THE FAT BOYS
The Fat Boys are an American hip hop trio from Brooklyn, New York City, that emerged in the early 1980s. The group was briefly known originally as the Disco 3. (More from Wikipedia)
The Fat Boys were pretty hard to miss in the early days of rap music, not only because of their prodigious weight, but also due to their high-profile cover of “The Twist” that featured Chubby Checker, who had originally recorded the mega-hit “The Twist”. Years before the Yo! MTV Raps program debuted in 1988, the Fat Boys were featured in one of MTV’s earliest commercials.
One of the bandmembers in the Fat Boys, Darren Robinson became known as “the Human Beatbox” (among other aliases) for his ability to mimic the sounds of a drum machine and was one of the pioneers of “beatboxing” that is sometimes called the “fifth element” in hip hop.
I recently picked up their second album, The Fat Boys Are Back (1984), and it sure is a lot of fun. Alex Henderson says of the album for Allmusic: “Because the Fat Boys acted like buffoons, some people dismissed them as a mere novelty act. But for all their clowning, the Fat Boys had impeccable rapping technique – the skills that they bring to ‘Yes, Yes Y’all’, the title song [‘The Fat Boys Are Back’], and other wildly infectious offerings are first rate. Much to their credit, this album is fairly unpredictable; The Fat Boys Are Back finds them rapping to everything from sleek urban contemporary (‘Pump It Up’) to hard rock (‘Rock-N-Roll’) and reggae (‘Hard Core Reggae’). The latter, in fact, is one of the most impressive examples of hip hop/reggae fusion to come from rap’s second generation.”
(September 2016)
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
September 2016 – 1980’s punk/rap band LIGHTNING STRIKE; Story of the Month on Patti Smith; also, Hamilton, School of Rock, MFSB, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Bob Dylan, Run-D.M.C., Aerosmith, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, the Fat Boys, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Kid ’N Play, MC Hammer, Rick James, Vanilla Ice, Blondie / Deborah Harry, Salt-N-Pepa, the Sugarhill Gang, Nile Rodgers / Chic, Ravales.
(Year 7 Review)
