Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Had it never been documented on record, rap music might simply have vanished; or remained static in its virgin, pre-Sugar Hill state; or mutated in ways that we cannot imagine. Instead, it was chronicled on vinyl, exposed to influences beyond the Bronx, from Kraftwerk to Phil Collins, and grew from a neighbourhood dialect into a global language which would, by the end of the 1980s, supplant rock as the most potent articulation of youthful alienation and bravado.

  In an effort to match ‘Rapper’s Delight’, New York labels poured out songs for the same novelty audience: ‘Christmas Rappin’’, ‘Astrology Rap’, ‘The Breaks’. The first and last of those were by Kurtis Blow, whose personality, skittish and arrogant, burst through his wordplay and easily memorised hooklines. With Brother D & Collective Effort’s ‘How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?’ (1980), however, rap followed soul’s journey into radical rhetoric. For Brother D, rhyming and breaking were just ‘wastin’ time’, when the point was to change the world.

  That object was achieved by other recruits to Sugar Hill. DJ Grandmaster Flash pre-empted the invention of the digital sampler with his dextrous deck-switching on ‘Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ (1981). Inevitably, he borrowed from Chic’s ‘Good Times’, as ‘Rapper’s Delight’ had done; but he also crossed racial boundaries by reclaiming Blondie’s ‘Rapture’, and snipping some vital seconds from Queen’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, which might have been fashioned with the sole purpose of being stripped down for hip-hop purposes. Flash also had his name on ‘The Message’ (1982; actually rapped by Melle Mel), which introduced British audiences to the concept of hip hop as social protest. Simultaneously, the American pop charts played host to another slant on the hip-hop revolution, Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s ‘Planet Rock’, co-produced by the decade’s most powerful remixer, Arthur Baker. Funny, chaotic, confrontational, the song’s universal declaration of hip hop was supported by synthetic keyboards echoing the innovations of Kraftwerk, and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Roland 808 drum machine. Bambaataa arrived in Britain that autumn with the New York City Rap Tour, a hip-hop package comprising DJs, graffiti artists, even a set of schoolgirls showing off their skipping skills.

  Along for the ride was Grandmixer D.ST, the man who transported GrandWizzard Theodore’s inventive scratching technique into a commercial gimmick. It received global attention on Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit, ‘Rockit’, to which the contribution of Hancock himself, a pioneer of jazz-funk-rock fusion with Miles Davis, was minimal: a jingle-like keyboard riff added after D.ST and producer Bill Laswell had assembled a hypnotic electro-funk track. Other electro sides that year might have been more enduring (West Street Mob’s ‘Break Dance – Electric Boogie’ is arguably the ultimate cross between robotics and the irresistible punch of the funky drummer), but Hancock’s appearance at the 1984 Grammy Awards – complete with shop-dummy dancers, and D.ST manning his steel wheels – transformed scratching from ghetto diversion into mainstream entertainment.

  It also consolidated hip hop as a synonym for partying, as breakbeats eased their way into the heart of adult-oriented soul records. The next gimmick lifted from the streets into the pop vocabulary was the human beatbox, central to the frivolity of Doug E Fresh’s 1985 hit ‘The Show’. The rapper, it seemed, was merely an irrelevance, as hip hop was reduced to a rhythm, a slick hand on a turntable, and a street attitude that was revitalising black music without leaving its mark.

  We don’t have to go to the leather3 guy and get costumes made up to look like Superman, or to look like the stars of the day, cause we are the stars.

  DMC, Run-DMC

  Too many acts think that all4 there is to rap is to talk about yourself. It’s killing the music.

  LL Cool J, 1987

  Run-DMC, said Chuck D of Public Enemy, were ‘the Beatles of hip hop5’; in which case, the role of producer George Martin was shared between the co-founders of Def Jam Recordings, Russell Simmons (brother of band member Run, né Joseph Simmons) and Rick Rubin. Recalling Run-DMC’s debut single, ‘It’s Like That’, Russell said: ‘No one could even imagine6 what the fuck it was. No melody. No harmony. No keyboards. Just a beat, some fake-sounding handclaps and these niggas from Queens yelling over the track.’ Rubin, who produced the trio’s 1986 breakthrough album, Raising Hell, boasted that ‘my biggest contribution to rap7 was the structured-song element. Prior to that, a lot of rap songs were seven minutes long; the guy would keep rapping until he ran out of words. “It’s Yours” [a 1984 Rubin production for T La Rock] separated it into verses and choruses.’

  Run himself had a simpler explanation for his outfit’s tight, incisive tracks: ‘Back then there weren’t any8 rap records. We’d just rap over anything with a hard beat, such as Aerosmith or James Brown, or breaks in songs like Billy Squier’s “Beat Box”.’ And their raps connected with their local audience, who shared their taste for (in DMC’s words) ‘Lee Jeans, shell-toe Adidas, Pro-Keds, Pumas, Kangol hats, sweatshirts, whatever was just common at the time’. Their music was stripped down to the raw elements of hip hop: beats from their DJ, Jam Master Jay, and compelling, fresh-from-the-corner slices of everyday life from DMC and Run. This earned them ten hits with the African-American audience, before the record which carried hip-hop culture into the white heartland of America, set up a symbiotic relationship with the rock mainstream, and enabled MTV to place a rap video on heavy rotation.

  The clip for ‘Walk This Way’ (1986) pitched Run-DMC in mock competition with hard-rock veterans Aerosmith, whose decade-old anthem the rappers had been chewing up for years. Run-DMC were persuaded by Rick Rubin to recut the song with its writers, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry, the two units battling for supremacy in front of the cameras before forgetting their enmity in their relish for the riff. With ‘King of Rock’ (1985), Run-DMC had already reached out to the rock audience as they rapped over the heavy-metal guitar clichés of session-man Eddie Martinez. ‘Walk This Way’ enveloped the rap act within Aerosmith’s macho allure, no longer a threat to the status quo but merely a fresh source of energy. Within a year this union of black and white would be transposed from drama to farce as the dysfunctional remnants of the Beach Boys joined the cartoon-like Fat Boys for a child-friendly revival of the 1960s surfing favourite, ‘Wipe Out’. Its video followed ‘Walk This Way’ on to MTV, as hip-hop clips were slotted into the network’s prime-time schedule, rather than being confined to a late-night ghetto. In summer 1988, Yo! MTV Raps – note the surprise and pride in that title – provided the same coverage as the station’s specialist shows on metal (Headbanger’s Ball) and alternative rock (120 Minutes).

  Run-DMC’s Raising Hell became the first hit album in hip-hop history. To outdo its No. 3 US chart peak, Rubin and Simmons offered a white rap act who might have been constructed from a kit to convert rock fans to rap: a former punk band named the Beastie Boys. As their subsequent career demonstrated, the trio’s immersion in hip-hop culture was total. But their Licensed to Ill debut album, stoked by their dorm-riot chant ‘Fight for the Right to Party’, suggested that a bunch of beer-soaked college kids had been allowed to pillage a hip-hop factory, stacking classic rock samples across breakbeats while competing to gross out their parents. With hard rock addicted to the bouffant curls and dry-ice posing of MTV videos, the Beastie Boys seemed to offer the exhilarating transgression that had stoked the rise of Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols: a 13-year-old’s fantasy orgy with the rowdiest gang in school.

  So prominent were the trio in 1987 that their profligate use of unauthorised samples could not be ignored. ‘One of the positive things9 about sampling’, claimed Beastie Boys drummer Mike D, ‘is that you’re incorporating a musical and cultural history into what you’re doing.’ This was an early sighting of the credo which would be heard repeatedly in the Internet age: that ignoring copyright restrictions promulgated artistic freedom. Those whose originality was being borrowed did not agree. ‘I just got a tape10 from some local record company
’, said Don Henley of the Eagles in 1990. ‘They used part of one of our songs from the 70s and just rapped over it. I resent that – go make up your own fucking music.’ While James Brown’s long-time sideman Fred Wesley credited sampling with keeping his music alive, the Godfather of Soul himself lambasted a generation of black musicians who would rather steal from their idol than reward him. KRS-One, whose Boogie Down Productions cut one of the most militant hip-hop albums of the late 1980s, By All Means Necessary, seemed to suggest that sampling was legitimate if it was white musicians who were losing out: ‘No one ever brings up11 the human factor of sampling. Black people have been sampled for years … Elvis Presley made millions “sampling” Little Richard.’ Once lawyers became involved in rap, however, unlicensed sampling became a thing of the past, and songwriting credits on hip-hop (and soul) albums ballooned to include all of those whose hooks or riffs had been borrowed.

  Just how creative that technique could be was illustrated in 1987. Eric B and Rakim hung their hit ‘I Know You Got Soul’ around elements of a 1971 track by James Brown’s vocal auxiliary, Bobby Byrd. Eric B was one of the first rappers to employ the devices of poetry in rap, breaking the pattern of simple, self-contained rhymed couplets to string out extended ideas across a series of lines, decorating his flow with internal rhymes and repeated vowel sounds. The Bomb Squad production team for the rap collective Public Enemy adopted a starkly different method, compressing what sounded like hundreds of samples – some of them a single symbolic noise, like a screech borrowed from (inevitably) James Brown’s band, the JBs – across the grooves of their UK hit ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, and their incendiary album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In their hands, rap was a deadly weapon: militant, religiously severe, confrontational, purposefully designed to disorient anyone who did not share their crusade. It was Public Enemy’s Chuck D who felt strong enough to say (on ‘Fight the Power’ from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing movie) ‘Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.’ Like the Clash’s similar recital from 1977, this was meant to shock and divide. When Public Enemy member Griff was quoted as saying that ‘Jews are responsible for the majority12 of wickedness that goes on around the globe’, and the collective were linked to the Nation of Islam, their reputation was scarred. Like the Beatles after John Lennon’s remarks about Christ in 1966, however, their best-selling work followed on the heels of this furore.

  Other hip-hop acts seemed to pose a threat to society greater than anti-Semitism, to judge from the hysterial press coverage given to rap between 1988 and 1990. NWA (alias Niggaz With Attitude) aroused political fury with their LP Straight Outta Compton. With its explicit anthem ‘Fuck Tha Police’, casual eroticism and cavalier stance towards gratuitous violence, the album confronted white America with the black men of its darkest dreams. If Public Enemy could be excused their militancy because it was accompanied by a coherent manifesto, NWA represented social and sexual terror: the unknown danger spelled out in capital letters.

  Alongside NWA’s distortion of the California promise there emerged a more carnal and less political threat from Florida. Miami’s 2 Live Crew became the first musicians to have an album (As Nasty as They Wanna Be, from 1989, with its crude hit single ‘Me So Horny’) declared officially obscene by a state judge. Their lyrics and videos were rampantly sexist, awash with profanities, utterly lacking in irony; but it seemed no coincidence that similar lapses of taste by rock musicians had not led to court hearings. As Bruce Springsteen’s producer/manager Jon Landau noted, ‘Now that the focus has switched13 to rap music, they’re trying to throw people in jail.’

  In fields and warehouses14 and aircraft hangers around Britain, for a while it felt as if we were building an alternative society of our own … [Participants] didn’t fit the stereotype of joyriding, ramraiding, shoplifting, drug-pushing, estate-dwelling lost youth. These were nice kids. The kids next door. Their kids. And it seemed as if they had all gone mad.

  Sheryl Garratt, dance-music historian

  Football hooliganism15 got finished overnight. Just the strength that we felt with each other, just en masse … beautiful. It was a community thing.

  Ian Brown, the Stone Roses

  In 1989, when there was unprecedented dissent in Communist China, and Eastern Europe’s closed minds and borders were about to be pierced, it was possible to imagine that Britain was staging a revolutionary uprising of its own – in the name of nothing more dangerous than love.

  The trigger word within dance culture in 1988 had been acid, memories of 1967’s psychedelia inspiring the claim that this was the second Summer of Love. In 1989, the ecstatic word was rave: another hangover from the 1960s, when it was both a pop magazine and any scene that was really happening. This time around, the ravers weren’t dolly birds and office workers in mod gear, but unashamed hedonists seeking a form of spontaneous unity that could not be confined within the conventions of the music business; and hence, in its anarchic immediacy, represented a threat to the status quo.

  So it was that the repetitive flurry of computerised dance beats, entirely free of angst, repression and violence, could spark police attention of an intensity not felt in Britain since 1977, the summer of punk hatred. Laws were undoubtedly being broken; empty warehouses and fields invaded by thousands of young people of all races; illegal drugs consumed, very occasionally with fatal consequences; giant convoys of pleasure-seekers circulating around the M25 motorway, waiting for the signal that would announce where tonight’s rave would begin. But the only violence – the customary by-product of teenage gatherings – came when police let loose their dogs on kids who were pulsating to a rhythm that was unrelenting and transcendent. It was the product of a decade’s experimentation with beats and electronics, in Chicago, Detroit and New York, on Ibiza, and in late-night clubs across London. Just as the music was a journey with no destination, so the ravers circling the capital in search of a party were engaged on a quest that might have no ending; merely a new beginning, as the countdown to the next party began.

  For those unaware of these epic voyages through the darkness towards ecstasy, the music which provided their soundtrack sounded baffling. The British charts in October 1988 seemed to explode into a new, surreal dimension, twisted out of shape by records which were disorienting sonic adventures. Beneath their unwavering beats there were sharp clatters of synthesised percussion; layered above were apparently random stabs of noise, samples that might come from factory sirens or TV shows, public information films or vintage rock ’n’ roll instrumentals, and war cries (of ‘aciieed’ or ‘party’) so simple that their banality started to seem profound. It was not quite, as the Pet Shop Boys promised in a contemporaneous song, ‘Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat’, but the aural assault of ‘We Call It Acieed’, ‘Acid Man’, ‘Can You Party?’, ‘Stakker Humanoid’ and the rest was almost that startling.

  Under this influence, pop could not fail to react, in ways almost too strange to imagine. Fifty-six-year-old Petula Clark produced a techno version of her signature 1964 hit ‘Downtown’. Forty-eight-year-old Tom Jones fell into the hands of synth-pop experimentalists the Art of Noise, and emerged with a revival of Prince’s funk classic ‘Kiss’, which revitalised his career. Indie rock bands abandoned their fixations with the Byrds, early 1960s girl groups and the Smiths to leap into the future – none more dramatically than Pop Will Eat Itself, whose ‘Can U Dig It’ was a magical compression of at least half a dozen different musical cultures, a clear sign of what lay ahead. Paul Weller, once the chronicler of urban angst, a political crusader and a student of suburban English life, remodelled himself as a stylist of house music, claiming that nothing bored him more than rock music with guitars. Britain even pioneered its own distinctive vision of the junction between soul and hip hop, with Soul II Soul’s ‘Keep On Movin’’.

  It was inevitable that the rave audiences should include fledgling rock bands. ‘We saw some of the spirit16 of Paris 1968 reflected in the acid-house mo
vement’, recalled Ian Brown of Manchester’s Stone Roses. ‘People were coming together and governments don’t want that.’ Neither did many followers of British indie, their flag defiantly reserved for bands who eschewed an overt black influence. Yet in Manchester, where the Hacienda club (owned by Factory Records) was a beacon of independence from the London corporate mainstream, and also a showcase for cutting-edge American dance rhythms, there was little opposition to this music which disposed with the instruments and symbolism of the rock tradition. ‘Pop music was saved by the advent17 of acid house and rap because [white guitar bands] have done nothing for ten years’, Brown declared.

  As the decade closed, a new form of British rock came out of the international rhythms of house, and the collective culture of rave. It was unashamedly tied to dance rhythms, often (especially in the hands of the Happy Mondays) filled with exuberant wordplay, anthemic and rousing – a culture dubbed (after a Happy Mondays EP) ‘Madchester’. Besides the Roses and the Mondays, there were a dozen lesser bands; exactly the kind of scene that catches the media’s attention, and then burns out in a matter of months. The decline of ‘baggy’ culture, a term inspired by a preference for clothes that were the opposite of rock ’n’ roll’s traditionally figure-hugging garb, was quick and merciless, aided by the self-destructive nature of its two biggest bands. Dance culture, too, began to fragment; the all-together ethos was replaced by cults that were deliberately elitist, seeking to exclude those who didn’t follow exactly the rhythmic or tonal formulae of their sect. With an increasingly fervid media ready to seize upon a new sensation or threat to social cohesion, the only way to claim ownership of a milieu was to impose ever tighter boundaries around it, and then label it as a badge of identity. Beginning with dance, with its handbag and hardbag, trance and hard trance, deep house and diva house, jungle and horrorcore, this division and division again of music into ever more exclusive categories was visible in almost every genre. The ultimate goal, perhaps, was a style which would belong to just one person: an impulse reminiscent of the desperate isolation and wilful solipsism of the tortured adolescent.