Can't Stop Won't Stop (21 page)

DJ Kay Slay (far right), then famous as the graf writer DEZ, with his crew in front
of an abandoned public school in East Harlem, 1982.
© Henry Chalfant

 

 

We had this as kind of a refuge. Otherwise you would not have pride about anything.

—DOZE

In the journey from the seven-mile world to Planet Rock, nothing was ever guaranteed.

B-boying might have gone back to the living rooms, a dance to be taken out like a fading picture album late on a Saturday night after a couple of forties. Rapping and scratching might have remained a Bronx novelty, a curious musicological artifact. Graffiti crews might have been crushed like the gangs, its chief practitioners systematically rounded up and herded into prison. The flamboyant kids of the postgang generation might have grown up and moved on or disappeared or died, another five-plus years in the street life of a small part of New York come and gone in a flicker of the city's eye.

Certainly that's how the future seemed in the Bronx in 1979. But by the beginning of the new decade, brought out by commercial interests, pressed down by the state, and saved by traditionalists, the Bronx-born culture jumped its borders forever.

On the one hand, rap was becoming known outside the seven-mile cipher. Live bootleg cassette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash and Furious 5, the L Brothers, the Cold Crush Brothers and others were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folks across the city. The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long
Island's Black Belt. Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx once possessed all to itself.

But in the Bronx, hip-hop was a fad that was passing. “I called it the Great Hip-Hop Drought,” says Jazzy Jay. “Everybody started fleeing away from hiphop.”

The kids raised on Herc and Bam and Flash and Lovebug Starski and DJ AJ had graduated from high school and were looking for the next thing. “People started growing up and calling that ‘kiddie music,' ” says Jay. “You ain't gonna go into no high school gymnasium to party no more.”

He would peek over the balcony at the gym-sized T-Connection, and be shocked to find only forty people dancing in the whole room. He longed for the old days of battling at the Webster Avenue P.A.L. “It was a terrible time,” Jay says. “I done got all my techniques down pat, I done got my belts, I done whipped Flash's ass, I done whipped Theodore's ass, I'm looking for whose ass can I whip next! I'm like, you mean I done went through all of these stepping stones just to
not
be the man? Hip-hop is gonna die like this?”

The audiences had moved on from Bronx sound-system battles and outdoor jams to the drinking-age uptown nightclubs, depriving b-boys and DJs of their competitive setting. At the same time, disco nightclub DJs in Harlem were finding success by adapting the Bronx rap styles and mixing techniques into their gigs, offering a more sophisticated version of the Bronx beat for a maturing crowd.

“I was wondering where my core audience was going,” says Grandmaster Flash. “They were going to see people like DJ Hollywood, who would get a party going from twenty-three and older. When they moved on, they wanted to wear a dress or they wanted to wear a suit. They were just getting older and their taste changed in music.”

He continues, “When I went to go see DJ Hollywood, I would say, ‘Oh Regina, what are you doing here? I haven't seen you in a long time!' ‘Yeah this is where I come now.' And there was this guy who was saying these incredible rhymes on the mic, he was about three, four hundred pounds and he had the crowd in an uproar the same way my Furious Five would have them. DJ Hollywood was quite incredible, he had the people singing his rhymes. So a lot of our audience was going to parties like that now, Eddie Cheeba parties, Hollywood parties, Pete “DJ” Jones parties. The bottom sort of dropped out. It was either you survive and you go with the changes or you get left back.”

The DJs themselves wanted more. It was no longer about rocking the block party and establishing a rep. They wanted to make a living. But the economics of the music had changed. “If Friday was the 25th, you would see DJ Hollywood in five places on five different flyers. How was this possible? How could he be in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens all in one night?” Flash says he asked himself. “Only to discover that he didn't carry a sound system. All he did was carry his records. He had a crew and a car. And he would do an hour here, get in the car, do an hour there an hour there and an hour there. After a while, people that had the huge sound systems became a dinosaur. Because now you could go and do five parties. And if you had a little record out, you could
really
make some money.”

Flash learned this last point the hard way. By 1979, independent Black record producers like Harlem's Bobby Robinson and Paul Winley, and Englewood, New Jersey's Sylvia Robinson (no relation to Bobby) had all heard about the rap phenomenon and were scouring the clubs in the Bronx and Harlem and doing their math, trying to figure out if rap could be financially viable. Flash and the Furious Five were at the top of everyone's signing wish-list.

But Flash refused to meet with any record-label heads. To him, the idea was absurd. Who would want to buy a record of Bronx kids rapping over a record? He and the Furious Five were still a big draw in the clubs, and making a record wasn't guaranteed money in the bank, like getting onstage.

“I kinda kicked these guys to the side. I kinda like had my security keep them people away from me. I didn't want to talk deals. As bad as they wanted to talk to me, no is no. That was that,” he says. As long as he had gigs to do all week, that was a sure bet, and he was content to play that game.

Then in October of 1979, the game changed.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that a no-name group using partly stolen rhymes—the very definition of a crew with
no
style—would have been the first to tap hip-hop's platinum potential. When three anonymous rappers stepped into Black indie label owner Sylvia Robinson's studios to cut “Rapper's Delight,” they had no local expectations to fulfill, no street reputations to keep, no regular audience to please, and absolutely no consequences if they failed.

Sylvia Robinson and her son, Joey, had been trying to sign a rap group but
had been met with skepticism from Bronx luminaries like Flash and Lovebug Starski. Undoubtedly, the appearance of “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” on a B-side of a single by Brooklyn funkateers the Fatback Band in the summer of 1979 raised the pressure on the Robinsons to make a deal.

Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson was a Herc follower and a Bronx nightclub bouncer who somehow became a manager for Grandmaster Caz and the rappers who became the Cold Crush Brothers. He was making pizzas in New Jersey to pay for Caz's sound system, and rapping along to a Caz tape one afternoon at the parlor, when Joey Robinson heard him and asked him to come to Jersey for an audition. On the way back, two other rhymers jumped into Joey's car, Guy “Master Gee” O'Brien and Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, and the three auditioned that evening. Sylvia Robinson immediately signed them to be the first group on her new imprint, Sugar Hill Records. Nobody knew who they were. They were the perfect people to vault hip-hop into the realm of pop.

“ ‘Rapper's Delight' was astonishing to me,” says Bill Adler, then a music critic for the
Boston Herald
who would later become Def Jam's publicist, “not because the artists were rapping and not singing. What was remarkable about it was that it was fifteen minutes long. Boston had one Black music radio station and it was an AM station called WILD. Whenever they played “Rapper's Delight”—which was all the time—they played the entire fifteen-minute version, which was unheard of.”

But at the far edge of the rap universe in the Black neighborhoods of Long Island, Chuck D, then a nineteen-year-old MC, remembers the impact of “Rapper's Delight”differently. “I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such thing as a hip-hop record,” he says. “I could not see it.” The famous DJ Eddie Cheeba had been out to Long Island and broken “Good Times” to Black audiences in May, promising as he played it that his own rap record would be out soon. “I'm like, record? Fuck, how you gon' put hip-hop onto a record? ‘Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon' put
three hours
on a record?” Chuck says. “Bam! They made ‘Rapper's Delight.' And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I'm thinking, ‘Man, they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?' It was a miracle.”

Chuck first heard “Rapper's Delight” while he was on the mic. “Good Times” had been the record of the summer of ‘79, replacing MFSB's “Love Is the Message”
as the beat that sent the dancers running to the floor and the MCs running to the microphone. One night in October, Chuck was rocking his Cheeba-styled party rhymes over “Good Times.” “All of a sudden, the DJ I'm hearing he's cutting in this shit behind me. Right? And I'm rhyming over words,” he laughs. “The crowd don't know. They're just thinking that I'm rhyming and I'm changing my voice or whatever. I held the mic in my hand, I heard words and I lip-synched that motherfucker. Folks thought that shit was me. I was a bad motherfucker after that, believe! The next day, Frankie Crocker broke that shit on BLS. By the next party, folks were looking at me like, ‘Pshhhh. You a bad motherfucker, but you ain't that nice!' ”

Three unknowns beating superstar Eddie Cheeba at his boast. A rap on a record trumping a live rap. In fifteen minutes, clearly, the whole world had changed.

“Rapper's Delight” crossed over from New York's insular hip-hop scene to Black radio, then charged up the American Top 40, and swept around the globe. Imitations popped up from Brazil to Jamaica. It became the best-selling twelve-inch single ever pressed. At one point, 75,000 copies were selling a week and the indie upstart from across the Hudson was straining to keep up with the demand. Tom Silverman, a DJ and journalist covering the dance music scene, had never seen anything like it. “I was there in Brooklyn on Fulton Street when they brought ‘Rapper's Delight' in stores, in ‘79 right around Christmas-time,” he recalls. “Ten boxes came out of the truck, they went onto the floor and they opened the cardboard boxes and literally handed two copies to everybody in the store who went right to the cash register. They must've moved two million records in a month on twelve-inch vinyl just in New York. I said, ‘I gotta be in this business, this is great!' ”

The disco era had peaked. Major labels were at their creative and financial end. The biggest song on the charts was a collaboration between Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand that was as pricey as it was hokey, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” By contrast, “Rapper's Delight” sounded fresh from its very first words—”I said uh hip-hop . . .” To the Bronx heads, the whole thing was a sham.

But the breakthrough may not have happened any other way. When the top Bronx acts made their recording debuts after “Rapper's Delight,” they usually
tried, and often failed, to be true to the experience of their shows. These live performances thrived on quick-witted improvisation and call-and-response audience participation. When they worked up routines, they gave their DJ and the neighborhood their props first and foremost. After all, they were onstage at the discretion of the DJ, the king of the party, and at the mercy of the audience, his subjects.

The rap amateurs of the Sugar Hill Gang never had a DJ. Assembled in a New Jersey afternoon, they were a studio creation that never stepped on a stage until after their single became a radio hit. They wrote with the ears of fans, and the enthusiasm of dilettantes. Their raps on “Rapper's Delight” were the stuff that sounded good not in the parties, but on the live bootleg cassettes playing in the OJ Cabs and on the boomboxes—the funny stories, the hookish slang, the same kind of stuff that would strike listeners around the world as both universal and new, not local and insular. “Rapper's Delight” was tailor-made to travel, to be perfectly accessible to folks who had never heard of rap or hip-hop or The Bronx.

The inexplicable success of the Sugar Hill Gang transformed the scene overnight. Artists and labels scrambled to cash in. The Funky Four + 1 More and the Treacherous Three signed on to do singles for Bobby Robinson's Enjoy Records. The Sequence signed with Sylvia Robinson. Afrika Bambaataa agreed to record for Paul Winley. Two Bronx-based reggae labels, Wackies and Joe Gibbs Music, put out rap singles. Kurtis Blow, managed by a young Queens native named Russell Simmons, became the first major-label rap artist when he signed to Mercury for the platinum-selling “Christmas Rappin' ” and “The Breaks.” And even Flash finally relented when he and the Furious Five struck a deal with Bobby Robinson, “Superappin' ” was released a month after “Rapper's Delight.” In Flash's mind, having a record out might increase their bookings.

Ironically, the Sugar Hill Gang helped revive the dying Bronx club scene. But club-going turned into a more passive experience than ever. The b-boys disappeared and, Charlie Ahearn says, “Nobody was dancing. Period! Rap became the focal point. MCs were onstage and people were looking at them.” DJs were no longer at the center of the music. The new indie rap industry—with its fear of music publishers—had no place for them, other than to advise the house-bands on how to emulate the spirit of their turntable routines. “This is 1980,” Ahearn says. “In other words, hip-hop is dead by 1980. It's true.”

If “Rapper's Delight” turned hip-hop into popular music, “Superappin' ”
shows how pop began to destroy what hip-hop was. The song begins with haunting silences. In unison, the Furious Five raps, “And it won't be long ‘til everyone is knowing that Flash is on the beatbox going, that Flash is on the beatbox going . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . sha na na!”
¹
In the original routine, the Furious Five would pause and point to Grandmaster Flash as he banged out frenetic fills on his electronic drum-machine. But on the record, Flash is MIA. The Five shout out Flash as “the king of the Quickmix,” but he never gets to demonstrate why. Instead the house band interpolates one of Flash's favorite platters, the Whole Darn Family's “Five Minutes of Funk,” while Flash paces the studio like a coach. For the length of “Superappin',” the tension between what rap was—a live performance medium dominated by the DJ—and what it would become—a recorded medium dominated by the rappers—is suspended. When the Five shout, “Can't won't don't stop rockin' to the rhythm, ‘cause I get down when Flash is on the beatbox,” history seems to be held in place.