The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  “Candy Girl,” like much of New Edition’s first album, was a Jackson Five–influenced record that echoed the black pop past while feeling very contemporary. About midway through the song, Bobby Brown motioned with a Cutty finger, and Carr jumped on stage.

  Carr: I go to touch the Soul Train logo. Come in between them, throw a Mike kick, point to the argyles. They all point to the argyles. I’m still in that moment, but I’m still thinking nobody got permission from Don. I hope I don’t get kicked off. First thing he says to New Edition is, “Big Lou, stay offstage with the singers.” But then he says facetiously, “You guys asked him, you like him?” They was like, “Yeah, we like his style.” And Don was like, “He can’t pop or lock,” which means I can’t dance. They was like, “Yeah, but he can George, though.” Somebody told them my name was George, and I used to wear suits. You know, the whole Gentlemen’s Quarterly style with the suits, ties, shoes, the Gators, Stacy Adams too. And so when they would buy suits they would call them George, after me.

  That first onstage collaboration began an enduring friendship between Carr and the various members of New Edition, a band that would form and re-form many times over the years. When three members split off to form the trio Bell Biv DeVoe, Carr was part of their team, appearing at shows and in videos, including a memorable night at the Forum. “There’s footage of me and Bel Biv DeVoe onstage at the Forum where the Lakers won the championship in the eighties,” he recalled fondly. “[Laker guard] Norm Nixon’s right there with two Honey Dips and Debbie Allen [his future wife]. Magic Johnson’s over here dancing. He’s looking at me and giving the Cutty finger.”

  Even with all of his non–Soul Train notoriety, Carr is still best remembered for his jaunts down the Soul Train line. “I would just come up with these most ridiculous skits and scenes in my mind, like movie things,” he said. “I remember one time I came down and my boy Tom Tom pretending like he was talking and kissing my girl. Then I come on stage, and I come with a gun and I shoot him with a fake gun, and he falls. My boy TV comes out with stun guns. Now we going down the line shooting people and stun-gunning people, right? After that, Don says, ‘Ski, don’t be pulling guns out on the Soul Train line. Come on.’ I was like, ‘It was a fake gun,’ and Don’s like, ‘I know, but it’s a family show.’ ”

  Chapter 12

  Hip-Hop vs. Soul Train

  IN THE SPRING OF 1980 Curtis Walker—also known as Kurtis Blow, Harlem native, City College of New York attendee, and all of nineteen years old—stepped onto the Soul Train set for episode #336 and became the first hip-hop figure to appear on the show. The headliner was the self-contained band L.T.D., featuring deep-voiced vocalist Jeffrey Osborne, but Blow’s appearance was the highlight of the taping. Overjoyed to be on the show, the young MC performed “The Breaks” live to a track for an excited group of dancers. Then Don Cornelius walked on stage to do the customary interview. For Blow, this was to be the high point of an extraordinary day. He’d flown in that morning from New York on his first trip to the City of Angels. On the heels of his first single, “Christmas Rappin’,” and the gold “The Breaks,” Blow had already performed in Amsterdam, London, and Paris.

  But for a ghetto kid from Harlem, being on Soul Train was a new pinnacle. Moreover, Blow had started his career in hip-hop as a break-dancer and had idolized Don Campbell and the Lockers. Blow had checked into his hotel that morning and then sped over to the Soul Train set, geeking out that his dressing room was right next to Fame star Irene Cara’s.

  Don had been cordial when greeting Blow backstage and gave in when the rapper requested that he be allowed to perform live to track, rather than lip-synch “The Breaks,” since (a) he’d never lip-synched in his young career and (b) he needed the crowd interplay that was essential to hip-hop. When Cornelius walked on the stage, Blow expected the standard Soul Train treatment. “We know Soul Train, after the performances, and you’re standing onstage, and Don Cornelius comes out. He gives a couple of accolades: ‘How about another round of applause for this great artist.’ I’ve seen this all my life. I’m anticipating this, and I’m ready for this . . . So he comes out, you know he has the microphone, he comes up and stands next to me, and he says, ‘I don’t really know what everyone is making so much fuss about all this hip-hop, but nonetheless you heard him here, Mr. Kurtis Blow.”

  The MC recalled that moment with sad clarity. “I was heartbroken. My heart actually left and traveled south to my feet, and I was stunned and shocked. And I don’t know what I said. I don’t think I said anything. I don’t know what I said, but whatever it was, believe me . . . It’s not really what I wanted to say.”

  Don’s ambivalence toward hip-hop was shared by most of the black music gatekeepers of his generation, be they major-label executives, radio programmers, or R&B musicians. Hip-hop seemed to challenge the essentials of black music: the stars didn’t sing, a DJ playing records served as the band, and “songs” weren’t structured in the verse-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-verse structure of standard pop songs. Moreover, the mainstream black popular music that Cornelius—and everyone in the black music biz—was heavily invested in had been trending toward an upscale, clean-sounding, self-conscious sophistication that was reflected in clothing as well as sound. Male artists were wearing lots of eyeliner and sporting jelled hair (either Jheri curl or California curls, depending on the product’s purveyor). It was a very LA look, one the dancers on Soul Train proudly displayed.

  The stripped-down (but no less codified) look coming out of New York’s hip-hop scene represented a contrast to (or perhaps an attack on) the black mainstream and the assumptions about acceptable black maleness behind them. It wasn’t simply a generation gap that separated Don from rap—though clearly that was part of it—but a disagreement about how to be “black.” In the 1970s Soul Train had promoted a liberated funkiness that took cutting-edge style into homes across the country. But from the time Blow took the Soul Train onward, Cornelius’s soulful train would be running a little behind the sonic vehicles transporting hip-hop.

  Years later, Cornelius talked about Soul Train’s sometimes uneasy relationship with this new musical movement.

  Cornelius: Hip-hop kind of took Soul Train by surprise because we thought it was something that might not stick, and we didn’t jump in with both feet. But apparently we had to put both feet in the pot, because young people became so committed to hip-hop, and it became the culture it is today. People look at you funny if you act like you don’t know what it is. The younger demographics will simply turn away from you because you’re making it clear to them that you don’t know what you’re doing. What’s made it beautiful in an overall sense, and why no other genre has accomplished what it has, is that hip-hop/rap are so inclusive. It’s inclusive in the sense that you don’t have to be Quincy Jones to succeed in hip-hop. There are people who have carved successful careers in the hip-hop/rap media who, thirty years ago, would not have been able to participate in the music biz. It’s part of the black culture, and if you learn to understand it, you can actually make a good living out of it.

  With this pragmatic view as Don’s guide, rap artists would slowly become part of the Soul Train mix. The first performers with a huge rap hit were the Sugar Hill Gang, a trio of inexperienced MCs from the New York–New Jersey area cobbled together by Sugar Hill Records co-owner Sylvia Robinson (a former R&B crooner who’d appeared on Soul Train in 1973 with the erotic hit “Pillow Talk”). Robinson and the three MCs put together “Rapper’s Delight,” a Top Ten hit all over the globe and a massive hit in the United States. Although this landmark recording was released in 1979, the Sugar Hill Gang didn’t appear on Soul Train until a year after its debut. I believe one reason Blow was booked on the show before the Sugar Hill Gang is that he was signed to Mercury Records, a major label with a strong, ongoing relationship with Cornelius—who needed the label’s cooperation if he wanted to book its more mainstream R&B acts. Sugar Hill Records, born out of the ruins of R&B All Platinum Records, out of Eng
lewood, New Jersey, was an independent label with no such leverage.

  “I guess he was hesitant with bringing [hip-hop] on,” recalled Sugar Hill Gang member Big Bank Hank. “But you can’t stop a hit . . . If you can’t stop it, you might as well get out of the way, because here it comes. It was like you were riding the perfect wave.”

  A reflection of Sugar Hill’s absence of clout was that neither the group’s three members nor its management were able to persuade Cornelius to drop his lip-synch policy. Where Blow was able to perform live, the trio was forced to lip-synch its performance. “Hip-hop is about being able to flow and rhythmically go in and out of the music and change it whenever you want to. Now you’re stuck because you have to go with what the track is. You can’t play with the music.” Still, the performance went well. “Oh, they lost their mind,” Hank recalled. “They just loved it.”

  As the eighties unfolded and rap began its long progression from New York underground culture to mainstream brand machine, Soul Train would showcase top MCs overwhelmingly from New York and elsewhere on the East Coast: everyone from Run-D.M.C. to LL Cool J to Whodini to the Beastie Boys. But several of the artists felt a chill from Cornelius and some of the Soul Train staffers. Members of Run-D.M.C. would, incredibly, tell reporters that they felt more welcome at their initial visit to American Bandstand than they did on Soul Train.

  Ahmir Thompson, an ardent Soul Train viewer and future hip-hop icon himself, remembers these appearances well. “I’m glad that it was included, but I more or less felt that maybe it was tokenism. Maybe it’s kind of hard to see change.” He felt that a lot of the tone of Cornelius’s interaction with rappers during the 1980s was “standoffish” and along the lines of “How long do you think this is gonna last?” Thompson knew this attitude well, since “that’s how my father was: ‘That’s not music.’ He would always cover his ears. I’m glad it was included because, again, my first view of the Sugar Hill Gang or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was on Soul Train . . . I could tell that Don was a little uncomfortable in embracing it, but as a businessman, I’m glad he was smart enough to give in.”

  If Cornelius tolerated the New York MCs for whom boasting about their rhyme skills was the essential topic, he was actively hostile toward the crack-era narratives that gained popularity around 1989 and, ironically, came out of some of the same South Central Los Angeles communities (Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood) as the majority of his dancers. Led by Ice-T, N.W.A, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Warren G, and Tupac Shakur and built primarily on samples from funk bands, this genre became a cultural-commercial phenomenon that initially didn’t need radio play to sell records, but by 1994 it found its obscenity-free singles and party-hardy videos landing in heavy rotation—not just on black radio and BET, but on MTV as well.

  Moreover, the charisma of the star gangsta rappers, plus the tabloid violence of the crack era, led many of them to star in Hollywood features (New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, Trespass, Juice) that generated platinum-selling soundtracks. By 1994 the ubiquity of these performers, as well as their drug-referenced, blood-splattered, sexually raw (and often sexist) records, outraged many.

  Spurred by activist C. Delores Tucker and other elders in the black community, on February 11, 1994, the Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer Protection, and Competitiveness of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the House of Representatives held the first of two hearings on whether there should be a ratings system for recorded music. While lip service was given to sexism and violence in rock, hip-hop was the clear target of the hearings. I was there that day to give historical context on the music and to support free speech in music.

  Don Cornelius was there, too. We spoke briefly at the hearings, but it was a strained conversation because he was there to attack gangsta rap and support a mandatory ratings system for all music. I’m reprinting Cornelius’s testimony in full because I think it perfectly captures the ambivalence of the R&B establishment’s feelings about hip-hop in general and gangsta rap in particular during the nineties.

  In order to understand the ever-growing popularity of the music form known as Gangsta Rap, it is necessary to briefly explore rap music in general and some of the reasons why rap has become the musical entertainment preference of many millions of youth and young adults throughout the free world. Originally intended as a purely entertaining form of street and night club or dance club rhyming or poetry spoken over prerecorded music tracks, rap music has evolved into a legitimate, popular music art form through which many young musicians, publicists and recorded music producers who are connected, often sociologically to America’s underclass (particularly that segment which is African-American), are able to express various kinds of commentary on some of the harder realities of life as it exists in many of America’s African-American ghettos.

  The preponderance of recorded rap music which deals with ghetto life is likely to include extremely profane lyrics which tend to glorify violence or illegal firearms or drug use. The lyrics which are degrading or disrespectful to women, or sexually explicit lyrics. This kind of rap has become widely known as “hard core” rap. Rap artists who specialize in hard core are well aware going in that hard core records, for obvious reasons, get no radio station airplay whatsoever, which would literally be the kiss of death for any other recording artist. This is usually not the fate, however, in the case of hard core rappers, thanks to what is known as the “underground” retailing market, a random array of small, independent record stores located usually in urban areas of the United States and specializing (at least partly) in hard core rap records which are sold mostly through word of mouth.

  It was eventually determined that the harder the core of an underground rap record, the bigger the unit sales and the more income the artist and the record label would earn. The underground record market established the fact that there exists an enormous audience (comprised mostly of youthful record buyers) which apparently enjoys hard core rap. Moreover, this consumer group is not limited to African-American youth who live in America’s African-American ghettos. Record industry sales research indicates that roughly sixty percent of all rap records sold are bought by whites. The form known as Gangsta Rap is a relatively recent spin-off of basic hard core. Gangsta Rap lyrics tend to glorify or glamorize rebelliousness, defiance of the law or various forms of street “hustling” in the minds of the listeners, much the same way as being “hard” and “tough” has historically been and still is being glamorized in the movies and often times on television.

  As to the question: “Why would African-American youth be so receptive to the marketing of hard core and Gangsta Rap and the messages within?” I would ask: “Why wouldn’t African-American youth pay attention to artists who seem to fully understand the lifestyle problems that African-American youth face. And why wouldn’t African-American youth be anxious to listen to recording artists who are willing to openly discuss and dramatize many of these dire problems within the context of their records?” Please keep in mind that, for the most part, these are African-American youth for whom America has shown no real concern—at least during the past decade or more. These are African-American youth in whom our country has invested very little over the past decade in terms of channeling economic assistance and better training and education.

  Over the last decade, our country has invested almost nothing toward creating the kinds of opportunity which would allow such citizens to eventually better their lives, their surroundings and ultimately their futures as Americans. I tend to wonder if we shouldn’t be far more concerned about eliminating poverty, violence, despair and hopelessness from low income African-American communities than about eliminating Gangsta Rap. In spite of its many critics and detractors, rap music has, indeed, been very effective and in some ways a Godsend in providing entertainment relief and in many cases economic relief to a largely forgotten community. On the other hand, it goes without saying that anyone who sells any form of entertainment which is either anti-social or illegal in
nature and cannot be indulged in except behind closed doors, is engaged in what could be defined as pandering. This same standard should also apply regarding hard core or Gangsta Rap.

  Therefore, any recording artist or record label who creates or sells any record which is anti-social, profane, violent or sexually explicit in nature to such a degree that it cannot be listened to in public without offending others or cannot be listened to by youthful fans of such music in the presence of an adult authority figure, in a certain sense, is also engaged in pandering. I recently heard a well known Gangsta rapper explain his philosophy during a TV interview. He said, “I make music for poor people and there are far more poor people than rich people! So, as long as I satisfy poor people, I’ll always have a job!”

  I viewed this explanation as quite intelligent and well thought out; but clearly a case of pandering to the naivete of youthful record buyers who are intrigued by anti-social commentary. At this time I am not prepared to say which is more perverse between pandering by certain political ideologues who do it to appease those who are turned on by pro–law and order, anti-urban development, anti-welfare and tax cutting rhetoric or pandering by recording artists and record companies to youth who think it’s hip to listen to Gangsta Rap. If I were asked, “Should governmental steps be taken to curtail hard core or Gangsta Rap; or to clean up rap lyrics; or to make recording artists or record companies pandering to the rebelliousness of youth illegal,” I would say no to all three. Consumer pandering within reason is, of course, an accepted practice in America with respect to entertainment distribution. Movie studios and home video movie distributors openly pander to customers who enjoy somewhat anti-social or sexually explicit entertainment.