or as complete as its gon' git cuz i already pushed submit.

thanks to all of y'all for the kind words of encouragement, the feedback, and your own stories and insights. that's definitely been helpful to me.

the '-------' near the bottom third designates where i stopped editing and just started writing so that i could turn it in on time. so if its out of focus... oh well.


Echoes Of The Old School: The Roots Of Hip Hop

The Unification
---------------

Hip Hop is the soundtrack of my life. We go back like pause-mix tapes and orange milk crates. And like Rakim say, “It’s been a long time…”

I heard rap music for the very first time in ’79. My mom was driving me over to grandmom’s house, about a mile from our crib. I lived in a little town in South Jersey, in the shadow of Atlantic City, which, itself, was in the shadow of Philly. You know how black folk do, aybody wanna be from somewhere else. The AM radio station – only black station on the dial at that time – threw on something that was so unique that the dj was like, “you have got to hear this”.

“A hip-hop-a-hibbie-to-the-hibbie… “ – yeah, nowadays those ten syllables are recognized the world over as the b-boy preamble, our “We da people…” if you will. But for me, chubby twelve year-old kid in the backseat of the blue Chevy Impala, it was something entirely new.

Moms was perplexed. Her expression, no doubt shared by all radio listeners outside of New York and North Jersey, was one that questioned, “Who are these fools talking over Chic’s Good Times?” I would not leave the car until the song was over. Which was a long time, cuz jams used to last like eight minutes back in the day. We all burst out laughing when the song got to the part where Wonder Mike was dissing the food at his friends house (“… the macaroni’s soggy, the peas are all mushed and the chicken taste like wood”).

I had no idea at the time that there was a whole culture called hiphop, that for years the streets of New York had served as a womb which nurtured a thriving underground scene populated with crews of deejays, emcees, breakdancers and graffiti artists. “Rapper’s Delight” was the umbilicus, the thin but necessary connection between the insular environs of black and latino youth in NY and the unsuspecting world that their culture would be born into. I didn’t know that the group that had made this seminal record was not one of those locally legendary crews, but rather a thrown-together trio, assembled by the shrewd Sylvia Robinson to capitalize on what she saw as a potentially lucrative musical trend. I certainly didn’t know that Big Bank Hank, one of the Sugarhill Gang’s rappers, had ‘bit’ his rhymes from Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, right down to the spelling of his name (“the C-A-S-A -N-O-V-A…”). Nah. I knew none of that, but nonetheless I did know that this was something special.

When the song was over, I ran inside, eager to discuss my discovery with my uncle, Reg. He’s three years older than me, always has been much more like a big brother than an uncle. And he had what seemed like every record known to mankind. R&B, Soul, Disco. So I ran in like I was putting him onto something.

As more and more of this music made its way to wax, Reg’s record store forays yielded an ever-increasing assortment of rap music. The pale blue record jacket with the multi-colored, Dr. Seussian spiral coming out of the middle – the unmistakeable trademark of a Sugarhill Records single, became a staple. It was a “brand” in modern day marketing parlance – you saw them colors you copped it. Sugarhill Gang. Funky Four Plus One. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Sequence. But if ‘Rappers Delight’ was the big bang, the hiphop universe experienced its most dramatic expansion in those early days, with Sugarhill Records followed by all kinds of labels – Enjoy, Disco Fever, Profile… And Reg copped it all. He never had a desire to be a dj, he just loved music. And made sure he had it first.

The Old Kingdom
---------------

Thanks to my uncle’s stacks of records (and my relentless sneaking into his room to make tapes when he wasn’t home), I was the man. I always had the flyest tapes, cuz I was devoted to my craft. I did the math, carefully calculatin’ how many jams I could cram on each side of a 60 minute purple Certron. Do I use the four-minute radio cut, or the eight-minute extended disco mix? Okay, That’s The Joint is gonna bat lead-off, because I love me some Funky Four Plus One. Gotta throw the Treacherous Three on there. I remember kids sweated me something fierce on my sixth grade class trip to New York – dope music evidently trumps ‘smart kid’ in the complex hierarchy of young black kids’ social interactions. Consequently, on the bus ride I kept a hand close to the volume knob, milking the EverReady C cells on my box for all I was worth, knowing I was only the joint until the batteries ran out.

Wu-Tang asked, “Can it be that it was all so simple then?”, while waxing nostalgic on their 1993 debut album Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Although they were only looking back toward the late eighties, truth be told, we can ask the same about hiphop as a whole. The most dominant and pervasive cultural force in the world today is one which few people, even those who fervently support it, truly understand.

Its easy, useful, and extremely tempting to confuse one aspect of the culture as its sum and total. For example, purists decry the common sin of elevating one of hiphop’s four elements over the others, as is done when we overemphasize rapping at the expense of b-boying (breakdancing), deejaying, and ‘writing’ (as graffiti practitioners refer to their art). What leads to more confusion and bad conclusions, however, is when we mistakenly believe the styles and aesthetics of one particular era of hiphop music are exclusively representative of the genre. I’ve certainly been guilty of that, myself, having had to come to terms with the fact that hip hop’s Golden Age (roughly from ’86-89’) **SNOOP: check that – what do other folks regard as the time period of the golden age?*** which saw a tremendous burst of both musical creativity and political consciousness -- while it may have been a zenith -- was not the only valid phase of hip hop, and certainly did not encompass its full definition.

Hiphop is black culture on fast forward -- constantly morphing, adapting, reinventing itself -- so much so, that it even forgets about its own origins. My boys always used to say that hiphop years are like dog years, advancing at a 7 to 1 ratio with the outside world. Young heads be calling music from ’95 ‘old school’.

KRS, who along with Chuck D and Rakim presided over the aforementioned ‘Golden Age’ of hiphop said at the time, “no one’s from the old school cause rap as a whole/ isn’t even twenty years old”. And yet, he came on the scene and verbally ripped the crown from the self-proclaimed Kings of Rap, Run-DMC, who themselves ushered in what was the ‘new school’ in its day with the release of the sparse, yet brilliant, Sucker MC’s in 1983. That record, which stripped the showbiz veneer off of a developing musical artform trying to find its way, was a stark departure from what had come before it, toppling the likes of Grandmaster Melle Mel an ‘nem in the process.

It’s a cold and often predatory progression. In a matter of months, many artists have gone from the undisputed champions, ruling the ears of their peers, to has-beens and forgot-abouts. Your record company screwed up and released your album six months late? Guess what, nobody likes those beats anymore. We hate those beats. Your rhyme style? That’s played out now, cuz. Come different or get to stepping.

In my mind, beats and rhymes trace the sonic strata of hiphop’s fossil record(s): mega crews, kazoos, storytelling, studio bands, disco instro's, electronic, punk rock, tv theme songs, battle rhymes, dj cuts, love raps, message raps, reality rhymes, triple x-rated, booty music, slanging rhymes, consciousness raising, cautionary tales, bling bling, parodies, black nationalism, five percent pedagogy, jazz-hop, hip house, Linn drums, 808 bass, James Brown breaks, s-s-s-s-sample crazy, diss records, answer records, weed records, diggedy-diggedy, reggae/rockers, rapid fire, slow drawl, g-funk…

We stay reinventing ourselves and casting off yesterday's styles like scuffed sneaks to keep ahead of the commodity curve -- it ain't fly no more when everybody else is up on it. Can't we have nothing just for US? We gon' drop it if it don't smell right no more. This has been the ethos in effect since the great murder, the supreme kidnapping. The masses of us have left Jazz, Blues, an tap dancing in the dumpster of the African American experience, to be picked up and raised by others, brothers and sisters having to go tour Europe an Asia where folks of different hues pack the venues.

Hiphop started out different, saying, "We will *kill* this culture before we let it be co-opted". And yet that is EXACTLY what has happened…Can’t stop. Won’t stop. We keep it movin’, like NWA, 100 Miles and runnin’. But years before they appeared the Last Poets told us that TIME was runnin and passin and runnin and passin and runnin, and maybe we ain’t as fast as we thought.

Ta-Seti (pre-history)
---------------------

In its essence, hiphop is party music. Born in New York, during the seventies, it sprang to life from the efforts of Jamaican mobile deejays, like Kool Herc, who threw jams in the neighborhood parks of the South Bronx. These deejays would plug their massive, home-built stereo systems into power illegally tapped from the streetlights, spinning records for throngs of youth, competing amongst themselves to see who could throw the best party, who had the baddest sound system. While everyone else was decrying the sorry state of popular music (‘disco sucks, dude!’), these pioneers took what was needful, the best parts of records. I guess you could call it deconstruction. And hasn’t black music always been about the beat? Proto-hiphop was sound, broken down to its very last compound.

An eight-minute record of pure garbage, to the discerning ears of early deejays, might yield two or three seconds of a drum break – they would catch these breaks, maybe right before a bunch of overblown, overproduced strings and stuff came in to ruin the vibe – and go back and forth between two turntables with copies of the same record, using a ‘mixer’ to switch the output so that it came from the turntable of their choice. The result was something new. Call it musical chitlins an’ collards, as they fed the masses of party people with audible castoffs and scraps.

As the early deejays entertained crowds at parties, there was always an underlying sense of competition, a need to out-perform all others (not to mention, a need to not get booed, stabbed or shot at). They’d talk to the crowd, over the microphone, encouraging people to dance and shout to show their appreciation. This early rapping would usually take the form of call and response, drawing on the ancient African mode of communal communication. It couldn’t help but do so, Hiphop is but an offshoot of the black cultural tree of life, whose gnarled roots wind and wend their way backward and forward through the rich soils of history, while encircling the globe, providing shade and solace for those of us in the diaspora. Like traditional African music, Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, Gospel, R&B, Reggae -- other cuttings and transplants from this tree – hiphop shares common traits, including improvisation, an emphasis on rhythm, and a pattern of "call and response."

"Make some noise!" "if you wanna party, let me hear you Scream!", "to let me know that you like the show, somebody say Ho!", and similar exhortations were answered with enthusiasm when the deejay was "rockin' the house."

Eventually, the call-and-response routines would grow more complex, involving boastful story-telling, creating the need for the separation of the rapping and deejaying duties. Soon, deejays had "crews" of several rappers, or MC's (emcees – Masters of Ceremony) as they became known, who initially shared the spotlight and later assumed roles of increasing importance in the New York party scene. These emcees would go on to develop unique lyrical and narrative styles, under the heat of intense competition with rival deejay groups. DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, an apprentice of sorts to Grandmaster Flash, noticed that moving the record back and forth while the needle was in place created interesting effects. His experimentation lead to the development of "scratching" -- the purely percussive elements of record manipulation. Flash took scratching and “cutting” (the insertion of small bits of music or sound from one record over another) to the levels of high art, making the turntable an instrument, something that poor kids could use in lieu of saxophones and trumpets to express their musical sensibilities, using prerecorded sounds as colors to be splashed on a pallete of beats. Again, all of these techniques were honed via competition during fierce ‘battles’, in which ‘hood fame and props went to the victor and shame and chagrin went to the loser. Call it free market music.

Separated by age and geography, I wasn’t physically at the park jams, but the sense of hiphop as party music and collaborative performance art was transmitted palpably through the wax, as deejays across the country took notice that this was the music that the kids wanted to hear. Hiphop rocked the gyms and rec centers and kept us off the streets.

We’d have parties anywhere we could -- fresh kids, b-boys and b-girls staying hot in cold Jersey winters -- we was sweating, dancing to breakbeats in bomber jackets that we couldn’t put down if wanted to see ‘em again. In South Main St. school, an ocean of blue and black ski-hats bobbed up and down in unison, united in rhythm, as we did “The Smurf” to Tyrone Brunson’s classic instrumental. By the time ‘Buffalo Gals’ came on, Malcolm McLaren’s brit-synth grooves, providing a sonic platform for the rhyming and scratching of the World Famous Supreme Team, you had to push your way onto the floor and fight to stay there. I did most of my work near the strobe light, until I got a lil’ older and more confident in my dancing abilities (anything look fly in the strobe light).

The zenith of gymnasium jams was in the auditorium at St. Pete’s, the local Catholic school, which stood out in the middle of town like a run down castle clad in tan stucco. By this time, folks were past just spinning, as the techniques for rocking parties like they did in NYC began to disseminate through word of mouth, family reunions, and kids whose moms’ sent them away from the Big Apple to stay out of trouble. The deejay was playing doubles of ‘Nipple To The Bottle” by Grace Jones, going back and forth extending the intro. In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard a feat --she left a solid eight bars (measures) of beats empty, no vocals, no other instruments, just nasty beats. It was only right to rip it. A bunch of brothas were up on the stage, jockeying for the mic, there was a crash and whoever was rappin’ at the time finished his rhyme with ‘… GodDAMN Moe C. jus’ broke the light!’ right on beat. That was hiphop.

As I reminisce, I ponder the ironies that escaped me at the time (well, apart from folks smokin' weed an cussing in church), of hundreds of kids bumrushing 7-11 and WaWa after being let out of a P.A.L. (Police Athletic League) party. Call it wildin out, or maybe payback for enduring “One Student At A Time” signs during the daytime, but they got stung for every last tastykake and fruit punch.

I bob my neck whenever I reflect and recollect, cuz my memories are indexed, affixed, in time and in mind to music, in general, and to hiphop in specific. Summer of ’82, after I graduated 8th grade, was spent bopping on the boardwalk with Reg and his boys. Nothing was flyer, to me, than hanging with the older kids, our whole crew taking turns lugging the huge box, leaned to one side, overcompensating for the weight of 12 D batteries worth of power, blasting out Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s “The Message”. The bass reverberated off the boards, the sound smacked the sides of casinos and storefronts and bounced back.

The sound from the box was like a field around us, it attracted other kids who instantly connected with the culture, provided a shared point of reference as we tried to cop numbers from the out of town girls visiting the shore with the fam. It invited cold, alien stares from white folks, at least the older ones, who’d much preferred for our culture not to be imposed upon them via woofers, tweeters and peaking volume meters. Perhaps it gave them a glimpse of what it was like for us in their world.

Melle Mel’s vivid verbal assault cut through the languid summer sea air, broadcasting live, for the first time in rap, the harsh realities that underscored the party scene. A world of rats, roaches, economic deprivation and human predators that was all-too-commonplace for hiphop’s inventors. This was the reality awaiting the party people after they’d left “the place to be”. Was it faith or escapism that allowed them to throw their hands in the air like they “just don’t care”?

--------------------

The Message was pivotal. It put people on notice concerning the vast potential power of hiphop as a musical genre, and, implicitly of the largely black and latin youth responsible for its creation. That potential would largely lay dormant, however. Melle Mel would prove to be a rap Akhenaton, perceived largely as a heretic, albeit a powerful and influential one. Mel was the force behind Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five recording that song, even over the objections of their Sugarhill management, who saw the fierce lyrical and sonic territory he carved out, the intrusion of reality upon this party music, as potentially damaging to their carefully cultivated image. It had to have been something he was waiting to do, since Mel actually kicked the last verse to “The Message” on “Superrapin”, their first recording, on Enjoy Records, before they bounced to what they thought were the greener pastures of Sugarhill. Ironically, the group would end up splitting due to label/money drama at Sylvia Robinson’s label, but over the next few years, between the two different incarnations of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, they’d go on to record Survival, New York New York, and the anti-coke classic White Lines, which were similarly themed. But ‘message rap’, as such, didn’t really blow up until half a decade later with the arrival of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions.

As the Summer of ’82 ended, the Old Kingdom era of hiphop was coming to a close, but as ends of eras go, nobody was checking for it. For me, it was freshman bball season -- layup drills in musty gyms, clapping the backboards cuz we couldn't touch the rims, to Jazzy Sensation… “Can you feel it? Can you feel it? our jazzy sensatioooooonn”, the bass bouncing like basketballs off the walls, filling the whole spot with our attitude, makin every game a home game for us, the only black team in the league. Head nods an’ soul claps were the haps. Our swagger said “You can look at us crazy and the referees can cheat, but we gonna be on beat, in maroon and white sweatsuits flicking finger rolls silky sweet”.

Jazzy Sensation, from the Jazzy 5, exemplified Old School sensibilities: large crews, perfect for rocking parties. Several different voices, which had their place in the arrangement like instruments. Harmonizing. Chants, routines and hand claps. All of this was laid down over a track from a studio band, playing a groove popularized in the clubs (Gwen McCrae’s Funky Sensation, which got the disco do-over from Tina B and the Kryptic Crew’s A-side Manhattan Mix, and the bboy treatment from Jazzy J and the Jazzy 5’s B-side Bronx Mix). But large crews are hard to fit in studios, and hard to split a check wit’. And can you imagine radio playing a cut nowadays that runs almost ten minutes long? They’d only be able to fit in two strong songs before the commercial break. Ain’t happenin. A tilt was forthcoming, from groups designed to rock parties, to groups designed to rock records.

The End Of An Era
-----------------

Later that school year, I got a peek into the future while working backstage at the school fashion show. Leo Harvey was running around with his new walkman, talkin’ bout “you have GOT to listen to this!” I knew it was something serious to distract us from the swimsuits, plus, we really ain’t like each other, so what’s so damn good on this tape?

“Boom – tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap… b-boom – tap-tap, boom tap… b-boom – tap-tap, boom tap…”

If you were listening to hiphop at that time, the effect was universal -- that unmistakable bass drum and six snare-hit intro yoked you up by the neck, jacked your attention and signified the coming of the next. Rapper’s Delight featured cats rocking directly over the instrumental to Chic’s disco classic, Good Times. Led by Sugarhill’s carefully crafted sound, much of the backing of early rap music featured slick studio bands covering top dance or R&B hits, or at the least, lifting a bassline, and filling in from there. Cuts were so upbeat, it was like cats were celebrating getting on wax, and they were. Backpackers -- ascetic contemporary adherents of non-commercial hiphop -- would be loathe to admit it, but once folks figured out that they could get paid for doing something they loved, you best believe they were trying to get put on.

After the literal shock of the Sugarhill Gang’s record (many heads in New York thought that they were hearing Grandmaster Caz, his rhymes were so well known) subsided within the hiphop community, the fact that the public reception of this novelty fueled a market for more ‘rap stuff’ meant that real crews who’d put in work for years started getting signed and recording. But much like early blues musicians, their aunts and uncles on the black musical continuum, most of them were signed to exploitive contracts that did little for the artists beyond giving them the thrill of getting a record pressed and maybe getting a little radio shine. These early rappers and deejays, however, maintained an optimism that they were on their way to stardom, and out of the ghetto. As the Funky Four rapped on “That’s The Joint” in 1981, “Let’s go to work, Let’s go to work/ we gave a lot of parties and we got jerked/ but that’s alright, because we be good sports/ cause we know someday we’ll get the big… payoff”.

In contrast to the darkness of The Message’s track, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s earliest releases, also on Sugarhill, made heavy use of kazoo’s (Freedom, The Birthday Party, etc). But Run-DMC, with that one record, Sucker MC’s, signaled a significant break from hiphop’s prehistory, as party music in the Bronx, from its Old School phase, in which the culture was unified and codified into high art, signifying the first New School era. The Old Schoolers’, with no one to come before them in the biz, adopted the trappings of other musicians (picture Afrikaa Bambataa and the Zulu Nation in spaced-out costumes not only reminiscent of, but contemporary with Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth, Wind & Fire, Con Funk Shun, and other R&B and Funk acts). Run, DMC and JamMaster Jay (R.I.P.) came with jeans and sneaks, staking out a place for hiphop culture, and the youth it represented, to be received on their own terms. Sonically, they brought the turntable even closer to the forefront, establishing it as the instrument, along with the drum machine, Jay, with his pervasive and precise eighth-note scratches was a percussionist and a conductor. Their rhymes, while still utilizing interplay between the two emcees (Busy Bee give-and-go as Ultramagnetic’s Kool Keith calls it), was more blunt, more direct. More street.

Of course, with the new styles and attitudes of Run-DMC, came a new wave of rap artists who more or less made themselves in Run-DMC’s likeness, up until they actually became ‘Old School’. Run an ‘nem brought flame and fame to the game, and the cash came soon after, with their Aerosmith crossover collabo. With that fame and money came corporate attention, and, eventually, a level of cultural commoditization as unprecedented as hiphop’s current pervasiveness. Still, it was necessary. Or at least unavoidable.

And for all its faults, hiphop still grows and spreads, throbs with the collective heartbeat of a people, its rough exterior hiding the concentric rings which tell the story of the years it has endured since it was planted in the Bronx, from seeds born across the Atlantic. It still sends branches out in all directions. Still has great potential to provide shelter, nourishment. But to truly understand this hiphop tree, you can’t just look at its branches, its bark, its fruits. No. To understand this thing called hiphop, you have to go to its source, its roots.


Poetx – 8/28/03













peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike