It’s Time For a Hip-Hop History Rewrite
Why I’m sick of most Hip-Hop History…and you should be too
People travel from all over the world and take pictures in front of the address.
And every Hip-Hop story starts with it.
But frankly…
…I don’t want to hear that address ever again. In fact, outside of this title, I will not type it or mention it again. From this moment forward it will be referred to as “That Address.”
Look, rap fanatics are losing their shit. Look.
You people should be sick of hearing it too. When I say you people, I’m not talking about a race, creed, or color, I’m talking about the people who say they love Hip-Hop.
Why?
Well, it’s simple — any story in 2017 that starts that way, after 30 plus years of Hip-Hop scholarship, is going to be History Lite…at best.
At it’s worst, a story that starts that way, more often than not, is about to hit you over the head with a series of myths. And, rather than be subjected to that, since I probably couldn’t do it myself, I’d rather have Cornwall gouge out one of my eyes. I’m sick of that story.
Here’s why you should be as well:
I’m guilty of it too.
When I first began writing, I was trying to find my (mental) audience. So I guinea-pigged the young brothers on my WhatsApp group.
Due to the fact that most of them are in their early 30s, they hadn’t heard many of these stories. Because of that, I retold the history as it’s been told over and over.
That was 100 some odd articles ago.
The more I wrote about Hip-Hop the more I began questioning it…we’ll get to that…but then I realized…I’m not writing for the general audience. The general audience may or may not know something about Rap’s history. But by and large, a Rap fan doesn’t care.
Someone who claims that they’re into Hip-Hop will know some of the basic history and that’s who I began focusing on.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve had a couple of History classes in your life. You probably had 13 of em.
When you were a wee tike of six and had American History explained, you were told a story that went something like this:
Some friendly Indians had visited the Pilgrims during the winter, and Captain Myles Standish, with several of his men, had returned the visit.
One of the kind Indians was called Squanto, and he came to stay with the Pilgrims, and showed them how to plant their corn, and their pease and wheat and barley. Nora Smith
As an adult, you know that’s a crock of shit. And, if someone told you this story now, not only would you be offended, you would think the person telling you the story was either condescending or mentally challenged.
You know that this history is simplistic at best, problematic at worst.
You know that Squanto’s name was really Tisquantum and that he was enslaved. You know that this history is not only racist but that it doesn’t speak into what the Europeans and Patuxet encounter would mean for the Aboriginal people of North America (The Patuxet were completely wiped off the face of the earth due to European diseases).
You know this because you’re not an asshole. You know this because if you have children, you don’t want them to be taught this crap. You’re reasonable.
And since you’re reasonable, I know that you don’t want to continue to hear the same-damn-story told to you the same-damn-way 1,000 times over. I mean, hats off to the people who were able to get a greenlight on documentaries and books that are all about that rehash life. But it’s gotta stop.
You’re asking… “well, what do you want to see?” We’ll get to that. But we have to first spell out why things are the way that they are.
As I’ve mentioned in several places, I’ve been reading Hip-Hop books since there’s been Hip-Hop books, with the most informative being Steven Hager’s Hip-Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti.
That was 32 years ago.
In those 30 years, Hip-Hop books have become a cottage industry. They’re churned out like mixtapes. By no coincidence, as the Rap Industry exploded in the late 90s and early 2000s, so too did the volume of books on Rap and Graffiti. Many of these books were written by the artists (with an assist usually) to the point where now there are hundreds of books on Rap.
Despite this uptick in books, the same stories persist. In this writer’s opinion, most of what is printed is History-lite, Elementary History, History 101.
And we all know why.
It’s an industry. Books aren’t the most lucrative product and with fewer places to sell them, publishers need a hit. When the Rap Book Boom began, you could buy them in HMV, Virgin, Tower, Borders, Barnes & Nobles, and a plethora of independent bookstores. Rap books were promoted like Rap albums. There were whole endcaps with stacks and stacks of books. Sometimes there was even a promotional poster.
Seventeen years later, most of those outlets are closed which means fewer places to display books.
A new Rap book may have three slots, spine out (books with their cover displayed are the priority), and if that book doesn’t move in a week, it will dwindle down to one (slot).
Thus, publishers and bookstores are looking for titles that are going to move off the shelf. The history isn’t as important as selling through the inventory. This is the main reason that there’s been a rise in artist’s books — familiarity.
If you really want history, you have to know what you’re looking for. You have to go off the beaten path.
Back in 1996 I saw a documentary that blew my mind. This documentary walked the viewer through the rise of a musical scene: the innocence, the excitement. Then it showed the explosion of the scene: the quick popularity, the success, the celebrations. Then it showed the backlash of that success: the imitators, the commercialization, the over-saturation.
Then it showed the end of a once vibrant scene. From explosion to backlash — four years. That’s how long it took to exploit a region’s musical scene, package it, commercialize it, monetize it, milk it, and spit it out.
That documentary is hype! and before seeing it, I had never focused on the actual musical industry. Since then, Doug Pray’s doc has been a part of my teaching modules on what the music industry can and often does to a music scene.
What made Pray’s documentary effective is the director knew who to talk to and what to ask. Had he only interviewed the so-called stars of the scene — Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc — the perspective of his documentary would have had a limited scope.
There’s an excellent book, Everyone Loves Our Town, an oral history, by Mark Yarm that takes the subject broached in hype! even deeper. Again, the success of the book lies in the fact that Yarm knows who to talk to and what to ask. There’s nothing finer then reading one person’s recollection of an event, turning the page, and seeing someone totally refute what the other person just said.
That’s history. It’s not clean. It’s not cut and dry. And, unless there’s primary documentation that covered an event when it happened (i.e. a tape or video recording), more often than not, it’s all subjective.
Which is why most Hip-Hop history fails to be compelling — fails to the point where it’s bordering on myth. We don’t often see the counterpoints. Unless you know where to look.
If you’re looking to get the skinny on Rap History, JayQuan’s Tha Foundation is one of the places that you should look. Through extensive interviews with key players, JayQuan gets people to spell out the specifics — who was there, when did it happen, what was it like.
And Tha Foundation interviews everyone. But you have to know who you’re looking for. You can’t just click on interviews on the site and a slew of people come up. Nope. You need to know you’re looking for an interview on Brucie Bee. You might even have to type Brucie Bee/Rooftop/Tha Foundation in your search engine.
I always kick myself if I write something and don’t look at his site first (I mention Brucie Bee because I should have read his interview before I published my skate jawn). But JayQuan can’t interview everyone.
Before Paradise’s No Half Steppin’, which was released at the end of 2016, you would be hard-pressed to find any information on one of Hip-Hop’s most important clubs, The Latin Quarters. You might find a YouTube clip here or a paragraph there, but otherwise, it was just a history that resided in the minds of the people who lived it.
And that’s the same dilemma for the early days of Hip-Hop, we’re talking 1970 to 1975. Most so-called historians go straight to Herc, ask the same basic questions, which of course, yields the same answers, and then POOF, they shove it off to the people.
But I’ve never seen anyone explore the environment of the Bronx in that time beyond “there was gangs.”
Having come through the Five Percent and also being a student of the history of Islam in North America, I know that the Five Percenters had a strong influence, not just in the Bronx (which we called Pelan), but all over New York City (Wakeel Allah, one of the Nation of Islam’s most prominent Historians will be going into detail about that influence in an upcoming book). That’s never discussed.
And even in terms of the gangs, there’s no careful examination of the different divisions and members and their influence.
I stumbled on these YouTube clips while looking up various Herc interviews and a whole new world opened up.
I knew of the Black Spades, knew they were large, but didn’t know the role they played in what we know as the B-boy. If you go through all of the videos on Michael Waynetv, you’ll get an entirely different perspective of those early years of Hip-Hop. He interviews several people (separate of each other) whose stories all line up…many of them discounting the current Hip-Hop history myth.
Just because you’ve never heard of it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Then if you want to fast forward again to the so-called Golden Era of Hip-Hop, the days of the original Brooklyn Zoo, the Decepts, The Lo-Lifes, etc, if you don’t follow @albeesquare87 on Instagram, you’re not getting the full story.
Q. Douglas posts the rare photos — Guru graduating from Morehouse, young Raekwon, stuff like that — and most importantly, Douglas provides a narrative with the picture. His narratives, often poetic, paint a perfect picture of what life in New York was like in that era:
So I’m convinced that there are specific reasons that prevent the youth from shooting fair ones today, but in gladiator school you are forced to man up and learn how to protect yourself with hand to hand combat. Back in the days brothers would bring out the boxing gloves on the block so you can get that stress off your chest and live to see another day. How many real ones out there can relate to the world famous story of meeting their best friend through beef before they were cool trying to knock each other’s head off. HAVING HAND SKILLS WAS A MUST ON 31ST and S.T.P was a problem shout to CHAOS, ACE, SIKE and LOON who had them things, but they can all defend themselves well without em. My Gz never left the crib without gem stars in the zapatos cause they never knew when they would be shipped to the island and this is way before all the metal detectors now, Old Testament Medina. @albeesquare87
That’s the history — first hand accounts by the people who lived the events. Whether the stories are conflicting or not, having a collection of as many types of source materials (oral history, recordings, flyers, newspaper clips, etc.) gives us a better view of what actually took place. If you’re not questioning what you’re reading, then you certainly shouldn’t claim that you’re an Historian.
So when I see someone start their history with “that address,” I already know where that story is going. So please, spare me. Or just call me Gloucester and gouge out my other eye, I won’t need to see any of the history that you’re kicking. I’ve seen and heard it six sextillion times already.
