The Jewnited States
Superstar
egotripland.com | Learning to Accept Rap
“Look at these new jack kids. They don’t even know what song this is, and it’s sad.”
I’d heard that statement a million times over. I’d said it myself a million and five times. But this time, for whatever reason, was different. I’d just finished DJ-ing,opening up for DJ Premier at the Soundset festival in May of 2012. And as I stood off to the side in the 1,000 degree tent, sweat-soaked from shirt to drawers, nodding my head as Preemo dropped the jazzy, yet beautifully morose intro for the Group Home LP he produced from 1995, an attendee around my age uttered that magic phrase that actually froze me in my tracks for the first time.
That’s when the doctor walked into the office holding the x-ray with the malignant tumor on it and sporting a somber face: I was officially part of the first generation of folks raised on hip-hop as recorded music to get…[gasp]…old.
As I scanned the crowd, the arithmetic made it even more obvious: About 40% of the people in that tent looked like they’d be cramming for the SATs when they got home from Soundset. Some that I met after my DJ set stated they couldn’t make it to that night’s after party due to curfews and age restrictions. I turned my internal calculator on. That’d make their year of birth about… 1996. Group Home’s album may have been available via special order at the record store in Mall of America when their parents were deciding whether or not they should drop a brat. I thought it was pretty cool young kids were nodding to a dope beat they didn’t know, but I guess the complainant had a point. If you were a teenager in the ’90s and didn’t know which song came after “Zig Zag” on the Car Wash Soundtrack from 1976, that’d be pretty Goddamn sad, too, right? Or does that sound a bit ridiculous?
The Soundset epiphany kind of reminded me of an episode 20 years earlier, when I had the fellas over the crib during the summer of ‘92, right after my freshman year of high school ended. When I pulled out Kool and the Gang’s “Give It Up” and Young **** Unlimited’s “Queen of the Nile” and played ‘em back to back, everyone bugged at how the funk and jazz record combined to form the backdrop for what was the hottest joint of the moment, Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique.”
“That’s fat,” said T-Bone. “You should use some more shyt off those records.”
T-Bone had no interest in learning about Kool and the Gang drummer, “Funky” George Brown, or asking me about this mysterious Young-**** Unlimited group. They were before his time. He just liked the samples. Those two to four second audio grabs were fat. When EQd right, they bumped in the jeeps that passed us in the street. That was it. He didn’t ask me for a tape dub of the first Kool and the Gang LP to bump on his own, but he was down to loop up their shyt. Aspiring producers and DJs like myself cared about that stuff. But our casual rap fan peers? Nah. If a sample was fat, it was fat. Who gave a fukk about the original source? The original source was before their time, their parents’ music. And when you’re a teenager, your parents’ music is corny. We snatched pieces of it and made it ours. It was different now. “Don’t Sweat the Technique” was our locker room music, not “Give It Up.”
So as I reminisced on T-Bone’s insouciant stance on the DNA of early ’90s hip-hop records while simultaneously examining the all ages crowd at Soundset, I finally and firmly accepted the fact that the generational disconnect will always exist. Music from the past is largely enjoyed and preserved by those who lived through it upon its release to the public and felt its impact. They first absorbed it immediately upon its creation. They’re old enough to look back on the music and its associated time period as a point of reference to where the world is in its current state. Vietnam, Reaganomics, Watergate, crack, The L.A. Riots, New York’s state of being a racial powder keg in the late ’80s – each had a soundtrack. Younger folks who dig deeper and are more intrigued by music than their peers appreciate stuff from all genres and all eras. But they’re in the minority, and although they may appreciate the music itself, they’ll never fully comprehend what surrounded it or the circumstances it was made under. Some of our “Golden Era” innovations in style have come back around – Gumby haircuts are actually popular again. But N.W.A. is no longer dangerous. Ice Cube’s penchant for getting lost in his movies and Dr. Dre’s overpriced headphones make the group seem damn near humorous in hindsight. I once played “fukk The Police” during a college music course I taught at my alma mater; my students thought it was hilarious and fun. Only a certain demographic can truly understand why the group and song were considered so dangerous once upon a time. You had to be there to “get it.” Furthermore, rap has always been propelled by youth and rebellion, so fewer older artists in hip-hop will be revered by the youth than in most other genres of music.
And despite all signs pointing to the merciless beating of a dead horse, we continue to wail away. Check the comment sections for any online hip-hop article related to beef between artists of two eras or start a rap debate in any black barbershop: “old,” “broke,” and “bitter” are words I’ll bet a kidney on popping up. KRS vs. Nelly, Lil’ Kim vs. Nicki Minaj, Common vs. Drake, Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy, Pete Rock vs. Lupe Fiasco, etc. – all the same. Had Twitter existed in 1991, when Biz Markie’s album was pulled from shelves for illegally sampling Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again,” you can’t deny that 14-year-old Biz fans like myself would be tweeting:
Gilbert O’Sullivan is a herb #Broke #Bitter #OldMan
The most recent generational divide was highlighted in the Lord Finesse vs. Mac Miller situation. Folks my age speaking on the infringement case might say: “Finesse chopped that sample creatively to make the beat; Mac Miller just used a finished product for a mixtape.” Alright, but how many 18-year-olds know about hitting up the dude with the ZZ Top beard at the Roosevelt record show in ’94 looking for obscure joints to chop beyond recognition, and in turn dipping the onerous and newly-established mandatory sample clearance process? We can frown on them being oblivious to the creative chopping methods born out of the SP-1200’s paltry 2.5 seconds of sampling time per button and overzealous lawyers, but that production process is just not part of their DNA whatsoever. Just like despite the ruthless creativity of sampling in the early ’90s, musicians from the ’70s didn’t give a fukk about how many pieces their work was chopped into in the SP. fukk the fact that I “flipped it” and made it my own. According to them, if I couldn’t play that inverted paradiddle-inspired breakbeat on the drums my damn self, I was stealing. Let’s attempt to tell (James Brown drummer) Clyde Stubblefield’s medical bills how creative we were. Or, tell the owners of rap labels from the late ‘80s, who released albums chock-full of (uncleared) samples, only to secure the rights to common breakbeats and rap vocal snippets and sue artists who use them without clearance today. There’s no true right or wrong with the sampling issue… just a gaping generation gap, with a shytload of open invoices on the ground below.
It’s also time for me to finally admit that once upon a time I was just like today’s teenage rap fan who sees the rap stalwarts of the ’90s as pot-bellied, 9XL shirt-wearing curmudgeons. I have the utmost respect for rap’s pioneers and their contributions that paved the way for the music that has engulfed my life. But my full entry into rap as a fan was in 1989. That explains my reaction when I heard The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in full for the first time, long after it had been released. I may have been 11 or 12 years old.
“I say hip, hop, the hibbit, the hibby to the hip hip hop and ya don’t stop the rockin to the bang bang boogie say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogidy bee!”
I thought to myself: What the fukk was that and why did I just waste ten minutes listening to it?
I thought “Rapper’s Delight” was a joke, like a parody of some sort. True enough, I’ve always had (and still have) an odd obsession with music from the late ’60s and ’70s, but the funk and jazz I studied hit their primes before my time. When I became a rap fan, the rap music of the day was my only reference point. “Rapper’s Delight” to me was like my uncles Fred and Calvin grabbing Carl Winslow from Family Matters and getting on the mike at a family BBQ, as my middle-aged, Jheri curled aunts cheered them on while eating fried chicken and potato salad. I didn’t take that shyt seriously like I did Stetsasonic’s “Talkin All That Jazz,” because Stesasonic’s In Full Gear was the first rap LP I ever bought. Kind of like how that NPR intern didn’t take Public Enemy’s classic Nation of Millions… LP seriously. Drake is his reference point and Chuck D reminded him of a drill sergeant. So I guess it’s hard to fully appreciate how the Group Home LP intro sets up “Inna Citi Life” unless you were walking around New York City with it in your Walkman through the Blizzard of ‘96 and watching Mayor Rudy Giuliani Windex your hometown. When Premier went into his next tune at Soundset, I heard it from the same cat: “I don’t get these kids today.”
Ah, that magical word: today. Let’s talk about “today.”
To my Grandfather, “today” was 1989.A number. Another summer. A year that featured he and I crossing 137th Avenue in Queens and arguing about who was sexier, Salt-N-Pepa or Lena Horne. He’d seen the “foolishness” I’d spent my allowance money on in the form of a Word Up! magazine and had to speak on the music of “today.”
Then he really revealed his Medicare card: “They ruin the records with all that scratching. And the Ink Spots were rappin’ long before Salt and Pepper [sic] were around. How ya like them apples?”
I didn’t. And despite my aforementioned childhood (and lifetime) infatuation with funk records older than I, I truly didn’t care about Grandpa’s Golden Oldies back then. The Ink Spots were seniors in high school when W.E.B. Dubois was a freshman as far as I was concerned. But us thirty-somethings reference 1989 now when telling the youth (and each other) about a time when hip-hop was picture perfect (ahem…poorly-placed, contrived hip-house jams on albums… ahem) and pontificating on Facebook about how far “today’s” artists like Drake are from the greatness of that era.
“Today” was 1993, when keep-it-realers kept it a little too real and the grumbling about gimmicks (tongue-twisting, saying “buck buck” on records despite living in palatial mansions, wearing all black with a bald head, brandishing a tech-9, and copy-catting Pete Rock and Dr. Dre’s production styles) from purists longing for The Rooftop to reopen began.
“Why can’t we take it back to ’86? Rap is too gimmicky today!”
Remember that? Of course we do, because people complained about the state of hip-hop back in the days, too. Current terms like “Golden Era” and “’90s hip-hop” are so broad they can refer to different time periods and music to different people. Tell me to DJ a “Golden Era” party and I’ll start playing 116 BPM records from 1990, but most people don’t usually react until you dip into the Nas / Wu-Tang / Biggie / A Tribe Called Quest stuff from five years later that’s about 20 BPM slower. Give a DJ born in 1966 the same instructions, he’s liable to pull out a Joeski Love record.
“Today” was 1996, when we scowled at the opulence of Bad Boy records, raising the roof, poppin’ Cristal bottles, keeping those bass drum rubs and triangles loud in the mix, Ma$e using a dollar sign instead of an ‘s’ to spell his name and downright gettin’ jiggy with it on these player haters. Boy did we hate hip-hop then.
“Today” was 2002, when we all admitted P-Diddy’s Bad Boy jiggyness from ‘96 was milquetoast, but nowhere near as egregious as Cash Money Records’ sample-free jams about buying platinum football fields, because “at least the Bad Boy Records had an old school hip-hop element.”
And “today” is now 2013, when 27-year-olds are beginning to say shyt like “How’d we go from a nikka as dope as Jim Jones to a nikka as wack as Tyga?”
continued...
“Look at these new jack kids. They don’t even know what song this is, and it’s sad.”
I’d heard that statement a million times over. I’d said it myself a million and five times. But this time, for whatever reason, was different. I’d just finished DJ-ing,opening up for DJ Premier at the Soundset festival in May of 2012. And as I stood off to the side in the 1,000 degree tent, sweat-soaked from shirt to drawers, nodding my head as Preemo dropped the jazzy, yet beautifully morose intro for the Group Home LP he produced from 1995, an attendee around my age uttered that magic phrase that actually froze me in my tracks for the first time.
That’s when the doctor walked into the office holding the x-ray with the malignant tumor on it and sporting a somber face: I was officially part of the first generation of folks raised on hip-hop as recorded music to get…[gasp]…old.
As I scanned the crowd, the arithmetic made it even more obvious: About 40% of the people in that tent looked like they’d be cramming for the SATs when they got home from Soundset. Some that I met after my DJ set stated they couldn’t make it to that night’s after party due to curfews and age restrictions. I turned my internal calculator on. That’d make their year of birth about… 1996. Group Home’s album may have been available via special order at the record store in Mall of America when their parents were deciding whether or not they should drop a brat. I thought it was pretty cool young kids were nodding to a dope beat they didn’t know, but I guess the complainant had a point. If you were a teenager in the ’90s and didn’t know which song came after “Zig Zag” on the Car Wash Soundtrack from 1976, that’d be pretty Goddamn sad, too, right? Or does that sound a bit ridiculous?
The Soundset epiphany kind of reminded me of an episode 20 years earlier, when I had the fellas over the crib during the summer of ‘92, right after my freshman year of high school ended. When I pulled out Kool and the Gang’s “Give It Up” and Young **** Unlimited’s “Queen of the Nile” and played ‘em back to back, everyone bugged at how the funk and jazz record combined to form the backdrop for what was the hottest joint of the moment, Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique.”
“That’s fat,” said T-Bone. “You should use some more shyt off those records.”
T-Bone had no interest in learning about Kool and the Gang drummer, “Funky” George Brown, or asking me about this mysterious Young-**** Unlimited group. They were before his time. He just liked the samples. Those two to four second audio grabs were fat. When EQd right, they bumped in the jeeps that passed us in the street. That was it. He didn’t ask me for a tape dub of the first Kool and the Gang LP to bump on his own, but he was down to loop up their shyt. Aspiring producers and DJs like myself cared about that stuff. But our casual rap fan peers? Nah. If a sample was fat, it was fat. Who gave a fukk about the original source? The original source was before their time, their parents’ music. And when you’re a teenager, your parents’ music is corny. We snatched pieces of it and made it ours. It was different now. “Don’t Sweat the Technique” was our locker room music, not “Give It Up.”
So as I reminisced on T-Bone’s insouciant stance on the DNA of early ’90s hip-hop records while simultaneously examining the all ages crowd at Soundset, I finally and firmly accepted the fact that the generational disconnect will always exist. Music from the past is largely enjoyed and preserved by those who lived through it upon its release to the public and felt its impact. They first absorbed it immediately upon its creation. They’re old enough to look back on the music and its associated time period as a point of reference to where the world is in its current state. Vietnam, Reaganomics, Watergate, crack, The L.A. Riots, New York’s state of being a racial powder keg in the late ’80s – each had a soundtrack. Younger folks who dig deeper and are more intrigued by music than their peers appreciate stuff from all genres and all eras. But they’re in the minority, and although they may appreciate the music itself, they’ll never fully comprehend what surrounded it or the circumstances it was made under. Some of our “Golden Era” innovations in style have come back around – Gumby haircuts are actually popular again. But N.W.A. is no longer dangerous. Ice Cube’s penchant for getting lost in his movies and Dr. Dre’s overpriced headphones make the group seem damn near humorous in hindsight. I once played “fukk The Police” during a college music course I taught at my alma mater; my students thought it was hilarious and fun. Only a certain demographic can truly understand why the group and song were considered so dangerous once upon a time. You had to be there to “get it.” Furthermore, rap has always been propelled by youth and rebellion, so fewer older artists in hip-hop will be revered by the youth than in most other genres of music.
And despite all signs pointing to the merciless beating of a dead horse, we continue to wail away. Check the comment sections for any online hip-hop article related to beef between artists of two eras or start a rap debate in any black barbershop: “old,” “broke,” and “bitter” are words I’ll bet a kidney on popping up. KRS vs. Nelly, Lil’ Kim vs. Nicki Minaj, Common vs. Drake, Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy, Pete Rock vs. Lupe Fiasco, etc. – all the same. Had Twitter existed in 1991, when Biz Markie’s album was pulled from shelves for illegally sampling Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again,” you can’t deny that 14-year-old Biz fans like myself would be tweeting:
Gilbert O’Sullivan is a herb #Broke #Bitter #OldMan
The most recent generational divide was highlighted in the Lord Finesse vs. Mac Miller situation. Folks my age speaking on the infringement case might say: “Finesse chopped that sample creatively to make the beat; Mac Miller just used a finished product for a mixtape.” Alright, but how many 18-year-olds know about hitting up the dude with the ZZ Top beard at the Roosevelt record show in ’94 looking for obscure joints to chop beyond recognition, and in turn dipping the onerous and newly-established mandatory sample clearance process? We can frown on them being oblivious to the creative chopping methods born out of the SP-1200’s paltry 2.5 seconds of sampling time per button and overzealous lawyers, but that production process is just not part of their DNA whatsoever. Just like despite the ruthless creativity of sampling in the early ’90s, musicians from the ’70s didn’t give a fukk about how many pieces their work was chopped into in the SP. fukk the fact that I “flipped it” and made it my own. According to them, if I couldn’t play that inverted paradiddle-inspired breakbeat on the drums my damn self, I was stealing. Let’s attempt to tell (James Brown drummer) Clyde Stubblefield’s medical bills how creative we were. Or, tell the owners of rap labels from the late ‘80s, who released albums chock-full of (uncleared) samples, only to secure the rights to common breakbeats and rap vocal snippets and sue artists who use them without clearance today. There’s no true right or wrong with the sampling issue… just a gaping generation gap, with a shytload of open invoices on the ground below.
It’s also time for me to finally admit that once upon a time I was just like today’s teenage rap fan who sees the rap stalwarts of the ’90s as pot-bellied, 9XL shirt-wearing curmudgeons. I have the utmost respect for rap’s pioneers and their contributions that paved the way for the music that has engulfed my life. But my full entry into rap as a fan was in 1989. That explains my reaction when I heard The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in full for the first time, long after it had been released. I may have been 11 or 12 years old.
“I say hip, hop, the hibbit, the hibby to the hip hip hop and ya don’t stop the rockin to the bang bang boogie say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogidy bee!”
I thought to myself: What the fukk was that and why did I just waste ten minutes listening to it?
I thought “Rapper’s Delight” was a joke, like a parody of some sort. True enough, I’ve always had (and still have) an odd obsession with music from the late ’60s and ’70s, but the funk and jazz I studied hit their primes before my time. When I became a rap fan, the rap music of the day was my only reference point. “Rapper’s Delight” to me was like my uncles Fred and Calvin grabbing Carl Winslow from Family Matters and getting on the mike at a family BBQ, as my middle-aged, Jheri curled aunts cheered them on while eating fried chicken and potato salad. I didn’t take that shyt seriously like I did Stetsasonic’s “Talkin All That Jazz,” because Stesasonic’s In Full Gear was the first rap LP I ever bought. Kind of like how that NPR intern didn’t take Public Enemy’s classic Nation of Millions… LP seriously. Drake is his reference point and Chuck D reminded him of a drill sergeant. So I guess it’s hard to fully appreciate how the Group Home LP intro sets up “Inna Citi Life” unless you were walking around New York City with it in your Walkman through the Blizzard of ‘96 and watching Mayor Rudy Giuliani Windex your hometown. When Premier went into his next tune at Soundset, I heard it from the same cat: “I don’t get these kids today.”
Ah, that magical word: today. Let’s talk about “today.”
To my Grandfather, “today” was 1989.A number. Another summer. A year that featured he and I crossing 137th Avenue in Queens and arguing about who was sexier, Salt-N-Pepa or Lena Horne. He’d seen the “foolishness” I’d spent my allowance money on in the form of a Word Up! magazine and had to speak on the music of “today.”
Then he really revealed his Medicare card: “They ruin the records with all that scratching. And the Ink Spots were rappin’ long before Salt and Pepper [sic] were around. How ya like them apples?”
I didn’t. And despite my aforementioned childhood (and lifetime) infatuation with funk records older than I, I truly didn’t care about Grandpa’s Golden Oldies back then. The Ink Spots were seniors in high school when W.E.B. Dubois was a freshman as far as I was concerned. But us thirty-somethings reference 1989 now when telling the youth (and each other) about a time when hip-hop was picture perfect (ahem…poorly-placed, contrived hip-house jams on albums… ahem) and pontificating on Facebook about how far “today’s” artists like Drake are from the greatness of that era.
“Today” was 1993, when keep-it-realers kept it a little too real and the grumbling about gimmicks (tongue-twisting, saying “buck buck” on records despite living in palatial mansions, wearing all black with a bald head, brandishing a tech-9, and copy-catting Pete Rock and Dr. Dre’s production styles) from purists longing for The Rooftop to reopen began.
“Why can’t we take it back to ’86? Rap is too gimmicky today!”
Remember that? Of course we do, because people complained about the state of hip-hop back in the days, too. Current terms like “Golden Era” and “’90s hip-hop” are so broad they can refer to different time periods and music to different people. Tell me to DJ a “Golden Era” party and I’ll start playing 116 BPM records from 1990, but most people don’t usually react until you dip into the Nas / Wu-Tang / Biggie / A Tribe Called Quest stuff from five years later that’s about 20 BPM slower. Give a DJ born in 1966 the same instructions, he’s liable to pull out a Joeski Love record.
“Today” was 1996, when we scowled at the opulence of Bad Boy records, raising the roof, poppin’ Cristal bottles, keeping those bass drum rubs and triangles loud in the mix, Ma$e using a dollar sign instead of an ‘s’ to spell his name and downright gettin’ jiggy with it on these player haters. Boy did we hate hip-hop then.
“Today” was 2002, when we all admitted P-Diddy’s Bad Boy jiggyness from ‘96 was milquetoast, but nowhere near as egregious as Cash Money Records’ sample-free jams about buying platinum football fields, because “at least the Bad Boy Records had an old school hip-hop element.”
And “today” is now 2013, when 27-year-olds are beginning to say shyt like “How’d we go from a nikka as dope as Jim Jones to a nikka as wack as Tyga?”
continued...
At least give us a few bolded parts.
for years...it's a simple enough concept that I'm still shocked that so many people fail to grasp, instead falling predictably into cliched nostalgia driven glory-dayism and idealism
"this isn't hip hop" shyt
