This week I decided to do something a little different. While doing research on my topic, which was to be about the rise of Loud Records in the early ’90s to help reestablish the East Coast as dominant force in hip-hop, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. Listening to the records of the time, digging through my attic and dusting off old issues of the Source, I was taken back to a great time of enjoyable solitude. A time when all I needed was my headphones and my favorite records to keep me company.
For the most part I try to leave autobiographical material out of my columns. The web is overflowing with people who are more than willing to share with you the minutia of their daily lives. I think in this instance, however, I feel my story is universal in its scope, though specific in its subject matter. Growing up in a household that played music constantly, I took its power for granted and never really grasped the notion that it could take control of all of your emotions. Anyone who truly loves music, feels it on an everyday basis, can pinpoint one artist, one album, one moment, where they felt the boundaries shatter. I have been fortunate enough to experience that moment twice; in 1997 upon hearing Atari Teenage Riot (definitely the subject of a future column), and the moment I will share with you now.
I was a freshman in high school. Like most schools, everything was broken down into cliques. Those cliques not only determined the music you listened to, but also the style of dress, the people you could talk to, etc. My friends at the time were yo’s (or wiggers, or whatever term your part of the country applied to white kids who acted like they were black). Baggy pants and basketball jerseys were the standard uniform. Most of these kids I had known for years, so I kind of fell in line. The one aspect I could never grasp was the language. Sure, like most of my friends I had grown up in a working poor family, but I received a good education and could handle the English language pretty well. I was perfectly fine with wearing pants five sizes too big, but I couldn’t reconcile being from New Hampshire and speaking in a broken urban slang I couldn’t relate to.
At the time, I only listened to albums that my friends were in to. The predominant style of rap was the West Coast scene. The dominant force at the time was of course Death Row Records, which was headed up by Dr. Dre, who masterminded The Chronic, and his protégé Snoop Doggy Dogg, whose debut Doggystyle was every bit the classic The Chronic was. The music was a combination of p-funk records, synthesizer melodies, and weed smoke. Other artists at the time included Ice Cube, Too Short, Eazy-E, Ant Banks, Hi-C, and MC Eiht.
I was buying the various rap albums of the day, though never really listening to them when I was alone. I just couldn’t get into the music. I found the lyrical matter to be repetitive and boring, with the same slow delivery about shooting this unknown enemy or f*cking this unknown girl. I think being a teenager at the time, there was a certain danger and juvenile interest in a kid my age listening to a guy talk about that sort of subject matter, so I can understand why my friends liked it. And the production was just as tired as the rhyming. It seemed every rapper in southern California used the same Casio keyboard. To say my interest in music was passing would be an understatement.
That all changed.
In 1994, I was over my friend Derek’s house listening to music. I had just bought the self-titled Spice-1 album, really only because Derek recommended it. Not to discredit Spice-1’s influence in the game, but the album sounded like more of the same stuff that was coming out at the time. Sensing my apathy toward the music (as well as his inherent opportunism), he offered me a trade; the Spice-1 album for an album he had bought the week before but didn’t like. That album was the Wu-Tang Clan‘s Return to the 36 Chambers. I found out later that he bought the album because of the track “C.R.E.A.M,” but beyond that he felt it was weak. I had never heard of them, but I thought I had nothing to lose because I know I didn’t like the Spice-1.
When I got home, I played the album once through, assuming I would never listen to it again. And then I did something I never normally did. I played it again. And again. There was something so incredibly gripping about the album. I had never felt that way about music before. The music was gritty. The production sounded like “shit,” but that’s what added to its power. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Listening to it again all these years later and I still feel the energy and possibilities that the RZA and crew were creating.
Similar in approach to the punk movement of the late ’70s, there was a scene growing in the New York rap circles. There was a general feeling that hip-hop had gotten too glossy, that it had lost its edge. Anyone under the age of 18 may not remember a time when hip-hop’s existence on a mainstream scale was relegated to one hit wonders (Biz Markie or flash in the pan wonders that no one took seriously (MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice). Death Row Records had helped changed that, but in the process saturated the landscape with similar sounding acts. The scene had gotten lazy and stagnant. The time was ripe for a group of fresh faces to come and reenergize the music. The East Coast rap scene was intent on bringing back the classic sound of hip-hop, filled with break beats and unlicensed samples. Just like punk, the goal was to return to the roots, but with an energy and passion unseen before.
Enraptured by 36 Chambers, I went to the record store and bought my first issue of the Source, then bible of the hip-hop world. Though it had since lost its luster (the result of cashing in their credibility to attack Eminem), The Source lived up to its name in providing the truth about what was great in the rap game. In that issue they had awarded five Mic’s to a debut by a young upstart rapper named Nas. The album, Illmatic, was applauded by the Source as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, rap album ever. I didn’t know it at the time, but to be awarded five Mic’s meant the album was an instant classic. Any hip-hop kid who knew his shit could name off the exclusive list of artists that have received five mic’s (Ice Cube, EPMD, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul to name a few). I bought the album next day, and was transfixed by its production and rhyme scheme. The subject matter wasn’t relegated to shooting guns, selling drugs, and f*cking bitches (though, to be honest, that music had its fair share too).
The more reading I had done, the more it became obvious that the truly progressive material in hip-hop was coming from New York. Over the next year and a half I bought every album I could from artists such as Gangstarr, Black Moon, Redman, Keith Murray, and Smif N’Wessun. I would try to get my friends to check out these albums, but they just weren’t interested. For them, it wasn’t until the emergence of the Notorious B.I.G and the Bad Boy sound (and ensuing East Coast/West Coast rivalry) that my friends started checking out anything from the NYC.
Soon, not unlike punk kids in the early DIY days,(or the Motown sound of the early 1960’s) I became attached to labels. In the days before the Internet, a kid would sometimes have to take a chance and buy an album from an artist he/she had never heard of. If you flipped it over, and saw who released it, it made the risk much more bearable. That was the inspiration for this column in the first place. I fell in love with Loud Records, who not released the Wu-Tang debut (along with clansmen Raekwon‘s classic album Only Built For Cuban Linx), but also Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, as well as everything from The Alkaholiks, who I was amazed to learn later was from the West Coast. When I saw the headphones logo, I knew that something good was under the shrink-wrap.
For the next two years I was completely wrapped up in the music and scene, buying vinyl from Beat Street records in New York, buying a pair of Technics 1200’s. Getting myself into the DJ scene (brought on by Roc Raida and X-Men, now known as the X-Ecutioners), the scope of music I was listening to began to widen. By late 1996, hip-hop was only a small part of what I was invested into as I had moved towards dance music and the incredible progressive house/French disco scene. Like just about everything in life, one thing leads to another, and I can easily say that if it wasn’t for that CD swap 11 years ago, I wouldn’t be writing this column.
I believe rap is in a stagnant state right now and is primed for a punk revival of sorts. Although there is a strong underground movement afoot, led by Madvillain and Jedi Mind Tricks, (who definitely carries the early ’90s torch), the truly progressive stuff is coming from of all places, the UK. Only known in the hip-hop world for years as the birthplace of Slick Rick, England and the emergence of Grime (headed by Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Kano) are putting people in the U.S. on notice. In a completely flossed out/designer clothes culture hip-hop has become, the roughest, grittiest stuff is being made by London youth with nothing more than a PS2 MTV Music Generator. Like any form of rebellious music, as long as you have hungry youth and a message to deliver (and in Grime’s case, a pirate radio station to project it), there will always be progression and a host of starving minds waiting to be opened. Just like mine.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to b.s. for a bit about a very pivotal time in my life.
What’s Going Around
Maximo Park – A Certain Trigger
– I won’t go long on this because I already wrote a full review of this album on the site, but I will say that I have not stopped listening to this album. The album is stateside at the end of the month. Do go get it.
There’s Something About Jonathan
– A few columns back I had written about the Modern Lovers. Someone had written me an email telling me about a biography on Jonathan Richman, the band’s founder. Starting from his early years up until his resurgence around the success of “There’s Something About Mary,” the book gets into detail about the genesis of some of the Lovers famous songs including “Roadrunner” and “Ice Cream Man.” The only setback is its length, at just under 200 pages. For any fan of the Lovers, it is a must buy.
