Beyond Worlds
The year was 1980. Fred Brathwaite, an art student at New York’s Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, had just returned to the borough from an art showcase at the Medusa gallery in Rome. Brathwaite — better known as Fab Five Freddy, after the Fabulous Five, the group of graffiti artists to which he belonged — had been involved in a show focused on New York’s thriving community of graffiti artists. The museum’s curator, Carlo Bruni, described the movement as “an art so strong, it hurt people.”
Graffiti had only begun to get recognition in the art world in the late seventies — in the dilapidated New York streets that Freddy made his canvas, his work was seen as vandalism by the moral majority, not to mention the NYPD. As one of hip-hop’s original four elements (along with DJing, emceeing and b-boying), tagging may have been the slowest to gain public approval. New York Mayor John Lindsay began a “war on graffiti” in 1972, focusing money and resources on capturing and arresting artists, whom he antagonized as “insecure cowards seeking recognition.”
But by the beginning of the 1980s, the tides had turned. Freddy was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the art world: he had befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well members of new wave bands such as Blondie and Talking Heads, from a stint as a camera operator on TV Party, a local public-access cable show. Basquiat had similarly begun his career as a graffiti artist in New York, under the imprimatur SAMO, which stood for “same old shit.”
His star rapidly rising, Freddy co-curated a show at the Mudd Club in Tribeca. Called “Beyond Worlds”, the show featured his own art as well as Basquiat’s and that of several other notable figures in the graffiti subculture. It also featured some unusual guest musicians. Freddy invited several of the Bronx’s biggest hip-hop stars to play, including Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation.
The punk rockers who attended the event felt an immediate kinship with the hip-hop performers: both subcultures had found a way to turn the frustration and disillusionment of poverty, prejudice and violence into powerful art. “It was a treat for basically both groups of people, that they were checking out a completely other cultural group,” Freddy said in The Hip-Hop Years, a BBC documentary. “It was like two groups of people at a zoo looking at each other, you know what I’m saying? It was really amazing.”
Ruza “Kool Lady” Blue, a local club owner and entrepreneur, was among those attending the event who were deeply impacted by the hip-hop sound. “That was when my mouth dropped and hip-hop replaced punk for me in terms of main musical interests,” she wrote in an article for Electronic Beats. “In the eighties, there was no hip-hop scene in downtown Manhattan. But there were DJs, emcees, b-boys, b-girls, dancers and graf [sic] artists scattered all over the place up in the Bronx, so I basically went up there and dragged them all downtown, and organized them.”
Though the hip-hop club that Blue organized began at a tiny hole-in-the-wall reggae club named Negril, the parties quickly outgrew the space, and were moved to The Roxy, a popular nightclub in Chelsea. The club’s hip-hop nights were emceed by Fab Five Freddy, and featured performers such as Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5, and the Rock Steady Crew, as well as graffiti murals and dance competitions. Some notable guests included future producer Rick Rubin and three young men who’d go on to form a group called the Beastie Boys.
Freddy’s friends Harry and Stein had also done their part to propel hip-hop into the mainstream: Blondie’s 1981 hit single “Rapture” included a rapped final verse, the first to appear in a mainstream pop song. The first lines are a tribute to Freddy and the scene he had shown them: “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly / DJ’s spinning, I said, ‘My, my!’” Hip-hop had found its way into the posh discotheques and dance clubs of downtown Manhattan for the first time.
Meanwhile, hip-hop records had steadily gained popularity since the release of “Rapper’s Delight.” Kurtis Blow’s single “The Breaks” had become the first hip-hop record to go Gold. Blow was a featured performer on Soul Train, a popular music variety show which spotlighted jazz, soul and disco musicians. This was hip-hop’s first notable TV appearance: suburban kids across the country had been exposed to a thriving new art form without ever leaving their living room.
But as the commercial success of “Rapture” faded and 1981 gave way to 1982, many began to think of hip-hop as a passing fad. The genre’s stranglehold on North American culture and radio waves hinged on two groundbreaking singles from two of the Bronx’s foremost talents: Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.
The Message
Though the hip-hop parties at The Roxy were host to a wide array of talent — including Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and some of the earliest performances from Run–D.M.C. and Madonna — Afrika Bambaataa stood alone. His skill and creativity overshadowed his competitors, and he was dubbed by partygoers as the “Master of Records,” a title to which he is still sometimes referred.
One of the keys to his success was his idiosyncratic musical taste. Since the early days of the Zulu Nation, Bambaataa had taken to washing and peeling the labels off of his records, in order to dissuade copycat DJs from aping his beats. “You can take music from any kind of field like soul, funk, heavy metal, jazz, calypso and reggae,” Bambaataa told Davey D in a 1995 interview. “As long as it’s funky and has that heavy beat and groove, you can take any part of it and make it hip-hop.”
Weary of Sugar Hill Records — the foremost label for hip-hop artists at the time — Bambaataa signed to Tommy Boy, a relatively obscure indie label run by music journalist Tom Silverman, to record “Planet Rock” with a branch of the Zulu Nation called the Soulsonic Force. The single, released in April 1982, was influenced by the electronic music that Bambaataa had been introduced to during his tenure at The Roxy, including acts such as Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
“That was the record that initiated that it wasn’t just an urban thing, it was inclusive,” Silverman said. “That’s when hip-hop became global.” Achieving mainstream success and underground credibility in equal measure, “Planet Rock” was arguably hip-hop’s first crossover hit — and Bambaataa’s competitors took notice.
Sylvia Robinson, Sugar Hill’s head honcho, enlisted Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher to write a single to rival Bambaataa’s. She pitched the track, titled “The Message,” to her most talented group, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five — but they were hesitant. The song’s socially conscious lyrics and downtempo groove were unlike any hip-hop records being made at the time.
“We didn’t actually want to do “The Message” because we was used to doing party raps and boasting how good we are and all that,” says Melle Mel. Though the other four members of the Furious Five refused to perform on the track, Mel eventually relented and recorded the song with Duke Bootee. Sugar Hill released the record under the Furious Five moniker anyway; apart from Mel, the group’s only contribution to the single was a spoken word skit tagged on to the end of its seven-minute runtime.
The track was a hit: though it didn’t chart as highly as “Planet Rock”, the song’s overt political themes won the group — and hip-hop — unprecedented critical praise and attention. “Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge / And I’m trying not to lose my head,” was the song’s refrain, a culmination of a lifetime’s worth of struggle that resonated with many Americans during the Reagan era. Hip-hop had been given a new voice.
“Planet Rock” was arguably hip-hop’s first crossover hit — and Afrika Bambaataa’s competitors took notice.
“The Message” also served to cement a shift in hip-hop that had begun with “Rapper’s Delight” three years previous. Emcees had come to the forefront as the stars of hip-hop, with DJs beginning a slow retreat to the background. As David Hinckley wrote in the New York Daily News, “It confirmed that emcees had vaulted past the deejays (sic) as the stars of the music.”
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would go on to record one more hit single — the anti-cocaine anthem “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” — before their untimely breakup in 1983. Bambaataa would continue to make records well into the 21st century, but would never match the incendiary impact of “Planet Rock.” Sugar Hill Records declared bankruptcy and went out of business in 1986. Rap music had weathered the rise and fall of its first generation. Its second would be defined by three familiar letters: MTV.
I Want My MTV
From the first music video the station ever aired — “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, an ironic choice — MTV established itself as a force to be reckoned with. Begun in the summer of 1981, MTV’s focus was rock- and pop-oriented: genres like funk, soul and country were seen as relics of the past and unsuitable for the fast-paced showmanship of music videos.
It’s fitting, then, that the first hip-hop group to gain airtime on the network would do so with a track called “Rock Box”, whose video featured three men clad in leather jackets rapping to an electric guitar riff reminiscent of Van Halen. The group was Run–D.M.C., a trio comprised of Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell. They would go on to become the first hip-hop group to go Platinum, to tour the US, to be nominated for a Grammy and to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The group’s third album, Raising Hell, is generally considered one of the most influential hip-hop recordings of all time: produced by Rick Rubin and Run’s brother, Russell Simmons, the LP hit number three on the Billboard Hot 200, and its lead single — a rap version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” — was the first hip-hop track to crack the Top 5. “We was (sic) going around selling out Madison Square Garden and all the big venues,” D.M.C. told NPR. “It all happened so fast.”
Run–D.M.C.’s unexpected success allowed Rubin and Simmons to establish Def Jam Records, a label which focused primarily on underground rap artists with a degree of authenticity. “Up until the time of Def Jam, pretty much most of the rap records at the time were R&B records with people rapping on them,” Simmons recalled in an NPR interview. “I think one of the things that separated our records from the ones that came prior was that they had more to do with what the actual hip-hop culture was like. The goal was to capture the energy you felt at a hip-hop club.”
Def Jam would go on to release some of hip-hop’s earliest classics, such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill. Its two founders eventually parted ways: Rubin founded Def American and would go on to become one of the most sought-after producers in the industry, while Simmons would strike a distribution partnership with CBS/Columbia, becoming one of the richest figures in hip-hop.
Fab Five Freddy had just finished promoting the first hip-hop motion picture, Wild Style, which he had made with his partner Lee Quiñones and writer-director Charlie Ahearn. Ahearn, a local artist and documentarian of graffiti culture, was immediately out of place in the Bronx hip-hop scene. “I never saw anyone that was from downtown or that was white hanging out in any place that I went to,” he said in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. “Everyone always thought I was a cop.”
Filmed over the course of a year and featuring major players such as Grandmaster Flash, the Rock Steady Crew and The Cold Crush Brothers, Wild Style was a worldwide success. The film and its soundtrack spread the word of hip-hop across the globe: what had once been a localized movement had become a worldwide phenomenon. Fab Five Freddy would remain integral to the culture in the years leading up to 1987, when he was approached by MTV to host a new music video program called Yo! MTV Raps.
Premiering in August 1988, the program’s pilot episode featured Run–D.M.C., Eric B. & Rakim and DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. For seven years, Yo! MTV Raps would be critical in bringing hip-hop to audiences across racial, gender and class lines. By the time the show aired its final episode in 1995, hip-hop was a multi-billion dollar industry.
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed hip-hop groups of all time, Public Enemy, quickly gained notoriety on Yo! MTV Raps for their challenging, politically charged lyricism and dissonant, hostile sound. “We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something, because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time,” Chuck D — the group’s emcee — told The Progressive. “Those in power didn’t know what to make of us, but they knew we had to be silenced.”
Public Enemy wasn’t the only rap group at the time to attract negative attention — hip-hop’s controversial lyrics had inspired a legion of detractors, angry parents and offended politicians who objected to the profane, violent and often misogynistic lyrics of rap groups like the 2 Live Crew, whose 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be would become the first LP deemed legally obscene. For two years, purchasing the album in Florida was considered a criminal offense.
Those in power didn’t know what to make of us, but they knew we had to be silenced.”
– Chuck D of Public Enemy
The most culturally accepted hip-hop artists at the time verged on bubblegum pop: MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” were non-threatening party hits. But Public Enemy’s socially conscious approach to hip-hop had inspired several acts — such as De La Soul, Nas and A Tribe Called Quest — to write raps which focused on social issues such as racism, poverty and drug use. Incorporating jazz and pop influences into their music, these groups used hip-hop to change the world, one breakbeat at a time.
Meanwhile, hip-hop was making waves on the West Coast: an LA rapper named Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow almost single-handedly pioneered the sub-genre gangsta rap, which primarily consisted of profane, autobiographical accounts of violent crime and drug abuse. Southeast of LA, in the working-class city of Compton, local DJ wunderkind Andre Young had adopted the nom de plume Dr. Dre and formed the influential gangsta rap outfit Niggaz Wit Attitudes (N.W.A.) with a group of Californian emcees, including O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson.
California had built a hip-hop culture comparable to that of New York — it was only a matter of time before the two would become rivals.
A Tale of Two Cities
The members of N.W.A. were barely out of their teens when they released 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, a testosterone-fueled mission statement of violence and rebellion. Its single “Fuck tha Police” — a heated criticism of police brutality along racial lines — inspired the FBI to formally warn the group’s label against further missteps. But its impact went far beyond government cautions: the album would eventually go Platinum and catapult the group’s stars, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, to international fame.
But gangsta rap had yet to fully capture the public eye. It wouldn’t be until the police beating of Rodney King, an African-American construction worker on parole for robbery, was leaked to the public that hip-hop would evolve into its most controversial iteration.
King’s beating was the inciting incident for the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the largest race riots the nation had seen since the sixties and the culmination of decades of institutional racism in police departments across the United States. Maxine Waters, the Representative for the 19th district of California, said of the eve of the riots, “The anger you see expressed out there in Los Angeles is a righteous anger.”
“Cop Killer,” a protest song recorded by Ice-T and his heavy metal group Body Count, was promptly blamed for the insurrection. President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle publicly spoke out against the track, and used its controversial lyrics as a springboard to condemn the genre in general. “Rap is really funny, man,” Ice-T told Rolling Stone in a feature interview. “But if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you.”
But by the end of 1992, the release of Dr. Dre’s wildly popular solo debut The Chronic on Death Row Records cemented what many already knew: the era of gangsta rap was in full swing.
Two of the genre’s most popular figures eventually fostered a professional rivalry that would result in both of their deaths, and mark a sea change in hip-hop’s culture. But they began as friends: Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur, both born in New York, met while Shakur was acting in the film Poetic Justice, and immediately connected. “Gemini thing,” Wallace — a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G. — said in a later interview. “We just clicked.” The two both blended aggressive exteriors with sentimental leanings; their approach to hip-hop highlighted both the hardest and softest sides of the genre.
But their mutual respect quickly turned into a heated rivalry: after being robbed and shot outside a Manhattan studio, Shakur, better known as 2Pac, immediately suspected Wallace and his labelmates on Bad Boy Records. Defecting to Death Row Records, the label Dr. Dre had begun with businessman Marion “Suge” Knight, 2Pac pledged allegiance to the West Coast and began to exacerbate the already existing tension between the East and West.
Hip-hop is a vibrant art form that touches people and gives voice to the voiceless.
Battles between rappers in the hip-hop community were nothing new: one of the most historic had taken place at Harlem World in 1981, when Kool Moe Dee wiped the floor with Busy Bee Starski on wax — Starski’s smooth pace was no match for Dee’s verbal spitfire. But Dee and Starski had kept their duel strictly musical; 2Pac and Biggie had no such preoccupations. For their part, Suge Knight and Sean “Puffy” Combs, Bad Boy Records’ CEO, came to verbal blows on several occasions.
In response to Biggie’s song “Who Shot Ya?”, which 2Pac interpreted as a personal attack, the rapper released “Hit ‘Em Up”, a merciless diss track whose music video included stand-ins for Biggie, Puffy and Bad Boy alumnus Lil’ Kim. The feud had gone from industry secret to media frenzy. With the pressure of their duelling coasts behind them, the duo’s rivalry had reached a boiling point. There was nowhere left to go but down. “Fear got stronger than love,” Tupac told Vibe magazine. “Niggas did things they weren’t supposed to do.”
On Sept. 7, 1996, Tupac was shot in Las Vegas — he died six days later in the hospital. That same year, The Notorious B.I.G. was in a car crash that led to the rapper walking with a cane for the rest of his life. On March 9th 1997, Biggie was shot four times in Los Angeles; he died immediately.
Hip-hop’s two most popular figures were gone in an instant, a fate Biggie himself had predicted in the eerily prescient “You’re Nobody (‘Til Somebody Kills You)”, the final track on his last studio album, Life After Death. As Dorian Lynskey, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote, “The two murders, both still unsolved, comprise the defining drama in the history of hip-hop.” No matter which side they were on, everyone in the hip-hop community knew things would never be the same.
Epilogue
No one knows for sure whether the murders of Biggie and 2Pac were related in any way to the East/West rivalry, although many assumed that this was the case — the rising popularity of internet forums spawned a variety of theories and possible suspects. Gangsta rap had monopolized the hip-hop market with boasts of violent crime, but no one had ever died as a result. If nothing else, the deaths of Biggie and 2Pac cast a shadow over the community. The popularity of the gangsta persona would never fully recover.
Instead, the result of the poisonous coastal rivalry had ushered in a new era in hip-hop: the age of the entrepreneur. Self-made rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye West, achieved fame and fortune with little street credibility. Both Death Row and Bad Boy fell into obscurity, to be replaced with Def Jam, whose relevance resurfaced at the turn of the century. The Internet would eventually render many hip-hop labels obsolete, as increasing numbers of fans would dig for hip-hop gold on the worldwide web.
Hip-hop has since come to dominate the radio waves, incorporating electronic and R&B influences. The 21st century has seen hip-hop become the most popular music genre in the world: listeners across the globe have found ways to use hip-hop as tools of education and cultural learning.
From its inception to the present day, hip-hop has been a vibrant art form that touches people and gives voice to the voiceless. It began as a way for inner city kids to escape the bleak housing projects of the Bronx and express themselves to an audience that had brushed them aside. Over the past few decades, hip-hop has become one of the most powerful art forms of all time, a sounding board for artists from myriad ethnic backgrounds and walks of life.
