Sammy Turned Me into a Hip-Hop Fan for Life!
…Sort of
In fourth grade Sammy Ortiz changed my life. The year was 1978 and I had been living in Riverdale for two years.
Before that I lived in the South Bronx. Although both neighborhoods are located in the same borough, they are culturally and physically worlds apart. Ironically, Sammy and I lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same elementary school in the South Bronx. I didn’t know him then but I did know his sister Lucy, who was in my second grade class.
That winter my mother, her boyfriend and I relocated to Henry Hudson Parkway, right in the center of Riverdale. A year later, I got a new student in my class and her name was Lucy Ortiz. How random is that? Two kids from the same class in the South Bronx were now in the same class a year later in swanky-ass Riverdale. Random, right? Word. But the randomness is on a roll.
Later that year my mother and I moved away from Henry Hudson Parkway and her cheatful boyfriend and into Lucy’s building. This was when I met her brother Sammy for the first time. Sammy and I quickly became best friends. It wasn’t long before I was hanging out in his apartment for hours. The first time this happened my mother came knocking on his door. When Sammy’s mother opened it to let my mother in, she asked, “Jackie?” My mom responded, “Carmen?”
Guess what? Our mothers grew up together and went to school with each other in the (yeah, you know it) South Bronx. So let’s recap for a sec: Our mothers grow up with each other, loose contact but then wind up sending their children to the same school and to the same class in the South Bronx. We leave the “hood” and move to Riverdale. The Ortiz family unwittingly follows and Lucy and I end up in the same class again. Then we move into the same building. Funny how life is.
As much as this seems like a story about how my family circles The Bronx with the Ortiz’s, it’s not. It’s about how Sammy changed my life. Up until the point that I met and became friends with Sammy, I had been a complete product of my mother. She should have been a complete product of the tenements in Harlem and the projects of the South Bronx that she was raised in, but she wasn’t. She didn’t hang out much, she was an avid reader, and she listened to Rock not Soul, R&B, Funk or Disco.
Her radio station was 102.7 WNEW “Where Rock Lives!” I was raised on a healthy dose of Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel, Hall and Oats, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles (I woke up to my mother crying when John Lennon was shot), The Rolling Stones, Queen (My mother took me to see Tommy in the movie theater. I was five, WTF?), Steely Dan, Steve Miller Band, Carol King, Cat Stevens, Jackson Brown, The Who, The Doors, Peter Allen, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills and Nash and, of course, Hendrix. The list goes on but I think you get the drift. This is not to say that I didn’t know who Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner (She was in Tommy and scared the sh*t out of me.), Diana Ross or any other black artist was. I’m just saying they weren’t played in my house.
So please understand why, the day Sammy came upstairs to my apartment, decided to listen to some music by turning on the radio, heard, “WNEW, Where Rock lives!”, then looked at me like I was crazy, I didn’t blink. It had never occurred to me to change the dial on our Pioneer receiver.
At this time there were only two stations that played black that weren’t jazz; 107.5 WBLS was probably more R&B and 92 WKTU was more Disco. Sammy turned the dial to WKTU Disco 92. This one action changed everything in my house forever.
I don’t want to sound apologetic for growing up listening to Rock. I love good music and a lot of Rock falls into that category. However, listening to Rock brings up two very interesting points. The first was, because white artists predominantly cultivated Rock at that time, it had little to offer me in the way of the black experience. Riverdale epitomized this fact by having a white dominant population that was very much into Rock music and definitely not into any music that fell under the “black music” banner. The other interesting point was that until Sammy turned that dial, I had never considered formulating my own musical taste.
In 1979, about a year or so later, the first commercially successful Hip-Hop record, Rapper’s Delight (The first Hip-Hop record made was King Tim III by the Fatback Band, but it didn’t have much commercial success), was pressed and played on the radio. Something was now awake in me. What I didn’t realize at the time, before Hip-Hop, when I turned on the radio to listen to music, the songs were abstract. Hip-Hop wasn’t; it was local. They were talking about the Bronx, going to 42nd Street, the subway, clubs that I was too young to go to but very much wished I could, the Knicks, and break dancing. It wasn’t long before I saw these Hip-Hop artists wearing the same clothes that I was. B-Boy culture was being represented in the music. R&B, Rock, and Disco might as well have been made by people who were a hundred years old. Hip-Hop was being made by the life that I was experiencing.
The biggest thing in Hip-Hop to me back then was going to a “jam.” Deejays would set up turntables outside to spin, cut and mix records for any and everyone in the neighborhood. MCs would get on the mic and rock. The first time I went to a jam, the deejay cutting and scratching Upside Down by Diana Ross. That sealed it for me; this was my music for life. I would always be a loyal participant.
The first song ever released on Def Jam was called, It’s Yours, by T La Rock. This was and probably still is the most complete and thorough Hip-Hop song ever made. I have always considered it Hip-Hop’s anthem. It had everything a Hip-Hop song was meant to have: great lyrics, dope beat, cuts and scratches, and it was catchy. The song was lyrically before it’s time because the first verse of T La Rock’s rhyme . . . doesn’t rhyme. The song is an analysis of the techniques used to create the Hip-Hop art form, but it never mentions the name of the art form. Whether this was intentional or not, I don’t know, but I can tell you that it was genius.
If Sammy hadn’t turned the dial on my mother’s stereo that day, I’m sure I would have still liked Hip-Hop, but I would have just been a passive listener. What Sammy did was show me that I had a choice.
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