The Tanning of America (5 page)

In 1970, the future DJ Kool Herc (fifteen-year-old Clive Campbell, who had recently come to the Bronx from Jamaica) started a house party business, spinning a funky collection of 45s on a rustic borrowed sound system wherever he could get hired. Probably the most daunting issue for him and most aspiring DJs in those days was a technical one—how to extend the break in the music, the most danceable section of the record. Extending the break, logically, was a matter of finding a way to repeat it, to keep the groove steady enough for the break dancers—the break boys and girls, also known as B-boys and B-girls—and hang on to the beat long enough to rap to it, using language, humor, and rhythm to fire up the crowd. Without sampling or the digital devices of future eras, to keep the break repeating on a continuous loop the pioneering DJs came up with the practice of setting up two turntables with the same record and extending the break by switching back and forth, jumping from one turntable to the other, playing the break over from the start, as seamlessly as possible.

While Clive refined his technology and style, honing his skills all across the Bronx, he ran track and lifted weights at school, where he earned the superhero nickname of Hercules. Meanwhile, a short-lived stint as a graffiti writer had led him to the sign-off that didn't totally reveal his identity to the authorities—“Clyde as Kool.” Putting all three identities together, in 1973 he officially became DJ Kool Herc, taking just the Kool from his tagging name and shortening Hercules to Herc.

And then, finally, ready to put his learning to the test, in August 1973 Herc decided to join forces with his sister and become an entrepreneur. The two pooled their resources and rented the rec room of the apartment building to which they'd recently moved. The address? It was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. With nothing more by way of advertising than handwritten invitations promoting the first party and charging a few coins to get in, there must have been the smell of history in the making, because after word got out, kids showed up in droves. The crowd was mixed, mostly African-American, some Hispanic who were mainly of Caribbean black descent, and some whose families had recently arrived to the increasingly poverty-stricken, institutionally abandoned neighborhood, along with a few outliers from other backgrounds. But when the makeshift strobe started to pulse—thanks to a friend flicking the light switch on and off—and DJ Kool Herc took to the mic and began to play the breaks, there was only one language being spoken: pure, unadulterated fun.

Hip-hop was born that night, even if it hadn't been named yet, and so had the legendary status of DJ Kool Herc, whose reputation preceded him far and wide almost overnight. Other masterful MCs and DJs would rise to equal and greater prominence, but because Herc helped to create the language and would therefore remain in a class of his own, nobody could truly take the throne from him. He would forever remain proof of the possibilities, that you could come from nothing, from the streets and even from the least likely circumstances, and make an indelible mark on the world.

The quest to leave a mark was not abstract—as could be heard in other voices contributing to the street code. There were the top graffiti writers, who spoke of “bombing” to describe their middle-of-the-night aerosol painting forays into the subway tunnels and onto tracks where the trains were locked down for the night. Battling individually or in crews, the objective was to see whose signature style could be most recognized and whose artwork could travel the farthest—literally, over the greatest stretch of tracks. B-boys and girls, many in their early teens, took existing dance moves out of the clubs, taped down cardboard on concrete, and invented new ways of twisting, flipping, and spinning to create their own signature moves, each one winding up in a gravity-defying “freeze” that if you could nail could make you a legend. The classic B-boy stance, arms folded over your chest, chin jutted, sideways lean, one foot extended, said everything without words—code in the form of gesture that was about defying the odds, about being proud of who you were, what crowd backed you, and inviting or challenging others to engage.

So the party kept on rocking throughout the 1970s. Fueled by aspiration, collaboration, and competition, it continued almost completely under the radar of the rest of the world—including most of the island of Manhattan. That is, until some visionary individuals started to bridge the divide for no other reason than that they could. Fab Five Freddy, a Renaissance man of tanning, was one of those people. From Brooklyn, Freddy Brathwaite distinguished himself as a graffiti writer by tagging a particular train on the IRT line so often that he took the number—5—as part of his name. Also known as Freddy Love, a nickname that fits his outgoing energy and embrace of everyone and everything hip-hop, he had the crazy idea early in the game that graffiti artists were as important to popular culture as was, say, Andy Warhol. To make that statement, Fab Five Freddy began bombing trains by painting them with oversized Campbell's soup cans, Warhol pop art style. It was a shout-out to an icon most graffiti writers didn't necessarily know, and at the same time it signaled to the downtown art world that subway art could stand alongside high-priced works in their galleries, all day, any day. In fact, that idea would be captured in the 1983 breakout movie
Wild Style,
in which graffiti artist Lee Quinones starred and Freddy played a supporting role, as well as contributing to the soundtrack. A feature film with a fictional story line but shot like a documentary,
Wild Style
brought to life the roots of hip-hop culture. Writer/ director Charlie Ahearn cast many of the actual leading figures from the scene to make the movie all the more authentic.

Whenever Freddy describes how the gaps between these seemingly disconnected worlds were bridged, he usually goes back to hip-hop's jazz underpinnings, particularly in bebop—one of his earliest influences. Freddy's godfather, jazz drummer and bebop pioneer Max Roach, was best friends with his dad, and in that mingling of black and Jewish and other immigrant sensibilities seeds were planted for cultural tanning and for the musical disobedience of conventional rules. Freddy told me, “My dad and Max and all the jazz guys believed that they were pushing music forward out of the underground to become the most important popular American art form. But then rock 'n' roll and the Beatles happened and jazz, more or less, was pushed to the sidelines.” Miles Davis—and other musical rule-breakers—then rebelled against being segregated to a genre that spoke only to a narrow constituency. So Miles found the intersection between jazz and rock after going to the Fillmore and seeing Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

One day when Max Roach had come to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn for a visit, a party was taking place with a DJ and Fab doing some of his own fun rhyming to the beat. After he had done his thing, Roach pulled him aside and told young Brathwaite, “This is some serious sh*t.” Popular music had always balanced melody, rhythm, and harmony; but now, Max Roach observed, the rhythm was going to take center stage and it was as powerful a force, even in infancy, as he had ever heard.

To Fab Five Freddy, the baton really had been passed from bebop to rap pioneers with some help from R&B and rock 'n' roll—as early as the sixties—so that the next form of counterculture expression (hip-hop) could pick up where jazz had been sidelined in order to give musical/cultural sharing its popular due.

Freddy didn't stop there. Before long, amazingly, he was instrumental in helping bring the uptown house party sensibility downtown. Not only did Fab Five Freddy help connect rap with the artsy disco/punk rock scene, but he also convinced gallery owners to open their doors to the work of graffiti writers. The next thing everyone knew, the most notorious East Coast graffiti artists were being linked with the likes of Fab's downtown friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Suddenly gallery owners, art collectors, and critics were proclaiming the magnificence of graffiti on canvas as both serious and worth investing thousands of dollars in.

The aspirational message that you could leave your mark on the world—
and
make some real money doing it—was new to the practitioners who had been doing the graff writing and rapping, as Fab observed, “from the standpoint of teenage angst.” And it was going to reverberate much more powerfully once rappers started to become recording artists. But that process, believe it or not, was not going to be so easy.

The atmosphere of a house party, by its nature, never lent itself in any obvious way to recording or media technology. For radio programming and the sales of single records, the cut needed to last about three minutes. With most MCs rapping over the breaks of existing records, besides the fact that they could go on and on 'n' 'n' on for as long as an hour (or many more), they weren't exactly writing songs that could be copyrighted lyrically or melodically. Besides that, the raps were frequently improvisations—freestyles—and included input from the crowd.

What had been successful was the homemade mix tapes made and sold through word of mouth, not too differently from other street fare. Also, selling mix tapes at house parties—or at other performance settings where rap was becoming a viable offering—could be a lucrative business for local and celebrity DJs. That was enough to convince a new crop of independent producers to try to solve the puzzle of how to get rap onto records. For a while, nothing really worked and the consensus was that perhaps the elements were only suited for the live experience.

But as the decade flew by and disco ran its course while R&B and other black artists were signed to major corporate labels—making Michael Jackson's
Off the Wall
one of the biggest recording phenomena of 1979—there was a void in the marketplace. Time for something different, something new. With the belief that rap's moment had come, enterprising African-American indie-label producers stepped up their game, now with better results from a rap record or two that had existing fans impressed. Still, the magic hadn't yet transferred to vinyl. While everyone was looking for the right mix, the resourceful producer who believed that such a translation was imminent and who wanted to be the one to do it first was former recording artist Sylvia Robinson of “Love Is Strange” and “Pillow Talk” hit fame.

In mid-1979, Sylvia and her husband had recently opened the doors of their new label, Sugar Hill Records, in Englewood, New Jersey, and needed product. And, as the story goes, after hearing MCs rhyming at a few different parties, she began scouring the town to identify the top talent and record them. But much to her surprise, no crew with name value or real credibility was interested. Why should they have been? After all, the motivation for rappers was to master the art form and win the love of the live and local audience. So any commercial recording enterprise might run the risk of being seen as inauthentic to the house party/performance art medium. Besides, if you were among the best MCs and wanted to put out a record, you would either produce it yourself (as with mix tapes) or go with an established label, not a start-up spearheaded by an outsider with ties to conventional R&B in suburban New Jersey.

But as I learned from my own mom, later from my daughter, and pretty much from every influential female in my life, there is no stopping a woman on a mission. Sylvia Robinson was relentless and resourceful. Instead of discovering a crew of leading rappers who had MC'd together and had an identity and a following, Sylvia ended up signing three guys on the fringes of the scene—if that—who had never performed together up until the day they went into the studio the first time. One was Wonder Mike, a friend of Sylvia's son, who theretofore had been employed in a pizza joint, where he practiced his rhymes on customers. Another was Master Gee, signed by Sugar Hill Records after he arranged for an audition. The third, Big Bank Hank, was allegedly discovered when Sylvia heard him rapping in the kitchen of a nightclub where he worked as a bouncer.

Now that the crew had been built to order, the real producing challenge was deciding what the track would be and how the instrumentation would be laid down without a DJ. Here history gets kind of murky, but as best as I can put it together, it seems that the resourcefulness of another woman, Debbie Harry—lead singer of the band Blondie and a key figure in tanning for a few reasons—played an unwitting role in the selection process.

It was Harry, a sex symbol and seventies sensation, American but aligned with British punk rock and new wave, who helped connect the megahit-making writer/producer Nile Rodgers of the band Chic to the house party rap scene then moving into clubs and dance halls. Pulling the strings for that connection as well was none other than Fab Five Freddy, who had been talking to Debbie and her boyfriend/musical collaborator Chris Stein about pulling off a huge concert that would feature up-and-coming MCs along with Blondie, Chic, and the Clash. Though the big concert never took place, they were able to get Nile Rodgers out to a rap show. And when he took to the stage and began to play Chic's latest summer hit, “Good Times,” all of a sudden Fab and some of the top rappers in the audience leapt onto the stage, grabbed mics, and began freestyling away.

Whether or not anyone from Sugar Hill Records was in the audience, no one knows. But what is known is that from then on, at shows around town, a mainstay of the entertainment was often somebody getting up to rap to “Good Times.” When that was chosen as the basis for Sugar Hill's first rap record, it showed how well the label was paying attention. When some of those freestyle lyrics that got passed from party to party ended up on the record, it was hard for anyone who may have come up with the original lines to claim credit because they weren't copyrighted or published.

After “Rapper's Delight” came out, however, there was no debate about the fact that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were owed songwriting credit for the recognizable bass line that had been borrowed, innocently or not, from “Good Times” and they had no problem getting it. To this day, no one can believe that the bass player hired for the session—before recording techniques for sampling were around—was able to keep the same line going perfectly for the entire fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Everyone assumed that they were playing the actual record and extending the break.