UNDER APPRECIATED ROCK BAND OF THE MONTH FOR SEPTEMBER 2016 – LIGHTNING STRIKE
In this post, I am not providing a comprehensive overview of the founding of rap music and hip hop and its place in American culture; others have done a much better job of this than I ever could. But I will hit some of the high points; and I will discuss some of the “old school” rap albums that I have purchased and enjoy, and also the history that hip hop has in relation to rock music. I am a little out of my depth here, to say the least, but here goes:
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Hit Broadway shows come and go, but there is something special about Hamilton, the current hit musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The show opened on Broadway about a year ago (August 6, 2015) after an acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier in the year, and it remains the hottest ticket in town. Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast album for Hamilton was released the month following the move to Broadway and debuted at #12 on the Billboard Hot 200 Albums chart – remarkably, that is the highest placement for a cast album in more than 50 years. Also, the Tony Awards broadcast this year had its best ratings in 15 years.
Alexander Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and was also the founder of the country’s first political party in the modern sense, the Federalist Party. In honor of his being the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of President George Washington, his portrait has graced the front of the $10 bill since 1929. Before Hamilton became such a hit, that was about to change in the recent drive to put a woman on some of our folding money – word now is that President Andrew Jackson will soon be removed from the $20 bill.
Previously, Alexander Hamilton had become an aide-de-camp of General George Washington and had a key military role in winning the Revolutionary War. Succeeding administrations were from the Democratic-Republican Party, in opposition to the Federalist Party. I think it was on 60 Minutes when I heard that those who sought to downplay Hamilton’s legacy included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe; these men were the second through fifth Presidents.
And then there was the famous duel that Alexander Hamilton lost with Vice-President Aaron Burr. There is no question that his story is long on drama. I did a book report in school once that featured the story of the duel, and frankly, that is about all I had remembered about him from my schoolboy days.
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Fresh from his success with his earlier musical In the Heights (set in the mostly Dominican-American communities in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan), Lin-Manuel Miranda began reading the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Once he saw echoes of his own life there, he started envisioning the idea of Alexander Hamilton’s story as a Broadway musical.
The first any of us knew about it was at the nationally televised White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Instead of performing songs from In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda told the audience: “I’m thrilled the White House called me here tonight because I’m actually working on a hip hop album. It’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted this statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end. On its face, the idea is absurd: The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries. But Miranda has connected the dots: Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age. Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience. And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772. His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, ‘Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons: For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’ The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
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In a post entitled “How Eloquence Made History Class Cool Again” in the blog Rhetoric, Media and the Civic Life, Samantha Biel notes that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance at the White House in 2009 was almost word-for-word from the opening song “Alexander Hamilton” in Hamilton:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore, and a Scotsman,
Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in
The Caribbean by providence impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
. . .
Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned
Our man saw his future drip, dripping down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain
Well, the word got around, they said, this kid is insane, man
Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Get your education, don’t forget from whence you came and
The world is gonna know your name, what’s your name, man?
Alexander Hamilton
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In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the period costumes and the history, but he changed just about everything else. Miranda, who is a Puerto-Rican–American, played the title role of Alexander Hamilton; he also inserted African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans into other major roles in the play so that this story about the founding of the USA would look like our nation does today.
At least as bold as this move was his decision to tell the stories of the Founding Mothers who are usually relegated to set pieces on the gowns that they were wearing. Four of the 14 principal roles listed in the Wikipedia article are women, all tied closely to Alexander Hamilton: Hamilton’s wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton; her sisters Angelica Schuyler Church and Peggy Schuyler Van Rensselaer; and Maria Reynolds, with whom Hamilton had a two-year affair in the 1790’s in one of the nation’s first sex scandals.
From Wikipedia: “Hamilton has received unanimous acclaim from professional critics, being deemed a cultural phenomenon by many.”
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Those unusual names Schuyler and Van Rensselaer are Dutch, by the way; the Dutch heritage of our nation in general and of New York in particular – New York City was originally named New Amsterdam – is, shall we say, under-appreciated today. It was hard for me to miss when we moved to New York in 1990, however, because Gansevoort Street was right around the corner from where we lived in Greenwich Village.
On This Week with George Stephanopoulos one morning a few years ago, the question of the day for the panel was, Which American President was not a native English language speaker? I don’t think anyone got it, but the answer was Martin Van Buren, the nation’s eighth President. That clicked in my mind immediately as soon as I heard the name; as a fellow “Martin”, I had long admired him. He came from upstate New York and, on December 15, 1782, was baptized “Maarten Van Buren”, in the original Dutch spelling. His family spoke Dutch at home, as many did in the isolated communities in that part of the state.
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Although the celebratory mood was muted due to the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando that had just taken place, this year’s Tony Awards ceremony was expected to be a rout for Hamilton; the Off-Broadway production had already racked up 27 awards in 2015 from all quarters. The number of Tony nominations for Hamilton (16) had already set a record.
USA Today reported: “The ultra-popular musical Hamilton had a big night, winning 11 honors including best musical, leading actor for Leslie Odom, Jr., featured actress for Renée Elise Goldsberry, and featured actor for Daveed Diggs. It fell one short of The Producers’ record 12 wins in 2001. . . . It was definitely a historical night for diversity: For the first time in the Tonys’ 70 years, all four musical acting honors were awarded to people of color.”
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Just because a hip hop musical made this big a splash doesn’t mean that rock musicals have gone away. Broadway titan Andrew Lloyd Webber returned to his roots with his current show, School of Rock that opened on Broadway four months after Hamilton, on December 6, 2015. The musical is based on the delightful Jack Black film from 2003, School of Rock that follows a washed-up rock musician who conceives the idea of masquerading as a substitute teacher and pressing a group of fourth graders into backing him at the local Battle of the Bands in order to get his career back on track.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first major show was the audacious Jesus Christ Superstar (1970); this rock opera actually did start out as an album, Jesus Christ Superstar, with Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan in the title role, while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical went straight to the stage.
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The next Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Evita – my personal favorite among the Webber shows – started out as a rock opera album that was released in 1975. In a novel move, the narrator of the story of Eva “Evita” Perón, the wife of Argentine dictator Juan Perón, is famed South American and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara (identified only as “Che” initially). Mandy Patinkin launched his career with his Tony-winning role as Che on Broadway; on the original Evita album and in earlier productions, Che is played by Colm Wilkinson, who later became world famous in originating the role of Jean Valjean in the 1985 West End (London) and Broadway musical Les Misèrables.
While many of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows had pop and rock music flourishes, including his other Biblical musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, his later shows until School of Rock have been more traditional musicals for the most part.
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For me, the first inkling that something new was up in the African-American community was the spontaneous, joyful performances of break dancing that I began seeing by the early 1980’s. Probably the first few times were at the three World’s Fairs that we attended in that time period, or it might have been on TV at first, but that is just a guess; we were traveling to several big cities in that period also. The acrobatic and robotic movements were unlike anything that I had seen before, as were the venues: Usually someone just threw a large piece of cardboard on the sidewalk and started in.
I don’t really remember what the music was like, but they attracted a large crowd pretty much every time I saw people break dancing.
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Musically, according to Wikipedia, a “break” can mean several different things but, relevant to this discussion, generally refers to a dramatic passage in a musical performance “where all elements of a song (e.g., pads, basslines, vocals), except for percussion, disappear for a time. . . . A break may be described as when the song takes a ‘breather, drops down to some exciting percussion, and then comes storming back again’ and comparable to a false ending. Breaks usually occur two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through a song.”
A DJ would be able to repeat a popular break over and over by playing the record on two turntables, backing up during the passage on one record while it is playing on the other. This is easily accomplished using conventional disc-jockey equipment that had been around for decades; every now and then back in the day, I would see a professional DJ at a dance using equipment like this, giving song intros or other patter between numbers.
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In the disco era, 12” singles became the standard; and in many cases, one or more vocal versions of a song, along with instrumental versions would be available on these discs. For especially popular numbers, a DJ could keep the song going by seamlessly playing these different versions over and over again.
One memorable time for me was hearing the 1973 hit song “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” by MFSB Featuring the Three Degrees for at least a half-hour at one North Carolina club. “TSOP” was a new theme song for the popular Soul Train television program and was the first TV theme to sell one million copies. “TSOP” is regarded as one of the foundation songs of the disco sound.
MFSB was basically the house band for the Gamble and Huff production team – it is analogous to the famed group of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew – and was based at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios. To the public, MFSB stood for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother” and was a reference to how MFSB was like a family; the “other” name used among the musicians, however, was Mother-F--kin Sons of Bitches, “referring to musical prowess” according to Wikipedia.
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As the idea of a break was refined (again from Wikipedia), “the term break refers to any segment of music (usually four measures or less) that could be sampled and repeated.” If the same passage were to be used repeatedly, it could be recorded and replayed, freeing the DJ to play other music along with the break.
Another innovation specific to rap music and hip hop was to allow the audience to hear the back-up on a record while the other was being played, a technique that became known as “scratching”. Essentially, a DJ is playing a vinyl turntable as though it were a musical instrument. Thus, the DJ became an integral performer in hip hop music and, not incidentally, replaced the need for backing musicians in many if not most cases.
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As usual though in popular music, it is the vocalist who became the focal point; in rap music, the vocals are not singing, but they are certainly not just talking either. “Rapping” (also known as “MCing”), according to Wikipedia, “is ‘spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics’. The components of rapping include ‘content’, ‘flow’ (rhythm and rhyme), and ‘delivery’. Rapping is distinct from spoken-word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat (external meter).”
The first rap song that I remember liking is “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I first heard it as a video, probably on the USA Network’s Night Flight program and others like it that showcased cutting-edge music videos. The song came out in 1982, and I likely saw it around that time period. (MTV launched on August 1, 1981, but not everyone had it on their cable system right away, leading to the common chant: “I want my MTV!”).
The performance in “The Message” is mostly unadorned, with the music having an under-stated intensity and the vocalist intoning in a manner just short of singing; the scratching initially put me off when I heard most early rap performances, and there was none of that on this song. According to Wikipedia, this was the first prominent hip hop song to have social commentary; “The Message” led directly to the “gangsta rap” era with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. but was enormously influential in its own right. The repeated lines that serve as the chorus – “Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head” and “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from goin’ under” – give an urgency to the description of life in the ghetto that forms most of the lyrics.
From Wikipedia: “‘The Message’ has been reused and re-sampled in so many different ways that it would be easy to reduce its legacy to cliché. Music critic Dan Carins described it in a 2008 edition of The Sunday Times: ‘Where it was inarguably innovative, was in slowing the beat right down, and opening up space in the instrumentation – the music isn’t so much hip hop as noirish, nightmarish slow-funk, stifling and claustrophobic, with electro, dub and disco also jostling for room in the genre mix – and thereby letting the lyrics speak loud and clear.’ Not only does the song utilize an ingenious mix of musical genres to great effect, but it also allows the slow and pulsating beat to take a backseat to the stark and haunting lyrical content.”
Rolling Stone magazine, in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time placed “The Message” at #51, higher than any other song from the 1980’s and also the highest ranked hip hop song. In 2012, Rolling Stone named “The Message” the greatest hip hop song of all time.
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Speaking rather than singing vocals did not originate with rap music, nor did the term “rap” either for that matter. I wasn’t sure anyone else felt the connection, but I did find this in Wikipedia: “By the late 1960s, when Hubert G. Brown changed his name to H. Rap Brown, rap was a slang term referring to an oration or speech, such as was common among the ‘hip’ crowd in the protest movements; but it did not come to be associated with a musical style for another decade.”
Several of Bob Dylan’s early songs were in the “talking blues” form that was pioneered in the 1920’s and popularized by Dylan’s idol Woody Guthrie in the 1940’s. Typically these songs have “Talking” or “Talkin’” somewhere in the title, such as “Talkin’ New York” on his debut album, Bob Dylan; many though were not released on his Columbia albums and often have bizarre titles, such as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”, and “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues”. These talking blues numbers are among Dylan’s funniest songs, albeit often with black humor.
The best known of these talking blues songs can be found on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (1963). The singer is telling his psychiatrist about the dreams he has been having about the aftermath of a nuclear war; Wikipedia quotes one of the verses: “Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell / And I leaned my head and I gave a yell / ‘Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man!’ / A shotgun fired and away I ran / I don’t blame him too much, though . . . he didn’t know me”.
Toward the end of the song, the psychiatrist interrupts him to say: “Hey I’ve been havin’ the same old dreams / But mine was a little different you see / I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me / I didn’t see you around.” The song ends with: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”
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One example of how hip hop vocals differ from conventional vocals can be found in the hit song “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, from 1988. The chorus has a fast tempo with the vocals closely matching the beat of the music. While the tempo of the song during the verses is noticeably slower (and absolutely lovely), Tracy sings the verses faster if anything, yet the musical timbre is still preserved. This hit song is recent enough to have been influenced by hip hop cadences; nowadays, singing faster than the music is commonplace, even in country music.
An early example is one of the first big hits by Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”, where most of the vocals are sung much faster than the beat of the music; it is taken from their third album, Toys in the Attic (1975). A decade later, Run-D.M.C. included a remake of “Walk This Way” on their album Raising Hell (1986), with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith sitting in on vocals and guitar, respectively. The two groups also collaborated on a video that was in heavy rotation on MTV. This was one of the first times that rock music and rap music were melded together.
The current (August/September 2016) issue of AARP The Magazine – a perk for anyone who joins AARP that keeps getting better every year – includes a section called “Surviving the ’80s”. The item about the “Walk This Way” remake reads, quoting Darryl McDaniels (aka D.M.C.): “[Producer] Rick Rubin gives us this yellow notebook pad. He tells us, ‘Go down to D’s basement, put the needle on the record.’ We go down to my basement and put on the record, and then you hear, “Backstroke lover always hidin’ ’neath the covers,’ and immediately me and Joe [Joseph Simmons aka Run] get on the phone and say, ‘Hell no, this ain’t going to happen. This is hillbilly gibberish.’”
My recollection is that the new version of “Walk This Way” revitalized Aerosmith’s career to a greater extent than it boosted that of Run-D.M.C.. Perhaps leaving a bad taste in the mouth of hip hop artists who were still searching for greater respect in the music world, I remember few rock/rap collaborations after that until the 1990’s.
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LL Cool J – the initials stand for “Ladies Love Cool James” (his real name is James Todd Smith) – is one of the forefathers of pop rap according to Wikipedia. To date, he has released 13 albums and 2 greatest-hits collections.
About his first album, Radio (1985), Wikipedia says: “Reflecting the new school and ghettoblaster subculture in the U.S. during the mid-1980s, Radio belongs to a pivotal moment in the history and culture of hip hop. Its success contributed to the displacement of the old school with the new school form and to the genre’s mainstream success during the period. Its success also served as a career breakthrough for LL Cool J and [producer] Rick Rubin. Radio has been recognized by music writers as one of the first cohesive and commercially successful hip hop albums.”
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Snoop Dogg (originally Snoop Doggy Dogg) was discovered in 1992 by one of the bandmembers in N.W.A., Dr. Dre; he has been seemingly omnipresent in the entertainment scene ever since. Snoop became known for his nearly unintelligible, mumbled speeches at music awards shows and other such, often featuring his own vocabulary, such as “fo shizzle”.
Snoop Dogg was featured prominently on Dr. Dre’s debut solo album, The Chronic (1992). Snoop’s first album, Doggystyle (1993) debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 Albums chart and sold more than 800,000 copies in its first week, a record at that time for a debut album. Snoop Dogg has released 13 albums, including his most recent, Coolaid (2016).
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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.”
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In the wake of the gangsta rap era, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince – Jeff Townes and Will Smith, respectively – were one of the first groups to try to tone things down with messages more suitable for teens. Their second album, He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper (1988) was a multi-platinum smash; the charming video for their hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was in heavy rotation on MTV. The duo had had an earlier hit in the same vein called “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble” (1986) while Will Smith was still in high school.
Will Smith parlayed their hit song into a stint on a sitcom called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and later became one of the biggest movie stars of our time following roles in summer blockbusters like Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997). He is not the only hip hop star to move to the small and/or big screen. Ice Cube, one of the founders of gangsta rap in his group N.W.A., has starred in numerous films in a variety of genres, such as All About the Benjamins, Barbershop, and XXX: State of the Union. Ice-T – whose debut album Rhyme Pays (1987) was “the first hip hop album to carry an explicit content sticker” (according to Wikipedia) – is well-known for his prominent role in the long-running television series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
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I recently bought the first album by Kid ’N Play, 2 Hype (1988) – mostly because of the hair, I admit, since I really didn’t know anything else about them – and found it to be a really enjoyable record. The cover shot is about as non-threatening as you can get. Allmusic gives the album 4½ stars. with Steve Huey raving: “Accusations of being soft notwithstanding, those qualities are exactly what give their debut album, 2 Hype, its refreshing charm. There isn’t much on the duo’s minds other than friendship, dancing, and dating, and everything stays pretty innocent – Kid even confesses to being shy around girls on ‘Undercover’. If all of this seems safe and lightweight, it’s also a tremendous amount of good, clean fun. Hurby ‘Luv Bug’ Azor’s production keeps things danceable and engaging throughout; the sound is fairly spare, with funky and occasionally club-friendly beats, catchy instrumental hooks behind the choruses, and basic DJ scratching. . . . And even if its sound and style are very much of their time, 2 Hype still holds up surprisingly well, thanks to Kid ’N Play’s winning personalities.”
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Not long after we moved to New York City in January 1990, THE song on the radio and on videos and even in the air was the huge rap hit “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer. It is almost impossible not to like this song, or at least I found it that way, and my landing in the big city about the time that “U Can’t Touch This” was hitting its stride in the charts helped that along. The song was not initially available as a single, so album sales of Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em hit 18 million. MC Hammer had other hit songs over the years but, not surprisingly, was never able to top this one.
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The sampled break that repeats throughout “U Can’t Touch This” is the monster opening riff of Rick James’s “Super Freak” (1981), one of the catchiest and funkiest instrumental passages ever (and I am certainly not alone in feeling this way). According to Wikipedia: “‘Freak’ is a slang term for a very promiscuous girl, as described in the song’s lyrics, ‘. . . a very kinky girl / The kind you don’t take home to mother’.”
“Super Freak” includes some background vocals by the Temptations in one part, preceded by Rick James saying: “Temptations sing!” The tempo of the background singing is different from that of the song. In some long-form versions of “U Can’t Touch This”, this part of the “Super Freak” song is also sampled – it felt like a sample of a sample to me.
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Initially, MC Hammer took full writing credit for “U Can’t Touch This”, but anyone familiar with “Super Freak” knew exactly where the song came from. The lawsuit brought by Rick James and others was settled out of court when MC Hammer agreed to give Rick James a songwriting credit (and thus a whole lot of cash) for “U Can’t Touch This”.
The same issue came up with the Vanilla Ice hit song “Ice Ice Baby” (1990) that was released on the heels of “U Can’t Touch This”, where in this case the sample was taken from “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. Robert Van Winkle (Vanilla Ice’s real name) wrote “Ice Ice Baby” in 1983 when he was 16 years old.
“Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice took a lot of heat at the time and in later years for not being authentic, etc. I don’t have a dog in that fight myself; I found “Ice Ice Baby” then and I find it now to be a well crafted piece of music. Whatever else might be said about “Ice Ice Baby”, as noted by Wikipedia: “‘Ice Ice Baby’ was the first hip hop single to top the Billboard charts. Outside the United States, the song topped the charts in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom, thus helping the song diversify hip hop by introducing it to a mainstream audience.”
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Vanilla Ice was inaccurately called the first white rapper by many in that time period, but this was not at all the case. For one thing, future superstar Eminem was already rapping in high school by the age of 14 (in about 1986). For another, past UARB Ja Ja Ja released “Katz Rap” (“Cat Rap”) in Germany in 1982 as the first female rap song in Europe. As a third example, “Under the Gun” (1984) by a long-time favorite New Wave band called Face to Face features a Christian rap passage.
Of more importance though is the ground-breaking song “Rapture” by Blondie – with a rap section that was performed by Deborah Harry – that was released in 1980 on their album Autoamerican. As noted in Wikipedia, this was the first song to top the American charts that featured rap, and also the first rap video to be broadcast on MTV.
The rap section of “Rapture” is not conventional rapping by a long shot; it has a stream-of-consciousness quality about it and is mostly a strange science-fiction tale about a “man from Mars” who eats cars, bars, and finally guitars. The first line name-checks a hip hop pioneer – “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly” – and this man later became the first host of Yo! MTV Raps, using this line as his musical intro.
Also mentioned in “Rapture” is Grandmaster Flash. I saw an interview with him once where he talked about the effect that “Rapture” had on his musical vision, which led to the release of “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I was amazed when I heard him say that.
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Salt-N-Pepa is an early female rap trio that helped legitimize hip hop in the wider musical landscape. Rap lyrics spoken by women are not so harsh and intimidating as those by men, particularly in the gangsta rap era that was just starting to take hold when Salt-N-Pepa emerged in 1985.
From Wikipedia: “The group entered the music industry at a time when hip hop music was believed to be a fad, and major record companies were reluctant to sign hip hop artists. . . . With lots of concerns about sexist lyrics and video clips that objectified women’s bodies in hip hop music, many feminists disliked rap and hip hop music because of its bad portrayal of women. However, Salt-N-Pepa changed the look of hip hop. They wore scantily clad, sexy clothing and were not afraid to talk about sex and their thoughts about men. Their song ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’ was a huge hit.”
The debut album by Salt-N-Pepa, Hot, Cool and Vicious (1986) had several moderate R&B hit songs, but the group hit it big when a remix version of “Push It” became a platinum hit and pushed their album sales above the one-million mark. Salt-N-Pepa has had a productive career over many years, including a Grammy win for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group in 1995 for “None of Your Business”.
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Sugar Hill Records is an early hip hop label that was founded in 1979 by the married couple of Joe Robinson and Sylvia Robinson plus Milton Malden, with financial backing by Morris Levy of Roulette Records. Sylvia Robinson – often called the “Mother of Hip Hop” – was listed as the CEO of the label. She has a long R&B history dating back to the 1956 hit “Love is Strange” (co-written by Bo Diddley and Jody Williams), under the name of Mickey and Sylvia; Mickey Baker taught her to play guitar, and they worked together off and on for about a decade. The two are also known for performing back-up singing on the 1961 Ike and Tina Turner hit, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”. Under the name Sylvia, Sylvia Robinson later scored a #3 hit in 1972, “Pillow Talk”.
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The generally acknowledged original rap song is “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) by the Sugarhill Gang. (Both Sugar Hill Records and the Sugarhill Gang are named after the Sugar Hill section of Harlem – by the way, Harlem is adapted from the Dutch place-name Haarlem). As noted in Wikipedia: “Bill Adler, an independent consultant, once said, ‘There was hardly ever a moment when rap music was underground; one of the very first so-called rap records [“Rapper’s Delight”], was a monster hit.’”
The Blondie frontwoman comes up again in this story of the genesis of “Rapper’s Delight” that is taken from Wikipedia: “In late 1978, Debbie Harry suggested that Chic’s Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a hip hop event, which at the time was a communal space taken over by teenagers with boombox stereos playing various pieces of music that performers would break dance to. Rodgers experienced a hip hop event the first time himself at a high school in the Bronx. On September 20, 1979, and September 21, 1979, Blondie and Chic were playing concerts with the Clash in New York at The Palladium. When Chic started playing ‘Good Times’, rapper Fab 5 Freddy and the members of the Sugarhill Gang (‘Big Bank Hank’ Jackson, Mike Wright, and ‘Master Gee’ O’Brien), jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band.
“A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club Leviticus and heard the DJ play a song which opened with Bernard Edwards’s bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’. Rodgers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which also included a scratched version of the song’s string section. Rodgers and Edwards immediately threatened legal action over copyright, which resulted in a settlement and their being credited as co-writers. Rodgers admitted that he was originally upset with the song, but later declared it to be ‘one of his favorite songs of all time’ and his favorite of all the tracks that sampled (or in this instance interpolated) Chic. He also stated: ‘As innovative and important as “Good Times” was, “Rapper’s Delight” was just as much, if not more so.’ ‘Rapper’s Delight’ is said to be the song that popularized rap music and put it into the mainstream.”
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Hip hop culture predates the development of rap and hip hop music by nearly a decade. From Wikipedia: “Hip hop is a subcultural movement that was formed during the early 1970s by African-American and Puerto Rican youths residing in the South Bronx in New York City. . . . It is characterized by four distinct elements, all of which represent the different manifestations of the culture: MCing (oral), turntablism or DJing (aural), b-boying (physical), and graffiti art (visual). . . . The origin of hip hop culture stems from the block parties of the Ghetto Brothers, when they plugged in the amplifiers for their instruments and speakers into the lampposts on 163rd Street and Prospect Avenue and used music to break down racial barriers, and from DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where Herc mixed samples of existing records with his own shouts to the crowd and dancers. Kool Herc is credited as the ‘Father of Hip Hop’. DJ Afrika Bambaataa of the hip hop collective Zulu Nation outlined the pillars of hip hop culture, to which he coined the terms: MCing or ‘Emceein’, DJing or ‘Deejayin’, ‘B-boying’ [break dancing], and graffiti writing or ‘Aerosol Writin’.”
The origin of the term “hip hop” is interesting; again from Wikipedia: “Keith ‘Cowboy’ Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five has been credited with coining the term in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing the words ‘hip/hop/hip/hop’ in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the ‘hip hop’ cadence into his stage performance. . . . The song ‘Rapper’s Delight’, by the Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the line, ‘I said a hip, hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop’.”
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As far as I know, none have been to Biloxi yet, but many of the early rap and hip hop artists have begun hitting the oldies circuit; and several came through Charlotte while I was there this summer. I couldn’t find the line-up for that show; but on November 12, 2016, a joint concert with Vanilla Ice, Salt-N-Pepa, Kid ’N Play, All-4-One, and Coolio will be at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro.
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The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for September 2016 is LIGHTNING STRIKE; I know them from a 1988 RCA Victor Records album, Lightning Strike that I picked up years ago. This was an early attempt at a punk and hip hop fusion that works really well to these ears.
In one of the sources for this post, the online magazine Louder than War, Paul Fischer describes the music by Lightning Strike as “an incendiary mix of Clash/B.A.D. and the Beastie Boys”. Big Audio Dynamite is the original punk/rap band, formed by Mick Jones in 1984 after he was thrown out of the Clash the year before. Most, though not all info on Lightning Strike lists them as a punk band or even a hardcore punk band.
Meanwhile, Lightning Strike sends up tinges of hip hop throughout the album and covers a Furious Five classic, “Beat Street” as their first single. “Get Ready” starts the Lightning Strike album off as a serious party, and “Beatbox International” is one of several songs that references hip hop culture.
The Nuzz Prowling Wolf blog quotes one member of Lightning Strike about their Clash roots: “The last review we had said, ‘The singer must have stood and practiced in front of the mirror for hours to be Joe Strummer’. And the geezer was right. I did! So what? We like the Clash so I don’t take it as an insult.”
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The first single by Lightning Strike was “Beat Street” b/w “The Pack”, featuring their twisted coat of arms on the front side of the jacket. “Beat Street” is their only cover, though the apparent songwriting credit on the 45 doesn’t acknowledge that; the other songs on the album are originals. Maria McKee of Lone Justice has a vocal interlude on this song.
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“Beat Street”, the debut single by Lightning Strike has true royalty among its songwriters: Melvin Glover (rapper Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five), Sylvia Robinson (“the mother of hip hop”), and Reggie Griffin. As recorded by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five, “Beat Street” is the title song of the 1984 hip hop movie Beat Street, featuring a host of rap pioneers.
Oddly though, “Beat Street” does not appear on the Beat Street soundtrack albums – issued in two volumes – although “Beat Street Breakdown” by Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five does (along with several other songs having “beat street” in the title). “Beat Street” is included in the Rhino Records retrospective from 1994, Message from Beat Street: The Best of Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & the Furious Five.
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Lightning Strike is a British band but spent some time in New York successfully drumming up a major-label recording contract. Bandmembers as listed on the back of the single sleeve are Dave Earl (vocals and guitar), Eddie Auffray (guitar and vocals), Teb Scott (drums), John Brooder (bass and vocals), and Sten Stenhouse (keyboards and vocals). Kevin Daly, their manager is listed as “mouth”.
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Nuzz Prowling Wolf mentions that Lightning Strike toured the UK with Boys Wonder and Crazy Pink Revolvers in the Jiffy Condoms-sponsored Safe Sex Tour.
Paul Fischer, in his interview with Eddie Auffray for Louder than War, gives this overview of the scene around Lightning Strike: “If you were a leather-jacket wearing teenager in London around that time you couldn’t miss them, they were the house band of the ‘Intrepid Fox’ and at the hub of a scene that has never really been documented, based around said boozer in Soho’s Wardour Street where everyone congregated before gigs at the Marquee which was over the other side of the road.”
Replies to the Nuzz Prowling Wolf post on Lightning Strike says that the band was an opening act for Stiff Little Fingers, for Crazyhead, and for Mega City Four.
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“Beat Street” was actually the second choice by Lightning Strike for their first single. As related by Paul Fischer: “Debut single was due to be live favorite ‘Exocet Alley’, a blast of Rick Rubin-esque rap-rock via Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which derided Jeffrey Archer in the lyrics.” Jeffrey Archer is a Conservative Party politician in England who had been caught with a prostitute in 1986. In July 1987, Archer launched a high-profile libel suit against one newspaper who reported the story, the Daily Star; and the record label decided to pass on the release.
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There is an alternate release of the Lightning Strike album, as shown above. Not surprisingly, the album was “Banned in Britain”. As a bonus, this edition includes the uncensored version of “Exocet Alley”.
As a self-titled album, Lightning Strike by Lightning Strike suffers from a name problem. Many websites show the band name as Lightning, and the album name as Strike. Even the record label on one of the RCA releases got it wrong.
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In the Paul Fischer interview, Eddie Auffray reports that Lightning Strike worked for two years on demos for a second album on RCA, but the label wasn’t interested.
Eddie Auffray stuck with it; as reported by Paul Fischer: “I continued to play in different bands one of them being Trash. Eventually Trash split and just after that I auditioned for Speedway, the bass player being a mate of mine and suggesting me. The rest is history! Ha! I wish!” But Speedway did wind up recording an album called Entertainment (1999) for Socal Records.
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Eddie Auffray relocated to Barcelona and recently joined a punk rock band called Ravales. “After about 6 months, I started to put out adverts and eventually got back into playing. Maxi Santapa (vocals/bass) put Ravales together based around his skate shop HEY HO SKATE. I was put forward by the (then) drummer, auditioned and joined. Drummer left due to personal circumstances, and Mauricio Schneider joined.”
Paul Fischer reports about their debut album: “Ravales’ debut album Barrio Chino has just been released [2012] and is a fierce collection of 17 punked-up rocky gems. At its best it really does sound like Steve Jones and Paul Cook [of Sex Pistols] playing a Ramones set, albeit mostly sung in Spanish!”
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In December 2014, Ravales released a Christmas single (!) called Merry Jingle Bells featuring punk-rock versions of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and “Jingle Bells”.
When I first researched Lightning Strike several years ago, I found a great post about the band. I dutifully bookmarked the website, and now I can’t find the bookmark; and I have not been able to find the website again either. But I did the best I could with what I had.
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Story of the Month: Patti Smith (from February 2014)
Patti Smith grew up in Chicago and is of Irish descent. She moved to New York City in 1967 and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; they had a tumultuous romantic relationship that was exacerbated by their poverty and Mapplethorpe’s struggles with his sexuality. In her multiply-award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids about their time together, Patti Smith refers to Robert Mapplethorpe as “the artist of her love”. His photographs of her became the album covers for the Patti Smith Group albums.
Patti Smith was under consideration as the lead singer for the psychedelic/hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult, and she contributed to several songs by the band, including “Debbie Denise” and “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” on what for my money is their best album, Agents of Fortune (1976); the latter song features her memorable spoken introduction: “You’re boned like a saint / With the consciousness of a snake”. Agents of Fortune also includes the biggest hit single by Blue Öyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”.
Patti Smith began performing rock music in 1974 – another year that popular music changed irrevocably, much like 1963 with the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion – with music archivist and guitarist Lenny Kaye. While not actually inventing the term “punk rock”, he had popularized it in his liner notes for the first compilation album of garage rock and psychedelic rock music, Nuggets, so this was most appropriate.
The band that became the Patti Smith Group was created when Ivan Kral (guitar and bass), Jay Dee Daugherty (drums) and Richard Sohl (piano) joined Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye. The piano player’s name is fitting, since his understated work at the ivories is in many ways the soul of the Patti Smith Group. The proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges added Scott Thurston as a frantic pianist in 1973, but a keyboard player in a punk rock band is rare.
Many years ago, I wrote of Patti Smith that she resembled nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s; but that really is only one side of her music persona. She is a rocker pure and simple as well as a poet and a first-rate vocalist and one hell of a writer besides.
Patti Smith is renowned for reworking well-known rock standards to fit her vision and also of adding shock value to her music that surely made Alice Cooper smile; and that was true of the band’s first single from 1974, “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory”. Patti Smith included a monologue about Patty Hearst (who had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army earlier that year) in the middle of her rendition of the 1960’s standard; while the latter song relates the salvation she received from the helplessness of her job on an assembly line after discovering a book by French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Jim Morrison of the Doors was similarly enthralled with Rimbaud).
Patti Smith Group was signed by Clive Davis to a major-label contract with Arista Records; and their debut album Horses was one of the first punk rock albums, being released in December 1975 (four months before the Ramones’ first album came out). Actually, through most of the 1970’s, punk rock was mostly found on 45’s and an occasional EP; except for the biggest punk rockers, LP’s were pretty rare.
While recording their third and most successful album, Easter, Patti Smith Group encountered Bruce Springsteen who was recording his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town in the adjoining studio. The Boss had recorded “Because the Night” but was unsatisfied with it and did not include it on the album. Jimmy Iovine was the producer and engineer on both albums; he passed along a copy of the tape of the song to Patti Smith, who recast the song and included it on their album. The first performance of “Because the Night” was at a Patti Smith Group concert on December 30, 1977 at New York’s CBGB club, with Bruce Springsteen joining in on guitar and vocals. Bruce and Patti share songwriting credits on “Because the Night”, which is probably Patti Smith’s best known song. Easter also includes several songs about Patti Smith’s feelings on organized religion, notably her version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” that has the spoken-word introduction, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”.
Patti Smith Group’s previous album, Radio Ethiopia was influenced by the fiery 1960’s Detroit band MC5; and Patti Smith later met the band’s guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. They married in 1980, and the couple raised two children. The joke at the time was that she married him only because she wouldn’t have to change her name. Their son, Jackson Smith married White Stripes drummer Meg White in 2009; interestingly, Meg didn’t have to change her name either when she had previously married the band’s guitarist Jack White.
The Patti Smith Group album Wave (1979) includes a lovely tribute to her husband called “Frederick”; “Dancing Barefoot” on the same album was also dedicated to him.
In 1988, Patti Smith released a well-received album called Dream of Life that included a hit song, “People Have the Power” – in that song, she seemed to anticipate the momentous changes that were coming in the world, including the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but not just that.
Patti Smith suffered a series of losses in quick succession beginning with the death in November 1994 of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, followed by the unexpected death of her brother Todd Smith and then her band’s keyboard player Richard Sohl – her early love Robert Mapplethorpe had died five years earlier. She reemerged from that pain more visible than ever; her next album, Gone Again (1996) was perhaps her most self-assured effort and included a tribute to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, “About a Boy”. The final track is a heartbreaking tribute to her late husband, “Farewell Reel”.
More recently, Patti Smith made news around the world when she was photographed with a beaming smile while meeting Pope Francis.
