The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed

by Serrano, Shea

  3. The Song’s Philosophy, Part I: There are two versions of “Jazzy Sensation.” There was the A side, most regularly known as the “Bronx Version,” and then there was the B side, a gentler, less funky iteration featuring singer Tina B. The B side was called the “Manhattan Version,” and so right here is one of the first examples of rap marketing itself to two different audiences. And this grays into . . .

  4. The Song’s Philosophy, Part II: When the Sugarhill Gang made “Rapper’s Delight,” they used the spellbinding bass line from “Good Times,” a massive disco hit by Chic, to draw a familiarity to this new thing they were doing. By Bambaataa co-opting McCrae’s “Funky Sensation,” he followed that same template, except “Jazzy Sensation” was more rugged, more raw than what the Sugarhill Gang presented. It was, on the surface, a very mainstream sound, but it was also an underground song, this mash-up of sounds and voices and call-and-responses and brags and low-key mayhem.

  That’s a large part of what makes “Jazzy Sensation” so remarkable: Only two years into having rap on the radio, and we already see this tug and pull between what is obviously acceptable and what will eventually become acceptable, which is essentially the core characteristic of rap. It’s that duality, and whether Bambaataa aimed for it to be that way or it accidentally turned into that later isn’t what matters. What matters is that it happened. It’s what ties “Jazzy Sensation” to the earliest days of hip-hop and also how it predicted what the genre's future became. You take parts of what’s already being done, what’s already been agreed upon as okay, and then you tweak them and twist them just enough that they become new thoughts and new actions and new ideas that are exciting and a little intimidating.

  The biggest example, the most obvious example of it happening was when DJ Screw did it in Houston in the ’90s. He took songs that were hits, cut them up, and slowed them down a ton until it felt like they weren’t doing anything except drooping out of your speakers, and so all of a sudden there’s this thing that’s new and exhilarating (the Chopped and Screwed sound) but also recognizable enough that it would eventually be adopted by basically all of rap.

  “Jazzy Sensation” was the same way. It’s a fun song, a happy song. But it’s also quietly the design for rap as a countercultural movement.

  Jazzy Sensation

  “Who said we don’t have no quality?” (0:39)

  “Now I’m the Master Ice and I’m twice as nice” (1:07)

  “And I’m the dedicated prince of the disco slice” (1:10)

  “Let’s party ‘til you can’t no more” (2:20)

  “I’m five feet eight, with sweet brown eyes” (3:01)

  “So tell me young ladies, what you wanna do?” (3:12)

  “I hold the key to the door of society” (3:17)

  “A presidential rapper with a lot of finesse” (3:27)

  Thrilling, Descriptive, Boastful, Confrontational, Cool on Purpose, Psychological, Considerate

  REBUTTAL: “THAT’S THE JOINT” FUNKY 4 + 1

  “That’s the Joint” was a giddy explosion of group harmonies, ball-passing team exercises, chattering cowbells, and the fearless Sha-Rock, the first female rapper in history. All told, the most ecstatic nine-minutes-and-change released during Sugar Hill Records’ historic first half decade. Technically released in 1980, “Joint” became a historic mile marker on February 14, 1981, when the Funky 4 + 1 performed it on Saturday Night Live, the first national television performance from a hip-hop group, at the behest of hosts Blondie.

  “The people on the show were so nervous about them doing it, I remember trying to explain to them how scratching worked,” guitarist Chris Stein told Wax Poetics. “Trying to verbalize what that is for someone who has no idea, it’s really difficult.” It’s unclear if America fully understood it in ’81. The group performed live but DJ Breakout pantomimed his record manipulation; plus their mics got cut, since rap songs in the early ’80s could go on like hot butter on popcorn. But even in truncated form, hip-hop was now something that could be seen in any suburban home before MTV launched their first transmission. Also, nearly thirty-five years later, how many great rap collectives don’t have a show-stealing alpha woman—word to the Juice Crew, the Native Tongues, Three 6 Mafia, Junior M.A.F.I.A., the Click, No Limit, Roc-A-Fella, Flipmode Squad, Ruff Ryders, Murder Inc., Terror Squad, and Young Money.

  —CHRIS WEINGARTEN

  1. There’s a guy who identifies himself as “Chuck Chuck.” It’s Mr. Freeze. It’s a thing he used to say at the beginning of a bunch of his rhymes, possibly because he was reciting Charlie Choo’s party raps, but also possibly not.

  2. There’s a part where Master Dee says his name and it sounds a lot like he’s saying “Master Gee,” who is a guy from the Sugarhill Gang.

  3. This is my favorite book about the history of rap.

  4. Nearly every article on Bambaataa that mentions this also mentions that he rose to the position of warlord in the gang, though no one seems to know what a warlord’s role was, or is, outside of expanding the territory of the gang. I can’t imagine it was anything nice.

  WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

  How hard it is to be alive when you’re poor and also when you’re black and especially when you’re poor and black at the same time.

  WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

  It was the moment that rap gained a conscience; the moment that broadened what rap was (and would eventually become); the moment that rap hinted at the sort of social significance it could (and would) carry.

  Three things need to be in place before we get to the following interview transcript, because if they are not in place then it will only carry a portion of the weight it should. Additionally, without these two notes the information in the interview will seem unnecessary and unrelated to “The Message,” as there are no specific references to it anywhere in the copy, and that could not be further from the truth, for reasons that will be made obvious soon, if they are not already. The three things are:

  1. Chuck D is the half-god frontman for Public Enemy, and Public Enemy is, by all measures, the greatest, most impactful political rap group to ever have existed.

  2. To describe a rap group as having been “political” is to assert that it spent a great deal of its energy discussing/critiquing the sociology of America.

  3. Without “The Message,” there is a likelihood that Chuck D and Public Enemy would have never become what they became, meaning the weight of “The Message” is one that bends the line of history that connects 1982 to today.

  The following is an excerpt from a big interview that ran in Spin magazine in 1988, the year Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, among the most potent rap albums ever recorded. The title of the article is “Armageddon in Effect,” and that should tell you the sort of tone the interview carried.

  SPIN: Do you consider yourselves prophets?

  CHUCK D: I guess so. We’re bringing a message that’s the same shit that all the other guys that I mentioned in the song have either been killed for or deported: Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, all the way up to Farrakhan and Malcolm X.

  What is a prophet? One that comes with a message from God to try to free people. My people are enslaved within their own minds.

  Rap serves as the communication that they don’t get for themselves to make them feel good about themselves. Rap is black America’s TV station. It gives a whole perspective of what exists and what black life is about. And black life doesn’t get the total spectrum of information through anything else. They don’t get it through print because kids won’t pick up no magazines or no books, really, unless it got pictures of rap stars. They don’t see themselves on TV. Number two, black radio stations have neglected giving out information.

  SPIN: On what?

  CHUCK D: On anything. They give out information that white America gives out. Black radio does not challenge information coming from the structure into the black community, does not interpret what’s happening around the world in the benefit
of us. It interprets it the same way that Channel 7 would. Where it should be, the black station interprets information from Channel 7 and says, “This is what Channel 7 was talking about. Now as far as we’re concerned . . .” We don’t have that. The only thing that gives the straight-up facts on how the black youth feels is a rap record. It’s the number one communicator, force, and source, in America right now. Black kids are listening to rap records right now more than anything, and they’re taking it word for word.

  By 1988, it had become clear that the most threatening and intimidating iteration of rap was the one focused on social commentary, on reflecting what was happening in black America back out to the rest of the country. Culture reporting was really the first true stance rap took (minus the act of rap existing as rap, which was for sure a defiant stance already). N.W.A did it most aggressively; their apoplectic and unapologetic examination of the country’s racial dynamic all but set fire to the White House. And Chuck D and Flavor Flav turned the angst into action, perfecting rap as protest and political music.

  And when that shift was made, when it was fully vetted, when it was given the opportunity to mutate into a hundred million different things, that’s what it did. Rap changed irrevocably. Rap changed with “The Message.”

  ♦

  “The Message” was not the first rap song to be politically slanted.

  A large percentage of the early rap music was party-based, that’s for sure, but not all of it. It even came in gradations. A handful of songs secretly high-fived social uprising by including a variation of the line “You gotta dip-dip-dip dive, so-so-socialize / Clean out your ears and then open your eyes,” which was only a slight deviation from a Black Panthers chant. Kurtis Blow hinted at creating a song with gravity on 1980’s “The Breaks,” (see this page), which sounded very much like a happy song but was quietly about some unhappy things, and then he got closer still to the idea with “Hard Times.” And Brother D and the Collective Effort made “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” that same year, which was about exactly what it sounds like it was about. But where Kurtis dulled the edge of his knife with humor (one of the things he was upset about was that he couldn’t claim his cat as a dependent when he filed his taxes) and mostly only spoke in generalities, Brother D and the Collective Effort were so militant that the profoundness of their overall message (America’s not that great of a place to be right now if you aren’t white and wealthy) was muted by the conspiracy theories they also spoke on (cancer was being pumped into the water; America was cooking people in ovens in secret concentration camps). “The Message,” though—“The Message” was pitch-perfect.

  It was poppy but slowed down just enough that it was nearly impossible to hear the song without really listening to it, and Melle Mel emoted out this beautifully colored picture of an austere and bleak New York that nobody had presented before. He talked about being frustrated by all the noise. He talked about homeless people eating garbage. He talked about receiving a subpar public education. He talked about always being surrounded by either rats or roaches or junkies, and let me tell you, a roach crawled across my calf one time and I gave very real consideration to cutting my leg off.

  It was insightful without being preachy. He talked about the inevitability of poverty begetting poverty and TV being unhealthy and said the phrase “Neon King Kong standing on my back,” and that is an unbelievably powerful statement when you pull it out into the open space all by itself.

  It was magnetic and captivating and immediately satisfying. Its first lines, “It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” are still all-world even thirty-some-odd years later, and the first bar of his actual verse, “Broken glass everywhere / People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care,” is even more transformative. And then all of that bundled up together, presented in this video that reinforced everything Mel was talking about, in this video that was such an aberration from the videos rap had known, with shots of homeless people smoking and tow trucks and broken bottles. The reverb it caused is still felt today.

  Not Picked

  There’s a reasonable (albeit wrong) argument to be had that Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” should’ve received the 1982 chapter. Other songs that weren’t picked:

  Fatback Band, “Kim Tim III (Personality Jock)” (1979) + Blondie, “Rapture” (1980) + Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (1981) + Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, “Planet Rock” (1982) + Too Short, “Don’t Stop Rappin’” (1983) + Kurtis Blow, “Basketball” (1984) + Schoolly D, “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” (1985) + Eric B. & Rakim, “Eric B. Is President” (1986) + The Beastie Boys, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” (1987) + Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe the Hype” (1988) + 2 Live Crew, “Me So Horny” (1989) + Digital Underground, “The Humpty Dance” (1990) + Cypress Hill, “How I Could Just Kill a Man” (1991) + House of Pain, “Jump Around” (1992) + Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day” (1993) +Snoop Doggy Dogg “Gin and Juice” (1994) + The Notorious B.I.G., “Big Poppa” (1995) + Outkast, “Elevators (Me & You)” (1996) + Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997) + Nas, “Hate Me Now” (1999) + Mystikal, “Shake Ya Ass” (2000) + Nelly, “Hot in Herre” (2002) + T.I., “Rubber Band Man” (2003) + Kanye West, “Jesus Walks” (2004) + Three 6 Mafia, “Stay Fly” (2005) + Lupe Fiasco, “Kick, Push” (2006) + Soulja By Tell ‘Em, “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)” (2007) + Wale, “The Kramer” (2008) + Gucci Mane, “Haterade” (2009) + Wiz Khalifa “Black and Yellow” (2010) + A$AP Rocky, “Purple Swag” (2011) + Killer Mike, “Reagan” (2012) + YG, “My Nigga” (2013) + Run The Jewels, “Lie, Cheat, Steal” (2014)

  ♦

  There are for sure some things that need to be mentioned when talking about “The Message,” because it was not a record that came together perfectly:

  • Grandmaster Flash isn’t anywhere on the song. He has zero parts. It’s the group’s most famous record, and its most ego-driven member is absent from it.1 While neither Flash nor any members of the group have ascribed their breakup to this fact, it seems to be at least partly attributable to it. They never recorded another song together after “The Message.” (I imagine Flash would respond to that with something like, “We barely even recorded this one together.”)

  • Nobody in the group wanted to record the song. It was too much of a bummer, they told people in interviews later. Melle Mel was the only one who could be convinced to record it, which is why he’s the only member of the group on it. After it took off, that’s when they accepted it, and even then Grandmaster Flash did so grudgingly.

  • It was written by one of the staff songwriters, Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, at Sugar Hill Records, the label Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five signed to after the success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (see this page). He composed it in the basement of his mother’s house. There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that the first truly popular radical rap song came from a record label that had been derided for not being authentically hip-hop.

  And yet none of that matters. None of it muddles the luster of “The Message.” None of it siphons away any of its historical significance.

  Here’s an easy way to see how important “The Message” was: It was the first rap song added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, and the National Recording Registry is a collection of “sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.” Another good way to see its reach is that Rolling Stone picked it as the best rap song of all time. Another good way is to listen to Melle Mel talk about it. Here’s what he said about it during an interview in 2005:

  That was the one that separated us from everybody else, you know what I mean? If it wasn’t for, you know, that record, we would still be a good group but we’d be kind of jumbled in with everybody else. That record kind of made the separation beca
use of what it meant to society and what it meant to the record industry.

  “The Message” turned Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five into insta-legends. And rap into an art form with the power of a colossus.

  REBUTTAL: “MAKING CASH MONEY” BUSY BEE

  It’s hard to argue that “The Message” is not the most important rap song released in 1982. Having introduced social-conscience protest music to rap, it’s very high on the list of most important songs of any kind, from any year. But what’s more hip-hop (and more fun) than arguing? So for the sake of argument: In lots of ways, Busy Bee’s slick, funky, stream-of-consciousness how-to guide “Making Cash Money” is the polar opposite of “The Message.” Largely frivolous, dedicated to nothing but the almighty dollar and the acquisition thereof, it’s about as pure a piece of capitalism as you can find. But that’s what’s so important: Rap music, more than any other art form before it, stepped itself up and over the boring old art-vs.-commerce argument that has plagued makers of things for so long. Think of how many of rap’s mile-stones—from Paid in Full, to Get Rich or Die Tryin’, to Watch the Throne—blur the line between paper chasing and art creation to the point where it’s basically erased. Rap music is a form of expression so powerfully modern as to render such old-world distinctions meaningless. “Making Cash Money,” from way back in 1982, stands as a seminal example.