“It’s not music”: Jerry Garcia believed hip-hop had no good musicians
Any great musician usually needs to put in a certain amount of hours before everything starts coming naturally. Anyone can dream about the day when they can have their name in lights and be able to have millions of people screaming their name, but it’s harder to get to that point if you aren’t picking up the instrument every day and being inspired by whatever strikes you at the moment. Jerry Garcia may have been one of the few who was forever in tune with what he wanted to play, but he knew that not everyone who reached the top of the charts was the cream of the crop, either.
When looking at how Grateful Dead started, though, Garcia wasn’t looking to be strictly one genre until the end of time. Despite the band building up the reputation of being the kind of hippie band that anyone could listen to, there was no guarantee for where any of their songs could go, whether it was a bluegrass style tune or throwing in some bluesy bends into the mix as well.
Because what Garcia did with his music was ever-evolving. He was never interested in being one of the greatest artists to walk the Earth, and while he could play the guitar well, it was always about him working as a guide for the rest of the band whenever he played rather than relying on the same old scales to get him through a solo. And when he did find time to play what he felt, it felt like he was talking through his instrument.
By the time the band reached their final albums in the early 1990s, though, rock was starting to give way to other styles of music, and rap was the first one to truly dominate the conversation outside of the pop sphere. Most people had treated the genre like a novelty most of the time, but as soon as people like Chuck D and Run-DMC started making waves, fans realised that the genre had much more to say than moving the beat along. This was a global movement, but that didn’t mean everyone had to like it.
“It’s okay, I have no problem with it, but it’s not music, and people who tend to get great at rap are not great musicians.”
Jerry Garcia
Throughout rap’s first wave, there were already people thinking that the genre was going to die out as a passing fad, with most people saying that it wasn’t for them. While Garcia was never one to have any malicious feelings towards any type of music, he simply thought that the entire concept of rap wasn’t good enough to stand alongside the other major genres coming up at the same time.
According to Garcia, none of the rappers he saw ever had a chance of making it big as a real musician, saying, “Rap is talking; it’s not music. It’s talking in metre and it’s got rhyme, [but] it’s not music. It’s okay, I have no problem with it, but it’s not music, and people who tend to get great at rap are not great musicians. There’s no road to get from rap to music. Music is something you can better and better at. I don’t know if you can do that with rap.”
Then again, many modern voices in hip-hop have shown that rap can go far beyond the primitive versions of the genre that came before. Artists like Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar have been able to spit over some of the most intricate beats of all time, and even if we aren’t talking about the best-selling artists, people like Mos Def and MF Doom have proven what can be done when someone starts bringing their unique sense of musicality to it by switching up the metre.
So while it’s easy to see where Garcia is coming from, given his background, the rise of rap comes from people with a different approach. They might not play instruments in the same way that everyone else does, but that never-ending creativity that comes from a great freestyle or finding the perfect sample is as important for music as a mind-bending guitar solo.
