How did Ray Charles feel about the rise of rap music?
When Ray Charles was singing ‘I Got a Woman’ back in 1958, there were plenty of god-fearing fans of jazz and gospel music who felt he’d gone too far; that the music was too simplified and too sexual with a sad shortage of sophistication.
Ray eventually made most dissenting opinions irrelevant, of course, as he went on to become one of the most revered performers of his generation. As is often the case with one-time rebels who grow into purveyors of the mainstream, however, even the ‘Genius of Soul’ couldn’t help himself from becoming ‘Old Man Yells at Cloud’ by the time he was 60.
“As a musician, what the hell can I learn from rap?” Charles told the Scripps-Howard News Service when asked about the rising popularity of rap and hip-hop in 1990. “I mean, honestly now. I can read. I can write. I used to write songs, as I’m sure you know. So what does it mean to me to say ‘I wanna-sa-za-da-anna-buzz-a-buss-za-ba-dah?!’”
My instant assumption in reading that quote is that Brother Ray must have just stumbled upon the classic 1990s hip-hop jam ‘Rump Shaker’ by Wreckx-N-Effect, which features the legendary chorus: “All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom / In a pum pum, just shake ya rump.” But no! ‘Rump Shaker’ didn’t come out until 1992 – two years after Charles shared his thoughts about rap music. So we’re left to assume that Ray’s use of rattled-off nonsense words was just his generic interpretation of any old rap song.
“I want to see some kids that are coming up that can play something or sing something that I will have to stand up and take notice and say, ‘Aw, what was that?’” Charles continued. “I don’t hear that, man. Everything I hear now is stuff that I could do when I was nine years old.”
If nothing else, you have to admire Ray Charles’ willingness to trash-talk the youngsters during a period in his career when it would have made more financial sense to make nice with them. Even when he did make the commercially wise decision to record an album of duets with younger artists in 2003, most of his guests were fellow jazz and blues vocalists, and many weren’t even that much younger: Norah Jones, Gladys Knight, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, BB King, etc.
As it turned out, that collabs project, titled Genius Love Company, would be the last studio album of Charles’ career. Released in 2004, the same year Charles died at the age of 73, the album paired up on the calendar with the release of the Jamie Foxx-led biopic Ray, launching a posthumous popular revival for Charles’ music. This, in turn, helped inspire a then up-and-coming Chicago rapper named Kanye West to feature a prominent sample from Ray’s ‘I Got a Woman’ in his new track ‘Gold Digger’, complete with a Jamie Foxx cameo.
Ray never got to hear ‘Gold Digger’ nor enjoy the earnings it presumably rolled into his estate, so we’ll never know his opinion on the hip-hop-ification of his own groove. To be fair to the man, though, he was always wise enough to understand that some things with musical taste just come down to when you were born and little else.
“You have to understand,” Charles concluded in 1990, “I came up with real bass players, real trombone players, real trumpet players… so naturally I lean toward the real sound. If I was a kid coming up today, I might lean more towards the synthetic music, because that’s the ‘in’ thing today.”
