At various points in my previous articles, I have at least pointed to the fact that I, having been born in the 2000s, had to learn about hip-hop out of order, at least compared to those who had been fans since very early on or the very beginning.
While I certainly have my own individual experience of learning about hip-hop, I sometimes wonder on a more general scale how the passage of time has shaped how hip-hop is viewed by an ever-evolving number of fans, and older music becomes more and more distant from the audience and moment it was conceived within.
If we speak about hip-hop in strictly evolutionary terms, of things always needing to progress, does that in some way obscure, particularly for younger fans, how tight-knit the music can be in terms of referring to hip-hop's past?
“...If the old school didn’t pave the way”
As I have definitely explained multiple times, early hip-hop music was completely based around the sounds being played and manipulated by the DJ.
In the earliest era of the genre, the music and especially the break down sections from songs such as “Scorpio” by the Dennis Coffey and the Guitar Steel Band from 1971 or “Catch A Groove” by Juice from 1976, would become the integral pieces of the musical canvass used by DJs during hip-hop parties.
These breaks were first the backdrop for people to dance, including to breakdance, and eventually for the MC to rap along with the DJ.
Subsequently, as rap records began to be made by 1979, this same tradition of utilizing and referencing records would start to spread over into the beginnings of the genre’s own existence on vinyl, which as discussed before was many times based on recreating popular breakbeats with house bands.
Though according to Jay-Quan The Hip-Hop Historian there was not an overall abundance of early hip-hop records that themselves became the source of new breakbeats as stated in his short overview of the career of the legendary producer and multi-instrumentalist Pumpkin, he does specify a few important exceptions.
As a notable example, some breakbeats that can be heard on live tapes from the early ‘80s originated from the series of singles released by The Treacherous Three on Enjoy Records, such as “Feel The Heartbeat,” which as the title suggests featured Pumpkin & Friends recreating “Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner.
DJs also heavily utilized “Love Rap,” the A-side of their 1980 single with Spoonie Gee, an original member of the group, which featured “The New Rap Language” on the B-side, a song that was used by DJs though not as much. The music for these songs was also provided by Pumpkin & Friends and featured Spoonie Gee's brother, Pooche Costello, on the congas.
While "Love Rap" was mainly a Spoonie Gee song, following up his 1979 "Spoonin Rap" single on Peter Brown's Sound of New York, USA label, “The New Rap Language” featured both Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three displaying an early style of fast rapping, the first time I believe it was heard on a record.
This in turn became a very popular style utilized by everyone from Sir Mix-a-Lot on the 1985 version of “Square Dance Rap” to J.J. Fad at the end of “Supersonic,” that was eventually referenced by Eminem in his extremely fast verse on “Rap God.”
The opening of “Love Rap” is also where the famous sample of The Treacherous Three saying “From the South, to the West, to the East, to the North, come on Spoonie Gee, and go off, and go off,” originates from.
As these examples show, whether through live performance, mixtape, or record, hip-hop music from the beginning has been constantly obsessed with referencing itself, such as on Grandmaster Flash’s groundbreaking “Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel” released during this same era in 1981.
As rap records and music technology continued to evolve and more music was made, these references and samples of the past also would morph rapidly.
On a larger level, this included the practice of response or answer records, such as when Sylvia Robinson recorded and released “It’s Good To Be The Queen” in 1982, which as stated by David Toop in the “Version to version” chapter of The Rap Attack: African jive to New York hip hop (1984), was an answer to director Mel Brooks’ “It’s Good To Be The King Rap,” a song and catchphrase connected to his film History Of The World, Part 1 (1981), and specifically his portrayal of King Louis XVI.
Dimples D. and Marley Marl’s “Sucker D.J.s (I Will Survive),” featuring production by Marly Marl and Andre Booth, was an answer to Run-DMC’s “Sucker M.C.’s (Krush-Groove 1),” both being released in 1983.
While not explicitly connected as response records, the overall tone and certainly the chorus on 1983’s “Problems Of The World (Today)” by The Fearless Four seems to be replicated on “World War III” by Grandmaster Melle Mel and The Furious Five, released the following year, though I’m not sure if the latter was some sort of response.
In a broader sense, social commentary raps such as “Problems Of The World (Today)” were themselves preceded by 1982’s “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, which in reality was basically a collaboration between Ed Fletcher, or Duke Bootee, a songwriter and percussionist in the Sugar Hill house band, and Melle Mel.
In any case, outside of answer records, hip-hop artists were also sampling very small tidbits of other rap songs and implementing them into their shows and songs, a style which is still used to this day.
LL Cool J asking El Shabazz “Is it live?” during the “Untitled” skit at the end of the A-Side to Radio (1985) would be sampled various times, such as when it was scratched in, presumably by Jam Master Jay, as the titular soundbite for Run-DMC’s “Is It Live,” featuring drum programming by Sam Sever, on their third album, Raising Hell (1986).
Dimples D. saying Marley Marl’s name on “Sucker D.J.s (I Will Survive),” would become a calling card, or even an early precursor to the producer tag to a degree, that Marley would begin to scratch on songs such as “Marley Marl Scratch” with MC Shan from 1985.
According to JayQuan The Hip-Hop Historian’s overview of Marley Marl’s early career, Marley was specifically utilizing the acapella, or “Suckapella” version of “Sucker D.J.’s,” which was featured on the B-side of the single, along with a dub version.
Beside just using her saying his name, Marley would also implement other rhymes Dimples D. said into “Marley Marl Scratch,” at one point even making MC Shan set up a lyric that would be finished by Dimples' voice, a style which I discuss in my previous article on how energy is diffused inside hip-hop.
Now, while I have given most of these examples of rap records sampling other rap records in what is basically chronological order, I will again reiterate that my own personal understanding of this history did not unfold that neatly, though these songs are very important to my discovery of hip-hop.
On a more personal level, my earliest awareness that hip-hop constantly sampled itself began probably around 2009 when I first heard “So Fresh,” a song by Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff, and featuring Biz Markie and Slick Rick. This song is from Will Smith’s second solo album, Willennium (1999), with it's production credited to Darren Henson and Jazzy Jeff, the latter who also scratches on the song.
As the title, and the inclusion of Biz Markie and Slick Rick may point to, “So Fresh” is a song based around nostalgia for hip-hop’s past. This sense of nostalgia comes through on many songs on Willennium, such as "Will 2K," featuring K-Ci from Jodeci and his partnership with fellow member and brother JoJo, which reflects on the past while awaiting the new millennium.
In the music video for "Will 2K," directed by Robert Caruso, Will throws a New Year's Eve party, featuring many cameos, and uses a time machine so that he, along with his friends K-Ci and Jazzy Jeff, can transport the guests to various parties throughout the 20th century, as well as one part where Will travels to a party a few centuries into the future.
Willennium also featured “Pump Me Up,” a throwback song in which the Fresh Prince emceed as Jazzy Jeff did a DJ routine with the titular go-go classic by Trouble Funk.
One of if not album's biggest hit was “Wild Wild West,” a meshing of Kool Moe Dee’s “Wild Wild West” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” featuring Dru Hill and Moe Dee, and which was made in connection to the 1999 film of the same name starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline, based on The Wild Wild West tv show from the 1960s.
“So Fresh” in particular is based around giving a very fun look back at hip-hop’s past, mainly in the 1980s. This goal comes through not only in featuring Biz Markie and Slick Rick doing verses that include references to some of their classic routines, but also in the '80s throwback style music video.
This video was directed Jada Pinkett Smith, and ties directly into Will and Jazzy's use of the time machine in the "Will 2K" video to visit the '80s, as in this instance Jazzy Jeff breaks the time machine because he wants to stay in the past when he and the Fresh Prince were a duo. Other than Slick Rick and Biz Markie, the video featured several cameos from stars of that era of hip-hop like The Juice Crew, Kangol Kid of UTFO (Untouchable Force Organization), and Flava Flav of Public Enemy.
In terms of the song’s title, in classic hip-hop fashion, Jazzy Jeff would scratch in a voice throughout the song which says, “So fresh,” and which I would figure out some years later was Juice Crew All-Star Roxanne Shanté.
However, before discovering the identity of who was saying “So fresh,” I would hear it sampled at least one other time. Probably around 2010 or 11, I heard Biz Markie and T.J. Swan’s “Nobody Beats The Biz” for the first time.
As designed by Marley Marl, the vocal samples heard in the intro to the song were basically a combination of Roxanne Shanté saying “He’s Biz Markie,” with phrases such as “Mr. Dynamite,” “Hard working,” and “The star of the show."
These other phrases were said by legendary saxophonist Maceo Parker while he emceed James Brown’s performance at Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia on October 1st, 1969, which I believe was first heard on the classic and highly influential on hip-hop Sex Machine live album from 1970, which in reality combined live and studio recordings that were overdubbed with audience noises and stitched together with audio of James Brown or Maceo talking to the crowd to make it all sound live.
In any case, you can once again hear Roxanne Shanté saying “So fresh” right before Biz Markie begins his first verse on “Nobody Beats The Biz," with most if not all of the vocal samples from the intro to the song coming back during the outro. While I am not sure if I immediately made the connection back to the voice I heard on “So Fresh” by Will Smith, I certainly know that would occur a few years later when I first heard Roxanne Shanté and Biz Markie’s “Def Fresh Crew” from 1986.
On that recording, Shanté begins her first verse with lines such as “I’m Shanté and the rhymes are def. Just rap, so fresh, ‘til I get outta breath,” and “I’m Shante, he’s Biz Markie. We rap so fresh that they think it’s three.” By the time I heard “Def Fresh Crew,” maybe around 2017, I would realize this was the origin of the vocal samples for both “Nobody Beats The Biz” and “So Fresh.”
So, to circle back, what I have explained is essentially my own personal journey to understanding the origin of a particular sample, which took almost a decade before I actually found the true source.
What I find interesting is that my own personal experience stands in stark contrast to the presumed experience of the intended audience of Will Smith’s “So Fresh,” who would for the most part know exactly where Roxanne Shanté’s voice came from as soon as they heard it, or at least would have remembered hearing it from their childhood growing up on hip-hop in the ‘80s.
Seeing as I didn’t grow up in the ‘80s, my connection to the sample was instead built in the opposite direction, first with “So Fresh” and ending with “Def Fresh Crew.” While I don’t think there is a strictly “correct” way to get introduced to hip-hop, this does make me wonder how the meaning or history of a rap song can shift or be heavily altered as time passes on.
Hip-hop, and in turn sampling, are many times vested within the audience, and to my understanding this means there will be a shift in how certain things are understood as time moves on, some of which is bound to occur as years go by, and some of which I believe can be controlled by the hip-hop community.
To give a quicker example, I will point to “I See Now” by Consequence, included on his 2004 mixtape, Take ‘Em To The Cleaners (2004), and featuring verses from his frequent collaborator Kanye West, an integral creative voice involved in the project who acted as it's host, providing much production and rapping throughout, as well as Big Pooh and Phonte, the dual rappers from the North Carolina based rap group Little Brother, which they formed with producer 9th Wonder, who also produced this track.
In the beginning of Phonte’s verse on the song, he says, in reference to his relationships with women, “Females, I hit ‘em with deliberate styles for me to try to lay with them, and then chill around the way with them, like her name was Lisa, Angela, Pamela, Renee and them.”
If you hear the lyric performed, at face value it has a very nice flow, as Little Brother is known for. However, besides the sound of the lyrics, Phonte is also using what may appear to some to be filler bars about pursuing women to make references to LL Cool J’s “Around The Way Girl” one of various hits from his fourth album, Mama Said Knock You Out (1990).
Phonte references the title when he says, “chill around the way with them,” and the names “Lisa, Angela, Pamela, Renee” are the same which are said by Cool J at the end of his last verse on said song.
To once again bring up target audience, I would assume most hip-hop fans in 2004 had heard “Around The Way Girl” at some point in their life, if not many more times as it is a popular song even now.
Fast forward 20 years, and I can’t say with as much confidence that newer fans of hip-hop would be able to make that connection to LL Cool J if they heard “I See Now,” and that’s if they even knew of Consequence and Little Brother to begin with, as Consequence is probably best known by younger fans for his appearances on Kanye West’s early albums rather than his own work.
So, what does this mean about the value and meaning of Phonte’s lyric, or of Jazzy Jeff scratching Roxanne Shanté’s voice? If the understanding or awareness of where these references mean or where they originate from can fade based on a shift in audience, does that in some way diminish the work itself?
Personally, I don't all the way know, but I do think that in some ways we can have a big effect on the relationship between hip-hop history and the audience based on how we decide to talk about the art form's background.
For example, as has been the case for a long time, a popular activity within rap discourse is to make ranked lists, from anywhere between ten to 100 or even more. Publications and media outlets such as Rolling Stone, Complex, and Pitchfork have made various lists either ranking artists or their albums, both within the current time and on a broader scale.
Based on how much coverage these lists can receive from artists or people who are involved in hip-hop media or fanbases, they sometimes look like the main avenue through which the hip-hop community gathers to talk about hip-hop history. However, it's important to note that talking about history is not really the point of these lists, at least not talking on any extensive level.
The main point of this form of discourse is usually to argue for who you think is number one, or the best, within hip-hop or in some given sub-genre or time period. I'm generalizing, but many of these lists are basically designed for this purpose.
To make another generalization, you often see the same artists at the top of these lists. 2Pac and Biggie Smalls are usually somewhere near the top, along with Jay-Z, Eminem, Nas, and Lil Wayne, with Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Nicki Minaj also somewhere close by. Again this is me brainstorming, but it's not a super inaccurate picture.
While there are certainly older hip-hop artists on these lists, with Rakim usually being the highest up, I believe their inclusion in a sense reinforces the idea that hip-hop has improved from what it once was, whatever our collective idea of what it "once was" even means.
For example, Eric B. & Rakim are often described as the key stylistic and lyrical shift in rap music, with their groundbreaking 1986 single "Eric B. Is President/ My Melody" changing the image and format of rap music in the mid-'80s.
This story is one of the only stories I can say with confidence that younger fans of hip-hop might know about '80s hip-hop.
While I love Eric B. & Rakim, framing them in this way always felt to me like it was potentially expressing some negative views of hip-hop history to younger hip-hop fans, specifically that the rest of hip-hop in the '80s was less than, or not as impressive and influential as Rakim.
The reason why Rakim can be so high on these rapper ranking lists, is often because he is described as elevating rap, which in my opinion carries the implication, whether intentional or not, that if you are an older artist who doesn't pass this test of "elevating" the art form, you are less valuable.
I often wonder what message this passes down if many younger fans do not listen to a lot of '80s hip-hop to even get a good sense of what that era sounded like to begin with, as there was much experimentation occurring in rap music all over the country and even outside of it.
I think this is relevant to this article because if we speak about the majority of '80s hip-hop as being something that needed to be improved, I think this ends up sending the message that it therefore does not need to get listened to.
Even if the passage of time will naturally mean certain references might become a little obscure, I think that this presentation of older rap music as being possibly not worth as much also helps to make certain connections between the eras less clear, even though these connections certainly still exist and I do not believe will go away any time soon.
Hip-hop music is still quite young, even with the near 40 years that have gone by since KRS-One famously made that point on "I'm Still #1," so these questions of how best to pass it on to younger fans are still fairly new, and I do believe that if we want to, we can shift many aspects of how the art form is discussed and understood.