The crowd go, whoo, shake, Hip-hop music has been with us for more than 20 years now. But what most of us haven't realized is how big it's become. Today, hip-hop outsells every other type of music. It's bigger than R&B, bigger than country, even bigger than rock. Forget the rock and roll years.
What we're living in now are the hip-hop years. Schoolgirl sleazy with a classic kind of sassy Little skirt hanging way up her knee It was three young ladies in a school gym like a anti-fascist Team! Hip-hop owes its beginnings to a particular place and a particular time. The place was the South Bronx, and the time was the 1970s. The South Bronx was a notorious borough of New York City, marked by some of the worst levels of unemployment, dereliction, and violent crime in America.
You had a lot of gang activity that was happening in the Bronx back in the late 60s, early 70s. You had a lot of drugs in the communities, a lot of violence and robberies, things was going on. The Bronx was called one of the destructive areas of the time.
While life in the city had become tougher, mainstream black music in the 70s had softened into the ultimate form of crossover pop. Disco. The generation growing up in the Bronx in the 70s found that music like disco was wildly out of step with the reality of their lives. It was something that seemed very far away from what Ghetto Kid on the street could realistically hope to attain or to be a part of. That whole idea of the flashy, the gaudy, the cop.
Costume, all that stuff was something that hip-hop reacted against. I guess we wasn't enough high society to be down with the disco. John Travolta dancing and all that.
You know what I'm saying? So we created our own. You know what I'm saying?
We created our own parties. Hip-hop's genesis can be traced to this inconspicuous housing project on the edge of the South Bronx. It was here that hip-hop's founding father, DJ Kool Herc, built his first sound system in 1971. 1520 Central Avenue, the historic birthland of the culture they call hip-hop music. My room in the back, and this was the landing.
When I used to play music in my room, the kids used to be back here hanging out, chilling. And when I started to play the music, everybody started to do their little stuff and break dance and all that type of stuff. Right here.
There's a recreation room for the building. You rent the room, that's what we did. So this was a breath of fresh air for us, going somewhere we could hear some music. Turned out to be a success. Herc was one of the first artists to be a part of the band.
one of the first DJs in the Bronx to borrow a technique from Manhattan's downtown discotheques, the use of two turntables. This meant DJs could play music without interruption, mixing from the end of one record straight into the beginning of another. But unlike other DJs, Herc didn't play disco music.
He said he specialised in the kind of hard-edged funk music that others ignored. Yeah, I remember going to the Herc parties and they started in the community room and it grew so big that we couldn't fit in the community room anymore. Music was just, it was slamming.
I was trying to think about what would be, I guess, synonymous with a cool Herc party. It would have to be James Brown, clap your hands, stomp your feet. It wasn't a cool Herc party. You can have a bird party here.
Exactly. What singled out Herc as a DJ was his keen eye for crowd reaction. He noticed that the energy on the dance floor hit a peak during the instrumental breaks in the records, the point when the singing stops and the music carries on.
From this simple observation, Herc came up with an idea that would become the basis of hip-hop. One night, I'm waiting for the record to play out. I said, I wonder if I put that to myself.
I said, hmm, if they're waiting for this particular break and I have a couple more records that's got the same breakup in it, I wonder how it would be if I put them all together. And I told him, I said, I'm going to try something new tonight. I'm going to call it the merry-go-round.
Herc's merry-go-round meant that instead of playing whole records, he would play just the instrumental breaks, mixing between them to create a continuous... dance rhythm. I started out with Steve and Don. Leave them behind, clap your hands, stomp your feet.
I'll part right there with the break. Boom. I had to come up with Bongo Rock.
Still no vocals in it, and I will go into Baby Yui, you know, the Mexican. I think we got some here, you know, people was like, oh, whoa, everybody was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm feeling this, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. The instrumental breaks on the records became known as the break beats.
And Herc's merry-go-round formula of mixing between them provided the blueprint for a new music. Oh, man, Kool Herc was the first person I ever heard that'd do anything like that, you know? Because I'm used to being in the house with my mother and we'd pull a James Brown record on and just let it play. play through. Kool Herc would play the break part back and forth, and that really astonished me.
I was really impressed when I seen that, something like that, because I'd never seen anything like that before. I saw Kool Herc when I was 14 years old, and that very day when I saw his sound system and how loud it was and the records that he played would just change the way the party was going, that's what I wanted to do for life. As Kool Herc's celebrity spread through the South Bronx in the early 70s, a new dance attached itself to the music he created.
The music didn't even have a name yet. The new dance did. It was called B-Boy, later to become known as breakdancing. As hip-hop was being formed, it was like before it had a name or before we kind of knew what was going on, there were B-Boys.
There was this new dance, you know, break dancing. B-Boy and B-Girl comes from Kuh-Herk. B meaning break, okay?
Break boy. You dance on the break. That's it. The break beats were for the B-Boys.
When Kuh-Herk was throwing on break beats, he would say, B-Boys, are you ready? B-Girls, are you ready? And that meant that it was about, you know, about that time, you know, the high point of the jam, But everyone just starts going off.
I got a certain that I made up I'll put my arm right here and it's easy and I'll push with my arm and swing my left leg my right leg it was our outlet and our way of expressing ourselves Showing our individuality, our character, our strength, and our attitude. I was walking down 4-0 Rowan University, which was my block, and I seen these two kids with a boombox. They had the music going, and I seen them, they were hitting the floor, they were doing fancy footwork, and I got stopped.
I just stopped to get amazed what they were doing. I was like, wow, that's kind of cool. I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to be them kids I seen, just the energy they had. And I wanted to catch the energy.
If you had the bones, the flexibility, the strength to do it, you know, I made you a hero. I got this knot on my back. back for trying to duplicate what I seen somebody do back in the days, trying to do some flip thing and land it on my back. Was not cut out for me.
Give it up for Turn It Loose. Paul and James Miles are going, clap your hands down. Stop your feet. Clap your hands down.
Stop your feet. Come on. The crowd gets ill when you become part of the music. Like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh no, he's killing it, you know?
By the mid-70s, Cool Herc's new music was taking the Bronx by storm. And inevitably, Herc's unique brand of DJing was beginning to attract imitators. The man who would become Hurt's biggest rival came out of a neighborhood on the other side of town called the Bronx River Projects. This was home to a young gang leader who went by the intriguing name of Africa Bambato.
When I first saw cool Hurt go, I said, whoa, they're playing a lot of records that I have at home. I said, I like them type of beats he's playing. And then when I came with my full system too, once I got, you know, graduated from high school, then I started saying, oh, this is the style I'm going to be playing, and then some. Bambata's musical experiments were noisy enough to attract attention. He's playing out the window.
I'm riding my bike by this window every day and I'm hearing, you know what I'm saying, James Brown, you know what I'm saying, all of the good stuff that they ain't playing on the radio. I'm like, okay, I can get with that because I just wanted to be around that guy. When Bambaataa became a DJ, he unleashed a new energy into hip-hop. It was an energy that tapped into a frightening force which dominated Bronx life in the 70s.
It's street gangs. In an era when the Bronx was rife with savage territorial conflict, Bambaataa was already well-known in the area as a notorious gang leader. At that time, you know, we was part of the gang movement, you know, the Black Spades, the Savage Scum. the 70 models, the Reapers, all those groups was, you know, controlling the Browns.
And then from my travels and seeing one of my best friends get killed by the police on Pollen Parkway in the Browns, you know, and seeing how a lot of the brothers and sisters was getting hurt up, that's when I said I had to, you know, try to lead, you know, our organization into another direction. Bambata formed the Zulu Nation, a dedicated following of local hip-hop enthusiasts who organized parties and then put the money they made into community self-help projects. You gotta understand, you really have to understand that the Zulu Nation had originally been the Black Spades. They were the biggest, most feared gang in the Bronx.
I mean they'd wear these denim jackets with the cut-off sleeves and fur around the collars and black... spades written across the back and this was before gangs had a lot of guns so it was all about getting beat down with these and with sticks and with knives I mean was brutal and Bambada had the inspiration to stop this gang-banging nonsense stop killing each other and let's get creative. So he turned one of the most violent street gangs into one of the most influential cultural organizations. His status was literally legendary. When you heard of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, there was a whole section of the Bronx that was under his command.
Well the name Zulu Nation inspired me when I seen a movie back in the early 60s which featured Michael Caine called Zulu. That movie just stuck with me. It was just, you know, inspirational. Seeing the people of Africa fight for what was theirs, I said, you know, one day I'm going to have me a Zulu nation.
Bambata's personal conversion from gang leader to hip-hop DJ set a trend that swept the Bronx. Kids who would previously have joined gangs began channeling their energy into hip-hop, literally taking to the streets with speakers and turntables. We just went to the nearest light pole and just plugged in and got our juice. And the police used to come by, even though that was illegal.
They allowed us to do it, you know what I mean, because it contained us. You know what I mean? They knew that, you know. So as long as a block party going on, that's where everybody at.
Stadion Get That Island Rock is rockin' to the break of dawn. Yo, whoever ain't in rock, stadion, dynamic, get behind the barriers. Yo, old rock crews, can you please listen?
Yo, nobody's listening to me. Rock is getting ready. Go! Well, the batting was to see who was the competitive artist, who was the more better, who had the better moves, who had the better style.
So who won the rocking contest? Rock and roll! You all know we took them out, right? The crowd would judge it.
And they would just say, who do you think won the battle? This guy or this guy? And they were like, is it A or is it B?
B? Yeah. And then the crowd would just hype it up. Yeah. Woo.
Who goes for Rocksteady? Dynamic Rockies. Oh, my God.
When DJs battled, the crucial factor was having the best breakbeats. And that meant digging up obscure records that your rivals didn't know about. The more unexpected the source of the breakbeat, the better the crowd liked it. Apache was the it. Apache was the b-boy anthem.
It was the it was the highlight of the party. The battle of wits that was to come would result in a 60s rock guitar band from England becoming the unwitting godfathers of hip-hop. In 1975, hip-hop was still in its infancy. Few outside the South Bronx were even aware of it. There was no such thing as a hip-hop record.
The music was made by DJs who took existing records and mixed the breakbeats together to create a new rhythm. Essential to any DJ's craft was the ability to find breakbeats that their rivals didn't have yet. DJs didn't let other people see what records they had. That was part of the thing of being competitive.
You know, who got the beats? and if you got the beats, if it's a competition thing about who got beats, you ain't gonna let me see your beats. No DJ used to let no DJ look at they beats.
Next item, a big favorite with everybody there, Apache, rendered by the popular group The Shadows. As the relentless search for obscure beats heated up, it was inevitably cool DJ Herc who discovered the most enduring breakbeat of hip-hop's first decade. And it came from the most unlikely source imaginable. Cover version of the Shadows hit Apache, recorded by Michael Viner's incredible bongo band, was discovered by Herc in 1975. When he played the record's breakbeat, he energized an audience who had never heard of the Shadows. Apache was the national anthem of hip-hop when Ku Herc bought that out.
But we wasn't calling it Apache, we was calling it The Rock. Herc had me and Bam going. When he played that song, we was trying to just look at the label. He kept that quiet for a long time, until eventually I found out what it was.
If I have a record right now and I'm playing somewhere, I wouldn't tell you the name. You have to find out. On your own, because this is where your recognition and your rep come from. You have the record nobody else gets. B-Boys will come to the party, they'll stand on the side, you know, the breakers, and they'll just, you know, you're doing your thing, you're throwing on your joints, but they're just waiting for that moment that you just break out with some Apache.
Bam! Da! Now that, let me tell you, if you didn't dance to that break, there was something wrong with you.
There was something wrong with you. But DJ supremacy wasn't only about having the best beats. It was also about what you did with them.
In their efforts to outdo each other, Bronx DJs began developing a series of revolutionary turntable techniques. Scratching was the most famous of them, a method of stopping the record and rubbing it back and forth against the needle. The trick here was to do it without damaging the vinyl.
DJs also began using two copies of the same record, playing them off of each other back and forth to extend the beat. This was known as backspinning. It was just magical to see somebody extend a piece of a record for like three to four minutes that you know that was only like a 20 second part in the song. That was magical. The very last element of hip-hop music to emerge was the skill of rapping.
Do it, boys! Yeah! Like the musical style itself, rapping evolved out of a combination of ingenuity and circumstance. At this stage, the term rap was yet to come into existence.
Picking up a microphone to speak over a record was simply called MCing. MCing evolved from the DJ having a microphone to make announcements, to announce when the next party was going to be, where the next party was going to be, who was going to be at the party, you know what I mean? To acknowledge members of the group, members in the crew, or people in the audience.
And I was to call people's names and say, yo, to my fellow Wallace D, D, D, D, D, or this is the joint, joint, joint, joint, joint, joint. You never heard it like this before, before, and playing around with it. Every DJ, either he did that himself or he had somebody that would make the announcements for him started to embellish you know when they would say things until it grew into sentences into paragraphs you know into verses you know into rhymes Who am I? Who are you?
Who am I? Who are you? Who am I?
I'm Cass! So what, what do that mean? I'm the baddest MC lover on the hip-hop scene.
It's the Bronx in the house! And singing was the final element which made the music music complete. The next phase in its development was about to begin, but the music itself still lacked a name. By the late 1970s, one would emerge.
way or this way and then up comes hip-hop and that kind of really that labor kind of tagged on it hip-hop tagged on it covered the whole scope of the game hip-hop as it was now known had grown from being a neighborhood pastime into a fully fledged culture and a way of life Since hip-hop was still unrecognized by any record labels, the music existed only in the form of live performance. Hip-hop is taking the sound system in the park, and, you know what I mean, setting it up and playing five, six, seven hours and then tearing it down and taking that sound system home. That was hip-hop, and we did it faithfully because we loved it.
Let's go from party to party. 15 guys packed in the back of a van speakers ...turn tables, amplifiers, we driving down the highway, set up in Connecticut, rip the party apart, throw all the speakers back in, everybody back in, drive back home, go to sleep, get up the next day, might do the same thing again. But that's the way we do it.
Even though the music was yet to receive recognition from record companies and radio stations, hip-hop had started to travel. From its birthplace in the Bronx, it was spreading into the other boroughs of New York City. DJing and rapping were seizing the imagination of black teenagers in Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem.
From the parties in the Bronx that Bambada and those guys were playing at in the mid-70s, they luckily had the foresight to record almost all the gigs, and these tapes would then become circuits. Like, I would make a copy and give it to you, and you would make a copy and give it to the next cat. It was all about tapes back then. And in my neighborhood, tapes used to filter in from all the shows that was thrown up in the Bronx at the Audubon Ballroom and all the Harlem World tapes. That used to filter into Queens, because a lot of people from Queens used to have to travel outside of our borough to go through these shows.
So it was these cassette tapes that were spreading all through the city. People were getting, the word was getting out, and that's how it all began to spread. Despite hip-hop's fast appeal in predominantly black neighbourhoods on New York's fringes, it was given scant attention in the mainstream and was yet to be acknowledged by record companies.
But as the 70s came to a close, all that was about to change. A hip-hop mixtape had found its way to the owner of a small independent label in New Jersey. Impressed by its originality, she decided to produce a hip-hop record and began looking for an MC to rap on it.
Her search ended during a chance visit to her local pizza shop. Inside, she heard one of the employees rapping to himself while preparing her food. I would help make pizza at the shop.
And a woman by the name of Sylvia... Robinson came to the pizza shop and they asked me did I want to make a record picture this I'm in a pizza shop full of dough flower all over me and I'm going to audition to make a record so I go into the back of her son's 98 and they had to have a cassette in the car and I'm rapping along with the track and she really enjoyed it she said okay I'm going to use you on the record and a A week later, we did it. It was done in one take.
I said a hip hop, the hip it, the hip it to the hip, hip hop You don't stop the rockin' to the bang bang boogie Say up, jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie to beat Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rappin' to the beat Released in 1979, Rapper's Delight would become an enduring dance floor hit. But despite its massive commercial success, the song was greeted with scorn within the hip-hop community. They thought it was too soft.
When Rappers of Light first came out, every... you know, traditional rapper was fucking mortified. It was like, what the fuck are they doing with our, you know, with our art form? It's like they, they, they, it's like they axe murdered the shit.
So, you know, we didn't think that that was creditable. I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball. Hear me talk on my checkbook, can they cost more money?
I've been a sucker, could never spend, but I wouldn't give a sucker... Another criticism of Rapper's Delight was that whole sections of Big Hand Hank's lyrics bore an uncanny resemblance to rhymes previously performed by Bronx MC Casanova Fly. I met Hank at a club called Sparkle in the Bronx.
We kind of clicked. And we used to talk about hip-hop and parties and stuff. He sounded like he had a good head. So I asked him to be down with us.
People from Sugar Hill Records came in and he called me. He said, I want to use some of your rhymes. So So I'm really not thinking.
I'm really not thinking, okay? So I said, okay, all right, well, cool, whatever. I'm the C-A-S-N, the O-V-A-N, the rest is F-L-Y.
You see, I go by the code of the doctor of the mix. These reasons I'll tell you why. The C-A-S-N, the O-V-A-N, the rest is F-L-Y.
That's my name spelled out, Casanova Fly. He didn't even change it. To say Big Bang Hank or to say, you know, he just said the rhyme the way it was in the book. I can understand why he would say that and I have nothing but love for him.
I mean, we used a lot of stuff together and I guess he, you know. because he didn't move to that magnitude or I couldn't bring him in because it was something that Miss Rob had already formatted. But some of the stuff was done together, and I just transposed it over. At that time...
I mean, I had already made a name for myself. People knew me for my rhymes. All right?
So people was like, yo, I heard you on the radio. I heard you on the radio. I'm like, yo, that ain't me.
Yo, but I heard your rhymes. Yeah, I know. I know. That's not me, though. That's this kid Hank.
Yo, I know you're getting paid, though. Yeah, well, you know, this and that, this and that, yeah. It's fucked me up ever since.
Regardless of its shortcomings, rap as the light exposed hip-hop to the mainstream. Hot on its heels came exposure for another aspect of hip-hop culture. Graffiti, or tagging. Like hip-hop music and dance, graph painting evolved in the Bronx and thrived in Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem.
But it didn't stay there. The practice of tagging trains transported hip-hop's uncompromising, in-your-face attitude and placed it before an unsuspecting new audience downtown. The first thing that I noticed coming to New York, I came in 1978, going to work in Wall Street of all places, a chemical bank, a credit analyst.
I would go. and get in the subway and about to get on a train. And these trains would go by with these amazing burners, you know, graffiti burners, multicolored, you know, name tags that would take up the whole train.
And I would watch them go by and just think, my God, this is amazing. And it was the first tug, the first pull into that subculture was, I would have to say, aerosol art or graffiti art. Having previously been regarded as an eyesore and a public nuisance, graffiti was now making headway as an accepted art form in Manhattan's trendy downtown galleries and studios. In the early 1980s, one of the first graffiti artists to find favor was Fab Five Freddy.
I began to move on the downtown scene in lower Manhattan and began to meet some of the main people on the downtown new wave scene. new wave punk rock scene. I became close friends with Chris Stein and Debra Harry, the main people in the group Blondie. They would commission me and they brought paintings for me and I'd say, you know Debbie, I want you to make a record about me. Or just mention me on a record.
because I want to be like a star. I told her that. I was like, she was like, okay, Freddie.
I don't think, you know, she would laugh. I used to think like, yeah, right, give me a break, you know. And then they made this record called Rapture. Town to town Dancing all alone Body breath I remember going by the house and they sat me down.
down and they played the record and then they break into this rap. Debbie breaks into this rap. And I'm like, wait a minute.
Oh, I thought, oh, this is a complete joke. I thought they'd made a version of this record just as a joke to me. I was like, they're not going to put out a record where they're trying to rap.
I mean, she didn't even sound like a rapper. I could immediately hear what she was saying on the rap, though. It was little snippets of stuff I used to tell her. Like, when I would explain the hip-hop scene, I'd be like, well, you know, they got these fly guys and fly girls.
Those are like, I guess the equivalent to like punk rockers. you know, like the hardcore fans, and they call the guys fly guys and the girls are fly girls. And then you have this DJ name known as Flash, and he's the fastest.
Fab Five Freddy told me everybody fly. DJ's spinning, I said my, my. Flash is fast, Flash is cool. Francois Cepar, Flash ain't no dude.
Well, the first line of the rap was, Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly. DJ Spin It. I said, my, my, Flash is fast, Flash is cool.
Fab Five Freddy. He used to come to my parties all the time. He was a good friend of Blondie.
And he had always told me that he would bring her to the Bronx. And one time he did. Chance to meet her.
Next thing I know, I heard this crazy rap record by her. My name in it. Cool. And then I used to have a...
rap that I used to do about how I was born and raised on the planet Mars. I used to chill and rock with the stars until one day I got bored and decided to split. I came to Earth on a rocket ship. So when I heard her rapping and she was like, and the man from Mars? Any and he shoots you dead in each.
It was just so crazy. You see me later as she begins to move around the set and me and my partner Lee Quinones are on the back wall kind of like pseudo-dancing, pseudo-painting. It was pretty cool actually.
Yeah! Whereas Rapper's Delight had principally been a regional hit in the New York area, Blondie's Rapture reached the number one position on the U.S. national chart. I guess for a lot of the white mainstream public, it was the first time that they heard anybody rap. And it kind of paved the way, you could say, for what was about to come. In the 70s, hip-hop had taken hold on the fringes of New York.
But in 1981, Blondie's hip-hop homage, Rapture, had reached the number one position on the U.S. pop chart. People who'd never heard the music before were curious about where it came from. Hip-hop music was now becoming fashionable in the one area of New York where it had never been accepted before, the discos and nightclubs of downtown Manhattan.
The man most responsible for this trend was the graffiti artist who'd inspired Rapture, Fab 5 Freddy. The owner of the Mud Club, which was a very famous club in downtown Manhattan, seen at the time, had asked me to curate a show of graffiti. And for that exhibition, I put together, you know, a group of some of the dopest heads from the Bronx that were making it happen, you know, Bambata, Cold Crush, Fantastic, Jazzy 5 MCs, and the crowd loved it.
I just thought Bambaataa was playing as a DJ completely blew me away. At the time I was wanting to open up my own club in New York and was looking for something to showcase inside the club and when I saw this I was like, oh my god, this is it, I've got to, whatever it is. I've got to put inside the club.
She decided to go to a little club on 2nd Avenue, right off of 10th Street, called The Grill, where she started a little thing. I got involved. I would be like the house emcee, talking about so-and-so was in the house and whatever.
Rooza Blue's hip-hop nights at the downtown The Grill Club quickly outgrew the space and moved to a nearby roller rink called The Roxy. The clientele were a curious mix of uptown hip-hop kids and downtown punk rockers. I think it was a treat for basically both groups of people that they were checking out a completely other cultural group, let's say. And that was really interesting.
It was like two groups of people at a zoo looking at each other, you know? You know what I'm saying? Like, it was really amazing. Come downtown, you see somebody with purple hair sticking up like this, and, you know what I'm saying, you'd bug out in the beginning. You're like, oh, what the hell?
But then after a while, you realize, hey, just because you got purple hair, it's all wild, it's not like yours, same person, you know what I'm saying? So we got along with that after a while, no problem. I think the punks could sort of relate to the, you know, the energy, because it was very similar, it was very sort of rebellious.
and, you know, ripping these records up and, you know, not using instruments, only turntables. The main crowd puller was Afrika Bambaataa. His eclectic range of hip-hop beats won him the title Master of Records.
Being known as the master of records, he had all kind of music and he would like to be able to play certain kind of music for a certain kind of crowd. So when he got to play at the Mud Club, he would throw on his monkey records. I remember this one record, it was like, Mary, Mary, why are you bugging? Do, da, do, do, do, da, do, do, da, do, do, do, da. Mary, Mary.
He would play with joints like that and you'd just be bugging out like, Ah, what is this? I mean, bam. He was incredible. A lot of the rock records we was taking from like Fog Hat, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Billy Squire, the Rolling Stones. Even the Beatles, the Monkees, you know, I was playing a lot of crazy stuff.
And so from that experience of him being in a room dominated by young, white, new wave heads, you know, people with, you know, weird haircuts and just super cool beyond belief, you know. were like, wow, we like this, and inspired him to go and make a record called Planet Rock. Go get funky.
Yeah, just hit me. Just hit me. Released in 1982, Planet Rock became the fastest-selling 12-inch single ever and established a new platform for hip-hop.
It was released by a tiny new independent label called Tommy Boy Records, which was the creation of a music journalist called Tom Silverman. I went to hear Bambadad. a DJ.
And afterwards I talked to him. I said, so like you're putting all these records together. Why don't we make a record? Because I had started a label in case, you know, I found something really interesting. Let's put a demo together.
Let's make a record that uses like some of these records here, you know, you're cutting up. And I was telling Tom, you know, I said, you know, with all this electronic music I was playing, I said, there's no black electronic group. I said, I want this sound as something like Kraftwerk, because I was deep into Kraftwerk, ill-imagined or Augusta still Gary Newman. We went into the studio called Intergalactic and they kind of didn't know the lines that well. They had sort of had them written down, but they weren't memorized that well.
And Pow Wow had one section and he couldn't remember his words. So he went, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz, zz. And we said, let's keep that, you know, that sounds good. And it's on the record.
It's one of the parts everybody sings along with. Everybody got it. True to hip-hop's DJ tradition of taking breakbeats from existing records, Planet Rock blended melodies from half a dozen songs.
One of them was Trans Europe Express by the German band. Kraftwerk. We got sued by Kraftwerk's publishing company.
We paid an ungodly amount of royalty per record that we sold. But even being sued by Kraftwerk couldn't diminish Planet Rock's stature. as the first hip-hop record to win both crossover pop success and grassroots credibility. Planet Rock was just some whole new shit.
Do you know what I'm saying? Planet Rock opened up a whole other world of music. It exposed another audience to hip-hop and it tried and it started merging those two audiences.
It's one of the first records that really crossed over the barriers into the pop field and really brought hip-hop worldwide. Hip-hop's newfound success in the record industry only intensified the competitiveness of the old days. While Bambaataa was reveling in his breakthrough at Tommy Boy, his old rivals Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five were about to release a record on the Sugarhill label that would raise hip-hop's rising stature a notch higher.
Planet Rock was like the hottest fucking record at that time. I mean, you heard it everywhere, and I was like, if somebody could just get a record that could knock off Planet Rock. And when the message came out, I knew we was going to knock Planet Rock off. And we're going to tell you all about New York City.
The message was the rawest form of rap yet put on record, a song with adult themes that demanded to be taken seriously. Don't push me, cos I'm close to the edge The message was kind of a puzzle to everybody when it first came out. It's like, they're putting out this slow song at a time where, you know what I'm saying, everything is kind of upbeat, up-tempo, whatever. But the content of the message is what... I caught everybody.
Don't push me, cause I'm close to the edge, and I'm trying not to lose my head. Anybody could have said, you know, even don't push me cause I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head. that time, anybody could have said that.
You know, at that time, you know, half the people in America probably wanted to say that. And then when the record came out, it was like somebody said this shit. Here it is. Unlike most of its predecessors, the message used specially composed music. It was written by Ed Fletcher, a former schoolteacher turned record producer at Sugar Hill, who went by the nickname of Duke Booty.
He wrote the song at the piano in the basement to his mother's house in suburban New Jersey. I came down here, actually here, you know, which is like piano, this is a piano I got the ba-ba-da-ba-ba-ba on, and I just kept playing it, and came up with verses for that. It's like a jungle sometimes, you know, broken glass everywhere, I mean, if you look around of the neighborhood, you kind of see things were going on.
And I created this track. Fletcher did the track. It was his idea.
He did the track from top to bottom. He did the music. We helped with the music. I came up with the little melody line on the message, even though they don't credit me for it, but that was my, I came up, you know, we all added a little bit of this and this and that and that, even though Fletcher was the main theme writer.
He brought it all in there. I think if you have a good idea, you could damn near beat on some cardboard and snap some rubber bands and people will respond to it. You know, and if it's funky enough, you make Lassie dance with it.
But the message almost never happened. When Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were first offered the song, they didn't want to record it. Everybody was doing party music. It was like, nah, this is not, you know, this is a little bit too serious.
You know, we don't know if our fans will get into something like this. And nobody wanted to do it. In the end, Melly Mel was the only member of the Furious Five who...
took part in recording the song. I wrote the part, a child is born with no state of mind, the very last rhyme that was on the message. A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind.
God is smiling on you, but he's frowning too. Cos only God knows what you'll go through You'll grow in the ghetto, live a second rate Your eyes will see a song of heat The places you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alleyway The owners of the Sugarhill label decided to release the message under the name Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five because they felt the group's image was right for the song. But it was only after the message was a hit that the group really accepted the song.
And even then, Grandmaster Flash himself was less than happy. It was the first record for Flash and then where the whole Flash wasn't going to be on the record. Flash isn't even on the record. From a public's point of view, it was like the incredible record.
But from what I believe in, it's extremely important that I do things that allow me to show people who I am, not as a group figure, but as an individual. And that's the biggest problem I had with that record. At one time, his name was known all over the world just from being on a record that he didn't even do nothing off. He should be happy.
I wish I could have been on every record and didn't do nothing, and there was just Melly Mel on the record. Oh, yeah, there was Melly Mel. I mean, what did you do?
I didn't do a fucking thing. I'm famous, hey. You know what I mean? Could you write me a check?
You know what I mean? Shit. You know?
Ironically, The Message was the last song recorded by the group. They split up six months later. But the impact of The Message, combined with the earlier success of Planet Rock, had awoken the music industry to the commercial potential of hip-hop.
Over the next decade, hip-hop would grow to dominate the pop charts, but it would also become the most notorious and controversial music in America. you The story continues tomorrow at 10 past midnight. Hip-hop is just one of the many things that have shaped and changed life here in England. If you'd like a chance to create a free website about the other influencers, visit channel4.com slash insight.
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