“Turn That Jungle Music Off!” — When Rap Was Abhorrent
A walk through a time when Rap was loud, aggressive, boisterous, counterculture and outward…then the headphones won
Growing up, damn near everyone hated Rap.
You were lucky if one parent could tolerate it, my Mom ain’t have a problem with Rap, she just didn’t listen to it, but my Dad…
“Turn off that hip-hop bippity bee bop mess!”
…is what he would scream the second he heard them DMX drum kicks. To top it off, we couldn’t even listen to Rap at all on Sunday…and that’s when Power 99 & Lady B’s Street Beat came on. We had to throw a tape in, make sure that the tape was lined up right, hit record, and turn the volume down.
I know many women would disagree, but for the most part girls (because I was a boy when Rap was young) were annoyed by Rap. They thought it was immature and preferred the sweet sounds of R&B.
So if you had a double speaker radio, which people came to call a ghetto blaster or boombox, and you played Rap…loud…it was an offense (depending on who you were around). The beats were hard. The rhymes and the staccato rhythm that they were said in coupled with the slang made understanding for the uninitiated impossible. You had to have a thick skin to be into Rap music back then.
Some would argue that the music has changed drastically. I would disagree. If you’re unfamiliar, you still may not understand it and depending on what you’re listening to, it may still be offensive. What’s changed, however, is how the music is experienced.
Listening to Rap and all music nowadays is a personal experience done in solitude even when amongst others. Children listen to all types of inappropriate music unbeknownst to their parents because the children do so with ever-present earbuds or headphones. You don’t have to be counter anything to listen to Rap. No one knows what you’re listening to and in this writer’s opinion, that changes everything.
Prior to the advent of Television, Radio was the only electronic medium. From the 20s to the 50s, the era considered ‘The Golden Age of Radio,’ families gathered around the radio and listened to the news, variety shows, dramas, and eventually as Television became more prominent, music.
But it was stationary.
If you wanted to listen to a record, you listened to it in your home. If you wanted to listen to your favorite radio station, pull up a chair, bub. All that would change in the mid-50s when transistors became affordable.
Like all origin stories, everyone claims to be the first, so we’ll skip over that part and fast forward to Transistor Radios becoming popular.
Transistor Radios were right on time. Popular music was becoming more youth-oriented and as we talked about here, many of the popular acts of the day were either teens or barely out of their teens. Groups like The Chords and Mello Moods were street legends that inspired others to believe that they too could belt out a tune and become famous.
This was the beginning of the famous Disk Jockey. In New York you had DJs like Dr. Jive who had the daily call of “sit back and relax and enjoy the wax; from three-oh-five to five-three-oh, it’s the Dr. Jive Show.” He could be found at 1600 on the AM dial. Down in Atlanta you had Jockey Jack Gibson (who became known as Jack the Rapper) at the Black-owned WERD, 860 on the AM dial. Up in Detroit you had Frantic Ernie Durham who rhymed most of his broadcast on WJLB, 1400 on the AM dial. These DJs were PERSONALITIES and loved by the youth.
Now you could be out on the street and listen to your favorite DJ. The Transistor Radio was pocket-sized and the amount of transistors was another part of the ads (Pocket-sized, four transistor radio…like that). But you had to pay the price if you were an early adopter. When the Regency TR-1 was introduced in October of 1954, that jawn cost $49.95…$454 in modern money. You had to be ballin’. A year later Chrysler introduced the transistor car radio…$1,368 (in 2017 money).
By the 60s, the price was reduced and the transistor count increased, meaning the Transistor Radio was more abundant and louder; more transistors, louder sound. My Dad said he saved up his lunch money to cop his RCA and knew he was the man as he jumped between WAUG (750AM) & WTHB (1550AM)…even though he was late to the party. The real rebels, my Dad continued, were the ones that brought their radios to school.
He came of age as Motown became “The Sound of Young America.” From Martha and the Vandellas “Dancing in the Streets” to The Temptations “I Wish it Would Rain,” Berry Gordy’s powerhouse of a record label churned out hit after hit. Those singles bookended my Dad’s high school matriculation and he experienced those songs via his RCA Transistor Radio.
Incidentally, Barry Gordy and Motown Chief Engineer, Mike McClean designed the mix, intentionally hot, to sound good on portable Transistor Radios and Car Stereos. It was a match made in heaven. Success breeds imitators and there were throngs of soundalikes (A music that would produce a movement in England called Northern Soul).
As the 60s rolled over to the 70s, those simple six and eight transistor radios would be unable to handle the next wave in Black youth music — Funk.
Tom Tom (Tom Palmer) was our idol.
Two years my brother’s senior, Tom Tom was the embodiement of cool. He was the first person that had a tricked out Stingray with reflectors and mirrors, he was the first to have a mini bike, the first to have a bb gun (which he terrorized us with), the first to be a part of a clique (The B.o.y.zs — the Playboy bunny was their identifier), and the first to have a Boombox.
Tom Tom had what I now know as the JVC RC 550 (bka El Diablo) but then it was just a bad ass radio with which he would play Zapp “More Bounce to the Ounce” or Funkadelic “Freak of the Week.” The standout feature on that JVC RC 550 was that 10" woofer, perfect for “Flashlight” and any other bass-heavy track. Tom Tom was a walking party, a Pied Piper to us eight and ten year olds who loved the music he was playing and loved the fact that it was loud.
Although the Radio/Cassette Recorder had been around since the late 60s, they were uncommon. Most people only owned one of those portable voice recorders that were originated by Phillips back in 63. If you were lucky, you had a rinky dink microphone that you could plug in and make voice recordings, otherwise your audio was ass. Incidentally, the majority of the early bootleg Hip-Hop tapes were made with these type of recorders (Perhaps you recall Rerun strapped one on to himself to record the Doobie Brothers in a Season 2 episode of What’s Happening).
We grew bored with the limitations of those recorders and longed…no begged to have a Cassette Recorder that gave us the option to record the radio. Finally, in the Fall (for my brother) and winter (for me) of 1981, our wishes were granted.
I was so jealous.
My older brother Ade’s birthday is in October, and for his special day he got a Superscope CR-1203s. It was so damn cool…although I tried to pretend that it wasn’t. And, even when I got my Sanyo (can’t remember the model number) that December, it was clear — he had the better radio. What was that based on? One thing and one thing only. Who’s radio was the loudest.
The music that we liked was synth and bass heavy and lent itself to popping routines…not by me, of course, but Ade and Bruce Cooley, our block’s finest.
If we had a fresh set of batteries, we’d take our radios out on the porch, in front of the house, or in the alleys where we’d listen to music as we either played sports or lazed around. Ade’s radio blew mine out of the water everytime. I kept it in the house.
That said, there’s no way for me to talk about Radio/Recorders without talking about Cassette Culture.
I can look at that pic of cassettes and identify with at least eight of them.
The third row over, third cassette down, that TDK was my tape of choice in the Summer of 85. I had UTFO Leader of the Pack on one of those. Last row over, four cassettes down, I used a bunch of those clear TDK my freshman year at Clark Atlanta. Lots of Dancehall/Rockers. Lots of House.
It doesn’t matter how good your Radio/Recorder was if you had a poor cassette, one with a lot of hiss, or one prone to pops, then you might as well play the radio.
Generally speaking, we bought 90 minute cassettes, 45 minutes on each side or enough space to fit two whole albums on each side. But when we were younger, we took whatever we got — 60 minutes, sucked but we’d use them.
We even took prerecorded tapes — tapes that already had music on them and either stuffed tissue in the top two tabs or taped over them. After doing that, the cassette was as good as new (see: figure below).
We became masters of tape. Some cassettes got caught in the play head of the tape recorder and we learned to unravel it without tearing it, being careful not to crinkle the magnetic tape. Those crinkles distorted the music and also made the cassette susceptible to being caught again.
Sometimes it was impossible to free the tape and we learned to take the scissors, cut the tape on both the right and left of the playhead, and then, with the precision of a surgeon, we’d tape both the right and left side together, leaving the tangled bit of tape in the cassette player.
Sometimes you could easily yank that tangled mess out. Other times you had to hit rewind or forward to release it. I was a pro at cassette surgery and used to charge a dollar for each bit of the process mentioned above.
The long cassettes — the 100 minute jawns were prone to snaps and getting caught and tangled. As a result, they were a last result. The extra length wasn’t worth it.
And that’s just the maintenance.
As I mentioned, we started out recording songs on the radio. Magic 1510, KDKO was our station. When we first moved to Colorado in the fall of 78, it played that popular Soft Rock/Soul/Easy Listening blend. That’s how I know Christopher Cross and the Doobie Brothers.
I first heard “Rapper’s Delight” on KDKO — it was a novelty record — but as Rap records began to become “a thing” they rarely played them. Hell, they barely played any Funk songs. So Cameo, Lakeside, Gap Band, Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy, Fat Back Band, whoever, you weren’t hearing them. You were hearing Champaign’s “How ‘Bout Us,” you were hearing Jeffrey Osborne’s “On The Wings of Love.”
If you had Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” Tyrone Branson’s “The Smurf,” or any Rap song on a cassette that would raise your ghetto stock. But you also got praise for Junior’s “Mama Used to Say” and Cheri’s “Murphy’s Law” which come to mind because KDKO played them in that order every time.
But there was also the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” and Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots.” There was One Way’s “Cutie Pie” and Gap Band’s “Early in the Morning.” These were songs that our Mom may have listened to but they weren’t her favorites. This was the beginning of our youth culture. The year was 1982.
Everything changed in 83.
The culture that people now know as Hip-Hop flourished and spread that year. Prior to that, like we discussed in How Rap Obliterated R&B, our definition of what Hip-Hop was broad and included any music that we could pop or break to. The advent of the drum machine and the rise of Run DMC altered that forever. As we talked about here, the fuel for that was mass media.
Up until that moment, I can’t say that I had ever seen a double speaker radio. But they were in every music video in 83…and impossible for an eleven year old to find. One thing that an eleven year old still has in abundance is imagination and I would walk around the house with my little one speaker radio, bumping songs recorded off the newly discovered Eclipse.
Unlike KDKO which was still trapped in the AM frequency of the past, Eclipse was an FM station. And not only was Eclipse FM, it had a dedicated Rap Radio Show…only thing was it lived on the far end of the FM dial, 88.5 to be precise. So it was hard finding the signal, even harder keeping it. You had to extend the antenna on your radio and walk around until you found the right spot.
In Park Hill, everyone was tuning in and a new culture emerged — modified bicycles with stereo racks attached. Let me explain. We grew up on 36th and Grape — a block North of us all the way to Commerce City were companies. This was an era when wood classes were normal. Well, the words “what can I use this for” never escaped the mouths of young Black boys in my hood.
We knew what to do with that training.
We would go to these companies, steal wood, cut four to six holes, as well as a rectangle slot (or two depending on if you had an EQ), and then we would secure a car stereo…preferably a Pioneer or an Alpine, four woofers, a couple of tweeters, and “somehow” we’d find a way to generate power. We’d find latches, make a rig to hook it unto our bikes, and ride up 36th street — from Fairfax to Holly — blasting “Pac Jam.” This took the place of riding wheelies up that same block…and also garnered more respect.
This was a time before police were paid to lock us up, when we only saw the cops when a crime was committed. So Demetrius Mothershed could ride up and down our blocks, rattling windows, making his presence known long before you saw him and at the most our parents griped about the music being so loud. Listening to the music itself wasn’t a crime.
I don’t know if the hand-made bike box was something done in Black neighborhoods all over America or if it was a Park Hill thing, but for us that culture preceded the “boom box” one which didn’t really take hold until after Breakin’, Beat Street, and a slew of videos.
Come 1985, what we called double speaker radios and what was negatively dubbed “ghetto blasters” finally are marketed as Boom Boxes, though I never knew anyone to call them that. Ok…maybe MC Lyte.
“So get ya ghetto blaster, boom box, whatever you call it — Grab it by the handle and start uhaulin’ it.” Funky Song (89)
Hip-Hop as a nationwide culture was on the tail end, fad wise. ‘How To’ books were made on B-boying (breakdancing) and the residuals of that fad were the adoption of Rap as the Beastie Boys emerged, Run-DMC made more accessible music (for white folks), and record labels began seeing profits.
For the most part, Boom Boxes were defanged and no longer looked at as being attached exclusively to Hip-Hop culture. Hence, the above ad (and several others like it).
In that regard, Radio Raheem in Do The Right (89), the smashing of his radio and subsequent death are almost a symbol of the death of that phase of B-Boy. When Sal yelled at Radio Raheem “Turn that jungle music off,” he echoed the words of many whites, young and old. That was common. We weren’t in the theater shocked at that statement. Radio Raheem, like many of us, was an annoyance to be tolerated but rarely looked at as a criminal. Things escalated from there.
And as my brother Bashir Allah oft said, the music aged with us. We got licenses and cars and the criminalization of Rap music became more than perception.
Darryl Dawkins made the NBA introduce the breakaway rim after shattering one back board too many. Hell, the NBA made all types of rule changes because of Shaq in the 2001–2 season. Don’t think for a second that the same doesn’t happen outside of the world of sport and play.
It happens when they change requirements to to get certain jobs, it happens when we know the law, and it happens when we learn how to boost the decibels of our car systems. Seriously.
Sure, I mostly listened to music with my headsets on, Realistic Stereo-Mate SCP21 in tow, but I ain’t have a car. And most people just had factory systems. Except for Andre Law. He had 12" woofers and a sub woofer in the back of his Ford Escort. I’on’t remember what kind of system he had just that it was a pull-out, which was the most sought out kind of the time.
Then there would be a power amp thrown in, pro’ly 50 watts, a five band equalizer, with two bands for the sub woofer, man, listen. The aim was to have the car knock, where the trunk rattled, but still be able to hear the words of the song. We loved to listen to LL’s “Doo Wop” in Andre’s car. The 808s in that song are sick.
But as Crack began to ravage neighborhoods from Tallahassee to Tacoma, Los Angeles gangs flourished, and general street crime increased, the focus of officers also shifted — they no longer waited for a crime to occur, nope. Cops were now paid to “find” and “stomp out” crime. Black men became a target and what better way to pull over random Black men than making a loud car illegal.
When I think about how I experienced Rap as an adult it is almost always in a car.
Rolling to Boulder with Understanding Allah rocking Stunts, Blunts, & Hip-Hop or having “Unbelievable” on repeat five deep in Bashir Allah’s Honda, that was the Rap listening experience. And all over America, getting pulled over, fined, sometimes having your car searched, sometimes being patted down, were also a part of that experience.
Mid 90s Rap is full of those references. So I’ll only list two. Check Masta Ace in “Jeep Ass Niguh:”
Black boy, black boy, turn that shit down
You know that America don’t wanna hear the sound
Of the bass drum jungle music
Go back to Afrika
Niguh, I’ll arrest ya if you’re holding up traffic
I’ll be damned if I listen
So cops, save your breath and
Write another ticket if you have any left and
I’m breakin’ eardrums while I’m breakin the law
I’m disturbin’ all the peace cause Sister Soldier said, “We’re at War”
So catch me if ya can, if ya can. Here’s a donut
Cause when you drive away, yo, you know Ima go nut
And turn it up yo where it was before.Nice try,
But you can’t stop the power of the bass in your eye
If wonder if I blasted
A little Elvis Presley
Would they pull me over and attempt to arrest me?
And Naughty by Nature had a couple of skits about the subject, one on their self-titled debut before “Strike a Nerve” and this one before “Holdin’ Fort” on the Poverty’s Paradise jawn:
Oh, oh hell yeah
(police sirens, car screeches)(Alright we don’t want any problems here. y’all just break it up) Five-0
(Just, just) Say what? (go on home)
(We don’t want to take anybody in. We don’t want to give any citations
I ain’t going nowhere, I ain’t going nowhere
(just, go on home and turn down that music)
Fuck that we having fun (Turn, I want the music turned off)
Ain’t nobody doing nothing, ain’t nobody doing nothing (right now!)
Now, don’t get me wrong. The music would be loud as shit. If I rode with my cousin Rick through the streets of Sharon Hill, he gave me earplugs. The bass from a well-done system would set off car alarms. If you were traveling, you had to rent a car. Couldn’t put nothing in the trunk, ahk.
It was a different time where there wasn’t 1,000s of Rap songs. We were able to identify most songs by the muffled bass a block away. That’s how you knew if a song was popular. How many times you heard cars driving by playing the same thing. We ain’t care how many albums a record sold. Do we hear it in the park? Do we hear it on the block? Is it playing in the club parking lot?
And it wouldn’t just be the single either. People cruised to the whole album.
You did so at your own peril, however. If you got pulled over and hit with a citation that was a $150 ticket, adjusted for inflation…that’s a $261 dollar problem. This is what we were talking about and this is why Masta Ace made his point about Elvis. I doubt any boomers were suping their cars up and rocking with Mr. Blue Suede Shoes, but fans of Nirvana, Stone Temples Pilot, Pearl Jam, they may have but still didn’t suffer the same type of harrasment.
Check New York Vehicle and Traffic Law N.Y. VEH. & TRAF. LAW § 375(47)(a) (McKinney 1995):
47. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to operate or cause to be
operated, an audio amplification system which is operated in, installed in or powered by a vehicle which generates an A-weighted sound level in excess of seventy dB (A) measured at, or adjusted to, a distance of
twenty-five feet from the vehicle which is driven, standing, or parked
on a public highway, or within one hundred feet of a public highway
unless that system is being operated to request assistance or warn of a
hazardous situation.
For perspective, a vacuum cleaner emits 70 dB of noise.
New York State wasn’t alone. Cleveland went as far as confiscating people’s systems and auctioning them off after three violations. If you want, you can read Stuart A. Laven’s 63 page PDF in the Cleveland State Law Review, Turn Down the Volume. There’s some serious source material in there for you to sink your teeth in. But the whole thing could be summarized in these four words. 1) Them 2) Laws 3)Were 4) Racist.
And if you never read Laven’s piece, this should suffice:
While there is no “smoking gun” upon which one could conclude that any particular car stereo ordinance was adopted as a way to deal with the culture of rap music and those who enjoy it, there is enough circumstantial evidence to at least negate the argument that the emergence of rap music and car stereo noise ordinances is simply coincidental. Stuart A. Laven
But we don’t need a 63 page paper to tell us that do we?
Funny thing. As Rap became more popular and ruled the Billboard 100, during the time where every damn rapper went platinum and rappers became t.v. personalities and movie stars, the phenomenon of boosting the car system slowly vanished….this, despite Xzibit pimping rides left and right on MTV. NPR even did a recent report on how car systems are rarely stolen nowadays.
Rap became what Motown used to be — the music of young America. If you hear a vibrating trunk nowadays, there’s no telling who is driving the car.
Despite that, the negative associations with Rap music and Black people persist. I’m sure we all remember the murder of Jordan Davis, killed after an altercation between Davis and William Dunn who was bothered by Davis’ “Thug music.” Dunn ordered Davis and friends to turn down their music. They refused, and when someone among Davis’ party got out the car Dunn resorted to the go to line — he “feared for his life.”
Dunn went into his glove compartment, pulled his gun, and shot into Davis’ car ten times. Three of those bullets hit Davis, killing him. Jordan Davis was 17.
If that’s not crazy enough, when Dunn was on trial, Davis’ friends were made to testify to the jury what exactly they were listening to that fateful day. Why that matters is beyond me.
My Brother Sayyed Munajj likes to joke that we used to listen to music with big devices and small headphones now we listen to music with big headphones and little devices. He was talking about most of the world, not himself. Sayyed used to walk the halls of high school with huge headphones and a cord long enough to use as a jump rope.
But that was Sayyed. The majority of the world listened to music with small headphones or earbuds, self included. I lived by my Sony earbuds. Whether the device was cassette or CD, few people ever graduated beyond the plain o headphones.
I almost sat out the entire run of the CD. I was a tape maker. I enjoyed making custom cassettes, different tapes for different moods.
(Who didn’t make slow tapes back then?)
CDs? Man, them shits were self-contained. By the time burning CDs and making playlists were popular, the MP3, Limewire and all that was popping. People complained about the quality of MP3s but I couldn’t tell…neither could most people. We listened through basic headphones.
Even they were made obsolete as the iPod and “iPod Silhouette” marketing campaign took hold. Soon the white Apple earbuds were ubiquitous to the point where muggers knew that white earbuds equaled iPods and later iPhones.
The culture of the iPod and iTunes changed the way people consumed music. The most important advancement for me was the fact that you could fit hundreds of songs on a device and not have to carry tapes and cassettes anymore.
But for most people it meant that they could sample a little of this and a little of that. The average playlist started sounding like Starbucks morning rush hour music — Top 40 songs mixed with eclectic “oldies” and always a random Rap song…listened to on shitty white earbuds.
The only things that surprised me about how quickly Beats by Dre blew up were the fact that people would pay that much for headphones and that they would wear those huge fuckers on the street. That’s why Dre is a billionaire and I’m not.
At first people identified Beats as “urban” but now…everyone owns a pair or some other huge equivalent (even I submit and got some big as shit Bluetooth headphones).
Some say that never has a time existed where music listeners consumed such a wide spans of music. “It’s the end of genres” they proclaim.
I think that I agree with Logan Sama’s assessment where he compared the modern listener to a house cat that has learned to expect it’s meal at the same time and same place daily. That cat couldn’t hunt if put out into the wild to save it’s life.
Coming of age alongside Rap meant that we the listeners were emboldened with the same level of inventiveness and ingenuity that the creators of the music had. Lack produced both.
It was also an era where competitiveness produced craftsmanship. It wasn’t enough to have a radio, boombox, or whatever. You had to have the loudest. You had to play the best music. You had to do it consistently.
And it was an outward expression. Sure, you liked what you liked but you also wanted to blow the block away when you played that 12" single that no one heard yet. You wanted your car system to be so clear and so loud that heads turned and nodded in approval as you cruised by.
All of those things gave us lovers of Rap a sense of community. If other people in other communities were doing it, we had no idea. We were pariahs to them…and perfectly ok with it. White people hating Rap? Oh well. We would just play it louder.
Nowadays, you can play whatever you want. The audio rarely even bleeds out from your noise cancellation headphones. You can be all by yourself in your love for the most obscure Rap or the most mainstream. No one hears it and no one cares.
When I see some young kid riding the train blasting a Rap song via his phone or a Bluetooth speaker, I chuckle and I feel a tinge of irritation. Not because they’re subjecting me to their music. Nope. I’m irritated because that phone or those speakers aren’t designed to be played outside. The audio sucks.
Such is the modern world of Rap.
