_ | \ | \ | | \ __ | |\ \ __ _____________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ _____________ | ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ | | | _/_/_____ | | > > _/_/_____ | | | | /________/ | | / / /________/ | | | | | | / / | | | | | |/ / | | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | |_/ | | | | | | | | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | | | |________________________________________________________________| | |____________________________________________________________________| ...presents... Hip-Hop Primer #2 Part 2 of 2 by Mark Dery >>> a cDc publication.......1991 <<< -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- ______________________________________________________________________________ RUBIN: "Rap records are really black rock and roll records, the antithesis of disco. The rap records which were being made in the beginning, like the ones on the Sugar Hill label, were disco records with a guy rappin' on top of 'em. That's because these were companies who, before rap became popular, were making disco records. What I tried to do was make records that had more to do with what the rap scene was about in the clubs, where the kinds of beats they were rapping over weren't disco beats; they were Billy Squier and Aerosmith - rock and roll beats! So I thought what needed to happen was to make the beats on these records more oriented toward rock." ADLER: "Rappers make rock and roll. My notion of rock and roll isn't pegged to a big, noisy guitar. I think rock and roll has always been about attitude and rhythm; it's about aggression, rebellion, sex, and a big beat. It's also about intelligence and wit. And if those are the qualities that you look for in rock and roll, you're gonna come to rap." RUBIN: "A Run-D.M.C. concert, which, two or three years ago, would draw maybe a 70 or 80 percent black audience, is now drawing a 70 or 80 percent white audience. I'd say that's a crossover. Things are definitely changing in rap." McDANIELS: "When we did 'Rock Box' and 'King Of Rock,' these headbangers couldn't believe the tracks we made. They like, 'Yo, man, that's really bad!' It definitely brought them in, and now, they still with it. Even if Run-D.M.C. don't put a metal track, they gonna buy the album and they'll wind up liking a hip-hop jam, they'll end up liking a cut like 'Run's House' or 'Beats To The Rhyme.' Now they understand it. They followed the guitar in there, and then they found out there was a whole other side to it." ADLER: "Can I tell you why this music wins? Because it is intrinsically powerful. This is some of the most exciting popular music being made by anyone anywhere on the planet. I've always said, 'Please let us play on a bill with Bruce Springsteen or whoever most white people think is an exciting rock and roller. We'll go on first!' Let me put Public Enemy on before Bruce Springsteen; that would be it for brother Brucie; he'd be finished! He'd have to go and take an early shower! Public Enemy would get off the stage and the crowd would head for the exits!" SILVERMAN: "Is rap rock and roll? Rap is what rock and roll should be. When rock went to sleep, rap rose from its ashes." _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ The chapter on rap in the late '80s will have to be written when historical distance affords a little objectivity. It's safe to make several predictions, though, based on the words and music of some of the more innovative rappers. For example, it seems clear that we'll be seeing a return to the use of live musicians in the studio and onstage. SILVERMAN: "Stetsasonic is the first rap group to tour with a live drummer. It's sort of a retro movement, because all the sampling that's done is James Brown stuff, which was live drums to begin with. Stetsasonic have three emcees, two deejays, a guy named D.B.C. ['Dynamic Beat Creator'] who plays synthesizers, a live drummer, and a guy who makes scratch sounds and beats with his mouth. It's sort of like a hip-hop orchestra." McDANIELS: "People are startin' to put basslines in it, and pianos and horns. A lot of the records you hear on the radio now got good tracks behind 'em. The music is maturing, progressing, and as it does, the rap scene does. The rappers and the deejays go into the studio and put a beat down and rap over it and then they say, 'Hey, I know a bass line that would go great with that!' So I would say the scene is getting more musical. Or at least, people are utilizing more musical sounds. Musicians play an important role; they add the flavor to the beats. We always have a lot of real instruments on our tracks. But people are still sampling. We're still dropping in beats from James Brown or Billy Squier or the Meters." The tug of war over the ethical and legal aspects of sampling will continue as rappers go on painting remarkable pastiches in sound. GEHR: "So far, the big case involves the Beastie Boys, and the group they ripped off for their tune 'Brass Monkey,' off of LICENSE TO ILL. I suspect that will be settled out of court, because everyone's afraid of setting a legal precedent for this stuff. If record companies were smarter, they'd say, 'Sure, anybody can do it,' because people from their record companies are going to want to rip off people from other companies. But they're so concerned with keeping their turf that that's probably not going to happen. There will probably be these dippy little court cases that get settled out of court without setting any legal precedent. I don't think it's going to be etched in stone." ROBINSON: "We've never really used bits and pieces of other peoples' stuff too much, because a lot of groups are getting involved in lawsuits over that. We just take ordinary sounds, like if I hear a noisy car outside, I'll grab the little sampler and sample that. Or if I hear people talking, I'll sample that too. Or if I'm watchin' TV and I hear somethin' from a commercial, like where they say, 'Parkay... Butter!,' I'll sample that." DADDY-O, from Stetsasonic: "Our latest single and video, 'Talkin' All That Jazz,' is pro-sampling. It's almost like an anti-James Brown nowadays record, now that's he's coming back with this static about sampling. I'm just establishing what we intend to do with sampling. We sometimes use the words 'recontextualization' or 'revivification,' but it means the same thing, which is to take something old and make it new again. The strong point of what sampling does for us, as a music form, is to establish some soul groove and some old funk that's lost with today's R&B in the name of crossover, in the name of pop charts, in the name of Whitney Houston, whatever. You know what I'm saying?" STEVE ETT, engineer and co-owner, Chung King House Of Metal studios: "I'm with everybody who steals stuff to make new stuff, because in my book, one plus one equals three. If you take one thing and add it to something else, you get two in mathematics. But in the real world, when you take one sound and add it to a second sound, you create a third sound. By stealing a bass line from one old record and sticking it into a drumbeat, you create a whole new song." McDANIELS: "If you use somebody's material, just give 'em their royalties and everybody will be happy and merry. That's something you should do right away instead of waitin' until your records sell, because if your record does good, the person will be like, 'Yo, I want mine.' Then you can't put the album out 'cause you be goin' to court and then you sittin' there mad, you know?" Rap is travelling beyond its old neighborhoods, and adapting to diverse climates throughout the world. In the U.S. strong growth pockets in Los Angeles and Miami are creating new sub-styles of rap. SILVERMAN: "There's a Miami sound called 'bass music,' with modulating bass and a heavy 808 sound. And there's a California sound, which is totally different, typified by artists such as Ice-T, people who are selling a quarter of a million or more records in L.A. and don't ever get played in New York. All of the California stuff and a lot of the Miami music is high-speed rap of 120 beats per minute or more. It all sounds like 'Planet Rock.' BAMBAATAA: "It's spreadin' from country to country. You have Jovanotti, this white Italian guy who had a Number One rap album in Italy. You have rappers in Holland. You have a couple of groups comin' out of Belgium and Germany. A lot of the European rappin' is mixed, where you have blacks and whites doin' it together. I'd say France, besides England, has the funkiest acts. France is the only place that had a syndicated TV show called HIP HOP that was on for two to three years." SILVERMAN: "A British school of rap is beginning to rear its head. Derek B., Cookie Crew, and a whole new level of rappers are starting to emerge from there, with very strong Jamaican roots. If anything, they're a lot more knowledgeable about reggae, which sells a lot more in that country per capita than it does here. So I think that they're going to have a leg up on us when they do get into rap." RUBIN: "I think the British scene might be the future of rap. Much like Led Zeppelin taking the American blues and doing a white boy bastardized version if it, the British might do the same thing with rap. I don't necessarily like what they've done to it, but I think that's the only chance it has." GEHR: "The interesting thing about the British rap phenomenon is that what most hipsters seem to be into in England isn't rap at all; it's hip-hop. They're not into rap as an American derivative of Jamaican toasting, so much as they're into the idea of hip-hop being a larcenous kind of music that borrows from a lot of other sources, reorganizing them in interesting ways. They're into rap more as radical music than as social commentary." McDANIELS: "I like them English guys. They seem to be with it. They're just as enthusiastic as the people over here in the States; I think they want it more, even, 'cause they're not from here, you know what I'm sayin'? A lot of rappers do good over there, get a lot of radio play, do successful tours. It's very, very easy to get on TV over there, they got so many music shows. The scene over there is very good for this music, and I like the rappers that are comin' outta there. I think, right now, they just wanna see who's the best rapper, who got the best beats and stuff like that. But eventually, you'll have some of 'em comin' out, discussin' what's goin' on in the streets, givin' a message, making a strong social statement." _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ Rap, it seems, is everywhere. But despite its escalating sales, and despite the push given it by respected critics in THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE VILLAGE VOICE, and other publications, it continues to receive little or no airplay on white or black radio. ADLER: "There's a kind of paradox build into our success. At the same time that we've achieved enormous critical and commercial recognition, we've also had to face an awful lot of resistance in the form of bans on radio. If Public Enemy got airplay commensurate with their true popularity, they'd sell ten times as many records as they're already selling. They've already sold 750,000 records in six weeks without any airplay! Everybody in the music industry understands that radio is the chief sales medium and yet we find ourselves banned. Why is this happening? Because rock radio doesn't play rap. There's a more or less blanket ban on music by artists of color. They don't think that black musicians play rock and roll. That's why we think AOR means 'Apartheid-Oriented Radio.' "The thing to understand is the difference in the cultural climate today vis a' vis the '60s. Take Woodstock, for example: There was an even balance of white and black artists there. Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone were the heroes of that event in a lot of ways, but there was Crosby, Still, Nash & Young for people who liked folk rock, Joan Baez was on the bill, The Who were there, and they were all mixed up together. And that wasn't unusual because that's the way radio was at that time. When Sly Stone had a hit and The Beatles had a hit, you heard them back-to-back on the radio. What happened, in the early '70s, was that the once-monolithic rock audience was demographed by radio programmers. Now, there's so-called 'rock radio' for white kids in the suburbs and so-called 'urban radio' for black kids in the cities and there's very little actual crossover in terms of day-to-day programming. So rock radio plays virtually no black artists, even though there are musicological links between the staple music of AOR and our music. An artful programmer could program Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, and Eric B., along with Van Halen and the rest of those bands. Why aren't they doing it? It's racism! They're afraid of black people! It's all-white staffs and all-white deejays playing all-white artists for an all-white audience. "Now, black radio is fucked up on the basis, not of racism, but of class. To put it in current cultural terms, it's a war between the buppies and the B-boys; buppies are black yuppies and the B-boys are our guys. Black radio is run by upwardly mobile black men who, even if they come from a background like Chuck's, don't want anybody to know about it. Rap music pulls them right back to the streetcorner, which is distasteful to them, even terrorizing. It's black, aggressive, loud, sexual music, and it has very little to do with Luther Vandross, who's a staple of black radio at this point." Rap, according to Adler and others, has also been virtually ignored by the technically oriented music press. The problem, it seems, is that hip-hoppers simply don't fit the white, middle-class definition of a musician. A musician, according to that definition, is someone who toils over manuscript paper in an age where the studio has become the standard notational tool. A musician is someone who values manual dexterity above all else, in an age where computers may soon circumvent that aspect of music-making altogether. A musician-the subtext reads-is a lanky-limbed Briton with a mid-'70s shag haircut playing florid, high-register arpeggios that are equal parts Liszt and Liberace. What a musician is not, and could never be, is a black kid from the Bronx making whukka-whukka sounds with a record needle. SILVERMAN: "To me, hip-hop deejays are musicians. The technique that's necessary to be one is at a level of sophistication similar to what it would take to play an instrument. It's really difficult to do what they do, playing three seconds of a beat, in rhythm, and locking it so that it loops and they can play it back and forth without missing a beat. They're taking platters, throwing them on, cueing them up, and going back and forth between two turntables so that it sounds like it was recorded that way. Making new music from seven or eight other records is an incredibly difficult thing to do. I've heard people cut as little as one beat back and forth, from one turntable to the other, left, right, left, right, without headphones or anything!" "Current hip-hop represents the use of synthesizers and drum machines by people who are musically illiterate but could be musical geniuses. I believe that there could be Beethovens and Mozarts in the ghettoes of the United States who never surface because they can't get access to the tools of music. As the prices have come down on synthesizers and drum machines, they now have access to instruments which they don't need manual dexterity to be able to play, because of sequencing. They're able to put down musical ideas which they can't express on an instrument that takes some type of musical articulation." "Without any airplay, rap sells more concert tickets and more records than any of this. Anything that can sell more than 30 million albums a year without any airplay-more than Marillion or most of these groups that you read about in technical music magazines-is a legitimate art form that people are appreciating. Rap music is real. Rap isn't a bunch of middle-class guys with money going out and putting on makeup and talking about throwing their parents out the window [Twisted Sister]. It's about people who are living in ghettoes and have no way out. And it's also a mega-business, practically an industry unto itself. I mean, how long can you ignore it?" D.B.C. ["Dynamic Beat Creator"], sampler/synthesist for Stetsasonic: "Who's to say what music is? As we move further toward the future, music is gonna change even more drastically, and then what you gonna say?" _ _ ____________________________________________________________________ /((___))\|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) |====================================================================| .ooM |1991 cDc communications by Mark Dery 08/31/91-#187| \_______/|All Rights Pissed Away. FIVE YEARS of cDc|