Road Scholars

In 1984, rap’s first theorist, T La Rock, declared the universality
of hiphop. The music and culture was not his, nor the Bronx’s, nor New
York City’s. Whose was it? “People of the universe, this is yours!” As far as T La Rock was concerned, if you
liked it, desired it, and promised to fun/funk it, it was yours to
have. From the luminous center of this universality, its openness to
all who desire to use the music, hiphop radiated to L.A., Rio de
Janeiro, Paris, Stuttgart, Dakar, Seoul, and Cape Town. Hiphop not only
radiated globally but also culturally. House of Pain connected hiphop
to the narratives of working-class Irish Americans, the great Mountain
Brothers connected it to the inner-city realities of Asian Americans,
and K’naan to the difficulties that confront African immigrants in big
North American and European cities.

Enter Seattle’s Common Market. The last two CDs (Black Patch
War and Tobacco Road) by rapper RA Scion and beat-maker
Sabzi have gone all the way back to the rural regions of Kentucky,
connecting hiphop to the history and hardships of white tobacco
farmers. This is the greatness of hiphop: It can go to any social
situation and give that situation a powerful voice. If the music
was limited to the content of, say, one group (black Americans), in one
specific class and geographic position (the Bronx), then the album
Tobacco Road could not be what it is: a convincing work of
hiphop.

“Yeah, some people look at the CD cover,” says RA Scion over lunch,
“they see these white farmers and tractor and shit and they think
something’s wrong. But that’s family. Those are my uncles and aunts.
Those are the people I grew up with in Kentucky.”

On Common Market’s first album, RA Scion focused on the state of the
local hiphop scene, the history of hiphop (recognizing the Bronx as the
point of origin), radical/socialist politics, and a global humanism
directed by his spiritual commitment to the Baha’i faith, a
metareligion that has as its basis the same kind of universalism found
in the words “It’s yours.”

Tobacco Road turns away from the global to look back at the
family and early experiences that shaped the core of RA Scion’s being.
Like the words of the old church hymn, “this is my story, this is my
song,” on Tobacco Road, RA Scion is telling his story in song.
The story is about his parents, uncles and aunts, their rural
community, and the economic and emotional pressures that challenged the
everyday life of this community. Often the challenges were too much,
people gave up, lost control of their property and minds, lost all
hope, went to jail, dissolved into alcoholism, or committed suicide as
did three members of RA Scion’s family.

Though he describes the class struggle between small farmers and big
tobacco, the album is more personal than political. “Why did I do this
record? Because I worked in the tobacco fields,” explains RA Scion. “I
grew it, set it, cut it, housed it, pressed it, and took it to auction.
That’s me. That’s who you are looking at. And it was in Kentucky, in
this community, that I started listening to hiphop and writing
rhymes.”

When one thinks of Kentucky, one instantly pictures the sort of
people who are bitter, racist, and “cling to their guns and religion.”
Tobacco Road gives expression to the other side of that world,
the side that’s exploited, oppressed by the law, and frequently suffers
from bouts of bad luck. “Last year drought took the crops, now facin’
floods/Staples on the table ain’t enough, what we scrapin’ up will/Go
to pay the bank back, partial payment—take that/Life in dire
straits will make a stark-raving maniac/Tapped a fifth of vodka, kicked
her hard enough to break a rib/Shhh—keep quiet, too much cryin’
she gon’ wake the kids,” raps RA Scion on “Weather Vane.” Tobacco
Road, in short, is a salvaging project. It wants to salvage the
important and good moments of a way of life that is by no means
easy.

DJ Sabzi provides the song for RA Scion’s story. For this project,
Sabzi’s beats are not heavy or slamming but spaced out, giving RA Scion
all the room he needs to reach the right emotional register for his
long walks down memory lane—the old tobacco road. Above and below
these spare and spacious beats, Sabzi conjures melodic atmospheres and
jazzy vibes, mellow and often melancholy piano loops. The music recalls
hiphop’s most aesthetic moment, the mid ’90s, a period dominated by the
beautiful beats of Mic Geronimo (“Masta I.C.”), Diamond D (“Sally Got a
One Track Mind”), and MC Solaar (“Message de l’Ange”). It’s also an
aesthetic (a beauty) that defined Seattle’s post–Sir
Mix-A-Lot/pre–Blue Scholars hiphop—the music produced by
Source of Labor, Black Anger, Silent Lambs Project, and the Ghetto
Children aspired to a kind of vibraphonic ethereality; the beats were
slow because the rappers needed space to expresses difficult or complex
ideas.

On “Doors,” the last track of Common Market’s self-titled debut
album, RA Scion took us back to hiphop’s home, the “South Bronx, the
South, South Bronx,” the very place from which T La Rock declared to
the people of the universe, “This is yours.” On the last track of
Common Market’s new album, “Tobacco Road,” RA Scion takes us all the
way back to his actual home in Kentucky. “Doors” is a celebration of
hiphop history; “Tobacco Road” is a “remembrance of things past.”

“You know, my mother used to listen to my music just to hear my
voice, because I was far away from her,” says RA Scion. “But now she
listens because of the things I have to say. Her brother, my uncle, is
a racist. I know that. It’s all conditioning. But, you know, maybe one
day he will start listening to the things I’m saying on the record, and
that might change him.”