Clever chap that he is, Santa Claus identified an area of ignorance in my music knowledge and delivered this book to me on Christmas Day. I’ve never been particularly fond of rap music – to my mind it lacks melody and most of the time I can’t decipher the words – but I’m always up for investigating the roots of music, be it pop, rock, blues, R&B, jazz or even rap, for that matter, and thanks to Santa and Jeff Chang I now know all about where it came from and how it originated.
I wasn’t to know it at the time, and even those involved hadn’t a clue how what they were doing would end up, but rap in its original incarnation of hip-hop was being invented a few miles from where I lived in New York in the mid-seventies, up in the Bronx, an area I only ever drove through, a few miles north of Manhattan’s tony East Side where my apartment doubled as Melody Maker’s US office.
The sole manifestation I saw of the culture that would produce this multi-million dollar musical phenomenon was graffiti on the exteriors of subway trains. It was a weird and wonderful form of artistic expression enacted mostly by black teenagers with spray cans who daubed the carriages in translucent colours; strangely plump, circular lettering of distinctive design that spelt out their nomes-de-can, or tags as these balloon-like expressions of individuality became known, arrogantly displaying not just the artistic skills of the individual graffiti artist but also their audacity in gaining access to the surfaces on which their work appeared. I loved it and was wryly amused by the city’s largely vain attempts to erase their work, the carriages on which washed out graffiti still poked through.
Other manifestations were less obvious, to me anyway. If Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is to be believed, and I have no reason to think otherwise, it all began with an urban renewal plan in the South Bronx that prioritised roads over housing. The resulting displacement created territorial divisions controlled by rival gangs, some of whom looted turntables from hi-fi shops during the electricity blackout that hit New York City during the night of July 13-14, 1977, an event I remember well. Close to where I lived restaurants were giving away food that would otherwise decay through lack of refrigeration, the streets were crowded with revellers and the beer was warm for once.
On their looted turntables DJs began to scratch, to make new sounds from old records, at parties held originally in their apartments before they broke out into the streets and, eventually, clubs. DJ Cool Herc (Clive Campbell) noticed that dancers “got wild” during instrumental breaks, and began playing songs with them. Then, in a technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round, he began to work two copies of the same record,” writes Chang, “back-cuing a record to the beginning of the break as the other reached the end, extending a five-second breakdown into a five minutes loop of fury, a makeshift version excursion. Before long he had tossed most of the songs, focusing on the breaks alone.”
Thus was born a crucial element of rap, alongside the graffiti, DJ-ing and break-dancing – as first seen and heard in the UK via hip-hop pioneer Malcolm McLaren’s 'Buffalo Gals'. Before long DJs were opting to play dub versions of Jamaican reggae singles or only instrumental breaks in songs, and whipping up excitement by talking over them.
The three pioneers of the genre were Herc, Afrika Bambaataa (Lance Taylor) and Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler) whose backgrounds are covered extensively; their families, how they arrived on the hip-hop scene, their entrepreneurial schemes and their prescience in driving forward new ideas. The former contributes a foreword to this book, Bambaataa was a bringer of peace to warring neighbourhoods and Flash more or less invented scratching by shifting the needle as he spun records on twin turntables.
None of this would have happened, however, without the sense of injustice felt amongst the black communities in both the Bronx and Jamaica, from where immigrants to New York brought the influence of reggae. Hip-hop arose from the need of these deprived communities to stamp a culture of their own on society, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop describes how they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
This is not a new book – it was first published in 2005 – nor, at 560 pages, is it short. I haven’t even finished it yet but I figured what I’d learned so far was worth a post on Just Backdated. In the fullness of time I doubtless will, though other, shorter books waiting for me might grab my attention in the meantime. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is less about the stars and more about the background, politics and unsung heroes. It’s well indexed, has a useful discography and bibliography and the list of names among author Jeff Chang’s acknowledgements alone reflects the depth of his research.
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