by Bob Stanley
Being slagged off by Arsenio Hall wasn’t the only reason for De La Soul and the Native Tongues’ demise. Neither conscious-rap nor daisy-age videos featured girls in bikinis and, consequently, they received less exposure and fewer requests from excitable teenage boys. Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr Dre, with their ladies draped across them on MTV heavy rotation, defined mid-nineties hip hop. Their G-funk, with its Michael McDonald samples and pat gang-culture raps, was the sound of ’93 and ’94.
The lead single from Dr Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic, ‘Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang’ (US no. 2 ’92), became an anthem for frustrated American youth. It wasn’t exactly a cry of liberation in the style of the Prodigy’s contemporaneous ‘Everybody in the Place’ (UK no. 2 ’92) or SL2’s ‘On a Ragga Tip’ (UK no. 2 ’92) – it was simply a numbed, Generation X shoulder shrug: don’t know, don’t care, get trashed, pass out. ‘Music is an art,’ said Dre’s sidekick Snoop Dogg by way of explanation. ‘It ain’t made to preach – that’s literature.’ Still, the reformed drug dealer was happy to blur the distinctions between the images of the lyrics and his real life if it helped to pay the rent. By the time of his own Doggystyle album a year later he was on bail awaiting trial in a gang-related murder trial. As he began a UK tour in February ’94, the Daily Star headline ran ‘Kick this evil bastard out’. In the meantime, the spat between Suge Knight’s Death Row label on the west coast and Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs’s Bad Boy Records in New York was getting out of hand. Knight’s buddy Tupac Shakur forged a rivalry with Combs protégé Biggie Smalls; in a recording studio in 1994 he was shot five times but survived, and publicly accused Smalls and Combs. The profile and sales figures of everyone involved proceeded to spiral upwards. After a while, MCs and fans alike became battle-hardened, inured to the cruelty, the violence, the casual acceptance of death. Ice-T had his private security, the ‘Armed Response’ sign on his lawn – from the sound of his records, you’d think that was his idea of fun.
While Melle Mel was flat on the canvas, and Public Enemy were floundering in internal political issues, the team of young hip-hop rebels who would step in and save the day – creatively, morally, politically – were plotting their rise in unlikely and unfashionable Staten Island, the Essex of New York boroughs. Robert Diggs, aka the RZA, aka Bobby Digital, assembled eight like-minded souls in a basement studio in the winter of 1992. He was bored with the way hip hop had smoothed out, lost energy, become a cliché. In the charts it was represented by MC Hammer’s child-friendly run of hits7 or Ice-T and Dr Dre’s gang lore; it was resting on the laurels of its easy alternative culture. Diggs played his cohorts a bunch of loops which contained the dirt, grime and history of the original vinyl; the chords were almost all minor. Then he explained how he had spent the summer walking the streets of Staten Island, reimagining it as Shaolin; for Diggs, this fantasy grew from a lifetime’s obsession with kung fu movies. He wanted to christen the nine rappers the Wu-Tang Clan, after a gang of sword-wielding renegade monks. Wu-Tang Clan, he explained, would use their vocal dexterity as the monks had used their swords. ‘Let me drive the bus,’ he told them.
At a stroke, the Wu-Tang Clan reconnected hip hop with its Bronx roots, its crate-digging days, and at the same time became its most formidable crew. With a thunderstorm behind them, over dark chords and a Gladys Knight vocal sample, ‘Can It All Be So Simple’ found them on a street corner, reminiscing, while also knowing they had the future mapped out: ‘1993 exoticness!’ Within a year of releasing their first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), six members of the Clan had released solo albums; they all went Top 10 in the US. Each of the Clan was distinctive enough to operate alone: Ol’ Dirty Bastard could growl and slur, like a demented South Park character – ‘Stop annoying me! Play my music loud!’; Method Man smoked industrial-strength weed, turned in the most laid-back, spontaneous-sounding solo album with Tical, and also scored Wu-Tang’s biggest single, ‘All I Need’ (UK no. 10 ’95), a duet with Mary J. Blige. Even better solo albums came from Chef Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx was put together like a Mafia movie, with Raekwon as the star and the RZA as director – and GZA with Liquid Swords, loaded with odd echoes and clipped, minimal samples.
They loved maths almost as much as they loved self-mythology – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) cost $36,000 to make. Their solidarity was crucial; together Wu-Tang had nobility, sorrow and heroism. On many levels they failed – they pretty much disintegrated straight after the release of their second album, the transatlantic number one Wu-Tang Forever in ’97 – but their fallibility is a large part of their appeal.
They had as many aliases as the KLF; in some ways they’re the American counterpart, even producing their own Wu-Tang Manual. In it, the RZA talks about his superhero alter ego Bobby Digital and how, when the group imploded in ’97, he decided to ‘become Bobby Digital for real. I had the car and I had the suit. I had this suit built for me that’s literally invulnerable to AK fire. The car was bomb-proof, up to government security standards. I even had a good butler almost ready to go. I was really on a mission, I really felt compelled. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.’
The Wu-Tang Clan reintroduced a cartoon element and playfulness to hip hop that had been missing since the turn of the nineties. The inevitable conclusion to the west coast–east coast wars came when Tupac Shakur was shot dead in 1996, and Biggie Smalls a few months later. Though gangsta rap’s resentment and intolerance still dominated the nineties and the early part of the next decade – through essentially filler acts like Ja Rule, the Game and 50 Cent – the biggest names to emerge in the wake of the Wu-Tang’s realignment were Jay-Z and Kanye West, both of whom have acknowledged them as a major inspiration. Ol’ Dirty Bastard was in the studio recording an album for Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella label when he collapsed and died in 2004.
By the end of the nineties hip hop had become part of the furniture, albeit with a continued, daft adherence to arrogance and machismo. Take tattooed lover boy Ja Rule, who released an album that sampled the ultra-mainstream Coldplay and the Script; it came out while he was serving a two-year jail sentence for gun possession. Like pro wrestling, it was superficially violent and deadly serious, while refusing to accept that part of its appeal lies in its ludicrousness.8 Eminem and Mariah Carey took to musical sparring (he claims they had a fling, she denies it), which at least proved a lot more fun than the east coast–west coast battles.
Prince Paul, the daisy-age innovator and De La Soul producer, has said that he finds hip hop in the new century ‘uninspiring … everything is so recycled and repetitive and nothing makes you want to freak out and do something new. I have to go back and listen to stuff like the Beatles or someone to get amped on. I can’t find anyone new I really want to hear, I have to listen to the Beach Boys or something.’ Still, hip hop continues to make money, whether it’s inspiring or not: Busta Rhymes can demand $70,000 for writing a single guest verse on someone else’s record; the Neptunes can still get $100,000 for a mix. Kanye West at least recognises the tensions and ironies of being a socially aware, business-conscious hip-hop superstar in the twenty-first century: in 2011 he showed solidarity by turning up at an Occupy demo in New York, albeit wearing a plaid Givenchy shirt.
1 Technically, the very first Def Jam single was released in ’82 by Rick Rubin’s band Hose – it came in a brown paper bag, had no label and was a dead slow, super-fuzzed hardcore track called ‘Mobo’.
2 Marley Marl was the first producer to sample James Brown loops, cut them up and mix them with programmed drum-machine beats. The results were harder than anything else around: MC Shan’s ‘The Bridge’, Roxanne Shante’s ‘Bite This’, Biz Markie’s ‘Make the Music with Your Mouth Biz’. He later produced LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ and TLC’s debut album. Marley Marl’s Queens-based Juice Crew (Shan, Shante, Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane) also got into the first hip-hop feud, with KRS-One and DJ Scott La Rock of the South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions.
3 The source of gangs
ta rap can be found in a 1985 DIY twelve-inch by Philadelphia’s Schoolly D. The label was written with a Berol pen, the rap was slurred, addled, drowned in reverb, and the title was ‘PSK’, short for ‘Park Side Killers’. Schoolly D was bred on Run-DMC’s primitive first records, and the backing was all beatbox and scratching, but his lyrics were unsettlingly immoral tales of shootings, beatings and God knows what else. Urban realism, if you like. He was representing his gang, the Park Side Killers, and that was the be-all and end-all of ‘PSK’. No call to arms, or Islam, or love peace and unity. No wit, either. Nothing but cold fear.
4 PM Dawn would shortly nod to ‘Bonita Applebum’ as part of an extended chat-up line to Married with Children actress Christina Applegate, in ‘Set Adrift on Memory Bliss’.
5 In 1998, eight years after their first record, Digital Underground released Who Got the Gravy?, which featured several west-coast rappers, as well as old hands like Biz Markie and KRS-One at a time when the east coast–west coast rivalry was at its height – their intention was to both ignore and ridicule it.
6 There was a lot of international potential in this pacific, anti-macho, nonpartisan hip hop. It blended with jazz (Gang Starr, Stetsasonic) and crossed borders, to Canada with bright colours ’n’ beads duo the Dream Warriors (‘Wash Your Face in My Sink’, UK no. 16 ’90; ‘My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style’, no. 13 ’90), and to Britain with Definition of Sound (‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’, UK no. 17 ’91), who effectively blended house, dub and hip hop. They were fun, and it’s probably not a coincidence that they shared a producer – John Coxon – with Betty Boo.
7 MC Hammer’s second album, 1990’s beautifully titled Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em, was the first hip-hop album to sell ten million copies. Pop culture remembers his baggy ‘Hammer pants’ more than his hits, with the possible exception of ‘U Can’t Touch This’ (US no. 8, UK no. 5 ’90). Originally he had been in a Christian rap group called Holy Ghost Boys and later starred in his own movie (also called Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em) about a rapper, Reverend Pressure, who returns to his home town and defeats a criminal mastermind who has been using children to traffic drugs. His music was weedy and his rhymes rather comical (take ‘Addams Groove’: ‘They do what they wanna do, say what they wanna say, live how they wanna live, play how they wanna play, dance how they wanna dance, kick and they slap a friend’), but Hammer was an effective pre-teen hip-hop entry point.
8 Tupac Shakur had ‘THUG LIFE’ tattooed across his belly. Rather unconvincingly, he claimed it was an acronym for ‘the hurt u give little infants fucks everything’.
61
BASSLINE CHANGED MY LIFE: DANCE MUSIC
The whole thing was offensive and obscene in many ways. You would have been surprised at some of the people there. There had been university people from America, Oxford and Cambridge, and ordinary decent people. They just wanted to do what they wanted to do and they did it. I just cannot understand it.
Mr E. T. Oates, public health inspector, Phun City festival, 1971
Hardcore has once again astounded the house nation with its diversity. No longer is a rave track a selection of obscure noises from an ancient analog keyboard, the modern era rave tune is now more likely to contain a multiplicity of elements such as soul, techno and rap from diverse musical cultures. All the tracks on this album have some of the elements; ruff cut up beats, severe bass lines, uplifting vocals, piano breaks, dark sounds (sometimes samples from horror films). The end result is music that has a power and intensity that elevates the mind.
Sleevenotes to The Dark Side: Hardcore Drum & Bass, 1993
The most significant event for modern pop in 1991 hadn’t been Bryan Adams’s record-breaking run at number one, or the Prodigy sampling a cartoon cat from a public-information film. It had taken place in an American court, where Gilbert O’Sullivan was up against rapper Biz Markie, who had sampled his ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’ without getting clearance first. Judge Duffy concluded ‘the defendants … would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused’. His written opinion began with the line ‘Thou shalt not steal’. Gilbert was awarded one hundred per cent of the royalties on Biz’s track, ‘Alone Again’.
The sound of hip hop was radically altered by the case. The Bomb Squad’s late-eighties productions for Public Enemy had been entirely reliant on dozens of samples – it was simply no longer possible to make records like this, unless you cleared each and every sample, and that could prove prohibitively expensive.1 One way of avoiding a legal quagmire was to sample acts who were amenable to hip hop, like Parliament/Funkadelic, who let you sample their catalogue rather than sending a writ. Another way forward was ‘interpolation’, meaning you replayed the sample rather than use the original recording – this was Dr Dre’s solution, and explains the prevalence of G-funk’s stripped-back, sample-light sound.
At first, this was largely seen as an American problem. Britain was a far less litigious place in the nineties. Besides, it had a growing remix culture largely based on co-operation and kinship. While the likes of New York garage-house team Masters at Work could charge $30,000 for a remix, acts in Britain would ask for a fraction of that, or do swap mixes for nothing. Expression through reinterpretation; producers sometimes delivered their finest works for other people’s intellectual property (Andrew Weatherall’s ‘Loaded’ for Primal Scream, UK no. 16 ’90; Todd Terry’s ‘Missing’ for Everything but the Girl, UK no. 3 ’94; K-Klass’s ‘Two Can Play That Game’ for Bobby Brown, UK no. 3 ’95). Remix culture highlighted the innocence that informed the dance scene of the decade.
On top of this, the legal system in Britain – and the music industry – simply struggled to keep up; dance music in the early nineties was as constantly shapeshifting as beat music had been in the mid-sixties. To make your skin tingle, to match the rush of whatever you were dancing to two weeks earlier, producers and DJs had to be reactive. For a good five or six years they did their best, and genres within genres sprouted on a monthly basis. Their functionalism matched Cameo Parkway’s keenness to keep the kids of Philadelphia on their feet in the early sixties, practising new moves on a weekly basis.
Of the new cottage-industry dance labels, London’s most successful was Shut Up and Dance, which was based on the border of Stoke Newington and Dalston, an area once known for its tailors and furniture makers but by 1991 renowned for its itchy beats and pirate stations. Red Bird had self-destructed through George Goldner’s racetrack habit; Philles had the plugs pulled by Phil Spector in a fit of pique when ‘River Deep – Mountain High’ flopped, but the rise and fall of Shut Up and Dance was entirely down to dance music’s rapid motion and the American legal system.
Childhood friends Philip ‘PJ’ Johnson and Carl ‘Smiley’ Hyman were Hackney-born DJs who had started off in a mid-eighties sound system called Heatwave. They loved hip hop, the whole lifestyle, entering dance battles and making their own tapes. Inspired by sound system-turned-record producers Soul II Soul, they had made their first records as Shut Up and Dance in 1989 with ‘5678’ and ‘£10 to Get In’ – these had raw, pitched-up hip-hop beats, fast enough to body-pop to, fed through a reggae sound-system sensibility that, like Sheffield’s bleep crowd, gave them gut-churning, half-speed, subsonic basslines. This was entirely new and pretty soon became the most influential sound in East London. Originally it was called breakbeat house2 but then, like the extreme end of American punk before it, the new sound was tagged ‘hardcore’.
PJ and Smiley’s productions were DIY, incredibly basic (a loop, a sample, a bassline and a vocal – that’ll do), paid no heed to copyright and had blatant samples from deeply uncool mainstream acts like Annie Lennox and Terence Trent D’Arby floating over tracks like ‘Derek Went Mad’;3 unsurprisingly, it served SUAD’s purpose to stay underground and sell their product from the back of a car. They were also irresistible, playful, dark and hilarious: Rum and Black’s ‘Fuck the Leg
al Stations’ – with its intentionally erased mid-section – was a pirate-radio pinnacle; Nicolette’s coy ‘Waking Up’ was the sexiest record of 1990; the Ragga Twins’ ‘Spliffhead’ as clean and urban as freshly laid cement. All came out on the Shut Up and Dance label, which had basic black-and-white artwork that would embarrass a nine-year-old, and sold tens of thousands of copies in the myriad dance shops booming across London at the turn of the nineties. Few were stocked by chart-return shops; none troubled the Top 40. With 1992’s ‘Raving I’m Raving’, though, they finally scored a massive hit, a UK number two, and the label imploded. The song took liberties with Marc Cohn’s weighty 1991 MOR hit ‘Walking in Memphis’ (US no. 13, UK no. 22). ‘Put on my blue suede shoes,’ crooned Cohn, about to embark on a dues-paying trip to the home of the blues – ‘W. C. Handy, won’t you look down over me?’
Shut Up and Dance employed a soulful Hackney boy called Peter Bouncer to sing their cheeky rewrite. Cohn’s blue suede shoes became ‘raving shoes’; the plea to W. C. Handy became ‘Everybody was happy, ecstasy shining down on me.’ Finally, the chorus laughed in the face of Cohn’s guilt-ridden cultural tourist taking a holiday in the city of his heroes: ‘I’m raving till the sweat just pours down off me … but do I really feel the way I feel?’
Cohn’s version was all about fear of inauthenticity, and how he felt that real life, real music, and maybe even real fun, could only happen in Memphis – everything else felt phoney to him. Shut Up and Dance, true to their name, turned ‘Walking in Memphis’ into a hedonistic anthem. Their footwear was functional, their plane ticket – as it should be – was a passport to pleasure. And where Cohn went into NYC therapy-speak with the tautological pay-off ‘do I really feel the way I feel?’, SUAD spun it as an E reference and used the line as jump-off point – straight away there was a key change, dark chords, then a disembodied androgynous wail and finally the rave riff, a familiar plastic keyboard sound that dominated the charts in the early nineties.