superhero—the Black Panther—a character from the fictional African country of Wakanda, the world’s only producer of vibranium, a metal that gains mystical energy by absorbing vibrations.

Likewise, Fab 5 absorbed the energy of comic books and fed them into his graffiti and hip hip advocacy: “the whole comic-book concept of adapting this alterative persona was a big inspiration on the development of hip-hop culture…Since I’m the fastest DJ,

I’m going to call myself Grandmaster Flash. You’d create this alternative urban superhero personal who could do all the cool things you fantasize about doing—graffiti or rap or break-dancing.” Exhibit two is DMC of Run-DMC. Once a self-described “shy kid” who was picked on and teased in school, he related to characters like Spiderman and Superman. From his own account, Peter Parker and Clark Kent assuaged his sense of shame and inspired him to take on the role of superhero himself, a hero with

“Devastating Mic Control” (today he uses the acronym to stand for Daryl Makes

Comics, his own line of comic books).

Other parallels between comics and hip hop: 1) Both value a precise sense of place.

Physical settings and local lifeways are much more than mere backdrops; places often function as characters in in its own right. How many people know Compton thanks to

NWA, or know Asgard thanks to Thor?

Not only that, but places are routinely remade in these two worlds—on one hand, the

Boogie Down Bronx, Strong Island, Shaolin, the Dirty South, etc. and on the other hand—Smallville, Metropolis, Gotham; the latter two are of course stand-ins for New

York City, the birthplace of both comic books and hip hop.

2) Historically, both forms, with notable exceptions, have been the domain of boys and young men. Neither is known for being terribly progressive when it comes to gender roles and treatment of sexuality (again, exceptions abound).

3) Both fly in the face Romantic individualism; instead, they constantly highlight the role of collaboration and contingency, with shifting configurations between artists and slippage between roles. Much like the split between writers and illustrators (including pencillers, inkers, colorists) in comics, is created in the sonic space between MC lyricists and musical “colorists”—not only DJs but also producers, beatmakers, turntablists, and so on.

And finally, 4) both for have suffered for their low social status and association with marginalized communities—Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, in the first case, and in the second, black inhabitants of post-industrial spaces that had largely been written off in the 70s and early 80s. In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent, using pseudo-science to link juvenile delinquency to comic books. The US Senate stepped in, and the industry was forced to self regulate—forming the CCA, or Comics Code Authority, to place their seal of approval on acceptable comics. In 1987, Tipper Gore, a BA in psychology, published Raising PG

Kids in a X-Rated World. The book took aim at various musical genres, but its effects were felt most strongly in hip hop. Again, congressional hearings followed along with a fun new acronym—the PMRC—while the industry policed its products with a seal of disapproval on unacceptable records.

The rest of the paper will be based around a case study of ’s 2013 project, . All of the above factors—locale, gender trouble, collaboration, marginalization, and boundary-pushing content—come into play in this project, plus some other watery factors which I’ll analyze shortly.

The genesis of 12 Reasons was an idea by the Wu-Tang Clan’s producer and spiritual leader, the RZA to do a crossover hip hop and comic book project. Perhaps due to his time spent composing and executive producing film scores, the project took on a cinematic scope from the beginning. The RZA went on to form a team of writers, graphic artists, musicians, and Ghostface himself in the starring role as MC, lyrcist, and subject of the 6-part comic book series.

Instead of going for marquee name writers, RZA chose the Ashcan Comics team—

Patrick Kindlon and Matthew Rosenberg—a former punk rocker and music video director and publicist, respectively, who worked hand in hand with the musicians in shaping the story. Kindlon and Rosenberg then contracted twenty acclaimed upcoming artists—each with their own distinctive visual style—to draw panels, covers, and transition splashes.

Structurally, the 12 songs on Ghostface’s 12 Reasons album is mirrored by the 12 parts of the comic—each of the six books is divided into 2 distinct section—with the artistic style shifting noticeably, often radically, between each of the 12 parts, just as the musical backing shifts between each musical track.

On the musical end, RZA fills the roles of executive producer and, on some tracks, narrator—the aural equivalent of the invisible comic book narrator. Adrian Younge and his band Venice Dawn were hired to write and record the music. Once a hip hop producer, in the late 1990s Younge began to explore live instrumentation, simulating the music he loved to sample—classic soul, Spaghetti Westerns, Italian giallo soundtracks, and psychedelic rock. His breakthrough came when he was chosen to compose the score and write songs for Black Dynamite (2009). The blaxploitation parody and homage is so uncanny that it seems to have entered the blaxplotation canon itself— with Younge’s music a key element in its success (in 2012, the Cartoon Network aired a full-season animated spin-off with a second season due to air later this year).

The narrative of 12 Reasons to Die is an origin story—a storytelling genre beloved by comic book readers and writers—that fits neatly into the existing Ghostface Killah narrative. Each issue of 12 Reasons is split into two parts—the first part following a man named Tony Starks in 1970s Italy; the second part follows a young crate-digging DJ named Migdal who’s been hired to track down 12 records under mysterious circumstances. Tony Starks is, of course, the non-superhero name of Iron Man with an appended “s”, and also, the alter-ego Ghostface Killah frequently inhabits in song lyrics stretching back to 1996’s Iron Man. In the story, Starks is an enforcer for the fictional

DeLuca crime family in Italy. Owing to the family’s nepotism and racism, the twelve bosses refuse to promote Starks despite the fact that he’s their most ruthless and invaluable soldier. When Starks splits off and starts his own crew, taking over much of the DeLuca business in the process, the twelve conspire to have him murdered. They draw Starks to a record pressing plant—a plant Starks has purchased in an attempt to go legit—kill him and melt his body into a vat of vinyl to hide the evidence, pressing twelve records out of his remains as a demented souvenir. The punch line is that whenever one of the records is played, the “Ghostface Killah” of Tony Starks is animated and brutally slays one of the twelve bosses. A couple decades later, the crate digger is hired to track down the haunted slabs of vinyl, resulting in lovingly rendered bloodshed and mayhem when the needle is dropped on each record in turn.

It’s a telling image: melted down into records, the merging of man and music, total immersion into sound. It’s also a telling metaphor for the plasticity of hip hop as a genre—continually reviving, reimagining, and reshuffling sounds from the past. Those sounds are melted into the present, not necessarily to wreak bloody havoc, thought there is a metaphorically violent reclamation at work in hip hop, forcibly stealing back the sounds that were stolen from cultural antecedents.

Adding comic books to the 12 Reasons mix reinforces this free flow of sound and time.

Just as hip hop aesthetics are based in the art of the remix, so too comics inhabit a liquefied time-space continuum. As fans are well aware, popular characters and storylines are often subject to retelling—with all manner of parallel universes and retcons (retroactive continuity, the altering of previously-established facts in a story’s continuity), not to mention frequent character and story reboots and the alternate universes known as multi-verses. In other words, stories are rarely linear or singular.

They are told backwards and forwards and sideways, layer building upon layer. In comics and hip hop, it’s left up to readers and listeners to assemble the fragments for themselves. This fluidity makes each form inherently participatory to a certain extent.

And from cosplay to cyphering—the participatory nature of both comics and hip hop has bled over into the fan cultures built around them.

Comic book writer/artist/scholar Scott McCloud offers a theory on the structural basis of comic book “participation”:

In comic book parlance, “closure” refers to the act of creating a coherent whole out of individual parts—finding the story between the static set of panels. Writers and illustrators tend to follow established conventions to create a sense of closure. In

Understanding Comics, McCloud’s 1993 comic book analyzing how comic books work, he points out the crucial role of the gutter as “host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics.”

The gutter is the negative space between the frames. A solid line marks a clear boundary, with empty space left between each individual frame. In McCloud’s view, it’s this empty space that leaves room for the reader’s imagination. Take the top two frames above—most viewers would guess that the shriek in the second frame is a sound made by the man in the first frame. This much must be inferred, but even given this inference, it’s up to the reader to imagine the violence that took place between the frames and the circumstances behind it. Quoting McCloud doppelganger, “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.”

Ultimately, then, the task of providing closure is the responsibility of the reader. For instance, take the following sequence of panels from book two of Twelve Reasons To Die

(see next page). Here, the hired-gun record digger Migdal is seen approaching a feast celebration after leaving confession with a Catholic priest. The gutter between panels two and three implies that the record digger, Migdal, is watching the party’s DJ drop the needle on a record. In the series of panels, Migdal reenters the church and calls the priest by an unfamiliar name—implying a hidden identity at play; one can guess from previous action that he’s a DeLuca though it’s never stated. A posse of ghosts appear on the next page; it can be inferred form what came before that the ghosts were victims of the gangster-turned priest. The last frame of the second page is rather impressionistic, comprised only of shattered glass and a splatter of blood. On the third page, a single full-page illustration, the priest’s lifeless body lies at the base of the church in a crucifix pose pierced by glass from the stained window. Some of the shards magically spell out a biblical quote, "Ecce Homo” or “behold the man”, words spoken by Pontius Pilate.

Very little of what I’ve described is directly represented. The reader is never explicitly told the priest is one of the twelve dons or that Michael set him up, or that the record is one of the twelve made of Starks’ remains. You don’t even see the priest take his fall. All of these bits of information and action are made real through the mental work of the viewer—through closure. The reader/listener can also draw additional layers of closure in the spaces between the comic and the album, filling in blanks left by the comic— it does little to convey the emotional states of Tony Starks or his internal though processes

–and the blanks left by Ghostface Killah who never gets around to describing the individual DeLucas or the details of each murder. Instead, on “Murder Spree” he enumerates various gory methods he could use to enact his revenge, drawing on a watery metaphor: “there’s a dozen ways to die, six million ways to do it / Let’s go through it, my mind flow like fluid.”

So what is the musical equivalent to the comic book’s grammar of closure? In hip hop, I would argue that it’s flow. At the 2012 Comic Con in New York, Jean Grae—the respected female MC named after the X-Men character Jean Grey—revealed how comics have inspired her creative process, comparing bars (the word denoting a single measure of music) to comic book panels. Both provide the writer with a marked off box of space or time to put across words and actions; and both depend on nuances of pacing and flow. It’s an uncanny observation. A musical form first conceived as snippets of recorded sound assembled in sequence—Kool Herc’s original merry-go-round, with “The

Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” being the best-known recorded example—reminds me of panels like the ones pictured on the next page.

Whereas once the practice of looping breaks became the norm, especially in the digital sampling era—a lot of rap music started to resemble evenly spaced panels with clearly marked boundaries, with the panels/bars distinguished by the varied illustrations and dialogue contained within.

Throw in some scratching and you’ve got the musical to “motion blur”—multiple images and streaking effects that indicate movement.

Just as comics stitch together continuity out of individual panels—with closure required from the reader—in hip hop, the MC stiches together bars while DJs and producers stich together grooves, samples, and beats, juxtaposing and looping these musical units into a continuous musical texture. The flow thus created is at the heart of hip hop aesthetics. The MC flows in sync with the DJ’s beat. Drawing on simile, metaphor, and signifyin’ speech, the meaning of one word flows into another. Drawing on various forms of rhyme and other poetic devices, each line flows into the line before and/or after.

Drawing on sampling, quotation, and interpolation, familiar sounds and language flow into and out of previous iterations. Thus flow is the direct equivalent to closure in comic book aesthetics. And in a project like Twelve Reasons To Die, the parallels are directly observable, allowing us to witness what happens when the groove meets the gutter.

Let’s listen now to the “Brown Tape” version of 12 Reasons To Die—in yet another layer of fluid dialogue, the entire album was re-assembled by Detroit-based producer Apollo

Brown (only Ghostface’s vocals are preserved) on a special Record Store Day cassette release. The new version proved so popular it’s since been released on record and MP3.

The following excerpt from track 8, “Rise of the Ghostface Killah” comes right after

Tony Starks is melted down and transformed into Ghostface Killah. [PLAY 0:27 – 0:48]

The beat, enhanced by a crackling dirty vinyl effect—trading off the gutter between digital and analog technologies—is overlaid by a plodding piano part, or rather, a chopped piano line. Almost no one would mistake the repeated chords for someone actually playing a piano. Its clipped attack and unnatural delay easily give it away, deliberately so, and you clearly hear the space between each repeated sample. In other words, the gutter is clearly audible—the same effect can be heard in the vocal sample on the album-opening “Beware of the Stare” and, indeed, throughout the album—creating a tension that’s bolstered by Ghostface’s fast-charging, revenge-fixated verse. [PLAY instrumental version] On “Rise,” the opening transformer scratch featuring the late Ol’

Dirty Bastard, taking from Wu-Tang’s “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”, draws on another type of gutter, riding the groove between Wu-Tang’s past and Ghostface in the present.

By chopping up the piano chords, no doubt applying other sound filters and blatantly pitch-shifting the chords at certain points, the resultant sound is deliberately abstracted.

One hears not a piano but a “piano.” This process, too, has an equivalent in comics, for drawing are by their very nature abstracted, deliberately stylized, visual representations.

Scott McCloud notes how abstraction in comic book art doesn’t “so much eliminate detail” as it “focuses [attention] on specific details” in a way that photo-realistic art can’t.

From this McCloud concludes that cartooning is less a way of drawing than a way of seeing, and many a crate-digger would no doubt agree that hip hop is more a way of hearing music than anything.

Moving briefly to the Adrian Young production of 12 Reasons, let’s listen to a snippet of the opening track, “Beware of the Stare.” While Young uses live instrumentation, he uses these instruments to simulate sample- and loop-based music making. Note here the stutter step at the end of the first two bars—the effect sounds like a skipping record, but it’s actually a product of the musician playing two measures in 5/4, that is, a grouping of five beats instead of four. This is a rare meter to hear in 4/4-dominated hip hop, adding a sense of tension as the asymmetrical meter rub up against Ghostface’s flow. [PLAY 0:42 – 0:55] This means that, on the “Brown Tape” which sticks to a straight

4/4 meter throughout, Ghostface’s flow is completely altered since his relationship to the musical backing is changed, with different words falling on the downbeats between the two versions, creating a unique rhythm impact in each case.

*****

In conclusion, my next goal with this research is to look at the socio-cultural conditions behind the shared hip hop--comics aesthetic, and to bring ethnography into the picture.

For as much as hip hop owes to superheroes in comic books, it owes an equal debt to what Robert Reich calls super-capitalism. The unleashed Id of unregulated, neoliberal economics—with its erratically expanding and contracting financial bubbles—serves as the scientific experiment gone awry in the hip hop origin story, thus lending the first superheroes of rap music their great and terrible powers.

Leftovers

So how we can break it down? I think Scott McCloud gives us a great model to follow.

First and foremost, “flow” is judged by how well an MC, DJ, or producer creates continuity from one bar to the next, i.e., moment-to-moment. If they are judged to lack this ability, the creation of other types of flow don’t even come into effect since an awkward flow—in hip hop or in comics—is equivalent to kryptonite. In the context of a commercially-released album, non-commercial mixtape, live performance or DJ set, they create flow from track to track. This is somewhat equivalent to action-to-action closure in comic books, if each track is viewed as an “action”. The third type of flow in hip hop is something like scene-to-scene closure—the hip hop artist seeks to create continuity between his or her various expressive actions—recordings, live performances, visual self-presentation, graphic iconography, music videos, press coverage and other publicity, social media presence, and so on—creating a coherent persona for the consumers who connect the various dots. And finally, in creating subject-to-subject continuity, the sounds, words, and actions of the hip hop artist are interpreted and judged in terms of how they resonate with their crew, their scene, their city, and certain strands in hip hop as a whole.