To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
the era yielded manifold musical blessings: Afrika Bambaataa's “Jazzy Sensation,” “Looking for the Perfect Beat,” and the heart-rate spiking “Planet Rock.” The Fearless Four released “Rockin' It” and “Problems of the World Today,” the Treacherous Three offered “Yes, We Can, Can” and “Action”—not to mention lesser-hailed contributions from Grand Master Flash and his five MCs like “Scorpio” and “Survival.”
To later ears, the toddler awkwardness of the early music is apparent in a way that it never could have been to the contemporary listener. That said, all artistic development begins with shots in the dark and for the artists of hip hop's embryonic stages, there was simply more dark to shoot at. That reality could be seen, for instance, in the awkward intonations and unruly variations in pitch that early MCs employed. Check the Fearless Four's “It's Magic,” a classic release whose supernatural boasts made it a thematic cousin to the Tempations' “Can't Get Next to You.” The most notable trait of Mike C and Peso's MCing is the wild alternation between false baritone and high-pitched excitement. That brand of unruly intonation had given way to more subtle vocal changes even before the Old School era expired, but their approach to verbal styling wasn't accidental. Just as the rhyme routines of early rappers bore the hallmarks of the soul groups they were imitating, their tonal adventurism was an inheritance from the fast-talking, pitch-varying pseudo-baritone couplets that radio deejays—another ancestor to the hip hop MC—had been practicing for decades.
The radio deejay was in fact a significant precursor to the rapper. That much was clear as early as 1979, when the Fatback Band's “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” appeared. The first recorded rap record featured King Tim throwing down his rap over funked guitar riff. And unlike the Poets, Baraka, or Heron, whose work, in retrospect, sounds raplike, King Tim was rapping. The recording is virtually identical in stylistic terms to the early work released by the Furious Five, Grandmaster Caz, and the Funky Four—artists who were the first to be assigned the label “rapper.” But the recording is also thoroughly reminiscent of the cadence, intonation, and pitch of the radio entertainers who, by the 1970s, were long-established media personalities.
Rap was delivered to that nebulously defined American deity the Market by the Sugar Hill Gang's “Rapper's Delight,” but the political birth of hip hop could arguably be traced to Melle Mel's 1982 rhyme manifesto “The Message.” While “Rapper's Delight” had remained true to the party spirit at the center of the newborn culture, “The Message” had taken aim at the decaying metropolis—and the decaying lives lived within it—that had made that desperate partying so essential to daily survival in the first place. Frantz Fanon famously pointed out in Wretched of the Earth that music and dance remained social safety valves that siphoned anger away and actually made life under inhuman conditions tolerable. Frederick Douglass informed readers of his autobiographical narrative that slavemasters encouraged black people to participate in all manner of recreational diversion in their few moments of respite so as to prevent them from hatching plans to seize their freedom. But with all due respect to Douglass and Fanon, Mel could've schooled them on the revolutionary potential of black joy.
Hip hop was that joy. And on that level, the distinctions between “The Message” and a contemporary party track like the Treacherous Three's “Put the Boogie in Your Body” were less clear than the conventional wisdom would have one believe. “The Message” succeeded—as did Public Enemy's later rhyme polemics like “Welcome to the Terror-dome”—primarily because the form was blazing. What Melle Mel put down on that record, backed by a cluster of ascending keys and a rotund bassline, was undeniable. Had a lesser MC taken aim at the ills of South Bronx living, no matter how desperately they needed a public exposé, crowds would've ignored it while jamming to apolitical bangers like “Put the Boogie in Your Body.” In Melle Mel, though, there was a brilliant combination of both talent and political insight.
Sugar Hill had gotten over with a market success that was, in terms of form, a series of verses strung together without pause. Kurtis Blow's “Christmas Rappin',” released that same year, contained a series of rhymes tied together by the holiday theme. But later offerings more closely adhered to the traditional song structure of sixteen bars followed by an eight-bar chorus. By the time of releases like T-Ski's “Catch the Beat” in 1981, the eight-bar “hook” had become a feature of hip hop songs. Even so, nothing in the music's short history had the kind of resonance of Melle Mel's enduring refrain “It's like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” which was probably the first classic hook in the art form. His mic skills allowed his indictment of the cancerous ways of Reagan-era America to initiate a genre of overtly political hip hop.
Even outside of “The Message” it would be hard to overstate Melle Mel's impact upon the early evolution of the art. (Kool Moe Dee would later point to Mel as the single greatest MC in the history of the music.) In the years, now decades, following the ascent of Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, there would be dozens of rappers who might be considered to be better than Melle Mel was, but none has been as far ahead of their peers as Mel was circa 1982. His was an unimpeachable position atop the lyricist food chain—a spot he held at least until he ran up against Kool Moe Dee, who had set his sights on Mel's crown after having verbally humiliated Busy Bee. The fact is that for the Melle Mels and Kool Moe Dees there were no precedents; they were artists who had to first create their art form itself before getting down to the business of creating actual art. Every subsequent generation of MCs had a whole genealogy of artists to define themselves against. Melle Mel had a pen, a pad, and an idea.
Run DMC is to hip hop as BC and AD are to history. The emergence of the Queens duo and their insistent opening statement “Sucker MCs” signaled a new era in the music commercially as well as aesthetically. Everything down to their ascetic sartorial choices indicated a shift in priorities. Where Afrika Bambaataa's Soul Sonic Force performed in costumes worthy of George Clinton, Run DMC and Jay opted for the solemnity of all-black outfits offset by black fedoras. Prior to them, hip hop acts blew on stage with Parliament-sized delegations; by the mid-1980s, their format—two MCs and a sole deejay—had become the standard. Not only did the revenues get divided into fewer hands, the structure of their songs changed as well, becoming more individualistic and defined.
But what made the era they inaugurated worthy of the term golden—an adjective gleaned from that longest glorified of precious metals in hip hop—was the sheer number of stylistic innovations that came into existence. The era witnessed the emergence of definitive influences, Big Daddy Kane, Queen Latifah, Ice Cube, the Ultra Magnetic MCs, Main Source, 2 Live Crew, Cypress Hill, LL Cool J, MC Lyte, Slick Rick, Too Short, KRS-One, Doug E. Fresh, EPMD, Kool G. Rap, Ice-T, Biz-Markie, NWA, Rakim—almost all of whom were under twenty-one years of age when they made their debuts.
Artists spend years trying to cultivate a unique approach to their chosen form; in these golden years, a critical mass of mic prodigies were literally creating themselves and their art form at the same time. In addition to verbally decapitating MC Shan, for example, KRS-One, the Bronx-born, Jamaica-descended sage and MC, returned hip hop to its Caribbean roots. On tracks like “The P Is Free” on the debut classic Criminal Minded, KRS fused bottom-heavy dancehall riddims and patois seasoned flow with the standards of hip hop articulation. The same would have to be said for Just-Ice, who in addition to pouring the foundation for gangsta rap had blended ragga stylings of his Jamaican ancestry on 1986's Back to the Old School. It came as no surprise then that KRS and Just-Ice would find themselves trading island-inflected verses on the 1988's “Suicide.”
A Tribe Called Quest constructed an impossibly original sound based on H2O cool melodic structures that complimented their smoothed-out rhyme patterns. It's hard to believe that their 1990 debut album People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was crafted by artists who were less than two years out of high school. Tribe not only distanced itself even further from the tradition of rhyming routines that sustained the early rap acts, their individual members didn't even necessarily appear on the same songs. On tracks like “8 Million Stories” from Midnight Marauder and “Luck of Lucien” from People's Instinctive Travels, Phife and Q-Tip delivered distinctive solo lyrical efforts. There had been precedent for this: “The Message,” which was released under the name Grandmaster