by Jeff Chang
“ ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was astonishing to me,” says Bill Adler, then a music critic for the Boston Herald who would later become Def Jam’s publicist, “not because the artists were rapping and not singing. What was remarkable about it was that it was fifteen minutes long. Boston had one Black music radio station and it was an AM station called WILD. Whenever they played “Rapper’s Delight”—which was all the time—they played the entire fifteen-minute version, which was unheard of.”
But at the far edge of the rap universe in the Black neighborhoods of Long Island, Chuck D, then a nineteen-year-old MC, remembers the impact of “Rapper’s Delight”differently. “I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such thing as a hip-hop record,” he says. “I could not see it.” The famous DJ Eddie Cheeba had been out to Long Island and broken “Good Times” to Black audiences in May, promising as he played it that his own rap record would be out soon. “I’m like, record? Fuck, how you gon’ put hip-hop onto a record? ‘Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record?” Chuck says. “Bam! They made ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I’m thinking, ‘Man, they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?’ It was a miracle.”
Chuck first heard “Rapper’s Delight” while he was on the mic. “Good Times” had been the record of the summer of ‘79, replacing MFSB’s “Love Is the Message” as the beat that sent the dancers running to the floor and the MCs running to the microphone. One night in October, Chuck was rocking his Cheeba-styled party rhymes over “Good Times.” “All of a sudden, the DJ I’m hearing he’s cutting in this shit behind me. Right? And I’m rhyming over words,” he laughs. “The crowd don’t know. They’re just thinking that I’m rhyming and I’m changing my voice or whatever. I held the mic in my hand, I heard words and I lip-synched that motherfucker. Folks thought that shit was me. I was a bad motherfucker after that, believe! The next day, Frankie Crocker broke that shit on BLS. By the next party, folks were looking at me like, ‘Pshhhh. You a bad motherfucker, but you ain’t that nice!’ ”
Three unknowns beating superstar Eddie Cheeba at his boast. A rap on a record trumping a live rap. In fifteen minutes, clearly, the whole world had changed.
“Rapper’s Delight” crossed over from New York’s insular hip-hop scene to Black radio, then charged up the American Top 40, and swept around the globe. Imitations popped up from Brazil to Jamaica. It became the best-selling twelve-inch single ever pressed. At one point, 75,000 copies were selling a week and the indie upstart from across the Hudson was straining to keep up with the demand. Tom Silverman, a DJ and journalist covering the dance music scene, had never seen anything like it. “I was there in Brooklyn on Fulton Street when they brought ‘Rapper’s Delight’ in stores, in ‘79 right around Christmas-time,” he recalls. “Ten boxes came out of the truck, they went onto the floor and they opened the cardboard boxes and literally handed two copies to everybody in the store who went right to the cash register. They must’ve moved two million records in a month on twelve-inch vinyl just in New York. I said, ‘I gotta be in this business, this is great!’ ”
The disco era had peaked. Major labels were at their creative and financial end. The biggest song on the charts was a collaboration between Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand that was as pricey as it was hokey, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” By contrast, “Rapper’s Delight” sounded fresh from its very first words—”I said uh hip-hop . . .” To the Bronx heads, the whole thing was a sham.
But the breakthrough may not have happened any other way. When the top Bronx acts made their recording debuts after “Rapper’s Delight,” they usually tried, and often failed, to be true to the experience of their shows. These live performances thrived on quick-witted improvisation and call-and-response audience participation. When they worked up routines, they gave their DJ and the neighborhood their props first and foremost. After all, they were onstage at the discretion of the DJ, the king of the party, and at the mercy of the audience, his subjects.
The rap amateurs of the Sugar Hill Gang never had a DJ. Assembled in a New Jersey afternoon, they were a studio creation that never stepped on a stage until after their single became a radio hit. They wrote with the ears of fans, and the enthusiasm of dilettantes. Their raps on “Rapper’s Delight” were the stuff that sounded good not in the parties, but on the live bootleg cassettes playing in the OJ Cabs and on the boomboxes—the funny stories, the hookish slang, the same kind of stuff that would strike listeners around the world as both universal and new, not local and insular. “Rapper’s Delight” was tailor-made to travel, to be perfectly accessible to folks who had never heard of rap or hip-hop or The Bronx.
The inexplicable success of the Sugar Hill Gang transformed the scene overnight. Artists and labels scrambled to cash in. The Funky Four + 1 More and the Treacherous Three signed on to do singles for Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy Records. The Sequence signed with Sylvia Robinson. Afrika Bambaataa agreed to record for Paul Winley. Two Bronx-based reggae labels, Wackies and Joe Gibbs Music, put out rap singles. Kurtis Blow, managed by a young Queens native named Russell Simmons, became the first major-label rap artist when he signed to Mercury for the platinum-selling “Christmas Rappin’ ” and “The Breaks.” And even Flash finally relented when he and the Furious Five struck a deal with Bobby Robinson, “Superappin’ ” was released a month after “Rapper’s Delight.” In Flash’s mind, having a record out might increase their bookings.
Ironically, the Sugar Hill Gang helped revive the dying Bronx club scene. But club-going turned into a more passive experience than ever. The b-boys disappeared and, Charlie Ahearn says, “Nobody was dancing. Period! Rap became the focal point. MCs were onstage and people were looking at them.” DJs were no longer at the center of the music. The new indie rap industry—with its fear of music publishers—had no place for them, other than to advise the house-bands on how to emulate the spirit of their turntable routines. “This is 1980,” Ahearn says. “In other words, hip-hop is dead by 1980. It’s true.”
If “Rapper’s Delight” turned hip-hop into popular music, “Superappin’ ” shows how pop began to destroy what hip-hop was. The song begins with haunting silences. In unison, the Furious Five raps, “And it won’t be long ‘til everyone is knowing that Flash is on the beatbox going, that Flash is on the beatbox going . . . and . . . and . . . and . . . sha na na!”1 In the original routine, the Furious Five would pause and point to Grandmaster Flash as he banged out frenetic fills on his electronic drum-machine. But on the record, Flash is MIA. The Five shout out Flash as “the king of the Quickmix,” but he never gets to demonstrate why. Instead the house band interpolates one of Flash’s favorite platters, the Whole Darn Family’s “Five Minutes of Funk,” while Flash paces the studio like a coach. For the length of “Superappin’,” the tension between what rap was—a live performance medium dominated by the DJ—and what it would become—a recorded medium dominated by the rappers—is suspended. When the Five shout, “Can’t won’t don’t stop rockin’ to the rhythm, ‘cause I get down when Flash is on the beatbox,” history seems to be held in place.
On the other hand, there was an overwhelming sense of release on many of these early records, especially the ones captured on Bobby Robinson’s aptly named Enjoy label, the sound of rappers exuberantly pouring rhymes they had honed for years in front of skeptical Bronx crowds onto wax for the world and eternity. Robinson’s nephew Spoonie Gee spun a story of fast girls and cheap sex on “Love Rap,” backed only by a steaming, phased break by Pumpkin, the legendary drummer behind so many early hip-hop records. “So let’s rock y’all! To the beat y’all!” he rapped in a heart-racing adrenaline rush, the tinge of echo making him seem ten-feet tall. On the Treacherous Three and Spoonie Gee’s “New Rap Language,” Kool Moe Dee, L.A. Sunshine, Special K, and Spoonie demonstrated their mastery of the Furious Five’s group dynamics, and added quicksilver-tongued, metaphor-drunk skills. The crew tur
ned its gaze “to the south, the west, to the east, to the north,” brimming with the child’s-eye self-importance that hip-hop music would need to jump out of the boroughs and go worldwide.
Record execs realized there were potentially many more millions of fans out there for the music. The number of rap crews exploded, living-room fantasies fueled by platinum dreams. For the next decade and a half, hip-hop music moved away from the parks and the community centers and the clubs and into the lab. Indie labels invested in researching and developing how to make hip-hop music, specifically rap, fit the standards of the music industry, how to rationalize and exploit the new product—how to find, capture, package, and sell its essence like a bottle of lightning. Six-man crews would drop to two. Fifteen-minute party-rocking raps would become three-minute ready-for-radio singles. Hip-Hop was refined like sugar.
The tension between culture and commerce would become one of the main storylines of the hip-hop generation.
Broken Windows
The other was the relationship between youth and authority. If rap presented an opportunity for hip-hop culture to be commodified, graffiti presented an opportunity for it to be demonized. The graffiti movement had been the effect of benign neglect, mass media, and youth rebellion. It would not be long before the most extreme demonstration of the generation’s revolutionary new aesthetic provoked the most extreme backlash.
From the first surfacing of TAKI 183 in the New York Times in 1971, graffiti moved from being a neighborhood teenage curiosity to a municipal issue with national political implications. And that’s where it would stay. In the summer of 1972, with his presidential campaign on the ropes, Mayor John Lindsay launched the first “War on Graffiti” with the exasperated cry: “For heaven’s sake, New Yorkers, come to the aid of your great city—defend it, support and protect it!”2 He called the graffiti writers “insecure cowards” and suggested they all had mental health problems. The mayor’s anti-graffiti program called not only for restriction of markers and aerosol paints, increased security measures and use of chemicals, solvents and paints to deter graf, but the deployment of psychological measures.
To Lindsay, graffiti was the most infuriating crime. It had a “demoralizing visual impact,” and he declared, “It’s a dirty shame that we must spend money for this purpose in a time of austerity.”3 But the war would go on. Politicians had found a way to agree with their constituents that the city was going to hell, while doing little else to get it off that track. The War on Graffiti covered over municipal government’s inability to deal with multiple real crises—of which bankruptcy was the most urgent. So-called “quality of life” campaigns were symbolic, and often expensive, appeasement to malaise-weary voters.
In 1976, as the city hurtled toward bankruptcy, it found $20 million to establish “the buff,” a chemical washing of graffitied trains, to add to the usual $25 million in annual expenditures to wage its war. The buff not only left the cars an aesthetically dull color, it was harmful; hundreds of workers became sick and one man died of long-term exposure.4
The same year, the Transit Authority established a four-man Anti-Graffiti Squad, which quickly issued a misleading “Profile of a Common Offender”:
Sex—Male
Race—Black, Puerto Rican, other (in that order)
Age—Variable, predominantly 13 to 16 years
Dress—Carries package or paper bag, long coat in cold weather
Occupation—Student (lower social economic background). . .5
It is easy to scoff now at the profile’s obvious inaccuracies, just as it is easy to dismiss the transit police efforts as largely bumbling and ineffective. But police also made thousands of arrests and stepped up intelligence of youths of color—monitoring their crews, confiscating writer’s black books, interrogating graffiti perps and raiding writer’s homes. These surveillance-and-sweep techniques generated their own kind of ideology. The profile became its own kind of sick truth, with bloody consequences.
In 1979, an astonishingly disingenuous Public Interest article by neoconservative Nathan Glazer provided justification—theory is all too strong a word—for increasingly hysterical policing and punishment efforts directed against youths of color. The central premise of the piece rested not on well-tested empirical data but, as Glazer himself admitted, raw fear of the Other. Musing on the graffiti problem, he wrote, “(W)hile I do not find myself consciously making the connection between the graffiti-makers and the criminals who occasionally rob, rape, assault, and murder passengers, the sense that all are a part of one world of uncontrollable predators seems inescapable.”6
Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson would further develop this incoherent argument into what would come to be called “the broken windows” theory. If one broken window was allowed to go unfixed, the “theory” said, a neighborhood’s violent plunge into Fort Apache would soon follow. Broken windows theory paved the way for the brutal zero tolerance “quality of life” campaigns of surveillance, harassment and propaganda that a new generation of mayors perfected by the 1990s. Again, despite scant empirical evidence, the City Hall sound bite that graffiti was a gateway to violent crime necrotized into unimpeachable truth.
Glazer and Wilson had simply repackaged the same old there-goes-the-neighborhood racism that had driven the white flight of the ‘60s, albeit in a way that seemed prophetic. Two decades later, Malcolm Gladwell’s influential book, The Tipping Point, would still be celebrating “broken windows” as a bleeding-edge idea, less proving the “theory” ‘s viability than showing the complete success these ideologues had in transforming urban policy. Glazer’s and Wilson’s articles, in fact, represented a different kind of tipping point: once named, the neocon reaction to graffiti would become one of the hinges on which the politics of abandonment would turn toward a politics of containment. Both these politics would profoundly shape the hip-hop generation.
In the media, racial profiling and the War on Graffiti converged. The subway epitomized New York’s anarchic ruin, a city that had been given over to the rule of criminally undisciplined dark-skinned youths. In 1984, self-styled “subway vigilante” Bernhard Hugo Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a train at close range, paralyzing one, and became a national hero overnight. It was a climax that SKEME, a frustrated Black teenager with talent to burn, had foreseen a few years earlier, telling subway riders in a window-down burner: “All you see is . . . CRIME IN THE CITY.”
Pre-Teen B-Boy Preservationists
By the end of 1979, rap and graffiti were being thoroughly transformed by capital and authority. As Flash had said, it was time to survive and change or get left behind, the turning of another five-year cycle of style.
But then there were the pre-teens, the ones who once could not wait to grow up so they could have their own battles and block parties, rock their own styles, make their own names. The stylistic explosions of the mid-’70s were over, and time, money, and power seemed to be conspiring to steal their chance to shine. If these youth movements were to survive with their traditions intact, they needed nostalgic shorties who remembered how it used to be back in the day.
Two years after the Crotona Avenue jam, Crazy Legs was living in far uptown Manhattan on 207th Street, near the Ghost Yard. He and his cousin Lenny had battled two leaders of the original Rock Steady Crew from Echo Park, Jimmy Dee and Jimmy Lee, and lost. Still they had shown much heart and now they were members. But it wasn’t like it was. The legends had drifted away from the dance and the crews dissipated. Even worse, he says, “There weren’t too many crews out there when I moved into Manhattan. Very few people were doing the dance.” He was being cheated of his chance to prove himself. He was all of thirteen years old, and he ached for the past.
So Crazy Legs embarked on a mission. Like a character in one of the Times Square kung-fu flicks he loved, he traveled through the city to find and challenge every remaining b-boy. “I went and met this guy named Lil’ Man, who eventually became Lil’ Crazy Legs. I met Take One, this kid named Quiquito
, we used to call him Little Kicks, and I battled them. When I would come across b-boys, I would start hanging out with them and one person would tell me, ‘Yo, I know a b-boy from this area down here.’ He might be fifty blocks away or whatever. I’d be like, ‘Come on let’s go there.’ My little kung-fu flick mission continued. And eventually I recruited all of them,” he says.
Down in the Upper West Side, Wayne “Frosty Freeze” Frost was part of a group formed by Zulu Kings called the Rock City Rockers. Jeffrey “DOZE” Green and Ken “Swift” Gabbert had a crew called the Young City Boys. There were others, too, like Buck 4 and Kuriaki. Crazy Legs met and battled them all. Then Jimmy Dee gave him the Rock Steady Crew name. He says, “Jimmy Dee had seen that I had so many people down and I kept it going and a lot of the other b-boys weren’t still as active. It was a humble stance he took. He reduced his own rank and gave me everything and never got in my way of doing things, but was still there to give me guidance at being a crew leader.” The new Rock Steady Crew became a magnet for isolated Bronx-styling youths across the city, a second-generation supergroup, the last b-boys standing.
DOZE says, “Every Saturday, me, Legs, Frosty and Kenny spent all day in the movies in Times Square. Three dollars for ten movies, some crazy shit! Just watch Shaw Brothers movies and just bug out. And so we started incorporating those moves into the dance. That’s how we started getting our own style.” When they practiced their moves in the park at 84th and Amsterdam, they may have made an odd sight, a lost school of b-boy monks. They had inherited the dance, and they took that legacy seriously.
DOZE had first seen the dance in the North Bronx in the early ‘70s, in the Edenwald Projects where the outlaws danced with radios on their shoulders. He and Ken honed in on the gangsters’ up-rock and made that the core of their style. “The dance is actually very long. It’s like a fifteen-minute dance. It has a lot of steps. It goes from a format of standing up and being still and kinda like out doing with the hand gestures, then it goes to a strut, like a skip, then to a strut, then a backwards step and then it goes into a forward step, and then it’s like a hesitate, and then you drop. We took that part, the ending. We saw that, and said, ‘That’s the shit.’ The thrust forward and drop—that’s like the most powerful part of the dance, that’s like the breakdown. Me and Kenny learned from the last folks, we learned a fraction of it, but what we did with that dance is took it to a whole ‘nother level.”