by Bob Stanley
Rap’s pop-culture rise had climaxed in the summer of ’84 with a brace of movies, Beat Street and Breakdance, that cemented rap and breakdancing as pre-teen novelties to be tolerated by adults until, like skateboarding, they impinged on their fiercely guarded public spaces. The two biggest spin-off hits – Break Machine’s ‘Street Dance’ (UK no. 3 in the spring of ’84) and Ollie and Jerry’s ‘There’s No Stopping Us’ (US no. 9, UK no. 5 in the summer) – dispensed with rapping altogether; they were sweet enough electro-fied pop-soul records, but could just as easily have been straightforward love songs if they hadn’t included the odd reference to ‘city kids spinnin’ on our backs’.
And yet 1984 was also the year the Def Jam label put out its first records,1 LL Cool J’s ‘I Need a Beat’ and the Beastie Boys’ ‘Rock Hard’: rap was about to be reborn as hip hop. Def Jam gave rap muscle, stealing it with intent from their kid brother’s bedroom, and they weren’t subtle about it. Graceful electro backing tracks were binned in favour of pared-down beatbox crunch and samples as heavy as AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ or John Bonham’s drums on ‘Kashmir’. Suddenly rap wasn’t a played-out novelty at all. Within three years, Def Jam made it the biggest commercial force in pop, a position that it has yet to relinquish.
Def Jam also signed Run-DMC, from Hollis in Queens, who had started out as a three-piece version of the Furious Five but stripped the disco samples and ditched the colourful suits as they gained confidence. In 1984 they released ‘It’s Like That’ backed with ‘Sucker MCs’, a single that consisted of nothing more than hard rap and harder beatbox – no disco, no bassline, no melody at all – and to match the new minimal sound the boys eschewed visual excess by dressing in black. Without troubling the US charts, Run-DMC’s debut sold a quarter of a million copies. Def Jam’s founders, Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, managed to convince Columbia of the label’s, and hip hop’s, crossover potential. Simmons was black and Rubin was a Jewish NYU student; Columbia bit and gave them a million-dollar deal.
What Simmons used to convince Columbia, and what he introduced to hip hop, was entrepreneurial flash. Two years on, Run-DMC were covering ‘Walk This Way’, which had been a US Top 10 hit for heavy-rockers Aerosmith in 1976. If this wasn’t crossover enough, they got members of Aerosmith to guest on it and play the original’s guitar-boogie riff. And, in case you still didn’t get Simmons and Rubin’s cross-cultural message, the video had the two acts in neighbouring studios, initially winding each other up before literally kicking down the wall between them and doing a crazy little show together with their arms around each other. This racial blending was something that had occurred, unforced, in modern pop forever, from Bill Haley through to Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Thom Bell, Todd Rundgren and Blondie. What ‘Walk This Way’ did was to make it seem like a breakthrough, physically so. The song was a crossbreed all right, like a pit bull; with rare MTV approval for a rap record, ‘Walk This Way’ went Top 10 in Britain and America.
With one foot in the door, Def Jam then kicked it open with the Beastie Boys. By 1986 pop was aware enough of its history to anticipate hip hop’s Elvis moment, white kids borrowing black kids’ culture and scoring Pat Boone-like sales figures. The Beastie Boys’ breakthrough hit ‘Fight for Your Right (to Party)’ (UK no. 11 ’87) was barely hip hop at all, though, a frat-metal burn-up that may or may not have been a parody; the only real difference between ‘Fight for Your Right’ and This Is Spinal Tap was the dress sense – baseball caps and VW medallions – and the rhythmic vocal delivery. Self-fulfilling prophecies, Run-DMC’s Raising Hell sold three million in ’86, while the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill sold four million in ’87 and became the first number-one hip-hop album in America.
So, Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin’s commercial senses were acute. Fortunately they were fans, too. Def Jam also had LL Cool J (whose ‘I Need Love’ – US no. 14, UK no. 8 ’87 – was the first hip-hop ballad hit, a far cuter innovation than ‘Walk This Way’) and, soon enough, Public Enemy. Nevertheless, Def Jam cashed cheques that were many times larger than any that had been paid out to Grandmaster Flash or Afrika Bambaataa. In part, this was down to the less prominent role of the DJ. In 1979 the DJ had been the fount of hip hop, but beatboxes and record producers meant the art of scratching and mixing was suddenly ‘old school’ – a term of endearment that also rendered it passé. The MC was now the central character, and rapping veered away from ‘throw your hands in the air’ gaiety. As Reaganomics bit hard, and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam wowed black youth the way Malcolm X once had, hip hop began to investigate the textures and persuasive powers of dialogue and flow.
Between 1983 and 1989 the top one per cent of American households saw their wealth increase by sixty-six per cent; in 1983 the average white American family was eleven times wealthier than its black counterpart, and twenty-two times wealthier in 1989. Racial equality was only real on MTV. Crack cocaine was riddling and wrecking black communities by the mid-eighties: high-profile casualties included the Furious Five’s Cowboy and Rock Steady Crew’s Buck 4 and Kuriaki; everywhere was murder, crime, and the dream of Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation was in tatters.
Public Enemy weren’t as MTV-friendly as Run-DMC or the Beastie Boys. They looked like Stokely Carmichael and his buddies twenty years on, had their own ‘minister of information’ – Professor Griff – and were not about to be gently ribbed on a Mel Brooks record. Carlton ‘Chuck D’ Ridenhour, Hank ‘Shocklee’ Boxley and Richard ‘Professor Griff’ Griffin grew up in relatively affluent and culturally rich Long Island. Chuck’s mum formed and ran the Roosevelt Community Theater. When they were barely in their teens, along with Chuck’s childhood pal Eddie Murphy, they attended a course called the Afro American Experience led by Black Panthers, black Muslims and students at Adelphi and Hofstra universities; Chuck and Hank were impressed enough to attend these largely white universities a few years later.
Def Jam’s publicist Bill Adler pitched Chuck D to the music press as ‘the new Bob Dylan’, the first time in a generation that that old chestnut had been reheated. Like Dylan and Dexys Midnight Runners before, and the Manic Street Preachers a few years later, Public Enemy’s interviews were at least as challenging and entertaining as their music. The NME made their middling debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show album of the year in 1987; it sounded exciting but, alongside Eric B. and Rakim’s inner revolution on ‘I Know You Got Soul’ or producer Marley Marl’s high-tech crunch,2 it was a little clunky, dated even. They knew it, and raised their game for the next single: a sample from the JBs’ ‘The Grunt’ provided their production team, the Bomb Squad, with a relentless boiling-kettle sax squeal which made ‘Rebel without a Pause’ as relentless and thrilling and scary as any record since ‘Anarchy in the UK’. ‘Man, you gotta slow down!’ yelled Flavor Flav on the record’s brief moments of release. ‘Man, you’re losing them!’ But Chuck D would not slow down. By the time of their second album, 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, they had the music to match the message: their sound was astonishingly dense and confident, overloaded with party noise, sirens, pressure-drop bass notes, atonal brass bursts, and the raps were direct – ‘Get down for the prophets of rage.’
With astonishing cheek, Public Enemy had taken the entire history of hip hop up to this point and turned it into a forty-minute manifesto; there was no dead space between the tracks. They may not have been seen sharing a stage with Steven Tyler but they were smart enough to appreciate Def Jam’s elevated profile and Run-DMC’s groundbreaking step of turning a crew into a pop group (‘There’s three of us but we ain’t the Beatles,’ as they’d said – four years after John Lennon had been shot). They had a DJ, Terminator X, and the Bomb Squad: too black, too strong, almost too powerful to deal with. It was such an overloaded sound, such a lot to take in, and it was giving so much simultaneously (message, noise, inspiration) that it was hard to listen to in one sitting.
By October ’88 they graced the cover of the NME with a tagline of ‘Public Enemy.
The greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world?!’ Chuck D told Danny Kelly, ‘Rock ’n’ roll is there to be studied and learned about. Rap has closer links to rock ’n’ roll than to any other music. What is rock ’n’ roll? It’s the projection of attitude, not the deliverance of sound. Attitude! Rap’s acts have that attitude, that character, that rock bands have used to get across to the public. They just haven’t learned to project it.’
Run-DMC had boiled the sound down, but almost no one had delivered a message since, well, ‘The Message’, apart from the Furious Five (on ‘White Lines’ and ‘Message II’). With Public Enemy, out went the bragging. They wanted to cause a stink. ‘Never be average or mediocre,’ said Chuck D. ‘I remember our first tour, the Richmond show, we played the Public Enemy tone throughout the whole show. Kids were tugging at their moms, people were running for the exit, someone called the fire department – they thought it was an air raid! They hated it, but they remembered us.’ Their music was incendiary. Rappers, and Public Enemy especially, had the potential to affect racial affairs in the US like no one since the Black Panthers: ‘In five years, we intend to have cultivated five thousand black leaders.’
Elsewhere, hip hop had become big enough that it had to defend itself against more than just trad-rock critics. R&B songwriter Mtume (Stephanie Mills’s ‘Never Knew Love Like This Before’, Roberta Flack’s ‘The Closer I Get to You’, his own ‘Juicy Fruit’) posited on a New York radio station that hip hop’s sampling culture was ‘nothing but Memorex music’. Tuning in were Stetsasonic, who wrote ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ as hip hop’s own ‘It Will Stand’, as history lesson and defence of the music’s past, present and future: ‘Rap brings back old R&B … we wanna make this perfectly clear, we’re talented and strong and have no fear.’
Mtume’s charge that hip hop added nothing new to the black musical vocabulary seemed nuts in 1988. Eric B. and Rakim’s ‘Follow the Leader’ introduced chilled, understated beats and Rakim’s beyond laid-back, almost whispered style; Mitcham-born storyteller Slick Rick released his first album, sounding like a hip-hop Paddy Roberts with his long narratives and shaggy-dog tales; Salt-n-Pepa and their DJ Spinderella (who Smash Hits’ Tom Hibbert coyly described as ‘rather handsome’) became the first female hip-hop act to become pop stars with ‘Push It’ (UK no. 2, US no. 19), the first in a string of fifteen UK Top 40 hits, almost all of which had a forceful sexuality and a sense of humour to match Mae West; Ultramagnetic MCs, with producer Ced-Gee, were the first act to chop samples up, tweak them and use them out of context on ‘Critical Beatdown’. Everywhere you looked, there was innovation.
More significantly, though, NWA’s Straight outta Compton appeared in 1988. There was no Nation of Islam revolution in their words – this was a world of dope deals, ho’s and violence, tagged ‘reality rap’ by main lyricist Ice Cube. It was brutal. If dissenters had seen violence implicit in pop from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, even the Beastie Boys, it had never been as blatant as west-coast rap made it. At this point something was lost, a spell was broken.
Ultramagnetic MCs’ Tim Dog released a single called ‘Fuck Compton’ in 1991, which made its point without anyone having to hear it. Crews in the Bronx projects had long been suspicious of LA rappers bragging and beefing about how tough their lives were. Who were they kidding? thought Tim. Look at their houses – they live in bungalows! They’ve probably got net curtains and gnomes in their gardens.
Public Enemy’s intensity was struggling to sustain itself by ’91. ‘Once you getting into tit-for-tat rhetoric,’ said Chuck D in his autobiography, ‘then you fall into a sea full of contradiction.’ The righteous anger they’d brought out in the open was mixed up with a fondness for seventies blaxploitation movies and taken down another route by west-coast acts like NWA and Ice-T – gangsta rap was the outcome.3
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I remember Afrika [Bambaataa] called me that night, like, two in the morning. ‘Yo these kids, De La Soul, you gotta meet ’em! I swear we’re just alike!’ I went there, met them, and it was just fuckin’ love at first sight. It was disgusting! Hip hop, it praises individualism. I think that’s the main achievement of the Native Tongues – it just showed people could come together.
Q-Tip
While Ice-T was taking hip hop in a direction that Spike Lee found analogous to a minstrel show, there was a simultaneous movement on the east coast based around the Native Tongues collective. Groups like the Jungle Brothers, Beatnuts and A Tribe Called Quest used Steely Dan samples, preached togetherness and wore baggy, bright-coloured clothes. This certainly chimed with a British audience ready to bliss out after three years of relentlessly increasing dancefloor beats. De La Soul, from Amityville, Long Island, turned out to be the Monkees of hip hop.
They were a hit with students, stoners, teenagers coming home from illegal raves and kids looking for an easy way into hip hop; the Sesame Street cartoon imagery of their artwork chimed with late-sixties British psychedelia and in short order they had four UK hit singles: ‘Me, Myself and I’, ‘Say No Go’ (which sampled Hall and Oates), ‘Eye Know’ (ditto with Steely Dan) and ‘The Magic Number’, each scoring a progressively higher chart position. Helmed by producer Prince Paul, they were hip, nimble-witted, used previously untapped and unimagined source material (one track on their 1989 debut Three Feet High and Rising album sampled a French-language course over the intro of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Hey Jude’), and looked like the Banana Splits.
A Tribe Called Quest’s 1990 album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm showed the airiness of Three Feet High and Rising was no one-off, and this nascent movement was tagged ‘daisy age’. They sampled Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ on their sweet, summer-soundtracking ‘Can I Kick It’ (UK no. 15 ’91) and wooed a girl from their high school on ‘Bonita Applebum’:4 ‘Satisfaction? I have the right tactics. And if you need them I’ve got crazy prophylactics.’ MC Q-Tip got to act alongside Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice in ’93, romance blossomed, and they recorded ‘Got Till It’s Gone’ (UK no. 6 ’97). Later on he’d work with the Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, Mobb Deep, J Dilla, Raekwon, Common – ‘I’m just a people’s person,’ he said modestly, ‘and that’s it.’ A Tribe Called Quest were proof you could be all-round nice guys in hip hop and still get respected.
Parallel to the daisy-age movement, conscious rap had its moment in the sun headed by Atlanta’s Arrested Development, who were briefly enormous. They aimed to create a rural, Afrocentric alternative to gangsta rap’s urban malaise and pulled it off with three hits that made the British and American Top 20 in 1992: ‘Tennessee’ saluted their roots, ‘Mr Wendal’ turned the spotlight on the homeless, and ‘People Everyday’ (US no. 8, UK no. 2) sampled Sly Stone, the original gangsta (whatever Ice-T might have been claiming). They could have been a Georgian counterpart to New York’s Native Tongues, but the trouble was they took themselves frightfully seriously; they even had an official ‘spiritual elder’ in the group, a bearded, shoeless man called Baba Oje. ‘We try to make sure our minds are clear so that we can address the issues as opposed to let them totally engulf us,’ their front man Speech told Vogue magazine. He wanted to ‘take this rap thing beyond entertainment, to turn it into a soul-searching experience’. Arrested Development were full of such well-meaning platitudes, and everyone was heartily tired of them by the time of their second album, the unwelcomingly titled Zingalamaduni, in ’94. Still, they laid the groundwork for the hugely successful Fugees – who would score two UK number ones in ’96 with ‘Ready or Not’ and ‘Killing Me Softly’ – as well as the conscious soul of Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, none of whom felt the need to have a spiritual elder on bongos.
A lone exception to the west coast’s gangsta fixation was Oakland outfit Digital Underground, who practised what they called ‘ancestor worship’,5 heavily influenced by P-Funk’s grooves and humour. Their loping ‘Doowutchyalike’ and ‘Humpty Dance’ (US no. 11 ’89) singles came from an album called Sex Packets, a
concept album about a pharmaceutical substance called GSRA (Genetic Suppression Relief Antidotes): ‘Now I can still be getting busy with any girl I like. No more will I ever have to jack it, ’cos instead I can just take a packet.’
They were quite preposterous. Founder member Shock G, aka Humpty Hump, dressed like Groucho Marx and had a Hair Bear Bunch voice to suit their cartoon imagery. The young Tupac Shakur was part of the group, dressing up as an African king in the video for ‘Same Song’, and quitting after he contributed a verse to their unusually serious cultural awareness-raiser ‘Wussup wit the Luv’. Soon afterwards he lost his sense of humour, which was really too bad.
De La Soul loved Steely Dan and Hall and Oates, and this left them open to sniping – like the soft-rockers of the sixties – from the more credibility-hungry rappers. Arsenio Hall, in an unlikely dig, introduced them on his show as ‘the hippies of hip-hop’. Jeff Chang’s lauded Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation mentions them twice in passing. You can understand their hankering for acceptance.
Their second album featured a broken flower pot on the cover to bluntly signify the end of the daisy age. De La Soul Is Dead was unsurprisingly low on laughs but did include one joyous cut, maybe their best single of all, ‘A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays”’ (UK no. 22 ’91). At the same time as they distanced themselves from their daisy-age creation, they had a pop at gangsta rap on ‘Afro Connections at a Hi 5 (in the Eyes of the Hoodlum)’. Who did they end up pleasing? Well, The Source – by now America’s most important hip-hop magazine – gave it a 5-mic review, but white kids snubbed the dourness of tracks like ‘Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa’, and the west-coast hard core just shrugged. By 1993 Trugoy the Dove declared ‘that Native shit is dead’, and the Native Tongues collective disintegrated.6
