I’ve been listening to a fair amount of old-school hip hop lately. I’m talking real old-school. Like Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, like Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three. Back in the old-school days nobody really knew what to rap about, so just just rapped about rapping. Well, you’d rap about impressing the ladies with your rhyming skills, and Melle Mel would get somewhat real about what it’s like in the streets, but mostly you rapped about rippity-rap-ruh-raptastic! Just having fun with a microphone and a couple of friends and a turntable. Good clean fun. That’s why old-school raps are so long; you weren’t rapping to make a single, you were making a party track.
Couple fun facts about the old school for you:
- Grandmaster Flash? Not a rapper. GMF did beats. Most of the raps attributed to GMF were actually performed by Melle Mel.That’s Melle Mel rapping in White Lines and The Message. White Lines is an awesome song. The best part about it is that it’s so anti-drug that it goes all the way around to become pro-drug. Melle Mel’s message sort of boils down to “cocaine is bad because I currently don’t have any cocaine.”
- The Sugar Hill Gang are a bunch of punkasses. I’m not even linking to them. They ripped off the Cold Crush Brothers, plain and simple. Straight-up robbed Grandmaster Caz‘s lyrics to make “Rapper’s Delight.” This was back in the early days of the movement, when there just wasn’t even much there to rip off. That’s just triflin’.
- Afrika Bambaataa is awesome and basically invented chopping up beats and sound effects to string together into songs. He pretty much invented what we recognize today to be hip-hop. If you have a vinyl copy of Death Mix, I would sure appreciate it if you just sent it to me so I could have it. Just give it to me without expecting any sort of compensation. That would be great.
The thing is: the music feels old because hip-hop has grown so much, but it’s really not that old. These guys are all still around. They’re in their early fifties. Picture Lil Wayne when he’s 49. Think he’ll still be working? Who knows? Kool Keith is still putting out regular albums, and he’s been in the game since Ultramagnetic MCs. A lot of these rap pioneers don’t even have Wikipedia pages.
This form of music — not even a style or genre, but a full-on form — has been around for twenty-five, maybe thirty years. It’s gone from two turntables and a microphone at an illegal house party to 2Pac, Wu-Tang, the Beastie Boys, DJ Spooky, Gorillaz, Def Jux, and Curtis Plum. That’s a lot of growth in a pretty short time.
Listen and enjoy. These songs are a lot longer and less hook-driven than modern rap music, but if you really love hip-hop and not just the flash and charm of rap music, then you’re going to enjoy the hell out of this. They don’t make music like this anymore. No-one does.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – “Superrappin’”
Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force – “Zulu Nation Throwdown Vol. 1″
Spoonie Gee & the Treacherous Three – “New Rap Language”
