To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
Score
As an MC you will study verbal magic
But watch what you say 'cause you'll attract it
Control the subconscious magnet
From pulling in havoc
“Who am I?”
The MC
Categorizing art is as simple as holding a fist full of water. In hip hop, the standard dichotomies (old school vs. new school, commercial vs. underground, etc.) are as hazy as a Harlem August. As the music through which a new generation announced its aesthetic sensibilities, hip hop is tied to a particular point in history, but even then it is divided into sub-generations of its own. The Benetton-swathed, antiseptically white-Adidas-wearing b-boy who came to the Latin Quarter or Union Square in 1986 to catch Rakim or the Ultra Magnetic MCs, had an experience that was distinct from that of the mock-neck sporting old head who had checked the Treacherous Three at the Disco Fever in 1978. Art respects no borders and time frames, but for our own concerns, hip hop can be divided into four overlapping eras: the Old School, 1974–1983, the Golden Age 1984–1992, the Modern Era, 1992–1997, and the Industrial Era, 1998–2005.
Implicit within each is an approach to the verbal arts that differed from that of both its precedent and successor. The casual observer and the closed-eared critic—of which there are many, if not most—misses the increased artistic complexity that characterized each evolving stage of the music. Where rappers began by stringing together relatively simple rhyming phrases, the art progressed to the employment of metaphor, simile, alliteration, internal rhyme—an entire catalog of techniques to assist in getting one's listening audience open.
The irony of history lies in the fact that time moves only forward, but can be best understood by looking backward. It fell to the Old School artists—Grandmasters Flash and Caz, Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, the Cold Crush Brothers, the Crash Crew, the Fantastic Five, Kurtis Blow, the Funky Four Plus One, Sequence, Fearless Four, Spoonie Gee, Busy Bee, the Treacherous Three—to part with the history of weary soul singers and the sequined sync-stepping songsters of the era that preceded them. It fell to them to collectively create hip hop music and see it through its transition from a predominantly live performance medium to its first commercial recordings and distribution.
That transition can't be overestimated; Go-Go music, which germinated from the roots of funk in the 1970s, was, for a variety of reasons, not vigorously pursued by major music industry labels. Consequently, it remained almost exclusively a regional phenomenon, based in Washington, D.C., as well as one that was experienced primarily through live performance. In sharp contrast, the early hip hop recordings that appeared on record labels like Sugar Hill and Enjoy paved the way for the music's expansion from local style to regional sound to national subculture and ultimately global movement. The history of popular music in this country is the history of neglected innovators. It was not in the stars, the cards, or the medium of prognostication of your choosing for these artists to reap the kinds of returns that put them in the CEO tax bracket.
In those earliest days, it might have been harder for the unheralded poet-MC coming of age in the South Bronx and Manhattan to have not heard the poetic offerings of the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, or the Watts Prophets. Formed in the aesthetic blast-furnace of the Black Arts Movement, the Last Poets had given new form and elevation to the verbal arts that had come down to them from the traditions of scat syncopation in jazz, the epic folk toasts of the Great Migration era, and the incandescent oratory of Malcolm X. (For the record, with his raspy voice, intellect, and charisma, Malcolm would've made for a serious rapper in another place and time—then again there's just as much argument to be made that he was the first great rapper.)
Give “Wake Up, Nigger” from the eponymous debut album a listen and it becomes clear that Last Poets Jalal Nurridin and Umar Bin Hassan are working as proto-rappers, playing many of the verbal techniques that would later become central to the MCs. Their self-titled debut album was released in 1970 and the 1971 follow up This Is Madness was released close enough to the beginnings of hip hop to have almost been a contemporary influence. Years later, when Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's incendiary single “The Message” had infused hip hop with overt political content, Kid Creole would see it as a direct extension of the Last Poets' tradition. “There was nothing in rap like that before except for maybe the Last Poets,” he pointed out.
Contrary to popular wisdom, history does not repeat itself—but it is prone to extended paraphrases. Early MCs made use of their aesthetic inheritance in the same way that the generation that created blues had fallen back upon the folklore and musical legacy bequeathed to them by the ancestors who had survived the ordeal of slavery. That said, the irony is that critics and writers generally recognized the influence of the Last Poets more than hip hop artists did themselves. This hazy connection to one's artistic genealogy is not specific to hip hop (try asking the average twenty-three-year-old rock musician about his artistic debt to Ike Turner) but the truth is that an entire generation of hip hop heads were introduced to the Last Poets classic “All Hail to the Late Great Black Man” via Notorious B.I.G.'s first single, “Party & Bullshit,” which had sampled a snippet from the track—for decidedly opposite political ends. (This wasn't the last time Big would hijack political anthems for his own boulevardian ends—he famously shackled a segment of Public Enemy's “Shut 'Em Down” to his own “Ten Crack Commandments.”) And truth told, the chanted syncopation of Stetsasonic's 1988 release “Freedom or Death,” was so deeply indebted to the Last Poets' stylings that the song could've passed as a lost studio session from the revolutionary bards.
A Tribe Called Quest's “Excursions” on The Low End Theory featured a rip from the Last Poets' “Time Is Running Out” as the hook. But it was not until Common's 2005 release “The Corner,” which featured the Last Poets chanting the hook, did you see major hip hop artists collaborating with their literal elder spokespersons. At the same time, the Last Poets occupied the ironic niche of being the most widely recognized of a whole array of artists who had been mining similar veins. While The Last Poets and This Is Madness pre-dated the beginnings of hip hop, Gil Scott-Heron's 1974 album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was released as the art form took its first breaths of South Bronx air. Primarily a jazz album, Revolution's claim to the hip hop pantheon was anchored in a title track that found Scott-Heron delivering verse over a hypnotic, funk-indebted bassline—an approach that was so distinct at that point as to warrant classic status. (That same bassline was later lifted and enlisted for Queen Latifah and KRS-One's collaboration “The Evil That Men Do.”) At the same time, the other poetic standard-bearers of that era, Amiri Baraka, the Watts Prophets among others, were working toward the creation of another verse form; specifically they sought ever blacker forms of self-expression—however that term could be defined.
The debt to that generation of artists was apparent as were the distinctions between the two. In their approach to poetry—maybe as part of their collective efforts to shake themselves free of the constraints of whiter poetics—rhyme was often de-emphasized in the work of the Last Poets, Baraka, and Scott-Heron. Hip hop took the elements of verbal expression and percussive accompaniment, but within this new culture rhyme became—and three decades later remained—the most valued element of hip hop lyricism.
It is an irony of history that the complex culture fermenting in the South Bronx and Upper Manhattan came to national attention via the Sugar Hill Gang, an artificially flavored composite group whose “Rapper's Delight” was the first commercially successful recording of the genre. (It was not, however, the first rap record—that distinction belonged to Fatback Band's “King Tim III.”) Sugar Hill Records, the indie label owned by Sylvia Robinson, a former R&B vocalist, had gotten in on the ground floor of the movement. That said, they went on to sign future legends Busy Bee, Crash Crew, and Sequence, the first all-female rap act. Rival Enjoy Records, headed by Bobby Robinson, who had discovered Gladys Knight and the Pips, was responsible for the careers of the Funky Four Plus One, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Spoonie Gee, the Disco Four, and the Fearless Four.
Between the 1979 release of “Rapper's Delight” and 1983, the music was perceived as a cute Negro niche market capable of producing free-spirited confections like