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?