Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  The talking drummers recorded history in soundscapes, conveying the past to the present and the present to an extended community like a deft DJ. They were later joined by the griots, who, like the bards of Europe, crafted the trials and tribulations of their nation into long oral poems, memorized and set to song and passed along to each generation. Griots were the first historians, the original MCs. Africans uprooted by the slave trade and brought to the New World turned the griot tradition into what we now know as the blues, arguably the root of all modern popular music.

  A social-sciences professor investigating hip-hop might begin with the culture’s sense of community and point out that hip-hop’s closest ancestor is jazz, the musical form of the black working class from the forties to the sixties. From the bebop innovations of Charlie Parker through the mind-blowing redefinitions of Miles Davis and the intergalactic freedom of John Coltrane’s late work, jazz has been a canvas of innovative African-American musical expression (that has since wilted, for the most part, into the vapid castrato of Kenny G). Jazz shares the scat vocal tradition with hip-hop as well; the storytelling being suffused with so much rhythm and feeling at times that only sound will do. Jazz swaggered with a cool confidence that defied segregation and racism with soul and style, and reflected the tribulations of black Americans. Like hip-hop, jazz connected with white audiences and was absorbed into mainstream white culture.

  A historian studying hip-hop would couch the evolution of the form in the context of postwar, pre-eighties economic conditions in inner cities. The nutrients and waste products that fertilized the soil of hip-hop were America’s edgy, depressed post-Vietnam mood, widespread speed and heroin abuse, the Orwellian control mentality of local and national governments, and decaying inner cities in the late 1970s. In the years after the Vietnam War, the incentives of America’s major industries—auto, chemical, and real estate—funded the development of suburban life, and urban-based families that could afford to move did. Those left behind had no choice; they were predominantly matriarchal households left to fend for themselves in eroding neighborhoods while city governments spent their budgets on police containment instead of assistance. In New York, families moved to New Jersey and Long Island or better sections of Brooklyn and Queens. The Bronx, at the heart of America’s biggest metropolis, was hit hardest. Gangs and drugs ruled in an area with no economic foundation to build on; it was depicted in the media as a wasteland, for example, in movies such as Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981) and Escape from New York (1981), which predicted that in 1997 the federal government, in response to uncontrollable gangs and crime, would wall in Manhattan Island and declare it a maximum security prison. On the music front, the righteous soul of Motown and the funk of Sly and the Family Stone was superseded by disco’s smooth elitist soundtrack and R&B singers in the disco vein.

  In the 1970s, the northernmost tip of Manhattan, across the Harlem River from the southernmost section of the Bronx Borough of New York City, the restless youth either didn’t like or couldn’t afford to see hip-hop pioneer DJ Hollywood spin in Manhattan nightclubs, so they found a dance outlet at parties in their neighborhood parks. Unorthodox DJs there wove a sound harder than the show business boogie of disco bands such as Chic and Fatback. These rebel crews rocked the block with power that was siphoned from the city of New York by tapping into a transformer box at the base of a light pole. The performers reinvented themselves as grandiose street superheroes with flashy uniforms and spectacular names that suggested power, prestige, and respect. There were plenty of players on the scene, but three men permanently sculpted the revolution: Kool Herc Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa.

  I got techniques dripping out my buttcheeks: Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., performs in 1995.

  Kool Herc, born Clive Campbell on the island of Jamaica, was the first to link the instrumental drum breaks in a song. He sewed together hard funk, connecting James Brown and the Average White Band, and sought out obscure records with hot instrumental breaks to extend the jam. He called it “break spinning.” It was the first sound of hip-hop. Herc spun in Bronx nightclubs and outdoor parks with his “masters of ceremony” or “mike controllers” (MCs), Coke La Rock, Luv Bug Starski, and Busy Bee, who kept the party moving like the Jamaican toaster emcees in the dance halls of Kingston. They’d hype the songs, commend the DJ’s skills, and keep people on the floor with phrases that are still hip-hop staples, like “Ya rock and ya don’t stop” and “To the beat, y’all.”

  Bambaataa, born Kevin Donovan, broadened hip-hop’s sonic horizons and social image. Bambaataa, known for his sharp tongue and bold community politics, was the leader of the Black Spades, the city’s biggest, toughest street gang. Using their influence, Bambaataa formed the Organization, a coalition that helped keep drugs and violence at bay in his home, the Bronx River Projects. Spinning breaks like Herc, Bambaataa brought a multicultural strain to the party, courtesy of the eclectic tastes and diverse record collection he picked up from his mother, which ran the gamut from Sly Stone to Led Zeppelin to Latin soul. He would scour secondhand stores to score diverse vinyl, adding everything from African, jazz, and Caribbean breaks to the Euro-synth of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” to his mix. In 1974, as Bronx gangs imploded over turf wars, drugs, and police crackdowns, Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a collective of DJs, breakers, rappers, and graffiti artists, plus some friends from the Black Spades, that still thrives today. The Zulu Nation strove to de-escalate gang violence by creating a hub for the various groups involved in hip-hop. Over the years Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation have become the U.N. of hip-hop, albeit with less red tape and more success stories. The Zulus were the first hip-hop artists to take the music to Europe (in 1981) while Bambaataa, with Soulsonic Force, scored as a recording artist with the 1982 robo-funk opus “Planet Rock,” a genre-smashing classic, as influential for establishing Tommy Boy Records as it is for inspiring British dance DJs such as the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and the Prodigy more than a decade later.

  Grandmaster Wizard Theodore is regarded as the first DJ who scratched a record backward against the needle while cuing up, forever loosing a shrill exclamatory tear into hip-hop’s sonic vocabulary. But Grandmaster Flash, born Joseph Saddler, ran with the scratch. As a performer with the Furious Five, Flash expanded hip-hop’s lyrical legacy of party-up jams into trenchant social commentary in one fell swoop with 1982’s “The Message.” But before that, Flash redefined DJ-ing. He used the electronics training he received at vocational high school to construct a homemade cue mixer, which allowed him to listen to one record while the other was playing. At the time, this was a feature found only on professional nightclub setups. With that advantage and the hand–eye coordination that earned him his DJ handle, Flash dexterously perfected back-spinning: winding back records on alternating turntables to repeat the same musical segment. He also invented punch-phrasing: quickly blasting bits of sound from one record into the mix while the other continues to play. Flash even integrated the original beat box—a customized Vox drum machine—into his performance. He made an acrobatic show out of DJ-ing as Jimi Hendrix had out of guitar-playing: using his elbows to mix and turning his back to his turntables while scratching and back-spinning. Flash was also the man who made MCs the main draw of the evening. Where other DJs had one or two MCs who improvised rhymes to keep spirits high and bodies moving, Flash performed with five. His group elevated the form with bounced rhymes, tandem flows, and back-to-back delivery that came off like one voice. They moved the attention off the recorded music onto the words, from the DJs to the rappers. Flash and the Furious Five were the first hip-hop juggernaut product—they had the skills, the outfits, and the sound, as well as the complete recording and performing package. And they defined the first wave of rap music.

  Early hip-hop culture found its visual aesthetic in two nonmusical scenes: graffiti artists and break-dancers. Not all graffiti kids were into hip-hop and not all of them were black (many of the best were Hispa
nic and some were white). In the Bronx, artists such as Dondi White and Lee Quinones covered the rotting buildings of the ghetto with ornate murals, testifying their tags, or pen names. They painted subway cars and broken walls, displaying the same DIY attitude of the crews throwing park parties. Many, such as the brilliant Jean-Michel Basquiat (who soon evolved beyond graffiti style), ended up selling canvases of graffiti to the downtown art crowd by the early eighties. Graffiti style permeated early hip-hop, from the logos of the groups to the flyers that advertised the shows. It is less revolutionary now; graffiti is hip-hop’s calling card, expected everywhere there is hip-hop culture or the advertising aimed at the broad hip-hop market.

  The other group making waves in hip-hop’s early days were break-dancers. The dance style began as a trend among black gangs, devoid of the acrobatic tricks associated with it today. Like any novelty, it passed out of fashion, but when African-Americans moved on, Hispanic teens made it their own. In clubs and on street corners all over the city, “breakers” such as Crazy Legs (Richie Colon) elevated the style, integrating martial arts high kicks and spins. In the early eighties, break dancing was as common as DJs at hip-hop parties, though the first glimpse many Americans got of it came through three peppy Hollywood treatments: Beat Street, Breakin’, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

  The first rap song widely sold on vinyl was the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, the start of a four-year run for an independent label that included some of the most significant rap music made: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” and “White Lines,” as well as old-schoolers such as the “love rapper” Spoonie Gee and “Body Rock” by the Treacherous Three. “Rapper’s Delight” sold more than two million copies worldwide, hit number four on the R&B charts and number thirty-six on the pop charts. It was rap’s first commercial boom, all in one song; one that took many music execs, who were still pushing disco, by surprise.

  The new and improved second wave of rap hit in the eighties. Kurtis Blow got the party started with a fantastic rap jam, “The Breaks,” which sold gold as a twelve-inch in 1980. Kurtis’s party-hearty vibe married to pointed lyrics slipped onto the radar of punk and New Wave fans to reach the Top 30 in the U.K. Kurtis, in turn, opened up for reggae legend Bob Marley at Madison Square Garden, and toured with New Wave giants Blondie in Britain.

  But whereas Kurtis was barely known to pop audiences, Run-D.M.C. broke into the mainstream with their first twelve-inch “It’s Like That/Sucker MCs,” in 1983. While the Aside is amazing in its own right, on the B-side, rap evolved to a whole new level in just one song. “Sucker MCs” was a vision of rap to come; it is minimal, featuring only a drum machine and turntable scratches and the MCs overlapping delivery in which they finish each other’s sentences. Run-D.M.C.’s influence can’t be overestimated: They were the first group to fully cross over to pop and rock audiences, the first to integrate guitar riffs into their music, and the first to forgo the funk superhero gear and hyperbolic ganglike names in favor of b-boy sportswear. The members of Run-D.M.C. were closer to the street in image and attitude; they were the first rappers to “keep it real.” They were also middle-class kids who grew up in Hollis, Queens, and were managed by Joseph “Run” Simmons’s brother, mogul-in-the-making Russell. Run-D.M.C. ran with the rap ball, driving into the pop lane via the fledgling MTV. On the Music Television network, hip-hop had always played a bit part. Blondie’s “Rapture” brought proto-rapping and Fab Five Freddy’s name to the upper echelon (number one) of the pop charts, but true hip-hop culture first walked into the land of crossover on the robot legs of Herbie Hancock’s electro-monster “Rockit,” in 1983. The next year brought Chaka Khan’s Prince-penned pop and R&B hit, “I Feel for You,” featuring the low, smooth stylings of Grandmaster Melle Mel (of the Furious Five). These were inklings, but Run-D.M.C. changed it all with “Rock Box” in 1984, the third single to drop before their gold-selling eponymous debut was released the same year. “Rock Box” was the first real rap video, and it set the low-fi production values that seemed to stick until late in that decade. It was also, like Breakin’, the first that many American suburban teens saw of this thing called hip-hop.

  Run-D.M.C. may have opened the rap gates to the mainstream, but in the real world, eighties economics were laying waste to urban life in a way that would fuel the next wave of hip-hop. With more employment opportunities in post–Civil Rights corporate America, more African-Americans left for the suburbs, leaving what were once fully developed working-class urban communities behind. In Ronald Reagan’s America, the urban landscape became a gangland of drugs. Crack epitomized the rampant capitalism of the times: the narcotic equivalent of the turn of the decade. Where cocaine’s status symbol and social sniffing epitomized disco glamour, crack was its fast-food counterpart—a quick, intense high packaged for the masses. It was supremely capitalistic; it yielded more product from the drug dealer’s initial investment, and it’s low price and highly addictive nature ensured lifetime customers. The ratio of man hours to wages paid found in the job market for high-school graduates couldn’t compare to the money that could be made by crack, coke, and weed dealing, and there were plenty of openings in the inner city. Teenagers, even preteens, left school to work for gang corporations that produced, packaged, and sold drugs to a colorblind cross section of society. It was common practice at that time, as it still is today in a variety of locales nationwide.

  In a decade defined by conspicuous consumption, the division between rich and poor, addicts and dealers took on heaven and hell proportions in the cities. Profitable blocks—those with the most drug traffic—became war zones between rival dealing teams who would, as DMX put it in 1998’s “Ruff Ryders Anthem”: “Stop, drop, shut ’em down, open up shop / Oh, no, that’s how Ruff Ryders roll.” The dealers with the money bought more guns—big ones, such as the Israeli Uzi and the Austrian Glock, both designed for soldiers at war, which the drug game’s players are.

  Instead of a long-term path to a middle-management position, the drug trade is a shot at a monied life for those who can’t make it in the system; a shot at the very dream in the heart of rap music. Selling drugs is in no way a viable alternative—there are two logical ends: one is a coffin and the other is jail, arguably just a different type of coffin. But for many enterprising young men who are marginalized by society for their race, death is a worthwhile risk for the power and riches to be gained, as well as the chance to flaunt them in a society that values them so much. As rap grew commercially viable, music became the alternative to the alternative—an equally competitive, legal occupation with the same spoils, a wider degree of respect, and less mortal risk. It is a shot at a different kind of independence.

  “There’s a hyperbolic individualism in rap that has to do with the mistrust in relationships,” observes Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and author of the book A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. “All the central relationships of one’s life, with one’s single parent or whatever, are sources of pain, so therefore, there’s a self-sufficiency that meshes with the kind of simplistic capitalism of ‘every man for himself:’ It’s all a fabric of the alienation, the inability to make lasting, meaningful connections with human beings. Therefore, there’s a focus on things, on money, and a commodification of women, so their value to you is monetary. All of that kind of ugliness has to do with an underlying alienation. I don’t think the music is an informed embrace of capitalism, it’s an impulsive embrace of the self-sufficiency it seems to offer. Having said that, hip-hop has become this multibillion-dollar industry and produced the first generation of black entrepreneurs who really have access to the American mainstream, like Puff Daddy. So in an ironic sense, that’s good.”

  A young G, gettin’ paid: 2Pac in 1995.

  The crack boom of the 1980s also equaled more jailed young men. In the African-Ame
rican communities, close to 20 percent of the male population was in jail or on probation by the end of that decade, leaving fewer male role models outside the prison system and far too many with lessons to teach inside. In the music that came out of this era, the street reportage of Run-D.M.C. that opened so many doors was bowled over by groups with an even grittier broadcast to air. Whether it was the agitprop genius of Public Enemy, the protogangsta philosophies of Boogie Down Productions, the unapologetic sex and violence of N.W.A, the ghetto storytelling of Slick Rick, the pulp fiction pimpin’ of Ice-T, or the sublime boast and groove of Eric B. and Rakim, rap’s message had hardened. These groups dove deep into the realities of poverty, drugs, racism, and American hypocrisy while hip-hop producers such as the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) and Dr. Dre (N.W.A) turned beats into barrage. The new age of hip-hop MCs came with social commentary, from the contradictory theories of former homeless teen KRS-One to the middle-class, university-educated Chuck D’s literary sonic treatises with Public Enemy that forever changed what hip-hop could be. In an alternate take on the same issues, N.W.A shot their way into the depths of murder, mayhem, and sexism. In short, these are the groups that made hip-hop, as most consumers know it, matter.

  The East Coast acts, from Public Enemy to De La Soul, made huge inroads with white American teens, feeding the interest Run-D.M.C. had sparked. The sociopolitical agenda and hard edge of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions in particular dovetailed with the tastes of white punk-rock fans hooked on the Clash, and of those suburban rebels looking for a more extreme expression of anti-authoritarianism. By the release of their second album, 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy’s bombastic sonics and Chuck D’s lyrical rhetoric had set African-American pride to a revolutionary beat. They combined the social consciousness of Martin Luther King Jr., the stoic call for change of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the military imagery of the Black Panther Party. The group’s dense musical collage, Chuck D’s forceful baritone, and Flavor Flav’s comic foil coalesced the entirety of hip-hop: its roots, the conditions of its present, and the possibilities of its future. In the same late-eighties “golden age,” avant-garde groups such as De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, and A Tribe Called Quest—three groups who collaborated with other artists and collectively dubbed themselves the Native Tongues—expressed Afrocentricity through a bohemian perspective. The Tongues’ intellectual cynicism and humor took center stage, backed by a musical palette that integrated everything from jazz to Steely Dan. The Native Tongues and the artists like them who followed (Brand Nubian, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Arrested Development, and Digable Planets), crossed over with white college audiences. Literary-minded music fans of all ages and backgrounds dove deep into De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, a masterwork of pop music snippits and wit made in the brief age before music publishing lawyers realized the profit potential in sample clearances. Whether it was the smooth, soulful storytelling of A Tribe Called Quest or the blood sport of N.W.A, in the late eighties and early nineties, rap won a tremendous number of fans, mostly male, in white American suburbs. It was an obvious match. At a time when more young black men were convicted of crimes in America than any other demographic group, even rap that wasn’t overtly violent sounded like black men shouting, a sound that scared parents and peers more than the fastest punk rock or heavy metal. At the same time that rap appealed to its new fans for its message, it spoke of real American issues—poverty, crime, racism—that hadn’t quite filtered out to many quaint suburbs. Compared to rap music, the rock-and-roll rebellion of Metallica and Guns n’ Roses safely basked in its own excess.