please explain to me the appeal of old OLD old skool hip-hop

B) You hate fun.

it is mystifying, but you don't like lots of stuff I'd have imagined would be your thang, so hmmm. I do think of it in very much the same way I do with breakbeat hardcore--just totally fucking exuberant, funky as hell (taking sides: the voices on "That's the Joint" vs. the bassline), really pretty much everything Jess said except reverse the underlying opinion driving it. but it's your life etc.

One thing I've noticed about some of the very early rap recordings is also that, back then, the term "MC" actually meant "Master of Ceremonies", like they were the host of a great party, telling you who was on the turntables etc.

The fact that the beats are more 4/4 and the mc-ing more rigid than later hip hop means it lacks fludity in comparison. But on top of that, looping disco tends to destroy much of its funkiness, dunno why, so the end result is something like a crap p-funk record.

Also the 'fun' seems insincere.

But because contemporary hip-hop is SO sophisticated (both lyrically and sonically), it's cool to listen back to the period when everyone was just figuring out what this music was going to be LIKE. Early hip-hop is so full of weird, one-off experiments and strange tangents that could have been other genres of music and didn't take off that it's easy to get worked up abou the semi-naive joy of the endeavor alone.

here comes the cavil-ry

if you think pre 'rock box' automatically = happy clappy disco singalong jams then yr all living in a jurassic 5 dreamworld

Goodie Mobb to thread! Bone Thugz to thread! J-5 to thread! Quannum MCs to thread! (aka YOU'RE WRONG)

part of the problem i think is reconciling the general idea of disco as a mix and flow morass (where you only can be bothered to learn the names if you're matos haha) with hiphop's more singular nature. (length issues come from this tension too. see how many of these jams just fade away) so i'm only willing to endure this kinda stuff as an extension of disco with the exception of some fun tunes like margo's koolout crew's 'death rap' or better yet, illustrating the 'becoming singles' thing, fantasy 3's 'it's your rock' or ESPECIALLY 'beat bop' which deliberately uses its length and ramm's trad cipherplay to draw out the wooze...

(maybe this interplay is in the listener)

Seconded. It is, indeed, darn fun and all, but it's also entrancing in the way Chuck E. suggested for his first point. In otherwards: he likes that more than he likes Suicide because the drone/repetition isn't yelling in his ear while pissing down his mouth. Uh, maybe.

and yes jordan, i do. as i said above: and i enjoy the more electro-fied stuff (all the junk that would go on to become bounce and bass and the rest.)

First Age (from Muhammed Ali's rap novelty rekkid up until RUN DMC's "Walk This Way")
Strengths: Goofy, joyous party music with a beat simple enough that even whitey could headbang along with it
Weaknesses: The beats (and alot of the rhymes) we painfully primitive compared to what came after.

Second Age (from PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" until ICE-T's "Mic Contract")
Strengths: Social Commentary, Seat-of-the-pants on the edge-of-your-seat hormonal overthrust. Finally matches or exceeds the Last Poets.
Weaknesses: MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.

Third Age (from Snoop Dogg's "Doggystyle" to...I dunno...the present.)
Strengths: R&B gives hiphop something to harmonize to, hiphop gives R&B a frigging backbone. And Busta Rhymes keeps threatening to bring a Sugerhill Gang sense o' fun back into the genre (especially with his videos)
Weaknesses: Some recent (read:1998-2002) hiphop tracks (unfortunately alot of Busta Rhymes tracks) seem to have a discontinuity between the samples rhythm and the vocals rhythm. Or something like that.

Busta Rhymes - "WOO HAH! Got you all in check! ps The end times are coming."

for my tastes, a lot of hip hop was too derivate of disco in the beginning (although i think that in some ways it was a reaction against disco, i.e., creating an alternative to disco) and too cross-pollinated now - both with anticon "underground" and the r&b-heavy "mainstream" tracks. give me some sliced up samples, a nice break, and a grimy mc, and i'm fine. I’ve always been attracted hip hop I like for what it wasn't/isn't (no cheesy love songs, gratuitous harmonizing, singing, thematic abstraction, irony, or “real music”) almost as much as for what it was/ is (velocity, rhythm, radicalism, rupture, slice-of-life narratives, wit, samples, etc...). With that said, I like a lot of old school tracks and that of the new.

Sidenote: while not entirely pre-dmc tracks, the ego trip’s compilation from a couple years back is really fuckin’ good. I like wildstyle st too, but thought the movie was a much better reflection of early hip hop culture.

>jess - do you like dancing?
>-- James Blount

>no
> --Jess

(I have to really think about how to respond and will do so when I have time. Till then, I vehemently disagree with (or don’t understand) jess)

Jess, do you like Tackhead? (I'm asking this for a serious reason)

uh, is the answer never? (and hence always)

also leblanc's "No sell Out" =dull.

fuck though, how great was sherwood back then?

Anyway uk 2 step roll deep are already the punk of rap except the US isn't ready for it -- give it five years. "here's a synth tone. here's another, and a filter. now go start a band".

jess it's okay to not like early hip-hop music. I love the shit myself and I tend to side with Chuck on your deafness on this one[smiley emoticon here to indicate lack of hate] but I didn't love it when I first heard it, I thought it was disco with people talking. then I realized that all the girls in my jr. high liked 'rappers delight' and 'rapture' and all the magazines talked about 'the message' and said "hmmmmm." But some of that early stuff really is just disco with people talking.

jess do you hate disco j/k more importantly what kind of evidence could anyone really give jess (or anyone else) to convince him to like something that he just. doesn't. like.? Give it up, y'all, it's over.

A pisspoor association in that practically nobody heard the Velvets on pop radio then, a problem Outkast doesn't have with either radio or MTV. Is your argument one of impact or in terms of smoothing out over time (or is it just for fun, which is always a good thing :-))?

Well hey, he asked us to after all. What makes you think that it's impossible to have one's mind changed about a piece/genre of music after hearing what others love/hate about it? Happens to me all the time! The food/music analogy- which I've seen pop up frequently lately- is DUD, btw.

All I was saying was--oh, fuck it, who cares what I was saying.

btw, jess-do you like West Side Mob's "Break Dance (Electric Boogie)"?

No I'm not. I like Goodie Mob, J-5, Quannum just fine. But they all feel like they're connecting dots, in a fairly clinical way that comes off at best as a mere homage to the Funky Four et. al.'s original sense of discovery, and with not anywhere near as much WARMTH. Bone Thugs are weirder --when I first heard them (their "first of the month" song about welfare checks), the rapping (or, really, SINGING) fast over slow music thing struck me as pretty original, and even, in a way, DID remind me of doo-wop. But I didn't ENJOY it much. I wished they were more beautiful, or that the beats were as fast as their voices, or something. There's something really mooshy about them that sucks. As they went on, they sounded less and less original, and sucked more.

>>that said, i totally don't buy the "they were there first and therefore they were best" argument in any genre<<

Neither do I. But nobody has made this argument, I don't think.

What else? Oh yeah -- Adrian Sherwood is great, but disco is better. One of the retarded things about non-old-school hip-hop is that (with obvious exceptions, like, um, L'Trimm) it DENIED its disco element. Schoolly-D and Spoonie Gee were already punk rock rap, a long time ago. And Eminem has more in common with the Velvets than Outkast do.

And with even less of the Funky Four +1 etc.'s ENERGY, I should add.

And by denying disco (just like when prog-rock denied rock'n'roll) one big thing rap was denying was CATCHINESS. (Which isn't to say, obviously, that no post-old-school hip-hop is catchy. Obviously, tons of it is. {So is tons of prog-rock, believe it or not.} But starting maybe with Rakim or Chuck D or whoever, hooks started being equated with "cheesiness" or "pop crossover." Which is utter bullshit, of course, UNLESS YOU THINK PLEASURE IS A BAD THING. Which maybe you do.

Another point nobody has made: Early hop-hop DJs were open to more kinds of music -- I mean, they knew that beats could come from Thin Lizzy and Rush and Babe Ruth-doing-Ennio Morricone and Kraftwerk as well as from James Brown. That's part of what I meant by "sense of discovery." Which didn't last, though I'll concede that it seems to come and go -- right now, hip-hop sounds a lot more open to other musical influences (bhangra stuff, for one thing, obviously) than it has in years. Which is why the idiots who think hip-hop is "dead" are full of shit -- sometimes I'm convinced that part of why they think it's dead is because they don't WANT it to be open. Openness SCARES them. Which is why they don't trust the stuff from when there weren't yet rules about what "keeping it real" meant...But all THAT said, though, I'll also concede that I don't always disagree with the complaints Scott and Jess and etc. have lodged against the eternal LENGTHS of lots of those old-school 12-inches - I mean, sometimes they're hard for ME to get through, too. I won't deny that. But given the other factors, the long lengths are generally worth it, I think.

...except in the South, maybe, where hiphop maybe never even closed up (to Kraftwerk and disco, among other things) in the first place...

And yeah, I know, people like De La Soul or Tribe Called Quest could sample Hall and Oates, but it almost always came off to me as "Look at us, we're sampling Hall and Oates, aren't you impressed?" Yuck.

I never thought so, probaly cuz I wasn't familiar with most of the samples when I first heard it. It seemed cohesive, and the 'odd' sample choices didn't distract from the piece as a whole. The fact that someone like me could listen to it without thinking 'hey, look at all these eclectic samples' is evidence that 'it' worked.

significant that he wasn't talking about melody/harmony/hooks, no? it was all about the beats, the BASS and how low it could go, to Chuck. That's probably why he fell off once the Bomb Squad deteriorated.

I was teaching jr. high in NYC in the early 1990s and one of my students got all animated and said, "Man, Public Enemy used to be so dope and now no one listens to 'em anymore..." All he could do was shake his head.

"I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death
And you can't help me now, you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk"

Somehow, I can't imagine Outkast saying those words, you know?

Well, you just said that no one does this, and there certainly are folks who do.

I personally hear nothing "clinical" or "connecting the dots"-ish nor even slightly 'throw-back-ish' in the way Latyrx play off each other's voices in, say, "The Storm" or "Lady Don't Tekno", nor in the way Goodie Mobb played off each other's voices (who sonically sound more like the Monsters in the back row of the Muppets than old skool).

Now, with J-5, they themselves are SPECIFICALLY going for that older style harmonization, and honestly, they're not one of my favorite hip-hop groups, but regardless, they certainly DO play off each other's voices. Now, whether they "match" the vibe you get from old skool, that is entirely a matter of opinion.

You might not get as much from the way, say, Kool Keith & Motion Man use their voices together, or the way Mos Def & Talib Kweli do it, or the way Andre & Big Boi do it, and that's one thing...it's an ENTIRELY different thing to say "no MCs do this anymore".

....which is not what I said.

What I said, for the fourth time, was: >>the way the voices work off EACH OTHER, which NO later hiphop has matched<<

Which I still believe. I'm not saying no one TRIES to work voices off of each other. I'm just saying they're not nearly as good at it. (And yeah, I like Hieroglyphics okay, too. But on Enjoy Records in 1980, they would've been way below average.)

Or better yet:

"We, is gonna smoke out, until we choke out
like some merry men, cowards I be buryin
Comin around my shop with that see n--a you gets nothin
just like DJ do the cuttin I be havin your posse duckin nothin but
King Shit, I am askin, sucka can you hand
That player with the pepper throwin salt off in your game
Sprinkle sprinkle motherfucker don't be cryin on me
That stuff the sess be in my chest until I'm chillin in peace, yeah"

or even:

"There's some hoes in this house, damn right
I'm thinkin about the way you skull me, guzz me
Suckin me dry like deserts Mojave, Gotti, hotties and honeydips
Likin the way you do me, screw me it make my money flip
Shakin that ass for daddy puttin this gas off in my Cadi-llac
Back, don't ever snap, packin the gats and pimpin whores
Hors d'oevres, swerve, hit the curb because I'm reckless
Back in the days when I was broke I'd snatch your fuckin necklace."

Or they would have been a product of the time, ie focused on intergroup dynamics more and been incredible. It seems that if they copped some of the techniques that you are fond of, then they'd get branded as throwbacks ala J5.

"Some people they like to go out dancin
and other people they have to work. Just watch me now
and there's even some evil mothers
Well there gonna tell you that everthing is just dirt
you know that women never really faint
and that villians always blink their eyes
that children are the only ones who blush
and that life is just to die"

or a track like "Cool it Down" (and if Stankonia = Loaded, then "Cool It Down" totally = "Call Before I Come")

re: vocal interplays in newer groups. I believe that Funky 4-style "workin' off each other" tricks exist, but I think one possible difference now is that with the emphasis on production and sounds and 'eclecticism,' vocal interplays aren't as central as they used to be, at least not in a lot of recordings. (Or maybe that kind of interplay just works best with faster--disco--tempos.) I worked with this guy a couple years ago who knew how much I liked Sugarhill stuff and was forever going on about how great and how 'old school' Slum Village were. When I finally listened to the album I couldn't believe how lazy and boring it was. Actually I could believe it, I just couldn't believe he would make that connection. Yet, sometime later when I saw them on the OkayPlayer tour, they totally rocked--and specifically in that way. I thought they had the Sugarhill back-and-forth thing down pat and they were pretty exciting. But they sure didn't get it down on record.

"Working the midnight shift
While my friends are all out
They've all gone out dancing
They're out having fun...
Seems like I'm always leaving
When all the others arrive
My body still carries on
But I'm dying inside."

Faster and faster to nowhere. Say hello to never.

Are you nuts? I can understand not liking the production but that thing bumps harder in may car than virtually anything else. Incredible clear and LOOOOUUUUUUDDDDD

(Talking about Fantastic Vol 2)

-- James Blount (littlejohnnyjewe...), April 10th, 2003.

blount in reductionist hiphop/rock band comparisons shocker!!

-- jess (dubplatestyl...), April 10th, 2003 7:31 AM."

add strikes again!

I'm surprised you have heard this heh ;-)

Lauryn Hill, Arrested Development, Mos Def, and pretty much any rap groups that use "real instruments," for starters.

How does that follow? What does that tell us about anything? And why does rejecting rock mean rejecting history altogether?

The argument (at least as far as I'm concerned) is not against relating hip-hop (or any other music) to past musical forms. It's against reducing it (or them) to the same old tired rock narrative. That doesn't tell us anything new about either rock or hip-hop. And rejecting that narrative doesn't mean rejecting history--it just means rock ain't the only history that's available, and maybe it would be refreshing to hear some other histories more often. (And I say this as a total rock canonist who will go to bat for Hendrix or the Velvets any time). Or maybe just a different history of rock--like if we used hip-hop to re-read rock, maybe the way people like Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaata did when they were picking beats off Thin Lizzy. Isn't this what rejecting "influence" is about?

I think the Hives have far more black fans.

I was thinking that probably read more personally than it was actually meant--I am just thinking out loud here more than anything. I have never read you but pretty much have formed the impression you just described, so I was kind of just thinking to myself, hmm, maybe I'm saying this to the wrong person and I probably look like I'm selling coals to Newcastle... ;o)

remember that? d'ya? it was just above.

st you should also search the voice for chucks' feature on eminem (he compares him to styx*).

*i don't think he does, actually.

1) If by "folk-rock" Ben Williams means *Bringing it All Back Home* or the first Holy Modal Rounders, it occurs to me, then the closest hip-hop equivalent is probably *Licensed to Ill* or "Devil Without a Cause,* for the punchlines alone. If "folk-rock" means Sonny and Cher, off the top of my head I'd nominate "My Babydaddy" by B-Rock and Biz and "I Got a Man" by Positive K. And if "folk-rock" means the early Byrds, who were really weird, I dunno -- Rammelzee, maybe??

2) The Beastie Boys (on their first album) and Northern State both come closer to pulling off Funky Four Plus One/Furious Five style vocal switchoffs than Goodie Mob, Quannum, or Jurassic Five ever have.

3) That said, I spent a lot of this weekend listening to the new *Quannum Mix CD Winter/Spring 2003 Vol.1*, and I like it a lot. One of the best CDs so far this year, maybe. Best cuts: Lifesavas "What If It's True," Quannum MCs feat. Jurassic 5 "Concentration," Latryx "I Changed My Mind", Blackalicious "Alphabet Aerobics," Lifesavas "Hellohihey," Lyrics Born "Callin' Out." But in terms of vitality, velocity, dexterity, you name it, none of these even come
*close* to holding a candle to my favorite pre-'82 rap singles. (The Triple Threat album is also truly wonderful. But ditto.)

4) Even if comparing rap artists to old rock artists wasn't justified on musical terms, which it is, it would be worth doing if only to piss ridiculous purists like s trife (whoever he is) off. Hip-hop is an applecart that people don't upset ENOUGH -- especially hip-hop critics (who, in general, tend to be teacher's pets in ways rock critics NEVER were). And as far as s trife goes, his formulation of "weak ass fifties rock" then "stones beatles 'melodic pop' phase" then "jawdropping boston/chic/styx/jackson 5/yes/donna summer gloriously overproduced disco rock era!!", no matter how uninformed it is, sounds more like a parroting of somebody's stupid rock-history canon then anything else on this thread. He's not helping people think about hip-hop; he wants to STOP people from thinking about it. (Or at the very least, he wants to decide how they're allowed to do it.) The answer to his "ill write for vvoice" would be: No you won't.

anyway i just ordered gilette's two albums and "shake your money maker" is okay but the production on "On the Attack" is really great and works much better with her voice, at least so far.

i mean, i suppose i can see how saying "rap is one of those things that just gets better each year" is going against the grain; it beats saying it's all dead, anyway. (not that it makes for a revolutionary theory in its own right.) but mainly, she seems out to shut down other ideas -- not by arguing with them, but by trying to ban them.

if there's anything i learned this weekend it's that hip-hop works best for me when it's some goon shouting over a drum machine. oh well.

they did have better names back then, grown men who could appear hard (or at least grown men) by calling themselves "jellybean" and "pumpkin" and "pooche costello." in fact, the closer a new hip-hop act is to those old school names the better they probably are. (this has nothing to do with the sound being produced...or does it?)

chuck, is she part of some secret detroit rap/rock history which i'm unaware of?

As for non-macho names, maybe Nelly proves Jess's point.

oh barf. Fucking Northern State?!

you're "fairly indifferent" to chuck berry and jerry lee lewis?

something in the water does not compute

So, the lesson of this thread is that old-school hip hop is meh but NORTHERN STATE is the group to watch? I guess? Basically it's made me really want to swing by the record store and see if they still have the Grandmaster Flash LP I passed on a month ago.

feel like if you don't, um, enjoy this then you should just give up on old skool hiphop: http://www.discogs.com/Various-The-Best-Of-Enjoy-Records/release/352487

So, the lesson of this thread is that old-school hip hop is meh but NORTHERN STATE is the group to watch?

Uh, no.

Well....what's NOT good about Northern State?? They're better than the Cramps ever were

no music critic should have this opinion, ever

yeah, i'm a bit flummoxed by that tbh

Years later, I finally bought the Grandmaster Flash LP. It rules, obv. Somehow, I've managed not to get around to Northern State...

I used to have a huge Sugar Hill Records boxed set -- I don't remember buying it so maybe it was a gift or something, but I can't imagine from who. It was certainly uneven, but I'm not sure moreso than any grass roots label's boxed set that size would be.

I also just like to remind people that this song exists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYio6qP60lo

On the whole though, I think the era's best tracks make the case for it -- Apache (Jump On It), It's the Joint, The Message, White Lines, Rapper's Delight, The Breaks, Planet Rock, etc. And any genre still in it's low budget, homegrown phase is going to have a high proportion of lower quality output imo.

I want to hear these Northern State songs that chuck thinks are better than "Shake Some Action."