At any rate, I mention Next because they are connected to Kurtis Blow because “Too Close” heavily samples 1979’s “Christmas Rappin’,” Blow’s first single and the moment when it became obvious he was going to change rap irreversibly.
And on his next single, “The Breaks,” that’s exactly what he did.
♦
A short, personal aside: The first time I heard of Kurtis Blow was when I watched CB4, a 1993 movie where Chris Rock, the second main bad guy from New Jack City, and a guy I’d never heard of or seen before pretended to be hardcore rappers. It was really a parody, but really it was a satire.2 At the end of the movie, Rock’s character, MC Gusto, is being interviewed alongside his groupmates right before going onstage for a reunion show. The interviewer asks what they have planned for the future. Gusto says he’s going to get a search squad together and go down to South America and find Kurtis Blow. It was a reference to how Blow, having been part of a faction that dominated early rap, was basically invisible in the years that followed. I wasn’t concerned with any of that, though. I was concerned with the scene that occurred right before it.
In that scene, Chris Rock dresses up in lingerie to help catch a criminal. I didn’t see CB4 until 1996, and that was a year after Rock had appeared in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he also dressed up like a woman. Rock is a moderately handsome man, but he’s an uncomfortably unattractive woman.
♦
It’s easy to calibrate Kurtis Blow’s importance because all of the important things Kurtis Blow did are easy to identify.
He was the first rapper to sign a deal with a major record label (Mercury Records). Sugar Hill Records had become the preeminent indie rap label behind “Rapper’s Delight” and then also the signings of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Funky 4 + 1, Treacherous Three, and others, but even still they didn’t carry the sway that Mercury did. He was the first rapper to release an actual rap album (Kurtis Blow, 1980). He was the first prominent solo rapper.3 He was the first rapper managed by Russell Simmons. He was the first rapper to say the phrase “alley-oop” in a song4 and also the first to have a rap video where a basketball game turned into a karate fight,5 and also the first to indirectly advocate growing a mustache.6 Kurtis Blow did that. Kurtis Blow did all of those things. And still, “The Breaks,” his magnum opus, was more meaningful to rap than he was, if that even makes sense.
“The Breaks” did many things as a song, and some of those are tiny factoids that are more fun to remember than they are actually significant, but three are truly vital.
SOME TINY FACTOIDS
It was the first rap single to win the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop music critics poll; writer/author/producer/filmmaker Nelson George is one of the voices chanting in the background of the song; it didn’t sample any funk songs like most of the other rap songs had before it.
THE THREE TRULY VITAL THINGS
First, it was the first rap single to go gold and only the second 12-inch in all of music up to that point to have done that.7 This was very much when there were still doubts about whether or not rap was going to be able to stand as a genre of its own long-term or if it was going to fade off into nothingness like disco was beginning to do. In 1981, 20/20 ran a mini-documentary on rap. Hugh Downs opened it by describing what rap was, saying it was “A music that is all beat—strong beat—and talk,” and that it was becoming “a new phenomenon.” It’s weird to watch now because rap is the most popular form of music in the world, and Downs talks about it with the same disengaged and curiously unfamiliar tone I imagine he’d have used if he was telling people the army had found aliens in the desert. But it was representative of the way rap was seen then, which is to say new and with an uncertainty. “The Breaks” followed behind the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Blow’s own “Christmas Rappin’,” which sold more than four hundred thousand copies and showed that rap could be profitable.
Second, it was the first rap song to incorporate a stayed theme and wordplay. In “The Breaks,” the term “breaks” is said eighty-four times and is used to reference good things that can happen to you, bad things that can happen to you, things that actually break, things that only break metaphorically, and actual brakes on vehicles.8 Most of the good things mentioned are spatial and broad-spectrum (breaks to win, breaks to make you a superstar, breaks that are hot, breaks that are cold, etc.), but the bad things are hyper-specific. For example:
• Your significant other leaves you for another person and then they move to Japan. (I’m not sure how their moving to Japan makes it worse, but I guess it does.)
• You get audited by the IRS because you tried to claim your cat as a dependent. (This one would seem to be your own fault, really.)
• You get a big phone bill because you called Brazil eighteen times. (Again: your fault.) (Also, eighteen calls feels like a suspiciously large amount. Was this you trying to track down another ex-girlfriend? And if so, really, you have to start looking at yourself if every time someone leaves you they move to another continent.)
• You borrowed money from the mob because you lost your job.
• You met a guy you thought was perfect. Turned out, he was poor and also married.
The point is this: Kurtis Blow tied all of these different things and ideas together into a cogent and coherent idea on “The Breaks.” Rap large-scale adopted the idea almost immediately after he did it.
Third, “The Breaks” was the first rap song that had a hook, which is to say it was broken up into easily digestible sections rather than the long-form and borderless structure rap had up until then. It’s hard to state how crucial a move this was. Here’s what Kool Moe Dee said about Kurtis Blow in his 2003 book, There’s a God on the Mic: The True 50 Greatest MCs:
If you listen to all of the records that came before Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” you would notice that there was a very important element missing. The hook! Kurtis Blow is the inventor of the hook for rap songs. All of the significant records at the time had emcees rhyming continuously with a music break to break the monotony. So in a sense, Kurtis Blow showed us how to write songs, because if there’s no hook, there’s no song.
“The Breaks” took rap music and turned it into rap songs, which is a wholly different, wholly more influential thing.
REBUTTAL: “ZULU NATION THROWDOWN” AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
First thing to understand is that “Zulu Nation Throwdown” wasn’t just one record—there was a Volume #1 and a Volume #2, credited on their orange and black labels to “Afrika Bambaataa Zulu Nation Cosmic Force,” and “Bambaataa Zulu Nation Soul Sonic Force,” respectively.
That first volume—maybe partly because of the line that says, “Punk rock to the left, and Patty Duke to the right”—is what first got Bambaataa into downtown Manhattan new wave clubs. It’s an exciting, endlessly charming performance in rap’s super-old-school, amateurs-from-the-street roll-call mode, all nonstop energy and bubbling spirit from Cosmic Force (Lisa Lee, Chubby Chubb, Ice-Ice, Little Ikey C). It’s important to note on this version Lisa Lee comes off like the group’s leader, or at the very least a member on equal footing with all the guys, in a way that’d pretty much disappear from increasingly machismo-minded hip-hop as the ’80s progressed.
On Volume #2, Soul Sonic Force—Mr. Biggs, Pow Wow, the G.L.O.B.E.—feel a bit more professional, and at least marginally less propulsive, but still awesome; each gets his own sharp verse, but their throwdown really picks up steam when they all come back chanting together, showing off teamwork “with all due respect to the Zulu Nation.” Bambaataa told David Toop on Rap Attack the single “never went nowhere.” But three and a half decades on, it hasn’t stopped going.
—CHUCK EDDY
Rappers in Movies
Game, Waist Deep + DMX, Romeo Must Die + Ice Cube, Are We There Yet? + Young Jeezy, The Janky Promoters + Xzibit, xXx: State of the Union + RZA, The Man with the Iron Fists + Rah Digga, Thirteen Ghosts + Nas, Belly + Andre 3000, Sem
i-Pro + Snoop Dogg, Bones + Fat Joe, Thicker Than Water + Ludacris, Fred Claus + Ja Rule, The Fast and the Furious + Busta Rhymes, Halloween: Resurrection + Lil Wayne, Who’s Your Caddy? + Big Boi, ATL + Wiz Khalifa, Mac & Devin Go to High School + Dr. Dre, The Wash + Eminem, 8 Mile + 50 Cent, Before I Self Destruct + Beanie Sigel, State Property + Ice-T, Leprechaun: In the Hood + Sticky Fingaz, Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood + Cam’ron, Killa Season + Vanilla Ice, Cool as Ice + Will Smith, Men in Black + T.I., American Gangster + Eve, Barbershop + Lil’ Kim, You Got Served + Mos Def, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy + Kurtis Blow, Krush Groove + N.O.R.E., Paper Soldiers + Ed Lover + Who’s the Man? + Ghostface Killah, Black and White. Best Actor: Tupac, Juice (1992)
1. The first thing is Kevin Garnett, the Hall of Fame–worthy power forward on the Timberwolves. I would very much like to know Garnett’s opinion of “Too Close,” though. I assume he'd probably only be concerned with whether or not one’s defensive coverage of the pick and roll would be hampered or helped by being aroused.
2. The three guys are an N.W.A rip-off.
3. Russell Simmons tells a story in his 2001 book, Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God, about how Kurtis Blow performed as part of three separate shows of fifteen thousand–plus people in three separate states on the same day (with Graham Central Station and the Bar-Kays in Alabama; then in North Carolina with the Commodores, Patti LaBelle, and Stephanie Mills; then in Georgia with Con Funk Shun and Cameo).
4. “Basketball.”
5. Also “Basketball.” I really love the song “Basketball.”
6. He literally still has a mustache to this day. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was born with one, and even less surprised if archaeologists excavated his corpse in 2252 and the only things there were bones and a mustache.
7. The first was “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” by Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand. They were not rappers.
8. A bus, a car, a plane, a train.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
How jazzy the Jazzy Five were. (The best alive, to be thorough.)
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It’s the opening call from Afrika Bambaataa, a DJ and rapper who revolutionized rap by taking it away from the funk band arena that the Sugarhill Gang had made famous and pushing it toward the electro version he perfected in 1982 with “Planet Rock.” It was also the first big record to come from Tommy Boy, which became a vital record label.
The key figure on “Jazzy Sensation” is Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang member turned glam outfit enthusiast and civic activist. The most visible figures on “Jazzy Sensation,” though, are the people who rap on it. There are five of them—Master Ice, Master Dee, Master Bee, A. J. Les, and Mr. Freeze—even though it sounds like there are six1 (and occasionally seven2). And each one spends a fair amount of time saying nice things about himself, because that’s how rap was in the early ’80s. I suppose a lot of contemporary rap is still like that, it’s just like that in a different, less charming way.
There’s a part here, for example, where Master Ice raps that he has “sweet brown eyes.” That’s a very likable thing, and a part of the body not nearly enough rappers rap about when they talk about themselves anymore. Mostly the thing they describe as “sweet” in rap songs since 1990 is their penis. Nas did it on a song called “Live Now”: “Admit I did live a little bit, sweet pickle dick.” Freddie Gibbs did it on a song called “Thuggin’”: “Swiftly ’bout to stick a sweet dick in your sweetheart.” The most uncomfortable time was when the Game did it on Too Short’s “I’m Wit It,” because he gave an explanation for it. He said, “Bitches call me Sweet Dick Willie ’cause my cum tastes like Now or Laters,” and I wonder if anyone mentioned to him afterward that they’re actually called Now and Later, and I also wonder if the executives at the Now and Later corporation rap the line around the office as a joke.
To extend the point, there’s also a whole history of rappers saying their dicks taste like things. Without being too complicated: Danny Brown said his tastes like “tropical fruit Skittles.” Gucci Mane didn’t cite a specific candy when he talked about his, only that it tastes “like candy,” so I guess he gets blow jobs from girls who aren’t as good at identifying types of candy as the ones Danny Brown keeps company with. Soulja Boy said his tastes “like ribs,” which is either very fortunate or very unfortunate, depending on your opinion of barbecue. There’s more and more and more and more still, and I want you to know that when I agreed to write this book I did not consider the possibility that I would be required to research rapper dicks for more than two hours.
But, so on “Jazzy Sensation,” each rapper says nice things about himself. History has mostly scrubbed away mentions of the members of the Jazzy Five from rap’s story. This, it would appear, hints at their having never really done anything beyond being on an Afrika Bambaataa song, and that’s true: This is the only song they recorded with Bambaataa, and the only part of any of their work that’s remained vital. So a majority of what’s known about them is what they say in the song. A list:
MASTER ICE SAYS . . .
• He’s nice. (Twice as nice as everyone else, as it were.)
• He’s the dedicated Prince of the Disco Slice, and he says it with a very clear hubris in his voice, so I suspect this is a high honor.
• His formal name is Rodeo Rock of the Microphone.
• He’s 5'8" and he has the aforementioned sweet brown eyes.
MASTER DEE SAYS . . .
• He believes in astrology, or at least is familiar with it. (“An Aquarius man.”)
• That “rappin’ on the microphone is my pet peeve,” so he either does not enjoy rapping or he does not understand what a pet peeve is. Either way, he kind of sounds like the least jazzy person in the Jazzy Five.
• He’s the “ladies’ grand rocker,” so I guess that means he’s good at sex, which probably makes him feel better about not understanding idioms.
MASTER BEE SAYS . . .
• He’s the Microphone Chief of the Jazzy Five. I’m not sure if that’s a higher rank or lower rank than Prince of the Disco Slice. It sounds lower, but I can’t say for certain.
• He has a key to the door to society. I don’t know what this means.
A. J. LES SAYS . . .
• He’s very unique.
• He’s very good at speaking, so much so, in fact, that he asserts that hearing him doing so is a very real blessing for you.
• He also believes in astrology. (“I’m a Leo man.”)
• He’s presidential.
• He has many women. (Likely on account of his being so good at speaking and appearing presidential, which I hear women like. Sadly, I do not look presidential. At my best, I maybe look like the comptroller for a small city.)
MR. FREEZE SAYS . . .
• He is real and true, though not in those exact words.
• He is interested in confronting people he says are copying his style. (I think this makes Mr. Freeze the Tough One, inasmuch as someone in a group called the Jazzy Five can be described as tough.)
The origination of the Jazzy Five is similar to the origination of a lot of early rap groups: It started out as one group of people, parts were moved around, then eventually it became another group of people, and that’s that.
♦
Of all of the songs in this book, I suspect “Jazzy Sensation” is the least well-known, though that makes sense because it sits in the shadow of “Planet Rock,” Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 megahit. There are four points I’d like to go over here, so let’s do that.
1. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation: Bambaataa is one of three DJs often cited as having helped hip-hop—the other two being DJ Kool Herc, discussed in the 1979 chapter (see this page), and Grandmaster Flash, discussed in the 1982 chapter (see this page). And while it’s easy to mush them all together, each of the three influenced the music separately. To be short about it: Herc’s the one who first figured out to take the break beats from records and
stitch them together. Flash is the one who turned DJing into a complex and intricate art form. And Bambaataa took what was acceptable to use as reference material in rap and extended it outward in each direction about a hundred thousand miles. The most obvious example is his fondness for Kraftwerk, an electronic music group from West Germany mildly popular in the ’70s and ’80s.
But Bambaataa’s influence is even larger than that. When Nelson George wrote about Bambaataa in Hip Hop America,3 he said, “Bambaataa’s most important contribution to developing hip hop may have been sociological,” and when he said that, he was referencing the Zulu Nation and the ideology it spread.
In 1974, Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a cooperative of DJs, break-dancers, graffiti artists, and (eventually) rappers. The history of the Zulu Nation is a long and curvy story, but the essentials are: Bambaataa was a member of a very strong gang in New York called the Black Spades.4 Following either a trip to Africa or the death of a friend of his, depending on the article you happen to be reading, he opted to dedicate his life to providing an alternative to the gangs in the city. That’s the Zulu Nation. It’s still around today.
2. The Song’s Sound: “Jazzy Sensation” steals its musical base from a song called “Funky Sensation,” which had come out earlier that same year and was a hit on black radio. It was by singer Gwen McCrae, a woman most famous for a song where she asks a guy if she can be his rocking chair. It was the first time Bambaataa worked with producer Arthur Baker, who was already experimenting with drum machines, synths, and samplers. So what you hear are the first whispers of rap moving away from the disco or funk and toward the energetic electro-funk that Bambaataa would become most famous for, a sound that eventually morphed into a hundred different things.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 3