The Artist vs The Genre: Hear Us Raur

As I sit here scouring page results, I’m struck by the boundaries we attribute to some of our most progressive and liberal forms of music. Like a noir comic, we place hip-hop, electro and any other genre within frame with buzzwords like ‘whizz-bang’ and ‘blammo’ highlighting our juvenile attempts to categorize human expression. This is not a rant about genres but rather the way we put artists into genres. We force them into predefined roles and tell them to do what we expect them to. Two artists who I believe are breaking that mould, Childish Gambino and Raury, are both relatively young and both are looking to make some room in a saturated market.

 

Staying on my me shit, but hated on by both sides
I’m just a kid who blowing up with my father’s name
And every black “you’re not black enough”
Is a white “you’re all the same”
(Childish Gambino, That Power)

Like most albums, I found Camp took a few tries to really get in touch with it. A rocky start with Pitchfork awarding it a 1.6 rating didn’t help. While I admit I found some of the tracks lacking, ‘That Power’ really sold it for me. The song itself is petulant, begging you to punch it in the chin with Gambino’s voice calling out his haters from the get go. What follows is heavy on lyrics and loops, building upon Gambino’s chest-thumping, but isn’t this what we’ve come here to hear? It isn’t until the outro that you catch the real alloy within his crucible, the pared down monologue about leaving summer camp. This moment of clarity speaks volumes, that in the medium he has come to love he has turned it into a crutch.

“This isn’t a story about how girls are evil or how love is bad, this is a story about how I learned something and I’m not saying this thing is true or not, I’m just saying it’s what I learned. I told you something. It was just for you and you told everybody. So I learned cut out the middle man, make it all for everybody, always. Everybody can’t turn around and tell everybody, everybody already knows, I told them. But this means there isn’t a place in my life for you or someone like you. Is it sad? Sure. But it’s a sadness I chose.” (Childish Gambino – That Power outro)

Gambino does what we all want to do, he sounds a mighty yawp over the hills letting everybody know he is fucked off. Sweatpants follows in this same vein but it’s colder and more measured. The video is pared down and casual with no apologies and no conspicuous wealth. The lyrics are still angry but tired. Gambino has grown but the genre hasn’t grown with him.

Gambino isn’t alone in his challenge of the hip hop niche, with the likes of Aer, The Lonely Biscuits, Tyler the Creator and Doomtree all acting out in their own ways. Aer and The Lonely Biscuits preach ‘one love’ and beach parties, while Tyler flies full pelt into the face of political correctness. Even Doomtree have created their own brand with their sincere ‘collective’ spitting out line after line of unadulterated thought.

Enter Raury, who has three songs and one music video (at the time of writing). Raury has a wide-brimmed floppy hat. Raury considers himself an Indigo child. Raury is 17. Raury has by my estimation no defined genre. God’s Whisper mixes together guitars, chanting, drums and plain lyrics in a way which hearkens back to the turn of the century spirituals; a genre and generation of music which bred the blues and expressed the struggle of a life devoid of equality and freedom. That very same sense of power comes through in his music and demeanor. I find it almost uncanny how, while I was thinking about this article, Raury crashed the end of Childish Gambino’s tour with his own ‘Anti-tour’. In the name of progress and support this Atlanta-born artist travels around playing free gigs at the exits of his favorite artists’ shows as fans leave. He is a rambling man with ideas way beyond his tender age.

Raury – God’s Whisper Music video from Andrew Donoho on Vimeo.

With these artists questioning, changing and breaking the genres they are forced into, I feel drawn to their expressions as it is not God’s Whisper I hear but my own as they take my thoughts and emotions and realize them in a manner far braver and more honest than I ever could. This is why genres and tags are not enough. They convey a fraction of what an artist is capable of and if Larry King can respect the maker of the music instead of their genre, so can I.