Can't Stop Won't Stop (38 page)

Harold McGregor wasn't much of a party-goer. His Jamaican parents were strivers who had moved to Costa Rica, then Brooklyn, and finally to Freeport. He had grown up a devout Seventh-Day Adventist and gone to a boarding school in upper Pennsylvania. At Adelphi, he came upon his future by accident. On the first day in an animation class, he sat next to a guy who was doodling. Struck dumb, he leaned over to tell Chuck he was a big fan of his work. (“I still am,” he chuckles.) They teamed up to do an animated video set to Malcolm McLaren's “She's Looking Like a Hobo.” In a few years, McGregor would be calling himself Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin.

Bill Stephney came to Adelphi on an Urban League–sponsored communications scholarship that he had won by writing an essay on why more Blacks were needed in the media industry. Stephney had gone to Spectrum City parties as a youngster and now had a Monday night hip-hop show at the campus radio station, WBAU. The small Garden City liberal arts college was a predominantly white commuter campus. Most of the 10 percent of the student body that was African-American came from outside the area. So when Stephney spotted Chuck D sporting his Spectrum City jacket in the school cafeteria, he couldn't believe it. Stephney soon asked Chuck and Hank to join his radio show.

Stephney's scholarship had included a coveted internship at the trend-setting rock station, WLIR-FM. Armed with a wealth of radio tricks from WLIR and the famous Spectrum City crew, he began transforming a 300-watt station into a contender for rap-hungry ears on Strong Island. He became program director in 1982, and gave Chuck and Hank a Saturday night rap show, the “Super Spectrum Mix Hour.” Harry was a frequent visitor.

It was the beginning of a long, some say fated, friendship. They did not fit in with the Black fraternity and sorority scene, full of bougie wannabes who looked down their noses on hip-hop. They mixed more easily with the white, mullet-haired Long Island freaks that hung around the radio station.

“We were the rebels,” says Stephney, “and hip-hop was everything to us. Everything, all culture, all western civilization flowed through Bam, Herc, and Flash. We weren't trying to hear anything.”

Many people remember their old homies by the adventures they shared. Chuck, Bill, Hank, and Harry talk about the intense debates they had. Every
topic—the aesthetics of Schoolly D, the comparative emotional qualities of various basslines, the taste of White Castle cheeseburgers, the Mets and the Yankees and Jets and the Giants and the Knicks, Vanessa Williams's Miss America fiasco, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign—was up for grabs.

To Allen, hanging with the crew was an advanced rap seminar. To Stephney, it was a salon reminiscent of the Harlem Renaissance. To the authorities, it was something else. One late night after a gig as they partied and argued in the parking lot of a White Castle, a police helicopter and a fleet of Nassau County cop cars swooped down and surrounded them. There were reports that a riot was going on.

Rap crews popped up all over the area, and many found their way into the WBAU-Spectrum City nexus. Stephney added Adelphi classmate Andre “Dr. Dre” Brown and his man, T-Money, who had a crew called Original Concept, to the BAU roster. Dre later took over Stephney's show and his program director duties, and gave a show to a bizarre, classical piano-playing, jheri-curled, all-black-wearing character from Freeport named William “Rico” Drayton who called himself the MC DJ Flavor.

A friend from Roosevelt, Richard Griffin, director of a martial arts school and a Nation of Islam devotee, came in to handle Spectrum City's security with a team he called Unity Force. Chuck's 98 Posse, a group of hard-rocks and hustlers from around the way, rolled to the parties in their tricked-out Oldsmobiles. The two crews—one representing form and discipline, the other street wildness—had that Zulu/Gestapo dynamic going on. They didn't always get along, but they came together under Spectrum City.

Chuck and Hank's radio drops topped WBAU's request lists. Run DMC came down from Hollis to do their first New York radio interview and left huge fans of the Spectrum City crew. Tapes of the shows spread into New York City, and they compared favorably with Mr. Magic's Rap Attack on WBLS, Eddie Cheeba's WFUV show and the World Famous Supreme Team's show on WHBI. The Spectrum City empire expanded to TV when Bill hooked up a UHF show. Hank, placing a bet on the future, rented out a space on 510 South Franklin Street in Hempstead and set up a recording studio.

They had the crew, they had the skills, they certainly had the desire. But could
a hip-hop crew break out from Long Island? There was no road map. Then the rap-loving rebels found a mentor in a young African-American studies professor and jazz drummer named Andrei Strobert.

Born in 1950, Strobert grew up in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant and become a drumming prodigy. By the time he was in his teens, Strobert was supporting himself with music gigs through Mayor Lindsay-funded youth programs like the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, “Har-You” for short, where he recorded his first record with fourteen other teens, the great Latin jazz album,
Har-You Percussion Group
. At eighteen, he left to tour North America. He later played with jazz mavericks Makanda Ken McIntyre and South African exile Abdullah “Dollar Brand” Ibrahim, and finally devoted himself to teaching.

The Black Arts movement had creatively and literally fed Strobert. But after the riot season of 1968, the network that sustained him began to dry up. Radio marginalized jazz. Clubs and theaters closed. Many school music programs and nonprofit youth organizations ended when government money dried up. Strobert recognized that hip-hop had come out of a traumatic break between generations, and he was now in a position to take the rap rebels back to their roots.

For two semesters, Strobert offered a class called “Black Music and Musicians.” African music, he taught, was the source. It had come first; it was
first
world music, not
third
world music. Unlike many of his age, Strobert was respectful of rap music. Fats Waller, he told them, was a rapper. Louis Armstrong was a rapper. The only thing different with your rap, he told them, was that it went over a different rhythm. But even the beat wasn't new; it came from Ibo rhythms, through the pulse of the New Orleans second-line. Recognize the source, he said, return to the source. Bill, Harry, Andre, and Chuck—usually back-of-the-class kind of guys—were in the front row for all of Strobert's lectures.

After class, they peppered him with questions. Strobert gave them impromptu seminars. Control your image by developing your theme, he said. All the great artists—Mahalia Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, James Brown—had a theme, and when the theme was over, they moved to a new one. Tell a story, he said. A rap means nothing if it tells no story. The students worried that critics were calling rap a passing fad and record companies might lose interest. Strobert laughed sagely.
“Don't believe the hype,” he told them. Strobert now says, “I did
not
think they were really listening to me. I really didn't.”

Understanding how they fit into the historical continuum gave Chuck, Harry, and Bill confidence, and reinforced their impatience with the state of hip-hop. Crack had ushered in an era of conspicuous wealth and raw violence, and even the slang reflected the change. It was all about getting ill, cold getting dumb. Chuck complained, “It's like being content with being stupid.”
¹¹

When the media excoriated Run DMC for the gang violence at the 1986 Long Beach concert, Chuck got really angry. “Shit, if they ever come to me with that bullshit,” he said, “I'll have some shit to say that they won't want to fuck with. I'll give them the exact reasons that bullshit like that happens.”
¹²

The times indeed called for someone new to flip “It's Like That” and “Proud to Be Black” the way those records had flipped “The Message” and “Planet Rock.” But even more, the times required a harder kind of intellect.

Bill Stephney challenged Chuck, “Why don't you be the one?” Chuck wasn't so sure. But then he was writing as if he already had the freedom to say what folks couldn't: “I'm a MC protector, US defector, South African government wrecker. Panther power—you can feel it in my arm. Look out y'all, cause I'm a timebomb tickin'!”

The tempos were slowing down, the style changing. Run DMC's “It's Like That” and “Sucker MCs” shifted the game again—harder beats with harder rhymes that gave no quarter to anyone not already down. Hollis, Queens, was in the house, and the Spectrum City crew hoped Long Island could be next.

Chuck and Hank had always wanted to make a record. When the World's Famous Supreme Team broke out of WHBI in 1982, they began thinking it was possible. Two years later, Chuck and Hank landed a single deal with the dance indie, Vanguard. Harry Allen says he was convinced that “as soon as the rest of the world heard this music, we were just gonna take over.”

The Spectrum City single duplicated the split of “It's Like That”/”Sucker MCs.” On the A-side, “Lies.” Chuck and fellow Spectrum City rapper Butch Cassidy went topical. Opening with the notes of “Hail to the Chief,” the song seemed to promise a vivid deconstruction of Reagan. Instead it was a generic
dis record, delivered over a beat derived from Arthur Baker, James Brown, and Larry Smith. Chuck's voice thundered like Melle Mel's second coming, but lyrically this was no “Message.”

Instead, the B-side won. “Check Out the Radio” was based on one of Chuck's famous radio drops. Hank and his brother Keith assembled a beat based on a b-boy perennial, Juicy's “Catch a Groove,” and took a risk by pitching it down. If the trend was to decrease the tempo and pump up the bass, the Shocklees wanted it slower and lower. In a year, as if tipping their baseball caps to them, Def Jam would drop two more B-side trunk crushers—Original Concept's “Pump That Bass/Live (Get a Little Stupid . . . HO!)” and the Beastie Boys' “Slow and Low.”

The track hinted at Chuck's talent for deep signifying. He introduced Hank Boxley as Hank Shocklee, a very smart dis of the early-twentieth-century physicist and eugenicist William Shockley. But the crew still had not harnessed its strengths—Chuck's wordplay and presence, Hank and Keith's experimentalist drive, the crew's restless, race-conscious, collective intelligence. In December of that year, they found the prototype in a buzzsaw radio drop set to a loop of the intro to The JB's “Blow Your Head” and called, after James Brown's anti-heroin lament, “Public Enemy #1.” But by then the single had stiffed. Chastened by the experience, the crew retreated to lick their wounds.

So now in the break room in the bowels of a dying department store in the middle of Still Nowhere, Hip-Hop America, Hank and Harry talked Schoolly D's “P.S.K.”—repping Philly—with a mix of awe, envy and discouragement. “I think there was a lot of disappointment,” says Harry. “It was like, we could be doing this the rest of our lives—working at TSS, handing out our fliers, having people come to our club, nothing really happening. And it would all just be a minor footnote somewhere.”

Chuck graduated and helped land Flavor a job delivering furniture for his father's business. Then he moved on to work as a messenger for a photo company, scribbling raps on notepads on long drives into the city, letting WLIB's mix of Black-talk radio and booming beats fire his imagination.

The bills at their Spectrum City office in Hempstead were piling up. Their club and party audiences were maturing and moving on. The “Super Spectrum Mix Hour” was coming to an end.

In 1985, Original Concept signed to Def Jam. The label president Rick Rubin was calling Chuck's house to see if he would agree to be their rapper. “Mom!” Chuck would yell from his room, “Tell him I'm not home. Tell him I don't wanna make no stupid goddamn records!”
¹³
Once bitten, twice shy was the way he and Hank felt about record labels. They had already built a local empire by themselves. What next? At the end of long wearying days, they talked about starting their own indie record label.

Bill Stephney graduated and began working in the radio world, establishing a reputation in the record industry. Harry left for Brooklyn to finish his degree. Both of them were surrounded by the music, which seemed to be undergoing tectonic stylistic shifts every few weeks. The city seemed charged with importance—so many ideas, so much ferment. People were talking about things that mattered. Change was in the air. Something had to happen.

At Def Jam and Rush Artists Management, Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin's crew had big dreams.

Bill Adler was one of Russell's first hires. When he signed on to work at Rush Management and Def Jam in 1984 at thirty-two years of age, he was older than everyone on the tiny staff, twice as old as LL Cool J. A third-generation Jewish American from the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Adler had arrived at the University of Michigan in the feverish fall of 1969 and met a local hero, a self-described “cultural radical” named John Sinclair.

Sinclair was part of a generation of post–World War II whites, including Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan, who wanted to root themselves in what they thought was the special authenticity of African-American culture. To Sinclair, Black musicians like James Brown, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra offered a model of liberation for young whites. After Black Panther cofounder Bobby Seale told Sinclair whites could not do anything for Black people but to fix their square parents, he was inspired to form the White Panthers and draft their ten-point program. The first point was a full endorsement of the Black Panthers' program. The second read, “Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock ‘n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets.” For Adler, who had spent his teen nights under the covers listening to blues, Motown, and “freedom
jazz” on local radio, joining Sinclair's funkdafied guitar army of white radicals made perfect sense.