The rap star that David Bowie had nothing but respect for: “The beats are insane”
David Bowie has set the standards for a music career that evolves through genres.
Despite his somewhat speculative foray into drum and bass around the millennium, Bowie proved time and time again artistic legacy lies in the ability to evolve. Never did he rest on his laurels of success, be it with Space Oddity, his time as Ziggy Stardust or later in the 1970s with his Berlin Trilogy, instead he would shed whatever creative skin he had developed and move on to the next idea before it was trendy.
So come the 1990s, when a burgeoning movement of hip-hop began to commercialise, he was one of the best placed musicians to defend its legitimacy, to those narrow-minded critics who saw it as a threat to whatever ‘traditional guitar music’ was supposed to be.
Because, despite hip-hop’s obvious innovation towards the end of the 20th century and into the millennium, the ugly head of traditionalism would continuously appear to tread down on its legitimacy. Systemic prejudices combined with an unwillingness to accept sonic innovation meant that artists like Outkast, A Tribe Called Quest and Missy Elliott, were rarely legitimised.
Bowie noticed this cultural indifference and more precisely, the media’s reluctance to recognise hip-hop and said, “I think that the white generation has come of age and are part of the administration now, the people who brought rock ‘n’ roll to us in its white form. I think the quality and the significance of the social message has moved very much fundamentally to the black and Hispanic market. And that’s where the new force of music is coming from. With Black music, there’s a very strong social point to make. There’s a means of discovery and a purpose.”
When it came to naming the artists who define that shift, Bowie was never shy. While OutKast took up most of his attention in press appearances, it was Missy Elliott who garnered most of his respect.
Speaking of her 2003 record, This Is Not A Test! Bowie said, “You can’t fault the work that Missy does.” Adding, “There are some astounding technical achievements on that record, and the beats are insane, and she really is fantastic. I have nothing but respect for what she does. But my world is much more ambient and a little bit more wordy, but in a different way. There’s always an otherness to the music that I gravitate toward.”
It’s likely his praise for her rhythmic techniques was aimed towards tracks like ‘Pass That Dutch’ and ‘Let It Bump’, which together completely flipped the conventions of songwriting. While the former saw Elliott ride a beat delivered merely only by handclaps, the latter gave her a groovy albeit inconsistent backbone that her rapping had to constantly elude. It was as Bowie rightly pointed out, a masterclass in technique.
Artists like Elliott, and Outkast influenced Bowie to have a respect for the genre and all of its cultural representation that ensured he would be a defender of it but not an adopter. In an interview with The Denver Post, he expressed “hip-hop, it’s just not my world. I’m not about to be doing an album with Q-Tip.”
