Lyrics
Pick up to six lines to make a card.
"The schools in a portion of Boston stretching from just south of South Boston through Roxbury and into Dorchester are districted with a similar effect: the predominantly black areas are cut away from the predominantly white areas."
Morgan v. Hennigan, U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, 1974
THE SEEK BUTTON on the Ford's radio is working. The downtown recedes. Miles of neighborhoods fill the windshield. The SEEK function locks on someplace in stereo, college FM probably. "Yeah," a new friend says, "Whas up. Whas goin on." The radio has another button, VOL, which gets jacked repeatedly while the Ford hurtles, happily, to the source of the noise. Not to the station's broadcast booth on
The black areas are cut away from the white areas a federal judge ruled in '74, and evidence is everywhere that nothing's changed since then. On the southbound left of the Fitzgerald Expressway pass 20 blocks of grim Irish-Catholic housing projects, the western border of Belfast, complete with Sinn Fein graffiti and murals depicting a glorious United Ireland, a neighborhood where the gadfly will g
Uniting the two sides of the Expressway is just about nothing. Both neighborhoods are tough and poor. Both hate the college world across the river, which, because of Boston's rotten public schools, they will never see as freshmen. And kids from both neighborhoods can do this hating to the beat of undergraduate radio, which this fine morning features suburban kids with student debt broadcasting the
Not that the shared digging of black street music is news, or even new: twenty years ago, when Morgan v. Hennigan, Boston's own Brown v. Board of Education, was inching through the courts, and even dark-complected Italians were sometimes unwelcome in the Irish precincts east of the Expressway, kids in Boston's Little Belfast sang along with James Brown over the radio.
"Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud
Say it loud
I'm black and I'm proud!"
Except that halfway through the infectious funk, the crewcuts realize what they're saying: Jesus christ, "I'm proud to be black" fer chrissakes, like when you're in the porno store, you know, and you get lost or something and you find yourself in the men's part, you know? not the part for men in the part that's about men, Jesus, and you get the hell outta there. And so they hum/mumble the suppress
"Say it loud
I'm mmm hum proud
Say it loud
Mum hum hum proud!"
But rap isn't funk, rock or jazz, and the vast crossover move, broadcasting "ghetto" music over college radios to ghettos of a different color, is no simple reenactment of past crossovers. How, for example, does the sing-along fan of Smoke Some Kill mumble his way through these lines:
"Black is beautiful
Brown is sick? slick? stiff?
Yellow's OK
But white ain't shit."
Rjam Productions, modestly headquartered in a mixed black/Hispanic Field, Corner section of North Dorchester, is as follows:
* One (1) four-car garage fitted with dubbing and remastering gear worth more than most of the rest of the real estate on the block;
* One (1) touch-tone telephone (leased);
* Two (2) Chevy Blazers, vanity-plated RJAM1 and RJAM2, each equipped with cellular phones and slick tape decks (also leased);
* One (1) VCR with Kathleen Turner's Body Heat cued up on the morning in question;
* Most importantly, eight (8) promising acts under binding contract
If, as has happened to many local labels, Rjam were liquidated to satisfy creditors, these would be the pieces. But there are stores of value in the converted garage beyond the reach of the auctioneer's gavel. Schoolly D, the original Signifying Rapper, looms irresistibly from the pages of rap "fanzines" Hip-Hop and The Source; and Rjam's prime, unauctionable asset is the consuming ambition of the
Or so claims Tam-Tam's producer, promoter, and dutch uncle, Gary Smith, who opened RJam on Martin Luther King's birthday, '89, with his older brother Nate. Nate, the elder statesman, is 25. Gary, 22, runs the company while Nate travels with his boyhood-friend-turned-boss, quadruple-platinum, Prince-derived rapper/singer, Bobby Brown. RJam was founded in part with an investment from the 23-year-old
Nate and Gary Smith turn a healthy profit making demos at $500/tape, but the brothers aren't in the health business. Their aim: to follow in the corporate footsteps of Def Jam, a once similarly tiny production company run from a basement in Hollis, Queens, which since its basement days, has given America Public Enemy, L. L. Cool J., the Beastie Boys, and much of the rest of that culture-quake call
Twenty minutes farther south on the Fitzgerald Expressway, across the Neponset River and into the pricey suburbs, is the scene of John Cheever's boyhood, more recently celebrated as Massachusetts Miracle country, where technology ventures are started at the rate of five per week, four of which will fail within 12 months. RJam's Gary Smith is secret brother to the men of the suburban Chambers of Co
Waiting less than patiently for Tam-Tam, Gary honks twice. A tall, grave girl with an angel's heart-shaped face crosses the ghetto street and climbs into the back seat of RJAM1. She has, apparently, at least two voices, the cynical, sexy rant heard on tape this morning telling Pebbles men ain't worth it, and the whisper in which she now says hello.
As RJAM1 re-crosses North Dorchester, heading back to the soundproof studios to get the day's work started, Gary and DJ Reese hash out production details. Tam-Tam's a dignified island in the back seat, and a shiver accompanies the thought that this could be the Motor City in '63 with Berry Gordy and an eighty-pound teenage Diana Ross, just voted Best Dressed at Cass Technical High School, driving
Ask Tam-Tam about Diana Ross, and she gives a beatific smile. She's 16; she can remember only with difficulty the first rap she ever listened to, when rap was new and she was 8; Run-DMC or somebody, she mumbles in response to what suddenly seems a foolish question about her influences. Like most of rap's black audience (as distinct from rap's white audience, which is usually a decade older), Tam-T
Tam-Tam has star presence, and like many who do, she seems to see very little of what goes on around her, the price of the star's intense focus on self. She reminds you of Senator Gary Hart. He, too, had star presence. In front of a crowd, Hart was riveting; in the elevator riding up to the auditorium, he was barely there. Being barely there in the neighborhood Tam-Tam calls home is probably not s
Back in Rjam's control booth, Dj Reese and producer Ralph Stacey are programming the rhythm track for what will be "Ho, You're Guilty." Drum parts are taken from a Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer, a synth which electronically reproduces programmed beats on the user's choice of drum-matrix. The TR-909's keys, on a console designed to resemble, vaguely, the familiar piano, are named after the sound ea
Each percussion line is programmed onto the mixing board as a separate track: a snare track, a bass track, a clap track, etc. Reese has been studying the classics lately, too, viz: James Brown's Dead on the Heavy Funk from '75ish, including the ageless groove, "Funky President," in which James announces his third-party candidacy. Some of Bobby Byrd's Dead guitar, and a holy moment when James exhal
As Reese and Ralph Stacey mix the 24 tracks onto one master tape, Tam-Tam sips lemonade in the corner of the booth. You ask her if she is interested someday in learning about the obscure digital technology the two men manipulate on her behalf. She doesn't seem to register the question. "The other career besides rap I'd like to pursue is modelling," she says. "I'm five-seven. That's the perfect hei
Mixing takes the rest of the day. Producer Ralph Stacey at one late point corners you with a flinty stare and an uncomfortable question: "Why do you want to write about rap, anyway?" It is lucky that at that minute Reese is done mixing. Tomorrow the RJam staff will tape Tam-Tam's vocal track and lay this over Reese's rhythm track. Then the sound will be "fattened" with stacks of horns, guitar hook
Everyone's ready to call it a day. Gary Smith's already huddled with some new wanna-be stars in RJam's reception area. Reese plays the mixed rhythm track once through over the big speakers in the control booth, and Tam-Tam immediately stands, modelling forgotten, utterly alert. Reese gestures to her with maestro hands. She raps at an absent Antoinette in the hard, sexy voice you haven't heard sinc
"I'm a female
You're just a fairytale."
The small-w we here are two white Boston males: one native, one oft-transplanted; both residing in Somerbridge, a dim, ethnic-Portuguese neighborhood whose gentrification we abet. M. is an attorney with a taste for jazz, Blues, funk; D. a grad student and would-be drifter who watches TV instead of sleeping. Our cultural tastes and interests are day and night. They converged only lately, when D's s
We concurred as to the wheres and whens of rap's begetting--mid-to-late 70s' South Bronx house parties; then, by decade's end, block parties, with municipal electric lights tapped for a power source, literal dancing in the streets; by '82, regular rap-houses and then "floating clubs"--the Roxy every Sunday, The Bronx's Disco Fever TWTh--everybody Breaking to a new musical antimusic being fashioned
Our point of departure, essay-wise, was always less what we know than what we felt, listening: less what we liked than why. For this attempt at an outside sampler we plunked down and listened to thousands of hours of rap, trying to summon a kind of objective, critical, purely "aesthetic" passion that the music itself made impossible. For outsiders, rap's easy to move to, hard to dissect. The more
Other incongruities. Rap is a "music" essentially without melody, built instead around a digitally synthesized drum- and back-beat often about as complex as five idle fingers on a waiting-room table, enhanced by "sampled" (pirated) "krush grooves" (licks or repetitive chord-series) conceived and recorded by pre-rap rock icons, the whole affair characterized by a distinctive, spare, noisy, clatteri
The rapper (the guy in the cameo cut or Kangol hat, pricey warm-up, unlaced Adidas, extra thick gold chain or oversized medallion) offers lyrics that are spoken or bellowed in straight, stressed, rhymed verse, the verse's syntax and meter often tortured for rhythmic gain or the kind of limboing-for-rhyme we tend to associate with doggerel about men from Nantucket. The lyrics, nearly always self-re
The masks are many, too many for anything really but direct aural inspection: rap personae can change frequently even within single albums, the rapper delivering Hard, violent Black Nationalist communique on one cut, dubbing against Trinidadian steel drums on another, basking in big label eclat on a third, cracking a head and then defly outwitting someone muscled and dumb, cooing to his "bitch" an
The MC's Alice Toklas-esque DJ hovers ever nearby over his buffet of connected turntables and the black Germanness of a whole lot of digital editing & playback equipment. His responsibility is the song behind and around the rap -- the backbeat, krush groove, and the "sound carpet," i.e. a kind of electric aural environment, a chaos behind the rapper's rhymed order, a digitalized blend of snippets,
We have now read every review and essay to do with serious underground hip-hop available in every single on-line periodical ... xcept for one or two underground newsletters (viz. The City Sun, Fresh-Est) circulated in parts of the Bronx demimonde where learning about rap is as hard for white outsiders as scoring fine China White or AKs. From the kind of sedulous bibliomaniacal research to be expec
"What have you left me? what have I got?
Last night in cold blood my young brother got shot
My homey got jacked
My mother's on crack
My sister can't work cause her arms show tracks
Madness, insanity
Live in profanity
Then some punk claim that they understandin' me?
Give me a break--what world do you live in?
Death is my sex--guess my religion."**
What makes this stuff so much more disturbing, more real to outsiders than the Punk Rock even those of us who remember it could never quite take seriously? Maybe even a closed music has to have some kind of detente with received custom: I always found it tough to listen straight-faced to a nihilist lecture from someone with a chartreuse mohawk and an earring in his eyelid who punctuates his delive
Public Enemy and N.W.A., Ice T and Schoolly D discomfit us, our friends, the critics we read and cornered, because the Hard rappers' lyrics are conscientious about being of/for the real lives and attitudes of recognizable, if alien, persons. Here's where it's a level up from mere spectacle: ideology in Hard rap is always informed by incident or named condition. This makes rap not only better than
For outsiders, rap is hard to dissect, easy to move to. The command is: dance, don't understand; participate, don't manipulate. Rap is a fortress protected by the twin moats of talk and technology. The first is that nu style of speak--the "dialect drug," De La Soul calls it--that rappers fashion from jive and disseminate through record stores to all of us. Some in-words, like "fly," meaning "finel
Rap celebrates power, equating strength with style, and style with the "I" in "Individuality." Rappers "dis"--dismiss--the styleless, faceless. To "ill" is to be weak or wrong; to "bite" is to thieve another's dope beat. And only the ill would bite.
Early remastered pop was the first fake music ever, since what the record buyer of '63 experienced as Aural Event on his turntable couldn't happen live. Rock began to become an Illusion of Event which technology made possible; rock became more like the movies, starting down a long road at the end of which was MTV.
Not that this kept Phil Spector up nights. The gurus of the studio had fatter fish to clean, for the new freedom to shape sound had come at a price. With each magnetic jump from live, as tape was made of tapes which were themselves tapes of tapes, the hiss and crackle of interference multiplied. Dual high-bias media with 2 units each of sonic garbage per 10,000 units of Elvis Presley, retaped on s
The solution was a breakthrough called multi-tracking--using recorders that could capture and play back on 2 (as in stereo), 4 (as in '67's then-ear-shattering Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band), 12, 16, and today 24 parallel tracks, eliminating the hiss of transference from one machine to the next. Rhythms, melodies, harmonies could all be captured on separate tracks, allowing the perfor
Digital recording, the science dividing Rjam's Tam-Tam on tape from Tam-Tam as heard "live" is a technology that converts music to codes or "digits." The codes are "read" by a computer, one combining sophisticated sound-to-code translation hardware with a number-crunching COS and a high-response synthesizer, at speeds of 40,000 digits per second and up. The recorded sounds, reduced to numbers, can
Digital recording, part of the 80s sea-change in how pop gets made, divides the responsibility for the final song more or less equally between the performer, the engineer at the mixing board, the producer who coordinates the multi-tracking and mixing process, and the electronic hardware that actually "makes" the music we buy. The latest synthesizers**** produce notes from pure electric current ins
Basically we decided we were into rap because, even media-hype aside, this music had some kind of hard edge to it. Date of composition here is July '89. Think back. This last has been a fiscal year in which Madonna's "back on top," in which covers of classic covers of classic tunes are themselves covered and then climb corporate charts, in which Rod Stewart's out of cryogenics and back on top....
This last year heavy metal's fake-Satanist male models accounted for 1/2 of total U.S. record sales; U2 filmed a $20,000,000 homage to their own self-righteousness and Bono's ever more ill-disguised megalomania. A year when even good old REM finally went corporate-pop with Green, when good old Springsteen trashed his bride, when as modest and nascent a talent as Tracy Chapman earned cymbal-crashin
But so the point is we enjoy it. Plus we've developed some theses about why serious rap is important, both as art-for-own-sake and as a kind of metaphor-with-larynx for a subbed-culture unique in its distillation of the energy and horror of the American present.
Rap is expanding gas-like through the 80s' dry time, growing from house party schtick, gang anthem, a small-label fad with the sort of pop lifespan you measure with eggtimers--then somehow, when we weren't looking, into Scene, movement, On The Air--finally, in the last 24 months, assuming the fecund role of genuine Genre. Exploding into subspecies now faster than you can track. There's now Dub's m
And the rap world's vitality is one of replacement as well as variety, allowing the genre to remain fresh, as band after band is seduced into the "real" music biz. This Scene is hydra-like. Almost the moment a rap artist like Run-DMC or L. L. Cool J "breaks through" into major-market mix appeal, MTV's land of corporate bankability, certain reactions within the urban underground that spawned them c
Nevertheless, back in the underground Scene, the breakthrough band's tight set of original fans tends to hang loyal, to await feverishly "their" crew's spots on the same music TV they love to dis. In short, there are comparatively few of the accusations of selling out that accompanied a similarly oxymoronic coopting phenomenon in late-60s protest rock. Which if you think about it, is passing stran
Our opinion, then, from a distance: not only is a serious rap serious poetry, but, in terms of the size of its audience, its potency in the Great 80s Market, its power to spur and to authorize the artistic endeavor of a discouraged and malschooled young urban culture we've been encouraged sadly to write off,6 it's quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. "Real" (
But is this wildfire of urban rap ambition raging around converted four-car garages like North Dorchester's RJam's in spite of the genre's near-disciplinary prosodic restrictions, or because of them? Can't really tell. Probably doesn't matter. The fact remains that, were "important poetry" presently defined in terms of what makes important art important in a Supply-Side democracy (popularity, effe
... And even just the prospected fantasy of seeing Public Enemy's be-clocked Flavor Fav and like a Jorie Graham or Amy Clampitt sitting down over beer and Celestial Seasonings to hash out the debate over line-breaks in dactylic pentameter, a very serious young homeboy in Italian silk and pentagonal shades serving as interpreter is enough to make us hereby officially lobby for the admission of rhym
Unlike the mostly docile poetry and fiction of the late 80s, though, rap's own quality, the def freshness of the MC's bit, is set up to be judged primarily in the context of what it is against. In case you thought we forgot, rap is first of all a movement in rock music, and thus the time-honored requirement is that the rap Scene set itself very consciously athwart those circumstances and forces wh
Segregation may affect their hearts and minds, Earl Warren warned, as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, both alumni of Boston's old separate-but-awful schools, bear loud witness. Now, 40 years after X disgustedly quit a racist high school and began a career as a kind of be-bop gang-banger, 35 years after Brown v. Board of Education invented integration, 15 years after Morgan v. Hennigan brought Brown
But everything the white rock listener pays to enjoy is black-begotten. If today's Top?40 environment seems bleak or befouled, imagine the present mainstream without its sweetest sourcewaters, without the King-Waters-King Blues trinity, the Brownian soul, the backbeat, cut time, blue notes, funky French curves of sax and brass, the guitar solo, call-and-response, the Cold Medina or Lucky Powder, t
So maybe it's them. Them. Maybe we're approaching an enforced fork in the musical road where the white-run entertainment industry will have to pack up what it's taken and go seek its fortune on the backs of new minorities. Maybe, in serious rap, the extreme new insulation of the black sound is not only intentional but preplanned, part of a neo-Nationalist agenda, the hermetic new Scene's tight cir
You may now be getting some hazy idea of the sorts of really quite scary possibilities with which the rap we like is replete. And, hazier, of how complicated this stuff of sampler-from-outside can be. What's remained passing strange, for use, is the vague threat's appeal. The unease and ambivalence with which the rare white at the window loves rap renders that love no less love. Whence the fear, t
*'Hip-hop' is an older synonym, coined by Rap pioneer, Kool Herc, to describe the heavily danceable Jamaican scatting he introduced between records at the huge South Bronx block parties he and other new-Scene celebrities, like Jazzy Five and former Black Spades leader, Afrika Bambaataa, could turn into late-70s frenzies of Breakdance (both music and dance a self-conscious reaction against the glit
**Except but now hey kids! thanks to AT&T you can now speak directly to Ice T and hear his philosophy of life by phone! 1-900-907-9111. "Chill out with Ice T," the rapper adrape in military hardware and ammunition says on MTV, "I'm just waiting on you to call me," pointing at the camera and then himself lest the audience get at all confused. "Don't forget to ask your parent's permission first" (wh
***"Canon" being another non-jive rap term, meaning the division of a single sequence of sound into two or more repeating sound-sequences, like a vocal round.
**** ... themselves the heirs of a long, 20th-century evolutionary process, from the playe-?piano to the 20s Oncles Martenot and Theremin and Trautonium (crude electronic instruments big in France), to Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete in '48, to the first Electronic Music Synthesizer invented by engineers at RCA in the 50s to the inauguration of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in
***** Note how the ecstatic force's movement extends beyond sound into dance-Chicago-based house-dancing is very different from Coast-based rap-dancing, while both are distinct from the Quaalude sway a De La Soul's lazy complexity invites--and beyond dance into urban haute couture itself. The "cameo" or "fade," that troubling cyberpunk flat-top haircut favored by Carl Lewis and Grace Jones but pop
****** "We've lost a whole generation to their own culture out here," rues an LAPD Assistant Commissioner in a 14 May '89 Boston TV news special on the national Wa-?On gangs, drugs, crime, Others…
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