The Tanning of America Read online

  And then, finally, ready to put his learning to the test, in August 1973 Herc decided to join forces with his sister and become an entrepreneur. The two pooled their resources and rented the rec room of the apartment building to which they’d recently moved. The address? It was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. With nothing more by way of advertising than handwritten invitations promoting the first party and charging a few coins to get in, there must have been the smell of history in the making, because after word got out, kids showed up in droves. The crowd was mixed, mostly African-American, some Hispanic who were mainly of Caribbean black descent, and some whose families had recently arrived to the increasingly poverty-stricken, institutionally abandoned neighborhood, along with a few outliers from other backgrounds. But when the makeshift strobe started to pulse—thanks to a friend flicking the light switch on and off—and DJ Kool Herc took to the mic and began to play the breaks, there was only one language being spoken: pure, unadulterated fun.

  Hip-hop was born that night, even if it hadn’t been named yet, and so had the legendary status of DJ Kool Herc, whose reputation preceded him far and wide almost overnight. Other masterful MCs and DJs would rise to equal and greater prominence, but because Herc helped to create the language and would therefore remain in a class of his own, nobody could truly take the throne from him. He would forever remain proof of the possibilities, that you could come from nothing, from the streets and even from the least likely circumstances, and make an indelible mark on the world.

  The quest to leave a mark was not abstract—as could be heard in other voices contributing to the street code. There were the top graffiti writers, who spoke of “bombing” to describe their middle-of-the-night aerosol painting forays into the subway tunnels and onto tracks where the trains were locked down for the night. Battling individually or in crews, the objective was to see whose signature style could be most recognized and whose artwork could travel the farthest—literally, over the greatest stretch of tracks. B-boys and girls, many in their early teens, took existing dance moves out of the clubs, taped down cardboard on concrete, and invented new ways of twisting, flipping, and spinning to create their own signature moves, each one winding up in a gravity-defying “freeze” that if you could nail could make you a legend. The classic B-boy stance, arms folded over your chest, chin jutted, sideways lean, one foot extended, said everything without words—code in the form of gesture that was about defying the odds, about being proud of who you were, what crowd backed you, and inviting or challenging others to engage.

  So the party kept on rocking throughout the 1970s. Fueled by aspiration, collaboration, and competition, it continued almost completely under the radar of the rest of the world—including most of the island of Manhattan. That is, until some visionary individuals started to bridge the divide for no other reason than that they could. Fab Five Freddy, a Renaissance man of tanning, was one of those people. From Brooklyn, Freddy Brathwaite distinguished himself as a graffiti writer by tagging a particular train on the IRT line so often that he took the number—5—as part of his name. Also known as Freddy Love, a nickname that fits his outgoing energy and embrace of everyone and everything hip-hop, he had the crazy idea early in the game that graffiti artists were as important to popular culture as was, say, Andy Warhol. To make that statement, Fab Five Freddy began bombing trains by painting them with oversized Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol pop art style. It was a shout-out to an icon most graffiti writers didn’t necessarily know, and at the same time it signaled to the downtown art world that subway art could stand alongside high-priced works in their galleries, all day, any day. In fact, that idea would be captured in the 1983 breakout movie Wild Style, in which graffiti artist Lee Quinones starred and Freddy played a supporting role, as well as contributing to the soundtrack. A feature film with a fictional story line but shot like a documentary, Wild Style brought to life the roots of hip-hop culture. Writer/ director Charlie Ahearn cast many of the actual leading figures from the scene to make the movie all the more authentic.

  Whenever Freddy describes how the gaps between these seemingly disconnected worlds were bridged, he usually goes back to hip-hop’s jazz underpinnings, particularly in bebop—one of his earliest influences. Freddy’s godfather, jazz drummer and bebop pioneer Max Roach, was best friends with his dad, and in that mingling of black and Jewish and other immigrant sensibilities seeds were planted for cultural tanning and for the musical disobedience of conventional rules. Freddy told me, “My dad and Max and all the jazz guys believed that they were pushing music forward out of the underground to become the most important popular American art form. But then rock ’n’ roll and the Beatles happened and jazz, more or less, was pushed to the sidelines.” Miles Davis—and other musical rule-breakers—then rebelled against being segregated to a genre that spoke only to a narrow constituency. So Miles found the intersection between jazz and rock after going to the Fillmore and seeing Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

  One day when Max Roach had come to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn for a visit, a party was taking place with a DJ and Fab doing some of his own fun rhyming to the beat. After he had done his thing, Roach pulled him aside and told young Brathwaite, “This is some serious sh*t.” Popular music had always balanced melody, rhythm, and harmony; but now, Max Roach observed, the rhythm was going to take center stage and it was as powerful a force, even in infancy, as he had ever heard.

  To Fab Five Freddy, the baton really had been passed from bebop to rap pioneers with some help from R&B and rock ’n’ roll—as early as the sixties—so that the next form of counterculture expression (hip-hop) could pick up where jazz had been sidelined in order to give musical/cultural sharing its popular due.

  Freddy didn’t stop there. Before long, amazingly, he was instrumental in helping bring the uptown house party sensibility downtown. Not only did Fab Five Freddy help connect rap with the artsy disco/punk rock scene, but he also convinced gallery owners to open their doors to the work of graffiti writers. The next thing everyone knew, the most notorious East Coast graffiti artists were being linked with the likes of Fab’s downtown friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Suddenly gallery owners, art collectors, and critics were proclaiming the magnificence of graffiti on canvas as both serious and worth investing thousands of dollars in.

  The aspirational message that you could leave your mark on the world—and make some real money doing it—was new to the practitioners who had been doing the graff writing and rapping, as Fab observed, “from the standpoint of teenage angst.” And it was going to reverberate much more powerfully once rappers started to become recording artists. But that process, believe it or not, was not going to be so easy.

  It Takes a Woman

  The atmosphere of a house party, by its nature, never lent itself in any obvious way to recording or media technology. For radio programming and the sales of single records, the cut needed to last about three minutes. With most MCs rapping over the breaks of existing records, besides the fact that they could go on and on ’n’ ’n’ on for as long as an hour (or many more), they weren’t exactly writing songs that could be copyrighted lyrically or melodically. Besides that, the raps were frequently improvisations—freestyles—and included input from the crowd.

  What had been successful was the homemade mix tapes made and sold through word of mouth, not too differently from other street fare. Also, selling mix tapes at house parties—or at other performance settings where rap was becoming a viable offering—could be a lucrative business for local and celebrity DJs. That was enough to convince a new crop of independent producers to try to solve the puzzle of how to get rap onto records. For a while, nothing really worked and the consensus was that perhaps the elements were only suited for the live experience.

  But as the decade flew by and disco ran its course while R&B and other black artists were signed to major corporate labels—making Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall one of the biggest recording phenomena of 1979—there was a void in the
marketplace. Time for something different, something new. With the belief that rap’s moment had come, enterprising African-American indie-label producers stepped up their game, now with better results from a rap record or two that had existing fans impressed. Still, the magic hadn’t yet transferred to vinyl. While everyone was looking for the right mix, the resourceful producer who believed that such a translation was imminent and who wanted to be the one to do it first was former recording artist Sylvia Robinson of “Love Is Strange” and “Pillow Talk” hit fame.

  In mid-1979, Sylvia and her husband had recently opened the doors of their new label, Sugar Hill Records, in Englewood, New Jersey, and needed product. And, as the story goes, after hearing MCs rhyming at a few different parties, she began scouring the town to identify the top talent and record them. But much to her surprise, no crew with name value or real credibility was interested. Why should they have been? After all, the motivation for rappers was to master the art form and win the love of the live and local audience. So any commercial recording enterprise might run the risk of being seen as inauthentic to the house party/performance art medium. Besides, if you were among the best MCs and wanted to put out a record, you would either produce it yourself (as with mix tapes) or go with an established label, not a start-up spearheaded by an outsider with ties to conventional R&B in suburban New Jersey.

  But as I learned from my own mom, later from my daughter, and pretty much from every influential female in my life, there is no stopping a woman on a mission. Sylvia Robinson was relentless and resourceful. Instead of discovering a crew of leading rappers who had MC’d together and had an identity and a following, Sylvia ended up signing three guys on the fringes of the scene—if that—who had never performed together up until the day they went into the studio the first time. One was Wonder Mike, a friend of Sylvia’s son, who theretofore had been employed in a pizza joint, where he practiced his rhymes on customers. Another was Master Gee, signed by Sugar Hill Records after he arranged for an audition. The third, Big Bank Hank, was allegedly discovered when Sylvia heard him rapping in the kitchen of a nightclub where he worked as a bouncer.

  Now that the crew had been built to order, the real producing challenge was deciding what the track would be and how the instrumentation would be laid down without a DJ. Here history gets kind of murky, but as best as I can put it together, it seems that the resourcefulness of another woman, Debbie Harry—lead singer of the band Blondie and a key figure in tanning for a few reasons—played an unwitting role in the selection process.

  It was Harry, a sex symbol and seventies sensation, American but aligned with British punk rock and new wave, who helped connect the megahit-making writer/producer Nile Rodgers of the band Chic to the house party rap scene then moving into clubs and dance halls. Pulling the strings for that connection as well was none other than Fab Five Freddy, who had been talking to Debbie and her boyfriend/musical collaborator Chris Stein about pulling off a huge concert that would feature up-and-coming MCs along with Blondie, Chic, and the Clash. Though the big concert never took place, they were able to get Nile Rodgers out to a rap show. And when he took to the stage and began to play Chic’s latest summer hit, “Good Times,” all of a sudden Fab and some of the top rappers in the audience leapt onto the stage, grabbed mics, and began freestyling away.

  Whether or not anyone from Sugar Hill Records was in the audience, no one knows. But what is known is that from then on, at shows around town, a mainstay of the entertainment was often somebody getting up to rap to “Good Times.” When that was chosen as the basis for Sugar Hill’s first rap record, it showed how well the label was paying attention. When some of those freestyle lyrics that got passed from party to party ended up on the record, it was hard for anyone who may have come up with the original lines to claim credit because they weren’t copyrighted or published.

  After “Rapper’s Delight” came out, however, there was no debate about the fact that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were owed songwriting credit for the recognizable bass line that had been borrowed, innocently or not, from “Good Times” and they had no problem getting it. To this day, no one can believe that the bass player hired for the session—before recording techniques for sampling were around—was able to keep the same line going perfectly for the entire fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Everyone assumed that they were playing the actual record and extending the break.

  Some might say that Sylvia Robinson had gotten lucky, having gone out to find gold where everyone else was looking for it and then coming up with the first catch. But I think it was much more than luck or great timing when she made the strategic decision to record and release “Rapper’s Delight” as an almost-fifteen-minute extended-play twelve-inch single. Even as a novelty record that only sold on the street by word of mouth, it would have been brilliant. Yet the real brilliance was following up the street success by enflaming consumer demand for radio play. How else do you get DJs to disrupt rotation rules to play a fifteen-minute single other than by flooding the station’s request lines?

  So the gauntlet had been thrown down. The proof was in. If you were aspirational, you now believed in the possibilities. If you had seen what Sugar Hill Records had accomplished, going from nothing to being the hottest indie label for a genre that had yet to be defined—with the serious profits to go with that—your conclusion would be that you might have a shot too. If you had heard a nearly fifteen-minute hip-hop record on the radio at prime time and you were paying attention to its broad-based appeal, you had to know there was a lot more gold in them thar hills.

  You probably would have been thinking those things if you were a charismatic young man from Queens with incredible instincts and entrepreneurial blood in your veins, say, by the name of Russell Simmons, and were starting to try your hand at managing hip-hop artists and producing rap records—now that the field had broken wide-open. Or at least that’s what I would assume by the fact that just in time for the winter holidays at the end of 1979, one of Russell’s artists, Kurtis Blow, was signed to Mercury Records—the first rapper to go with a major label—and they released his “Christmas Rappin’,” which promptly sold four hundred thousand copies. Following that up with “The Breaks,” Kurtis soon went on to become the first rapper to have a gold record and to perform it on the popular music TV show Soul Train.

  Of course, the increasingly corporate-run music industry and mainstream media should have now been on notice that hip-hop was more than a passing fancy, more than a disco afterthought tossing crumbs out to the ghetto kids. Even if it was conceivable that there was a hungry market behind the graffiti’d walls or on the other side of the tracks, the industry executives didn’t speak that language—and, frankly, had no interest in learning to. As in any cultural disconnect, one could say that there was a degree of ethnocentricity in their lack of concern about urban blight and the fact that stretches of the inner city right in their backyards were beginning to look like war zones, with working-class families teetering on the edge. One could say that they saw but looked away, unable as they were to understand why it was that at the dawn of the 1980s, most of the symbols of aspiration, with a few exceptions, were turning out to be drug dealers and pimps.

  The sociology of rap’s future, however, wasn’t really at issue. The music was simply not commercially enticing, nor was it justified to an industry really marketing to white kids in suburbia. The math told the story. With the sizable price tags for producing the music videos that were going to be mandatory for record promotion, given the advent of MTV, the costs of investing in an unproven genre like hip-hop, without superstars, made the discussion a nonstarter. Lest we forget, the MTV platform when it launched in 1981 was rock, mostly new wave and hard rock and later metal—with artists like David Bowie, Duran Duran, and, eventually, Bon Jovi. MTV flat-out refused to show the video of Rick James’s smash “Super Freak,” and it wasn’t until 1983 that Michael Jackson videos were approved for rotation.

  All of this is to say tha
t if you were betting the odds, as is the case for most businesses most of the time, after “Rapper’s Delight” and Kurtis Blow’s appearance on Soul Train, the assumption might have been that the fun had by hip-hop and its fans was over. But not everybody was betting the odds, thankfully.

  Enter Blondie and their 1981 single “Rapture,” on the Chrysalis label—with its accompanying music video that took everyone by surprise. With a song that followed a rock model, out of nowhere, after the first verse, here was a white girl, a punk/pop singer, suddenly doing a change-up—rapping over the break. Not just rhyming, Debbie Harry was also talking about the sexy world of rap, even going so far as to name two of its celebrities, Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. In fact, they were both supposed to be in the video but Flash couldn’t make it, so Fab Five Freddy showed up with Jean-Michel Basquiat; the two can be seen to this day in the video, graff-writing on the walls. This was not the last time that Freddy would play a role in hip-hop’s migration into the world of music videos, as we’ll see later on. And meanwhile, the door couldn’t have been opened at a better time. True, “Rapture” didn’t make Debbie Harry’s career. But what it did for rap music was everything. When the record charted at number one on the Hot 100 Billboard list, it became the first rap-infused single to do so. Plus, the “Rapture” video made history as the first outing of rap on MTV. Coming from Blondie, it was a signal of how adaptive the genre was and how it would not be restricted to one kind of music over another. A creative liberation! What’s more, by using her prominence at that time to shout out two hip-hop icons, Debbie Harry authenticated an art form.