590 lines
37 KiB
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590 lines
37 KiB
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| ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ |
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| | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | |
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| |________________________________________________________________| |
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|____________________________________________________________________|
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...presents... Hip-Hop Primer #2
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Part 1 of 2 by Mark Dery
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>>> a cDc publication.......1991 <<<
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-cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc-
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______________________________________________________________________________
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American pop music is in bad shape. Stagnant, strangled by commercialism,
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it has fattened itself at the table of mediocrity, while the public feeds on
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scraps left over from distant eras of musical plenty. With more and more stars
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warbling sweetly in praise of soft drinks, with more and more college radio
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darlings dishing up folksy gruel, with more and more doddering prog rockers
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back from the grave to haunt them, kids all over America are itching for
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something loud and rude and ragged. Something like early Elvis. Something
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like Hendrix or the Sex Pistols.
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Something like... rap.
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Rap has what rock and roll desperately needs. It has sauce, strut, and
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soul. It has a big beat, and a message. It also has an image that many
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consumers can't abide. Tell ten white suburbanites you think rap is def,
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and nine will check to make sure their wallet is still there. (The tenth
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will smile sweetly and say, "What a pity. How long have you been hard of
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hearing?")
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This is unfortunate on many levels. In addition to the raising of old
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racial specters, mainstream ignorance also deprives mainstream culture of
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the energy of rap, and of the broader stimulus of the hip-hop culture to
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which rap is tied. For roughly ten years, even as such English acts as
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M/A/R/R/S and Wee Papa Girls have dipped freely into the wells of contemporary
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black music, white America has been turning itself out from the passionate
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eloquence of Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, L.L. Cool J, and the latest wave
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of innovators-Masters of Ceremony, Stetsasonic.
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Perhaps this will change. Perhaps the Beastie Boys will prove to be the
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Elvises of rap-the inevitable white catalysts necessary for exploding black
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music innovations into Anglo ears. But it has certainly taken long enough to
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put rap on the map. Rap has been around a long time. Longer than the six
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years since Grandmaster Flash recorded "The Message." Or the ten years since
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the Sugar Hill Gang set New York street rhymes to rhythm on vinyl.
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Arguably, rap is as old as black music itself. The African tribesman
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singing his "Song Of Self Praise" on _Bulu Songs From the Cameroon_ and the
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emcee puffing his chest out in Stetsasonic's "In Full Gear" have one thing in
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common: They're both rappers. Rap music, with its heavily accented drum
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patterns, its syncopated handclaps, and, most important, its vocals-chanted
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rather than sung, usually in rhymed couplets-is among the oldest of black
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musics. These underlying ideas of singsong, sometimes extemporaneous
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storytelling, sparse percussion, and stamping meters have survived the journey
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from the African savanna to the graffiti-scrawled projects of New York's South
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Bronx.
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AFRIKA BAMBAATAA: "You gotta remember that rap goes all the way back to
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Africa. There have always been different styles of rappin', from the African
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chants to James Brown to Shirley Ellis in the '60s doin' 'The Clapping Song.'
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There's Isaac Hayes, there's Barry White, there's Millie Jackson, that
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love-type rappin', and there's the Last Poets. And then there's your 'dozens,'
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that black people used to play in the '30s and '40s. The dozens is when you
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tryin' to put the other guy down, talkin' about his mama, his sister, his
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brother, sayin' it in rhyme. These days, rap is made up of funk, heavy metal,
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soca [soul calypso], African music, jazz, and other elements. You can do
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anything with rap music; you can go from the past to the future to what's
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happenin' now."
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The instrumentation has changed over the years, naturally. Where the
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hereditary minstrels of Morocco, Tunisia, and western Sudan accompanied
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themselves with stringed instruments, modern emcees are backed by drum
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machines, samplers, and turntable manipulation, or "scratching." But the
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hums, grunts, and glottal attacks of central Africa's pygmies, the tongue
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clicks, throat gurgles, and suction stops of the Bushmen of the Kalahari
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Desert, and the yodeling, whistling vocal effects of Zimbabwe's m'bira players
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all survive in the mouth percussion of "human beatbox" rappers like Doug E.
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Fresh and Darren Robinson of the Fat Boys. On Fresh's "The Original Human Beat
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Box," the Fat Boys' "Human Beatbox," Run-D.M.C.'s "Hit It Run," the intro to
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Stetsasonic's "Stet Troop '88," the fadeout of Biz Markie's "Make The Music
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With Your Mouth Biz," and dozens of other records, emcees use their mouths to
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emulate scratching, Simmons toms, gated snares, and sampled sounds.
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DARREN "HUMAN BEATBOX" ROBINSON, FAT BOYS: "That's still the best part of
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our concerts, when I do a 'human beatbox' solo. It lasts for about a minute,
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and our sound man beefs it up with delay so that it keeps going, doubles it. I
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used to live in Brooklyn, and my family didn't have much money. I wanted
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deejaying equipment like the other kids had, but I couldn't get it, so I just
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started playing the beat with my mouth. It just came naturally; I'd be
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standin' outside and I'd hear a record on the radio or somethin' like that, and
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I'd just try to play the beat with my mouth. People started likin' it. Then
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we won a rapping contest at Radio City Music Hall."
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Not only did rap play a vital role in African tribal life, but it appears
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in nearly every aspect of the Afro-American musical experience as well. The
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same emphatic rhymes, stuttering rhythms, and ribald, often downright raunchy,
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sense of humor that characterize today's rap records crop up in the work songs
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of the antebellum South, driven by the rhythms of a chopping axe, a pounding
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pestle, or the sad clink of prison chains. And the same responsorial
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vocalizing and "handclapping with offbeat syncopation" in the games of slave
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children that ethnomusicologist Ashenafi Kebede described in _Roots of Black
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Music_, would be right at home on any number of rap records. Early echoes of
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the genre can be heard in the moans and groans of gospel vocalists, the hoarse
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whoops of blues shouters, the expressionistic scatting of such jazz singers as
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Betty Carter, Eddie Jefferson, and Louis Armstrong, in doowop routines on
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streetcorners, in Bo Diddley belting "I'm a Man," in Chuck Berry wisecracking
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"No Money Down," in the jazz-backed recitations of Gil Scott-Heron.
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Not only that, but rap appears in non-musical contexts as well. Rap is
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the exhortations of tent show evangelists, put-down battles in Harlem pool
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halls, the slangy, scatological monologues of Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor,
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the sharp-tongued, tightly-rhymed speeches of Jesse Jackson, who, appropriately
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enough, is himself the subject of a 12"-"Run Jesse Run," sung by Lou Rawls,
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Phyllis Hyman, and the Reverend James Cleveland. Rap is Muhammed Ali reeling
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off rhymes about his opponents, Martin Luther King moving thousands to tears,
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Malcolm X pounding his fist in righteous fury. Rap even existed behind bars,
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in the poetic stories, or "toasts," that circulated among black prisoners. The
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practically unbroken line that leads from cellblock toasting to contemporary
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rapping is underscored dramatically by Schooly D's "Signifying Rapper," a cut
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from 1988's _Smoke Some Kill_ that gives a nod to one of the oldest and
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best-known toasts, "The Signifying Monkey."
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Two of the most obvious precedents for modern rappers are the hipsters of
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the '30s and '40s and the "personality jocks" of '40s, '50s, and '60s radio.
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The image of swing-era bandleader Cab Calloway decked out in a flapping zoot
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suit, whipping his long greasy forelock around and trading hepcat licks - "Look
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out, now... skipndigipipndibobopakoodoot!" - with his clarinet player speaks
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volumes about the connections between jive and rap. Calloway's best-know
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routine, "Minnie The Moocher," uses call-and-response "hi-de-hi-de-ho"s similar
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to the singer-audience interaction one hears at rap concerts. As British music
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writer David Toop notes in _The Rap Attack_, "Bandleaders like Cab Calloway
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occupied a role somewhere between the piano-playing leaders like Duke Ellington
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and Count Basie and the masters of ceremonies who used jive talk and rhyming
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couplets to introduce the acts-one of the strongest links with hip-hop, which
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started out with rappers talking on the microphone about the skill of the disc
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jockey." Toop offers a tongue-tangling monologue from one of those swing-era
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emcees, Ernie "Bubbles" Whitman, as evidence:
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"Yessirree, send me that ballad from Dallas.
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I'm floating on a swoonbeam.
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And right now to keep the beat bouncing right along,
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Here's a zootful snootful called 'Mr. Chips,'
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As it is fleeced and released by Billy Eckstine
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And his trilly tune-tossers. Toss it, Billy, toss it!"
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It's easy to see why rappers are still called emcees-"masters of
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ceremonies." Nearly every hip-hop group has an "M.C." somebody. One group-
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Masters Of Ceremony-even took its name from the genre that gave birth to
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bantering, back-talking word-spinners like Whitman. And it's probably no
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accident that one of Stetsasonic's three emcees goes by the handle Daddy-O,
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also the name of a Chicago deejay-Daddy-O Daylie-whose on-the-air patter
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rolled jive talk, jazz vocables, the jittery rhythms of bebop and the Mad
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Hatter humor of the reefer smoker into a House of Mirrors reflection of the
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English language. Daylie and disc jockeys like him-Al Benson ("The Midnight
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Gambler"), also out of Chicago, Maurice "Hot Rod" Hulbert out of Memphis, Dr.
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Hep Cat out of Austin, Dr. Daddy-O out of New Orleans, Douglas "Jocko"
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Henderson ("The Ace From Space") out of New York, and countless others-bridged
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the gaps between platters with machine-gunned syllables that came spitting
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through the static and into black living rooms across the States. It was
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greasier than ribs soaking through a brown paper bag, slicker than a snap-down
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fedora, hipper than a diamond stickpin in a handpainted necktie. It was black.
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It was raw. It was rap. And although payola scandals and changing tastes
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eventually brought down the jive jocks, their rat-a-tat rhymes, bawdy jokes,
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and onomatopoetic slang live on in the records of L.L. Cool J, M.C. Lyte, Dana
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Dane, Roxanne Shante, Big Daddy Kane, M.C. Shan, and many, many more.
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SULIAMAN EL-HADI, THE LAST POETS: "'Rap,' in our vernacular, just meant
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'talk,' like 'Dig this man. I wanna slide past your crib and rap with
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you.'"
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GRANDMASTER FLASH: "You gotta realize this: We don't want to sound like
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R&B or pop or jazz or calypso or opera; we wanna sound like us. And if that
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means taking an opera 'hit' with a funk foot and a jazz melody line and puttin'
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the whole ball of wax together with some rap on top of it, then that's what
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we've gotta do! And we're the only ones who can do it as blatantly as we do
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it. We might use a Roland bass drum with a James Brown snare and a Sly And the
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Family Stone melody line with an orchestra hit from an opera record, you know?"
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Since its beginnings in the early '70s, rap has been bootleg art. It
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is significant that the first rap record-"King Tim III (Personality Jock),"
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released on the Spring label in 1979 by a Brooklyn-based funk outfit called the
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Fatback Band, probably lifted its hooky chorus and tuneful bassline from Roy
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Ayres' "Running Away." And it is only fitting that a current rap hit like
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"Beat Dis" by Bomb The Bass amounts to a witty string of stolen sounds bouncing
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off an infectious bass riff and a pulverizing drumbeat. Gehr, in a May '88
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Artforum article, tallies some of the song's quotes: "The Dragnet theme, James
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Brown, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Hugo Montenegro playing Ennio Morricone's
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themes from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, the Bar-Kays' wah-wah guitar riff
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from Son Of Shaft... a Russian voice inviting the listener to play roulette...
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and a takeoff on BBC-style how-to records (swiped from a previous Coldcut
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disc)."
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MATT BLACK, Coldcut: "It's like the whole history of recorded sound is
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waiting there for us to murder."
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Like the Sex Pistols' scabrous deconstruction of Chuck Berry's "Johnny
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B. Goode," or Jimi Hendrix' splattery, spinart rendering of "The Star-Spangled
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Banner," Bomb The Bass' cut-up of funk, TV voice-overs, movie music,
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instructional records, and Prince questions all of our assumptions about music
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in specific and art in general. Is swiping other artists' riffs and
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recontextualizing them a stroke of dadaistic genius or a sign of conceptual
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bankruptcy? Is sampling, as Stetsasonic's Daddy-O suggests, a form of art in
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itself, or just a polite name for stealing? How you define "art," or whether
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you bother to define it, depends on whether you live in SoHo or the South Bronx
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_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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The South Bronx has a rat problem. Dubbed "super rats" by the media,
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these hearty rodents have developed a hereditary resistance to pesticides.
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According to one official, they can consume approximately ten times the amount
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of poison required to kill an ordinary rat. "They eat the back of the sofas,
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they eat the curtains," laments one interviewee in a recent television
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documentary. "They're bas big as cats. Some of 'em are as big as dogs." The
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camera eye follows a procession of big-bellied, long-tailed somethings
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squeaking and scuttling through the rubbish.
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Rats aren't the borough's only problem. Riding the Number 6 or Number
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2 IRT subway lines north past 149th Street, one flashes along elevated track,
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past cratered pavement, dilapidated roofs, and fire-gutted buildings whose
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broken windows stare blankly, the eyeless sockets of concrete skulls. A
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seemingly endless vista of projects, tenements, and potholed avenues littered
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with rusting car carcasses, this is the apocalyptic landscape that inspired
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Fort Apache: The Bronx. These are the rubble-strewn streets where Jimmy Carter
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and Ronald Reagan stopped and made long speeches about urban blight. And this
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is the birthplace of rap music.
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"Broken glass, everywhere, people pissing on the stairs,
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You know they just don't care.
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I can't take the smell, can't take the noise,
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Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.
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Rats in the front room, roaches in the back,
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Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat.
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I tried to get away but I couldn't get far,
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'cause the man from Prudential repossessed my car.
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Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge,
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I'm tryin' not to lose my head.
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It's like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder,
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How I keep from going under."
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--Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five,
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"The Message"
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In the '70s, when disco held sway and gold-neckchained nightclubbers
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packed Manhattan's Studio 54 and New York, New York, Grandmaster Flash-
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then Joseph Saddler-couldn't get past the doormen. Neither could fellow
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Bronx resident Afrika Bambaataa, Harlemite Kurtis Blow (born Curtis Walker),
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or hundreds of uptown teenagers like them. The glitterati had no desire to
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rub elbows with scruffy, streetwise youth.
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BILL ADLER: "The reason that Public Enemy called their first album Yo!
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Bum Rush The Show is because that's what they were forced to do-bum rush.
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See, the buppies are guarding the door to the disco. [Public Enemy emcee
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and main mouthpiece] Chuck D. and his crew roll up in sneakers and they're
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not going to be allowed to get in. Chuck says, 'Fuck it. We bum-rushin'!'
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Meaning, 'We're coming in anyway!'"
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D.M.C. [DARRYL MCDANIELS]: "When rap was startin 'with Grandmaster
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Flash and them, it was just before disco was dyin', around '73, '74. Us kids
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in the streets couldn't get into those places and everybody wanted to be a disc
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jockey, so we took our turntables to the streets. They had their discotheques
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and we had our discoparks."
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Kids headed for spinning parties in Harlem and the Bronx. There, in
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bars, community centers, after-hours clubs, gyms, old ballrooms, and public
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parks, mobile deejays, hired by promoters, worked the crowd with a bandleader's
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sense of pacing, slowing the mood with sultry ballads or revving things up with
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120-beats-per-minute sizzlers.
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Individual stars began to shine-jocks like Maboya, Eddie Cheeba, and
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Club 371 regular D.J. Hollywood, whose call-and-response exhortations and
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scat-style talkovers ["Hip, hop, de hip be de hop, de hiphop, hip de hop, on
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and on and on and on..."] made him an audience favorite.
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Kurtis Blow, then a student at New York's Music And Art High School,
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was a fan of Pete "D.J." Jones, a disco-style spinner who wowed crowds-not to
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mention fellow deejays-with his seamless segues. Jones, he recalls, was his
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"first role model," a smooth talker who "rocked the house better than anyone I
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ever saw." Meanwhile, Flash, ex-Black Spades gang member Bambaataa, and most
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of the teenage population of the South Bronx had fallen under the spell of a
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Jamaican-born jock who styled himself Kool D.J. Herc.
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Herc, whose given name was Clive Campbell, blew other deejays out of the
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dance hall with his megawatt McIntosh amplifier and gargantuan Shure speakers -
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towering cabinets he dubbed "the Herculords." Surrounded by gyrating dancers
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he tagged "B-boys"-a term that has come to refer to any black youth from the
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Big Apple who knows enough to wear his Puma laces untied and his Kangol hat at
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the right angle-Herc paved the way for rap. Eschewing the disco-derived
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practice of "blending," or fading smoothly from one 12" to another, Herc kept
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the dance floor at a sticky-sweaty peak by playing only the "breaks"-the
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timbale figures, conga or bongo triplets, cowbell accents and butt-funky howls
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that boomed across the mix when the other instruments dropped out. By slapping
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the same record on two turntables, re-cueing one while the other played, he was
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able to turn instrumental passages that were only a few bars in length into
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sweat-drizzled, hour-long workouts. The audience loved it.
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GRANDMASTER FLASH: "The deejay, in rap, takes the best part of the record
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and just keeps cutting it back and forth, back and forth, until he decides to
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change the record. The deejays who were popular in the streets were the ones
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who knew how to read a crowd. All you have is records and two turntables to
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play with, so you gotta consider what records you should start with, what
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records you should use to slowly build, which ones will take them to the
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orgasmic state, and then how you can bring 'em back down."
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Sadly, Herc has faded into obscurity. His career went into a tailspin
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after he was stabbed by an audience member during a gig at The Executive
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Playhouse. Nonetheless, his hip-hop style of spinning and "dub"-inspired
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monologues left a lasting imprint on rap.
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BAMBAATAA: "Rap started with Kool D.J. Herc; he's the man who brought it
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into the nation, from Jamaica. Our style of rappin' is close to the toasters
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of reggae, although Herc wasn't a toaster. Basically, the main three who
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helped pioneer this-Kool Herc, myself, and Grandmaster Flash-are all of West
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Indian background. What we did was take what was happenin' in the West Indies,
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put it to American disco and funk music, and then start rappin' on top of the
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beats."
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The rap-reggae connection is affirmed by Masters Of Ceremony tracks like
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"Sexy," "Rock With The Master," "Redder Posse," and "Master Move," from
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DYNAMITE, all of which feature a Bronx-born but Jamaican-descended toaster
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named Don Barron. McDaniels, who cut a skanked-up rap tune himself with
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Run-D.M.C. ["Roots, Rap, Reggae," from KING OF ROCK], states, "Them dub boys
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is incredible, the way they rhyme, the way their lyrics flow, how they use
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echoes, the bass lines and the drumbeats. Them boys is no joke; I know we
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owe a lot to them." Silverman seconds the motion: "Historically, the big
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influence on the New York-based hip-hop movement has been Caribbean and
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Jamaican music. I think Bambaataa's mother is Jamaican, Flash has Caribbean
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roots, Stetsasonic has a reggae number on every record, even the Fat Boys
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have done a reggae rap ["Hard Core Reggae," from FAT BOYS ARE BACK]. We just
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signed a girl named Latifah, and she has a record out called 'Princess of the
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Posse' that has a very heavy reggae groove in it."
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The void left by Kool Herc's disappearance was soon filled by Blow, Flash,
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Bambaataa, and other young deejays. Of the three, Flash soon emerged as the
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scene's technical wizard. A graduate of Samuel Gompers Vocational High School
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in the Bronx, Flash began deejaying in '75. He soon realized that Kool Herc's
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act had one flaw: Although his mixer had a headphone input jack, he never used
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it, dropping the needle into the grooves by eye.
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FLASH: "The early hip-hop jocks, when things first started, were hittin'
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and missin', droppin' the needle and just hopin' that the break was there.
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It wasn't a perfectly synced thing. I learned about cueing when I met Pete
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'D.J.' Jones, who was the hottest deejay of that time. We became friends, and
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when he would play, I would say to myself, 'How the hell is he mixing his
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records on time? He's not missin' a beat!' So once, when he was taking a
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break, he let me take over. He says, 'Here's the headset,' and I'm thinking,
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'The headset? Why is he giving me a headset?' But then, when I switched [the
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cue switches for the right and left turntables] back and forth, I says, 'You
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can hear the record before it comes on!' After I realized that you could
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pre-hear what you were doing, it was time to go out into the parks and do it!"
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Another brainstorm followed: "punch phrasing," or "cutting," the rhythmic
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intercutting of sonic bursts from a manually manipulated disc on one turntable
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while a second record was spinning on another. In a low-tech premonition of
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sampling, it allowed Flash and other deejays to drop brass blasts, orchestra
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hits, and James Brown "Good God!"s into dance tracks, effectively creating new
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compositions. Shortly thereafter, an idea popped into Flash's head that can
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only be described as a-pun intended-flash of brilliance: scratching.
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FLASH: "Scratching is just cueing the record. A deejay has to back-cue
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the record, but he only hears that sound himself. We felt, 'Why just let us
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hear it? Let's pull the fader halfway up while the other record's still
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playing and make this scratching noise, back and forth, to the beat!' At
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first, nobody else was doin' this except me and Grand Wizard Theodore, who
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also helped with the evolution of scratching. After I popularized it in my
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area, I started playing at Bronx clubs like Club 371. It worked so well that,
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slowly but surely, it caught on like the plague."
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The abrasive, grainy wukka-wukka of a stylus whipping back and forth-
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heard for the first time by much of white America on Herbie Hancock's gold
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single, "Rockit," from FUTURE SHOCK-has become rap's trademark, as emblematic
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of the genre as whammy bar orgasms and two-handed tapping are of mainstream
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metal. Almost any rap track can be stripped down to the bare-bones essentials
|
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of a declaiming emcee and the swishing, swooshing sound of a deejay scratching.
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As McDaniels puts it, "Look, Run-D.M.C. is just two turntables, a mixer, a
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stage, a crowd, and a microphone. Nothing's on tape; all of it is done by
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records. It started with deejays and emcees, and Run-D.M.C. is gonna make it
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end with deejays and emcees."
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As individual deejays gathered followings, they began recruiting their
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own emcees to sling slang and keep the crowd dancing. As Flash recalls in
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HIP HOP: THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF BREAK DANCING, RAP MUSIC, AND GRAFFITI,
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"When people first came to the park, they'd start dancing. But then everyone
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would gather around and watch the deejay. A block party could turn into a
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seminar. That was dangerous. You needed vocal entertainment to keep everyone
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dancing. I used to leave the mic on the other side of the table so anybody who
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wanted could pick it up."
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Early rappers patterned their staccato ejaculations after-who else?-the
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|
Godfather of Soul, James Brown. A quick listen to "(Get Up, I Feel Like Being
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|
A) Sex Machine," "Say It Loud-I'm Black And I'm Proud," and "My Thang," from
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JAMES BROWN/SOLID GOLD 30 GOLDEN HITS, offers a crash course in rap cliche's.
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|
It's no mistake that such Bambaataa efforts as UNITY and THE LIGHT feature
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|
Brown. Nor is it mere coincidence that Full Force, the production crew behind
|
|
Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, the Real Roxanne, and other hip-hop-flavored pop acts,
|
|
recently jumped at the opportunity to work with Brown on his latest album, I'M
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|
REAL. Lyrically and musically, Brown is in many ways the founding father of
|
|
hip-hop. His bass lines, drum licks, and trademark sobs, yips, grunts, and
|
|
groans have found their way into innumerable rap numbers, from Spoonie Gee's
|
|
"The Godfather" to Sweet T's "I Got Da Feelin'" to Kool Moe Dee's "How Ya Like
|
|
Me Now," and on and on. Kurtis Blow surely speaks for all of hip-hop when he
|
|
says, "James has that anticipated swing beat that's called soul. No one else
|
|
in music history has captured it like he has."
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|
A subtler, but equally pervasive, influence on rap emcees has been the
|
|
Last Poets, a raw-talking, fiercely political combo founded in 1968 by
|
|
Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin. Mindblowing Poets cuts like "Niggers Are Scared
|
|
Of Revolution" and "When The Revolution Comes," both from THE LAST POETS,
|
|
cut the die for the current crop of in-your-face rappers like Public Enemy,
|
|
Boogie Down Productions, and Schooly-D. Although their spare, bongo-powered
|
|
arrangements were a little too jazzy to catch on with the hard-funkin'
|
|
hip-hoppers, landmark numbers like "Hustler's Convention," released in 1973
|
|
on Douglas, influenced a generation of rappers. As Kool Herc himself once
|
|
noted, "The inspiration for rap is James Brown and HUSTLER'S CONVENTION."
|
|
|
|
Originally a quartet, the group has thinned to a core duo of Nuriddin
|
|
and Suliaman El-Hadi, who joined in 1971. Asked to give advice to the movement
|
|
he helped spark, El-Hadi observed, "You know, a lot of this is a fad, and if
|
|
you add 'e' to 'fad,' it becomes 'fade.' Fads fade, but our thing is not a
|
|
trend that comes to an end, you know what I mean? I can appreciate all of the
|
|
young brothers and sisters tryin' to do somethin'. My problem is with the
|
|
content; most of them are not givin' up no message, you know what I mean?
|
|
They're hung up on a real heavy ego trip. Everything travels in cycles, and I
|
|
think rap's gotta get back to basics; people are becoming fed up with the
|
|
nonsense. They're becoming disillusioned, so I think it's only a matter of
|
|
time before they get to basics. I believe that they wanna slap their feet to
|
|
the beat but I think they wanna sing somethin' that means somethin', too."
|
|
|
|
While early rappers were busy cutting their eyeteeth on James Brown and
|
|
Last Poets monologues, deejays were mining Manhattan's cut-out bins for obscure
|
|
nuggets that would make them stand apart from the competition. Afrika
|
|
Bambaataa, more than any jock, made a name for himself as "Master Of Records,"
|
|
quoting from THE MUNSTERS, THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, James Brown rarities, and
|
|
Sly Stone freakouts all in the space of a few minutes. Audiences, in hip-hop
|
|
parlance, "bugged out."
|
|
|
|
TOM SILVERMAN: "Bambaataa was spinning at this rap club called the
|
|
T-Connection up in the Bronx. He had a business card at that time that said,
|
|
'Afrika Bambaataa: Master Of Records.' That was his real claim to fame. If
|
|
Bambaataa knows anything, he knows every record that was ever released-rock,
|
|
jazz, whatever. He'll use a little lick from Bob James' "Mardi Gras," he'll
|
|
use a piece of the Eagles' THE LONG RUN, the Monkees, Billy Squier's BIG BEAT,
|
|
and so on. He used to tape over the labels of his records so that nobody could
|
|
tell what they were. The kids would gather around the deejay to watch because
|
|
they wanted to get the records.
|
|
|
|
"I used to go to a store called Downstairs Records, in New York. They
|
|
had a 'beats' room, where they would play old records, cut-outs that they
|
|
had originally gotten for 50 cents or a dollar each and were selling for 15
|
|
or 20 dollars to little kids from the Bronx who would pool their money together
|
|
to buy them. These kids would buy the Eagles' LONG RUN just for the three
|
|
seconds at the top of a record, just for that little piece with the beat on it!
|
|
These records weren't readily available, and this was the place you went that
|
|
had all the beats. They'd sell them that way too. They'd put a sign on THE
|
|
LONG RUN that would say 'Boogie Beat' or something, and everybody would know
|
|
what that meant. Every little kid in the Bronx had two turntables; they were
|
|
all imitating Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa."
|
|
|
|
FLASH: "The ultimate goal of a deejay, before hip-hop became a recorded
|
|
form, was to go out and find record that had danceable drum solos, regardless
|
|
of how long they were. A lot of the records that I used to play, my audience
|
|
probably would never have known that they were by white rock groups. But with
|
|
a lot of the white pop songs, they gave the drummer a serious solo, and if you
|
|
knew your beats-per-minute, you could mix 'em back and forth with the old funk
|
|
and R&B things and make the marriage work!"
|
|
|
|
To this day, deejays on the lookout for def breaks can still be found
|
|
pawing through the vinyl or jawing with day manager Stanley Platzer at New
|
|
York's Music Factory [1476 Broadway, between 42nd and 43rd, (212)221-1488].
|
|
There, in neat rows along one wall, are volumes one through 19 of ULTIMATE
|
|
BREAKS AND BEATS, a legit series of compilation LPs that cram the best beats
|
|
onto a single disc. One volume, for example, includes "Granny's Funky Rolls
|
|
Royce," "Funky Drummer," "Walk This Way," "Johnny The Fox," "Ashley's
|
|
Roachclip," and three other cuts. There are no artist listings, and volume
|
|
numbers are given only on the handlettered cards rubber-banded to each record.
|
|
As Stanley says, it's the breaks-"the bells, man, the bells"-that matter, and
|
|
nothing else.
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_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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Throughout the '70s, recorded rap existed solely in the form of live shows
|
|
taped on cassette, duped on double decks, and passed from fan to fan. Then, in
|
|
1979, with the release of the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," everything
|
|
changed. Although "King Tim III (Personality Jock)," the B-side of the Fatback
|
|
Band's "You're My Candy Sweet," hit the charts earlier that year, it didn't
|
|
cause quite the stir "Rapper's Delight" did. For one thing, more than a few of
|
|
the uptown emcees recognized their own rhymes in "Delight." It wasn't long
|
|
before the record, with its infectious hook "borrowed" from Chic's "Good
|
|
Times," went gold, selling more than two million copies and slapping the tag
|
|
"rap" on the genre forever. Emcees and deejays scrambled to sign with Sylvia
|
|
and Joe Robinson's New Jersey-based indie, Sugar Hill.
|
|
|
|
Later that same year, Kurtis Blow's novelty single "Christmas Rappin'"
|
|
joined the parade of gold rap records. Its 1980 follow-up, "The Breaks,"
|
|
went gold as well, putting rap on the musical map and establishing Blow as a
|
|
major label presence on an otherwise indie-dominated scene.
|
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|
BLOW: "The whole society of hip-hop was really new when I did 'The
|
|
Breaks.' I was sort of putting ideas together, trying to keep the whole fad
|
|
true to its roots. What I tried to do was make the kind of music that I
|
|
would hear in the clubs, and that's how I came up with 'The Breaks.' The
|
|
break was the most important part of the record in discos; people would go
|
|
crazy when they would get to the break. We wanted to make a record symbolizing
|
|
that, with a lot of different breaks. Lyrically, I got into the connotations
|
|
of a 'good break' or a 'bad break,' philosophically speaking-the breaks in the
|
|
record and also the breaks one can get in one's life. We had an all-star band
|
|
back then; real hot musicians. Jimmy Bralower was the drummer. The bassist
|
|
was Larry Smith, who later became a big producer; he produced the first two
|
|
Run-D.M.C. albums and the first four Whodini albums. He also became my
|
|
bandleader, with a band that I started in '81 called the Orange Krush band.
|
|
John Tropea played guitar, and Denzil Miller, who produced two songs on my new
|
|
album, BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND, played keyboards."
|
|
|
|
In '82, Bambaataa and Flash grabbed for the brass ring and caught it.
|
|
Bambaataa and his Soulsonic Force got lucky first with "Planet Rock," an
|
|
unlikely fusion of bleeping, fizzing techno-rock, Zulu surrealism, and
|
|
deep-fried funk.
|
|
|
|
TOM SILVERMAN: "The kids were really getting into Kraftwerk.
|
|
'Trans-Europe Express' was big in the ghettoes. Nobody at Capital Records,
|
|
Kraftwerk's label, knew anything about it, but Bambaataa used to spin it in
|
|
his clubs. I thought it would be a great idea to use those rhythms and that
|
|
kind of a sound in a black record, so Bambaataa and I went into the studio
|
|
with Arthur Baker as the producer. We needed a guy to put synthesizers down,
|
|
and somebody recommended John Robie, who had a danceable rock record out on
|
|
this disco deejay service. He came over and we went into Intergalactic Studio,
|
|
which, for $35 an hour, included a Neve board, a Fairlight, a Memorymoog, and a
|
|
Roland TR-808. That was pretty much all we used. We had these giant orchestra
|
|
hits in the tune, played in polyphony to make them sound even bigger. They
|
|
were stock sounds from one of the Fairlight disks. Today, those chords are
|
|
still the basis for samples on about 50 other records! 'Planet Rock' sold over
|
|
600,000 12" singles; it was one of the first four or five gold 12-inches ever."
|
|
|
|
In sharp contrast to "Planet Rock"'s glacial strings, zapping synths,
|
|
and quickstepping beatbox, Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five's "The
|
|
Message" seemed like a step backwards. Inspired in part by Tom Tom Club's
|
|
1981 single "Genius Of Love," it is a slow, almost plodding tune, prodded along
|
|
by a chicken-picked guitar figure, handclaps on the backbeat, burping synth
|
|
bass, and a descending melody line that seems to echo into a foggy infinity.
|
|
Its lyrics, by contrast, are crystal clear, a sharp-focus image of inner city
|
|
ugliness. To this day, it remains one of rap's most intelligent, scathing
|
|
looks at black life in a white-run world.
|
|
|
|
'83 ushered in "Sucker M.C.s," by Run-D.M.C., and with it, a new brand
|
|
of "gangster rap" that scrapped the sixteenth-note hi-hats, ringing 9th and
|
|
6th chords, and slick vocal inflections that hip-hop had carried over from
|
|
disco. Driven by a booming 808 kick that ripples through the seat of your
|
|
pants, power chords that crisp your face, and hollered lyrics that ricochet
|
|
around your skull, Run-D.M.C.'s tunes are headbanging rap at its hardest.
|
|
Taut as coiled whipsteel, tracks like "King Of Rock" and their lashing,
|
|
smashing cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" opened the door for L.L. Cool
|
|
J, the Beastie Boys, and other "hardcore B-boys."
|
|
|
|
Producer, guitarist, and Def Jam co-owner [now owner of Def American] Rick
|
|
Rubin, who handled production chores on L.L. Cool J's RADIO, the Beastie Boys'
|
|
LICENSE TO ILL, and other chartbusters, has played an important role in
|
|
hammering out the metal/rap sound that has been largely responsible for
|
|
crossing rap over to a broader, whiter demographic.
|
|
|
|
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
|
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|
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["Hip-Hop Primer #2" is concluded in #187]
|
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_ _ ____________________________________________________________________
|
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/((___))\|Demon Roach Undrgrnd.806/794-4362|Kingdom of Shit.......806/794-1842|
|
|
[ x x ] |NIHILISM.............517/546-0585|Paisley Pasture.......916/673-8412|
|
|
\ / |Polka AE {PW:KILL}...806/794-4362|Ripco.................312/528-5020|
|
|
(' ') |Tequila Willy's GSC..209/526-3194|The Works.............617/861-8976|
|
|
(U) |====================================================================|
|
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.ooM |1991 cDc communications by Mark Dery 08/31/91-#186|
|
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\_______/|All Rights Pissed Away. FIVE YEARS of cDc|
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