Global Hip-hop

Though it may be locked in a sonic loop back home, global of Hip-hop music keeps on expanding. Just today the New York Times ran an article on Cuban Hip--hop which raised some eyebrows -- including mine -- with its headline claim that Cubans, because they had little "access"to US music, had to "make it up" on their own. Of course, as the article itself makes clear, Cubans have been making antennas out of old coat hangers and tuning in Miami's WEDR since the 1980's; it turns out that the shortage that mattered was a shortage of technical equipment - digital samplers, mixers, even a decent mixing board - and that, once again, it's the 'beautiful limitations' that matter. Cuban crews even gained government support, the vital juice without which no Cuban artist can thrive; there's even a state-sponsored annual Hip-hop festival in Havana.

The globalization of rap music began in fits and starts. They dropped an EP in '92. but was Zimbabwe Legit legit? The London Posse pioneered the way back in 1988, but there weren't many successful UK artists until The Streets and Dizzee Rascal more than a dozen years later (Rascal was only three years old when LP's "How's Life in London" briefly charted). Japan, a reliable funhouse mirror for all things American pop culture, gave us the pioneering "Scha Dara Parr" back in 1988, but again it was several years before anything one could call a J-Rap "scene" emerged, and as usual it was a mad scramble of elements -- including several "burapan" groups who performed in blackface makeup. One might think that African popular music, which had already attained regional and global successes, would be a logical seedbed for Hip-hop, but it wasn't until later in the 1990's that such artists emerged, many of them from Sénégalese communities in France such as MC Solaar and Daara J. Solaar's combination of spahetti western themes and smart, sharp beats -- see "Nouveau Western" for one great example -- gave him an early edge, and he's been one of the few non-US artists to have chart success stateside.

The past decade has seen Hip-hop claim a foothold in some of the seemingly unlikeliest places -- Canada, for instance, which has given us the Rascalz, Kardinal Offishal, and K'naan (as well as Francophone artists such as Dubmatique and Roi Heenok) - and even Greenland's own Nuuk Posse, a band of west Greenland Inuit whose work has attracted the interest of figures such as DJ Spooky, who intermixed their music with a talk by Antonin Artaud on one of his CD's.

Where next? Hopefully, it's impossible to predict. One thing is for certain, though: the next wave of innovation in Hip-hop may very well come from outside North American shores.

Sampling and Copyright

The idea of an inherent right of the author of a written work to protect it from unauthorized copying is, in terms of western history, quite recent indeed. The 1709 "Statute of Anne" was the first legal recognition of the rights of an author. It presented itself as "an act for the encouragement of learning," with the implicit argument that allowing authors the exclusive right to publish their work for a limited term would enable them to earn some reward for their labors, while at the same time eventually allowing their work to be used freely. As with earlier systems of intellectual property, such as "Letters Patent," the Act's term was limited -- 14 years, which could be extended for 14 more, after which the rights of the author expired; it was understood then, as it is now, that authors, like inventors, quite frequently drew from the works of those who have come before them, and that preserving such rights indefinitely would stifle creativity. One thing that has certainly changed since 1709 is the term of copyright; US copyright eventually settled on a period twice as long as the Statute of Anne (28 years, renewable for 28 more years); revisions to this law in the past three decades have extended these 56 years to 80, 100, and even as many as 120 years; the last of these, the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act," went further and even re-instated copyright in works where it had become extinct, freezing the date at which works could enter the public domain at 1923. Many creative artists feel that this law has exercised a stifling effect upon creativity; many of them joined in support of a legal case, Eldred vs. Ashcroft, that challenged these extensions on the basis of the Constitution's reference to copyright law being for a "limited term." The Supreme Court eventually ruled against Eldred, saying in effect that Congress could establish any length of term they wanted, so long as it was not infinite. Could, is of course, not should.

The result has been, ironically, that in the very age when the ability of writers, artists, and musicians to draw upon, alter, and incorporate what the copyright office calls "previously existing works" is at its technical and aesthetic peak, the legal barriers against doing so have been raised to the harshest and longest in the history of copyright protections. This is offset, to a degree, by two factors: 1) "fair use," a doctrine established in the 1977 revision of the law, whereby a certain limited amount -- say, less than 10% of the original "work" -- may be used so long as it is not employed for profit, is used in an educational context, and/or used spontaneously; and 2) simple lack of enforceability. It's quite impossible to police all the billions of web servers, web pages, and personal computers and devices, to ensure that no copyrighted material has been taken or stored; enforcement, as a result, tends to be spotty if dramatic (as in the case of a woman in the midwest who was assessed a fine of 1.5 million dollars because her son had shared 24 music files on his Napster account).

It needs to be noted that copyright also functions very differently depending on the medium in question.  Music is one of the most complex form: there are at least four layers of copyright in a recorded song: 1) The composition itself, and its embodiment in sheet music; 2) The performance of that composition, including the act of interpretation and any variations on the composition; 3) The physical embodiment, if any, of this performance, known as "mechanical" rights; and 4) The right to transmit the performance. All of these, of course, were once separate domains: the sheet-music industry/print, the recording studio, the record company or "label," and radio stations -- but all are now merged indistinctly into a single, complex activity that can all be achieved on a single device, even a smartphone.

In Hip-hop, nearly all original samples were taken from vinyl, and most consisted of a few measures of the "break beat" -- far less than 10% of the original recording.  And yet, by cutting or looping this beat, it could in fact become the rhythm track for an entire recording.  How then to measure that, in terms of originality? (One recent legal formulation of this question -- "fragmented literal similarity" -- muddies the waters rather than clears them).

As things have turned out, neither of the two most significant cases of copyright litigation involving Hip-hop ended up dealing with this question.  In one case, where Biz Markie's half-singing the chorus from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" was represented by his lawyers as being part of the natural creative practice of Hip-hop -- an argument which they lost spectacularly, as the recording was quashed, all copies ordered destroyed, and substantial damages awarded.  In the other case, one which reached the Supreme Court, Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew were sued for their parodic Hip-hop version of "Pretty Woman," originally made famous by Roy Orbison.  Their lawyers quite wisely avoided the originality issue altogether, arguing that the 2 Live Crew version was a satire, an argument accepted by the "Supremes" on first amendment grounds.  After all, if we're going to use our free speech to parody or mock others, we'll have to be imitative, won't we?  It's too bad Biz's lawyers didn't make the same argument.

Dirty South

Hip-hop's southern turn may, perhaps, have been partly a marketing ploy, but there's no denying the arrival of a number of talented new artists from this region. After all, why should a form of music originated by African Americans not discover it roots -- and its stems and branches -- in the region of the country where African American culture originated?

Some would see Arrested Development as the first Hip-hop crew from the south to break out, and certainly their debut album 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... made quite a splash in 1992, but others point out that the AD style was more alterno-rap than southern, and that vocalist Dionne Farris was actually from New Jersey. For me, the real breakthrough came two years later with OutKast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, especially the track "Crumblin' Erb." Those lazy loping beats, the slight singing quality of the rap vocal, and bell-like synth tones, and sung chorus had me right from the beginning, and though I couldn't put my finger on it on a map, East Point immediately became an important place in my Hip-hop geography.

The other ingredients, though -- the ones that people probably have in mind when they use the phrase "dirty south" -- are a lot rawer and rougher than that polished debut. There's gangsta attitude, heavy heavy bass, the slowed-down crawl of "crunk," and a whole new cast of characters from the Geto Boys to Trick Daddy, the Three 6 Mafia, and of course Ludacris.

I have to confess that none of these later artists has been on heavy rotation in my house, though I followed OutKast for some years, and have all their albums. But maybe I'm missing something -- in fact, I'm sure I am. So post suggestions here, or bring a few links to class to share -- let's see if we can't dig a little deeper into Hip-hop's southern turn.

Early West Coast Hip-hop

If Old School NYC Hip-hop is kind of weird, then the first few years of West Coast rappers in the early 1980's were -- well -- even weirder. With jump suits, diamond earrings, Jheri-curled hair, and robotic dance steps, West Coast crews combined the electro-funk sensibilities of Bambaataa with personalities and stage costumes that looked as though the Village People tour bus had collided with a high school track team. And despite that, they still tried to look mean and impressive, as this early shot of the World Class Wreckin' Cru shows. Of course, West Coasters had one difficulty that crews from the South Bronx or Brooklyn never experienced; the fear that, despite their prodigious originality, they would just be seen as copies or imitations of a seemingly more "authentic" East Coast school.

They needn't have worried. There was no one in NYC to rival characters like the Egyptian Lover, a veteran of Uncle Jamm's Army who made it big with one of his very first singles, 1982's "Egypt Egypt," or "Captain Rapp"who rocked the mic with "Gigolo Rapp," long before he recorded "Bad Times (I Can't Stand It)," widely regarded as the earliest overtly political rap from the "other" coast. Even some artists we've come to know and love, such as Ice T, started out with embarrassing cold-wind sound effects in "The Coldest Rap" before finally breaking out with the gangsta-flavored "6 in the Morning." Latino rappers, this time with a Mexican rather than a Puerto Rican background, made their mark; who can forget Kid Frost, the original "Hispanic Causing Panic," or Mellow Man Ace, the "Brother with Two Tongues"?

Of course, it's the World Class Wreckin' Cru that looms largest, since their members formed the core of N.W.A., and launched the careers of of Dre and Ice Cube. But boy, it's a long long way from "Calling Dr. Dre to Surgery" to "Straight Outta Compton."

Sisters in the Name of Rap

The image here is of an old VHS cassette in my collection -- and what strikes me, after blowing the dust off, is how few of these names, after the first three or four, are likely to be remembered today. And to that list, one could add other names: Shazzy, May May Ali, The Cookie Crew, Mercedes Ladies, Sha Rock, Isis, Queen Mother Rage, MC Choice, Antoinette, Monie Love, Heather B, Nikki D, Ms. Melodie, Bo$$, BWP (Bytches wit Problems), and Sister Souljah, whose fifteen minutes of hip-hop fame in 1992 have long since been forgotten, and who has gone on to establish a successful career as a novelist. All in all, my own collection includes 42 solo albums by different women Hip-hop artists, and it's very far from complete.

Point being, that there has never been a shortage of women MC's, just a memory deficit when it comes to recalling them. Many fell victim to poor promotion or the "sophomore curse" in the 1990's; others were lost when labels were sold or went out of business. In many ways, Queen Latifah has been the most successful of them all; in addition to her own five Hip-hop albums, she was for a time the CEO of her own within-the-label label, Flavor Unit Records. More importantly, since then, her career as an actress and singer has brought her sustained success.

In artistic terms, it's true, as with men, that there are a few rappers of questionable talent on the list, but there are also some of the all-time greats. Roxanne Shanté, to my mind, is the greatest female MC of all time, with nonstop deadly rhymes and an attitude that never wavered, she rode the "Roxanne" craze to fame and left at the top of her game with The Bitch is Back in 1992. Close behind would be MC Lyte, whose seven albums from 1988 to 2003 span the period from old-schooly beats to gangsta ruffneck and beyond. Salt 'n' Pepa, along with their DJ Spinderella, made a definite mark upon Hip-hop and the culture at large with tracks ranging from "Tramp" to "Let's Talk About Sex." Special mention goes out to MC Choice, whose takedown of NWA and Too $hort, "The Big Payback," has to be one of the hardest-hitting diss tracks of all time; May May Ali, Muhammed Ali's daughter, who managed a rough-and-tough CD without single cuss word; and Yo Yo, whose distinctive raspy voice blazed along for a few years in the 1990's, giving better than she got on tracks such as Ice Cube's "It's a Man's World" -- amazingly, her very first studio track.

In recent years, some new talent have arisen to command attention around the globe, particularly Lady Sorevereign, who to my mind has few peers. And there are many more in the wings, or waiting: keep your ears out for Ladybug Mecca, Rah Digga, MC Trey, Yo Majesty, Ms. Dynamite, Estelle, Baby Blue ... the list goes on. Any new candidates?

Political Hip-hop

All music has its political element -- it is, after all, comprised of voices from the polis, the community, the world at large. No other artform is so intimately connected to the material world; by its very nature it represents the people. And yet, as KRS-One's interlocutor in "Why" remarks, not everyone sees their character represented; Hip-hop's foundational task has been to change that. In this sense, every rap is political.

But in the heyday from 1987 to 1995, dozens of rappers charged the content of their rhymes with much more explicit political ammunition. Some of these groups have faded from collective memory: who now remembers the Goats, the Poor Righteous Teachers, Channel Live, or Laquan? Others have soldiered on, continuing to find outlets for their message to the present day: Chuck D, Paris (pictured) and The Coup. Perhaps the best known political rapper who is neither forgotten nor fossilized is Common, whom I've admired from back when he called himself Common Sense; although is is the most thoughtful of political rappers, his recent appearance at the White House stirred perhaps predictable right-wing outrage.

We'll have plenty to talk about on Monday -- but until class is in session, here's my personal playlist of the twelve hardest-hitting political rap tracks from this era:

1. Public Enemy, Fight the Power

2. KRS-ONE, Sound of da Police

3. Ice Cube, I Wanna Kill Sam

4. Marxman, Ship Ahoy, feat. Sinead O'Connor

5. The Coup, Pimps: Freestylin' at the Fortune 500 Club

6. Paris, The Devil Made Me Do It (video directed by my friend Robert Caruso).

7. Queen Latifah and Monie Love, Ladies First

8. Roxanne Shanté, Year of the Independent Woman (video is a remix)

9. Ice-T, Freedom of Speech (Just Watch What You Say)

10. George Clinton, Paint the White House Black

11. Disposable Heroes of Hip-Hoprisy, Television, Drug of a Nation

12. The Goats, Not Your Typical American

What would be your picks?

Graffiti

Graffiti is at once ancient and postmodern, as old as Pompeii and as new as Shepard Fairey's Obey. Its association with the history of Hip-hop is but one aspect of its history, and yet it's a crucial one. Those credited with being the "first" -- Taki 183 and Cornbread (pictured), were at first lonely voices in the wilderness. Taki was a Greek-American bike messenger who threw up his tag to mark the outposts of his daily journeys; Cornbread was just a shy guy who hoped to impress his girlfriend. The ubiquity of their tags was what got people thinking: maybe this was a kind of fame, a kind of immortality. In that sense, its aims and those of the rappers, b-boys, and b-girls was the same, as was its method: to cut, to scratch, to re-arrange the lexicon of the urban landscape.

There were stylistic parallels as well; the early "Wild Style" of lettering coincided with innovations in breakdancing and the era of "parties in the park," and the continuing movement toward cryptic or "hieroglyphic" pieces that defied deciphering was an inspiration for the loosely-allied Hieroglyphics crew. Yet the conjunction of Hip-hop's holy trinity of rapping, writing, and breaking has proved, over time, to be like a conjunction of the planets -- the planets are still out there, but some have grown dimmer, and are no longer in close alignment. KRS-ONE might be the only old-school rapper/writer left, and NYC subway cars are (mostly) plain old metal; breakdancing has mutated into a hundred different forms, but the old school throwdowns are a thing of the past. Graffiti itself, of course, will never die -- but it does come and go, and mutate, and may never be as tightly styled as it was in the late 1970's and '80's.

Still, Providence will always remember the Temple of Junerism -- even if now it costs $200 a night to book a room there.

Old School

Once a musical form has become established, tracing its roots is kind of like pulling up a plant, like bamboo or quack grass, that grows by sending out rhizomes: one root leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another ... finding the mother root may well be impossible. We've listened at some major roots -- Calypso, Ska, 60's R&B, the Black Arts movement -- but these are by no means the whole story. Frustratingly, the Hip-hop that made it first onto record -- the Fatback Band's "King Tim III Personality Jock" or the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" -- were nothing like what was being done and heard at local parties hosted by pioneers such as Afrika Bambaataa (pictured) or Grandmaster Flash. Flash recalled hearing the Sugarhill Gang on the radio and saying "Shit, they're playing my music -- who are these guys?" As it turns out, the guys were a pre-fab group of "rappers" with little or no experience in the music, rounded up by Sylvia Robinson (Sugarhill co-owner and onetime R&B chanteuse -- check our her 1973 track "Pillow Talk"). She found "Big Bank Hank" at a local pizza parlor. Hank so was nervous that he borrowed Grandmaster Caz's book of rhymes and used it in the studio, with the result that it was Caz's namecheck and not his own that made it first onto vinyl.

There are snippets of what it might have really sounded like, like the live Bambaataa bootleg "Death Mix," which includes a number of different DJ's and mic checks, along with two tracks from Paulette and Tanya Winley (the daughters of Paul Winley, who put out the record), a few scattered airchecks from Mr. Magic's Rap Attack, or this gem featuring Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel live at Christ the King High School in 1979. But of course, all we're getting here is really the tips of a few scattered icebergs in a sea of ephemeral, passing jams.

But when looked at through its basics, you really have three key developments in Hip-hop music: 1) The move from having the DJ just rouse up the crowd and announce the discs to having him toss out a longer series of rhymes, rhymes which eventually come to dominate over the music; 2) The move from playing whole singles to cutting back and forth and cross-fading in order to extend the "breaks" (those nonvocal beats, bass lines, and bits and pieces which were the blood corpuscles of early Hip-hop); and 3) Scratching, said to be invented by Grand Wizard Theodore, which took a breakbeat and manipulated it into any number of new, scratching, slipping, sliding, percussive tones. Old school Hip-hop on record prior to 1984 had only the first of these three elements, so although they represented a key step in the music's eventually gaining a lasting presence, they only tell a portion of the story ...

Hip-hop culture as a whole, of course, also contained elements which were not distributed, or distributable, on vinyl. "Writing" -- that is, graffiti -- was one key element; in the days when whole subway trains could be "bombed" and turned into traveling "pieces," they too had a powerful means of reaching a mass audience, one without any filtering for commercial purposes. Dancing -- "breakdancing" -- was also publicly visible, although the first notice it attracted was when the police started arresting dancers for "obstructing" the streets. And there was also, as with most musical movements, a lively dress component, though in the old old days Pumas, Kangols, and even fedoras were more common than baseball caps, sweats or Addidas. There were, as yet, no Hip-hop clothing lines, and Tommy Hilfiger was still a few blessed years in the future.

So listen around -- what have you found? What kind of a scene do you imagine around these early parties and clubs? What does it take to make a fad into a trend into a phenomenon into a cultural mainstay? Why 1979?

What was Hip-hop, from the top?

Black Arts: The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron

The Last Poets first got together in Harlem in 1969 -- as legend has it, at a celebration of Malcolm X's birthday in Mt. Morris park, creating what Ty Williams calls "a workshop of the mind." This original get-together let to further sessions at "East Wind," a loft located on 125th St. between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and a record contract with Alan Douglas (known as the producer of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland LP). It was a time of potent Black nationalism, and the Black Arts were a major part of that scene; the Poets took their inspiration from poets like Imamu Amiri Baraka, musicians like'Trane and Sun Ra, and political organizations like the Panthers and the NOI.They chose African-flavored jazz rhythms as their backup, rather than R&B, consciously rejecting (at least at first) mass-media "Black" culture. Theirs was a performance art, done on the spot at late-night sessions, improvising individually and collectively, trading words just as jazz musicians traded melodic ideas, repeating them with variations, coming together with multiple voices for the climax.

Two different groups, in fact, emerged from this scene, both calling themselves the Last Poets. The first, and by far most short-lived, the "Original" Last Poets, consisted of Felipe Luciano, David Nelson and Gylan Kain. They appeared together the film Right On!, and Kain later released a solo album, Blue Guerilla. After that they seem to have largely vanished. The second group, headed by Jalal Nuriddin, Umar Bin Hassan, and Abiodun Oyewole, joined with percussionist Nilaja Obabi and were signed to Douglas Records. The lineup changed over time; Oyewole was in prison for a period, and Nilaja died of cancer; Hassan left and was replaced for a time by Suliaman El-Hadi. Jalal eventually left for the UK, where he recorded and produced for the On-U-Sound label, while other former bandmates reunited or cut solo recordings, many of them on Bill Laswell's Axiom label.

The legendary Mr. Gil Scott-Heron arrived on the scene at nearly the same time; his debut album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, came out in 1970 on Bob Theiele's Flying Dutchman label. Spare, with just voice and congas, Scott-Heron added a wry sense of humor, as evidenced in "Whitey on the Moon":

A rat done bit my sister Nell


(with Whitey on the moon) 


Her face and arms began to swell.


(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bills 


(but Whitey's on the moon) 


Ten years from now I'll be payin' still


(while Whitey's on the moon)

The album also included the original version of his best-known track, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Scott-Heron went on to release more than two dozen albums; in the mid-1970's he became more widely known after appearances as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and his anti-apartheid anthem "Johannesburg" became a hit. Always a bit reluctant to be seen as a progenitor of Hip-hop (asked in 1989 by Musician magazine if he had any advice for Hip-hop musicians, he replied "Yeah -- learn to play an instrument"), he relented in 1994, recording two tracks with ATCQ's Ali Shaheed Muhammed, including his "Message to the Messengers":

Hey, yeah, we the same brothas from a long time ago

We was talkin' about television and doin' it on the radio

What we did was to help our generation realize

They had to get out there and get busy cause it wasn't gonna be televised

We got respect for you rappers and the way they be free-weighin'

But if you're gon' be teachin' folks things, make sure you know what you're sayin'

Older folks in our neighborhood got plenty of know-how

Remember if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't be out here now

And I ain't comin' at you with no disrespect

All I'm sayin' is that you damn well got to be correct

Because if you're gonna be speakin' for a whole generation

And you know enough to try and handle their education

Make sure you know the real deal about past situations

It ain't just repeatin' what you heard on the local TV stations.

Scott-Heron remained active until his death, releasing a new album in 2010. In one of his last interviews, with his publisher Jamie Byng, he reflected on his career but gave no sign of heading anywhere but forwards.

Jamaican and Trinidadian Roots

The Caribbean roots of Hip-hop are much less familiar than its seemingly more immediate connections to R&B and the "dozens," but in many ways they are just as vital. Part of the reason, no doubt, was that when the first Hip-hop histories were written, much of the relevant material was not readily available in the US on disc (in the UK, where Blue Beat had been established since the 1960's, things were much different).

There are two key strands of influence. From Trinidad came the traditions of Calypso, which had a strong political strain from its very earliest days in the 1930's. With names such as "Mad Lion" and "Atilla the Hun," Calypsonians took on the local government as well as the "Big Empire," and traded call-and-answer songs on topics of the day. The melodic and rhythmic elements of Calypso translated easily in to US markets, but only in the form of cover versions and imitations by American artists such as the Andrews Sisters and Harry Belafonte. The political messages came through only indistinctly, and their influence was muted.

Jamaican music came much later -- there were no established recording studios until the late 1950's, two decades after Trinidadian artists had cut their first singles. The Jamaican tradition began with the "sound system" men, such as Duke Reid, who played both American singles (a costly and scarce commodity) as well as a few "specials" that they recorded and pressed in very limited quantities exclusively for their personal use.

Prince Buster, whose record shop on Orange Street became almost a national landmark, was among the first to take the next logical step and release singles for mass consumption. Along with his arch-rival Leslie Kong (whom Buster dissed as a "Black Head China Man"), he helped start the Jamaican recording industry, releasing not only his own dance and talk-over records, but also more traditional artists such as Count Ossie.  He took on many different personas in his talk-over records, perhaps most infamously the figure of "Judge Dread," who was known for sentencing "rude boys" to terms of more than five hundred years in prison!

Through distribution deals in the UK, where a significant number of Jamaican emigrés formed a faithful audience, Buster's influence reached international proportions. Ska intermingled in the UK with rock and skiffle and other home-grown forms, giving rise to the Two Tone movement and bands such as the Clash who were as much at home with a Ska shuffle as a 4-4 rock beat.

Eventually, of course, Bob Marley re-wrote the book, bringing rich, rhythmic, and politically potent music to the world, and making a fortune for Island Records. But in many ways it was the earlier Caribbean music forms, ones which -- much as Hip-hop would later -- came up from the streets by means of minimal technology and resources -- that laid the conceptual groundwork for the idea of a DJ talking over beats, and eventually bringing those two forms together to make new recordings.

So give a listen -- you can easily find many tracks via YouTube or at any online music services -- what do you hear in these old discs? How direct is the line of influence? And what surprised you most?

The Yin and Yang of R&B

Music critic Nelson George has famously described Motown as "the yin of Soul beside Stax's yang" -- and it's an apt choice of phrase. The English Wikipedia describes yin and yang as "complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system," and that certainly encapsulates the R&B landscape of the 1960's and early 1970's. Motown, the "yin" or more passive element, targeted its singles to the Pop charts; impresario Barry Gordy exercised close control over every aspect of the process: auditioning potential acts, naming them, choosing their image and wardrobe, and carefully producing their recordings for maximum cross-over appeal. A special A&R committee at Motown, headed by Gordy, vetted the final mix of every studio session, and often vetoed the preferences of the artists themselves. Some of these artists, such as Mabel John, left Motown for Stax, declaring that Motown was just a "pop" label, and that they really wanted to be on a "soul" label -- and so off to Memphis they went.

Stax Volt, thanks to its unique distribution arrangement with Atlantic Records, could afford to aim their singles in both directions; if some jumped to the top of the Race/R&B charts, that was good for business, and if some did well on the Pop charts, that was good too. Oddly, although for its classic period it was owned by a white couple, it was perceived as more of a "black" label. But in fact, it was as multiracial as its in-house band, Booker T and the MG's, which featured Booker T. Washington Jones on the drums and the legendary Steve Cropper on lead guitar. Stax also had an excellent relationship with Memphis's WDIA -- Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla were among their first stars -- and could count on airplay on what was, during this period, the largest black-marketed radio station in the country.

There were numerous other players, of course, any one of whom could, for a moment at least, leap to the front of the pack: Cincinnati's King Records (James Brown), Philadelphia International Records, New York's All Platinum (parent of the later Sugar Hill label), Los Angeles's Specialty Records (Little Richard), and numerous other smaller players. As I've written, these small labels served as "prosthetic taste buds" for the majors, who generally couldn't be bothered to learn much about black artists, and didn't have people in their A&R departments that understood black listeners and fans. But they couldn't argue with success, either.

Nearly all of these labels underwent upheaval in the later 1970's; the mergers in the majors, which conglomerated Time, Warner, Elektra, Atlantic, and Asylum under one large "WEA" roof, Columbia/Epic/CBS as Columbia (later Sony Music Group), and RCA/Bertelsmann as BMG (since merged with Sony), spelled doom for the minors. The new superlabels scorned their former partners, figuring they could do as good or a better job marketing such music -- but they couldn't. Many notable artists, among them Isaac Hayes and James Brown, ended up recording albums that were either never properly marketed, or never released at all, though one -- Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul -- would slip through the cracks and become an instant classic. It was thus to be the most minor of the minors -- whose business was never huge to begin with -- that survived into the Hip-hop era, along with smaller start-ups: Sugar Hill, Winley, and Tommy Boy led the pack. And then, of course, when Hip-hop turned out to be much more than a fad, the cycle began anew: wash, rinse, repeat.

The Signifying Monkey

The Signifyin' Monkey told the lion one day
"There's a bad motherfucker comin' down your way
He talk about your momma and your sister Lou
He talk about how good yo' gran'ma screw ...

Thus Rudy Ray Moore, a.k.a. Dolemite, who rose to fame in 1970's blaxploitation films, began his version of the Signifying Monkey toast. It's one among many -- there have been at least a dozen recordings of one version or another over since the 1940's -- and there's evidence that this "toast" goes back well into the nineteenth century, if not farther. Henry Louis Gates, in his book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, suggests that the figurative scenario may have its roots in the ancient Yoruba trickster figure Esu-Elegbara. That there aren't hundreds of recorded versions may in large part be due to the tacit censorship imposed by the recording industry; while studio acetates such as Lucille Bogan's X-rated version of "Shave 'em Dry" attest to such songs existing, they were almost never released -- and when they were, they were usually "private" off-label pressings such as the one shown here, "For Adults Only." Nowadays, many of these are only a click away on YouTube: The Big Three Trio, Smokey Joe, the Three Bits of Rhythm, Johnny Otis, and an even anonymous talking version by the "Arkansas Traveller." The Deep Blues blog also has a roundup of numerous versions, with video and audio links.

But although this may well be, as Gates theorizes, the ur-text of all toasts, it's far from the only one. Along with the one-person "toast," the two person dissing contest known as the "Dozens" is similarly structured -- a verbal contest, often involving insults against the opponent's mother, in which the first person to lose his cool loses. These, too, have made it on to records, as with Big Maybelle's "Gabbin' Blues" or Otis Redding and Carla Thomas's "Tramp."

Black Voices on the Air

The history of Black radio -- indeed, the history of music radio generally -- is only partly understood, and poorly documented. Without any easy means of recording the broadcasts, listeners could only listen, and we're forced to use our imaginations, relying on chance recordings or the few in-studio tapes and acetates scattered about in the hands of private collectors. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has a small corner devoted to the subject, with an amazing "radio" interface that allows you to "tune in" to local broadcasts from the golden age around the country -- but even on the Internet, that cornucopia of everything that has ever been thought or said, it's hard to find much of value, or get any historical context on what you do find.

Still, there are a few welcome discoveries out there for the dedicated searcher. YouTube, though supposedly a video archive, comes through as usual with some great audio. Jocko Henderson, whose 1950's-era radio intro had him flying in from outer space like Superman, recorded a novelty-song version of his patter ("Blast off to Love"), and lived long enough to cut a couple of rap records in the late 1970's, such as "Rhythm Talk" and "Everybody's Uptight."

Biographical information on a few major DJ's -- Dr. Hepcat, Dr. Daddy-O, Poppa Stoppa, Petey Greene, and Martha Jean "The Queen," can be found online, some with a soundbyte or two. A new site, The Masters of Ceremony, looks promising but has no content as of yet. Local sites that document the history of Black radio in cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, and San Francisco are another good if limited source. There are also a couple of (expensive) books which hold some promise, though I can't vouch for them one way or another.

It's also a great topic if anyone is interested in it for their paper -- maybe there are some histories closer to home that have yet to be uncovered?

Blackface Minstrelsy

Blackface Minstrelsy may very well have been the single most popular American form of entertainment from the 1840's through to the 1940's. Its popularity waxed and waned, from a peak in the 1850's, through a gradual decline until a revival in the 1880's, followed by a gradual shift toward more "refined" versions produced by both amateur and professional companies in the period between WWI and WWII. The 1940's saw its permanent decline, in large part due to social changes, integration of the armed forces, and the post-war rise of television, although it still survives in a few isolated places such as Derby Connecticut, where its clown-face "Gang Show" is now in its 81st year (they stopped using blackface in 1944). In the UK, where minstrelsy had been enormously popular from its earliest period, the Black and White Minstrel Show remained on the air until 1978!

Of course it is easy to see this tradition as fundamentally compromised from the start, as it relied upon a distorted, comical, theatrical version of "blackness" devised by white entertainers. And yet, from the beginning, it was a hybrid form, appropriating bits of actual Black culture and mixing them with elements such as Irish jigs, regional humor, melodrama, and early skit comedic routines. As early as the 1850's there were a number of Black Blackface troupes ("Black people in blacker faces," as Pierre Delacroix puts it), some of which enjoyed even wider success than white troupes. The commercial success of the form, for better and for worse, paved the way for other artforms which were, or were perceived as, "Black," including Dixieland jazz, blues, and Black vaudeville.

Could such a form ever, in this day and age, have a revival? Somehow, the proposition which in Spike Lee's Bamboozled seems so absurd, seems closer to reality today than when the film was released ten years ago. What does this mean? Or do you disagree -- is such a show unlikely to ever be aired by any network or production company today?