Front Burner - A salute to hip-hop at 50

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Hip-Hop celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. What started out in the South Bronx, became a best-selling, record-breaking, and globally influential art form. But for a long time, the genre and its innovators were not only debated but often dismissed. We look back at 50 years of art form with rapper and broadcaster Shad. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. On August 11th, 1973, a girl named Cindy Campbell hosted a birthday party in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, an apartment building in the Bronx. The entertainment for that party was her brother, Clive, better known as DJ Kool Herc. And I told him, I said, I'm going to try something new tonight. I'm going to call it the merry-go-round.

He was working the turntables, using this new technique he had perfected where he'd switch back and forth between two copies of the same record, using two turntables. And as the story goes, hip-hop was born. Bongo rock was still, oh, no vocals in it.

And I would go into Baby Uwe, you know, the Mexican. And it was like, whoa. I think we got some hit, you know, because people was like, oh, whoa. Everybody was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm feeling this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. Now, a genre of music isn't built in a day. But that party where Kool Herc played, think of it as the launch pad where something incredible took off.

And it's the reason why hip hop celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It's the reason why hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. What started out in the South Bronx became a best-selling, record-breaking, globally influential art form. And along the way, it was scrutinized and debated. It challenged people's ideas of the black experience, and it also shaped politics and pop culture. A Florida jury says the rap group 2 Live Crew can't be as nasty as they want to be if they want their records sold in stores. Gangster rap has become incredibly popular and profitable by selling lyrics about black-on-black violence to a young mainstream audience. They are selling explicit sex and violence to younger and younger kids,

and they don't seem to care about any scars. They leave, they take the money, and they run. So today, we're going to talk about a few of the defining moments in the genre's 50 years with rapper, broadcaster, and hip-hop scholar Shadrach Cabango. You might know him as Shad. Shad hosted the award-winning documentary series Hip-Hop Evolution. Hey Shad, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. My pleasure.

I brought up that story of hip-hop's kind of origin story in the intro, so to speak, because as you explained in your series, that party at 1520 Cedric Avenue kind of gives us the context that helps us understand what hip-hop is all about. So I think it makes sense for us to start there too. So maybe you can help me understand what life was like in the South Bronx at the time. And I guess even more specifically, what was the music culture like? Yeah. So the South Bronx at that time was the poorest neighborhood, not just in New York City, but in all of New York State.

So you're talking about devastation. Burnt out buildings is very famously a characteristic of that neighborhood at that time because the buildings and the land was so depressed in terms of value that landlords would just burn down the entire building to get the insurance money. The fire statistics for New York are staggering. New York has more fires than Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia put together. And the busiest district is the South Bronx, where last year the men from Battalion 27 responded to more than 10,000 calls. On average,

that's one every 45 minutes, night and day, every day of the year. The city of New York was very poor at that time. So there was a lot of underfunding of schools, of after-school programs, of music programs, which is important as it relates to the invention of hip-hop. Because as you said in the intro, this innovative way of using turntables, this was born out of kids not having access to instruments, to other instruments. And turning the turntable that was invented just to be a means of playing recorded music into effectively an instrument. So let's go into the use of the turntable as an instrument, as you point out.

Can you give me a sense of how it was being used in that context? DJ Kool Herc and really these kids, they were 14, 15, 16. They discovered that there were particular sections on these songs that the dancers liked to dance to, what they called breaks. So instrumental breaks, little eight bar, 16 bar musical sections. And so they were trying to figure out a way to repeat those musical sections. And so DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, famously just after him, came up with these innovative ways of looping these sections of the records that the dancers like to dance to that they call breaks, which is why they're called break dancers. And they figured out how to loop it seamlessly using two turntables.

I go by the name of the Grandmaster Flash from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. And the first phase of the break mixing I will show you is called the punch phase, where I will take the foot from the four bars of Billie Jean and just fake it in as such. And at this moment, I will proceed to warm up till I get things going. And that became a method. So that was applied to the live environment. But that's also what we hear when we hear rap music, right? Is these sections of music being looped.

So that was all born from these techniques that Kool Herc and others innovated on the turntables in the 70s in the Bronx. So it's interesting because like you said, these are really young people, like these are kids. And the music that they're pulling those breaks from, can we talk about that? Because like at the time, disco was the thing, right? That was the dance music of the era. That was the New York City mainstream music vibe. And this is coming out of that is this other little tiny, tiny, tiny subculture at the time. So tell me a bit more about the musical environment at the time. Yeah. So that's another really important contribution of hip hop is that hip hop is

fundamentally genre agnostic. The DJs played whatever made the people dance. So disco was the music of the day, and you would hear some disco at these hip-hop parties, but you would also hear funk. You would also hear soul. You would also hear soul. You would also hear rock breaks. If they had, you know, some funk to them, some swing to them,

you would hear Aerosmith, you would hear Billy Squire, whoever it was. Right? Tom Tom Club. An offshoot of the Talking Heads. You would hear a lot of Latin influence in the record. So there's, for example incredible bongo band so it's really this melting pot musical culture um a bit of a response to disco because disco was um well that was for the adults you the kids in the Bronx couldn't get into the disco parties. You had to be dressed up. You had to have money. So there was some disco played at the hip hop parties because that was the music of the day. But it was much more of a melting pot that reflected that culture in the Bronx and really shaped hip hophop as this genreless musical form okay so these hip-hop parties these

early you know pre-genitors to hip-hop parties are going on and then like another six years before the first hip-hop song as we think of it today is recorded so in 1979 that's rappers delight sugar hill gang it comes out and it's, it's, it's huge, right? It's also 15 minutes long. It's huge in time too. Uh, so, so what did, what did that do for hip hop as an art form? Yeah. Rapper's delight is a really interesting moment in the history of hip hop. So that's at the end of the seventies, hip hop had been incubating in New York and that area and other similar areas, including Toronto, actually, in the 70s.

Then you have Rapper's Delight that sells, I'm not sure exactly how many copies, but I want to say at least a dozen million copies, this rap single. Why is it 15 minutes long? Because people had no sense of how to capture what rap was in a recording. It was party music. It was something that you did for 15, 30 minutes, an hour. You know, a guy would get on the mic while a DJ like Kool Herc is playing records. So it is hilariously 15 minutes long, but it spread hip hop far and wide. I mean, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but just touching on kind of another aspect of the culture that's developing.

These early hip hop performers, they didn't look anything like what we consider hip hop now. And it was pretty wild. Like it was this kind of interesting mix of like, I don't know, punk, glam rock, and then things changed. So, so let's talk about who it was who really first kind of solidified that look that we still associate with hip hop. Run DMC, when they came on the scene in the early eighties and mid eighties, were the first to dress in what we would consider maybe classic hip hop fashion. They got the street shoes on. They have Adidas on. They have Kangol hats on.

They have leather, you know, leather bomber jackets on. You like to have your fresh sneakers on. So I just leave. We just leave our old ones in the store. Fresh out the box. New ones on and walk right out the store. That's why King of Rock, we always say, when we're on the tape, we're fresh out the box. And what they were doing is just dressing like themselves, dressing like kids in their neighborhood. But that was such an innovation at that time, because it was strange to just dress like yourself on a stage.

You're supposed to dress like a star, like you said, glam rock and all these things. You're supposed to elevate the presentation. And Run DMC really changed the game and gave hip hop its own aesthetic in terms of fashion by just dressing like people dressed on the street. And I'm just thinking, like, the My Adidas video, like, that was a big moment, right? With Bleed on my leg and Adidas on my feet and going out and just standing here shooting the gift.

Me and D and my Adidas standing on two fists. Huge moment. And you think about the excitement of communities seeing somebody really dressing like they do on a huge stage on a platform like MTV or big stadiums around America. Part of that era, and then moving beyond it, we've got Run DMC in the late 80s, and then moving into the early 90s, the genre is starting to flourish, right? And people are starting to

really pick this up and develop it. So you've got Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, So you've got Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, Rakim, and the list goes on. Nas, we keep moving on. But what stands out about that particular era? I can't remember what you call it in the series, but you've kind of got this foundational era, this classic era. What stands out to you? That's right. So we call that the golden era in hip hop.

So from the mid 80s into the early 90s, Run DMC, they're the first hip hop old school superstars. Then then you have mid 80s into the early 90s, the golden era. And it's called that because it seemed like every act that came out was an innovation. Like every act that came out was completely transforming the genre. So you have acts from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince telling funny stories and having these really sharp MC DJ routines to Public Enemy coming on the scene with literally an army behind them in terms of how they presented themselves and in the fatigues and the mix of Chuck D's consciousness and Flava Flav is the comedic foil with

also a lot of consciousness as well. You have people like Queen Latifah bringing this consciousness, female energy to hip-hop as well in a powerful way. But I'm nothing with you. I mean, I don't really love you if he hits you. This is my notice of the tour. I'm not taking it no more. I'm not your personal whore.

That's not what I'm here for. Ain't nothing good. Then you have artists like Rakim. And Rakim is like this BCAD moment in terms of lyricism. I go to Queens from Queens to get the groove from Brooklyn. Make money in Manhattan and never been to Token. Go uptown to the Bronx, I'll boogie down. Get strong on the island, recoup and lay around. And actually, when we interviewed Run DMC for Hip Hop Evolution,

I asked DMC, Daryl McDaniels, who's from the old school, I said, when you heard Rakim for the first time, what did you think? And he said, oh, I knew we were done. That's how much of a shift each of these artists was bringing to hip hop. So that was really a time of flourishing and excitement around the music. A lot of creativity. And you talk about almost like these quantum leaps between artists, but then you also see that kind of amplified on a grander scale when you look at like this this tiny little thing that that sprouted in the bronx and it spreads locally but then also across the country on the west coast and later you know in the south you get this development this like massive bounds of development

from from region to region too so so maybe we can talk a little bit about that part of the evolution hip-hop is fundamentally New York culture. It was born in the Bronx, and we talked a little bit about the cultural influences in terms of the social situation there, in terms of the musical culture in that place. And it is very similar to other cities like Philadelphia, like Toronto at that time. So they were all kind of developing this thing we call hip-hop. like Toronto at that time. So they were all kind of developing this thing we call hip hop. But then as that music was exported to some further regions, it starts to mingle with the local influences in some really interesting ways. So, you know, one example that really stands out for me is Los Angeles. We take for granted that there's hip-hop in la but when that started to

emerge and really take over hip-hop that was that was huge because hip-hop was new york culture um the experiences and the stories that were being told in la hip-hop were were shocking you know talk you think about ice tea boys in the hood it's considered one of the first gangsta rap records and then nwa after them and the kind of stories that they were telling that was reflecting uniquely L.A. gang life. And it was shocking to the mainstream. But it was even shocking within hip hop to some extent. So, you know, that's Los Angeles. Then you have the South.

You have Miami. Two Live Crew, one of the first real rap groups from the South to emerge. If you've ever been to Miami, that's a totally different culture than New York. That's a party culture, right? It was just fun, irreverent party music. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Let's talk about this shocking nature of hip hip hop's developing, because it really comes into the mainstream and it basically, you know, it clashes with the mainstream. So as it's growing in influence, the scrutiny on it is also growing, right? And we've got this, this national campaign that starts up in the U S in the mid eighties, targeting the shocking music, so to speak, as labeling it as obscene. And I'm thinking in particular of Tipper Gore, who's the former wife of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. She was a huge figure in this movement. These companies and some of these artists are engaged in cultural strip mining. They are selling

explicit sex and violence to younger and younger kids, and they don't seem to care about any scars. They leave, they take the money, and they run. And even though all genres of music were kind of caught up in the lens of that scrutiny, hip-hop was really a main target. So I'm thinking in 1990, we've got 2 Live Crew's album, Band in the USA, comes out, and it's the first to get this parental advisory sticker. We're too live, too black, too strong. Doing the right thing and not the wrong. So listen up, y'all, to what we say.

We won't be banned in the USA. Banned in the USA. And the album before that, as nasty as they want to be, the cover art is them lying on a beach with four almost naked bikini-clad women there as part of this party culture you talk about. That album's a subject of a trial. Can you kind of walk me through that?

Yeah. So again, this can be hard to imagine, but that album was deemed illegal to sell. There was a record store owner that was arrested for selling that album. It was deemed illegal. A Florida jury says the rap group 2 Live Crew can't be as nasty as they want to be if they want their records sold in stores. In what's being called a landmark case, the jury convicted a record store owner on obscenity charges for selling a 2 Live Crew album, an album banned by a federal judge because of its lyrics.

Charles Freeman was... Right, and it took an appeal. It took Henry Louis Gates, the famous Harvard professor, testifying to the inspirations, to the culture behind that music. It's Miami party culture. It's also a culture of comedy, black comedy records that were going around the South at the time. So it took all of that to even make it legal, literally.

So that was a victory that was won by hip hop for all of music. And we see that, we see the effect of that still, right? In terms of like artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, you know, artists who are making overt sexuality, what would have been termed then as obscene, part of their persona, part of their art, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think of Lil Nas X as a recent example as well

with his Montero campaign, you know, and there's a lot of controversy around that. That victory to number one has not come without controversy as the video's satanic theme and homoerotic displays of affection have caused quite the reaction online and beyond. But we would still never imagine that it would be banned outright. And it wasn't that long ago that music, hip hop music was outright banned. And so that was a victory that had to be fought and won. was a victory that had to be uh fought and won okay just kind of switching tack a little bit let's also talk about the money because hip-hop becomes incredibly lucrative over time and you can see that like physically with the jewelry you know artists wear bling is now a term everyone uses so how did money affect the evolution of the genre yeah in in in so many. So hip-hop was always culture, you know, initially.

And what artists aspired to be, because there wasn't a big industry, was just the best. The best, the most innovative, the most creative. And that's why we had that golden era of hip-hop that we were talking about earlier with all these stylistic innovations. Because there wasn't much of an industry around the music. innovations because there wasn't much of an industry around the music. When there was, getting into the 90s, this is becoming a very popular musical form, eventually the most popular musical form. It did shape the music. People had more commercial considerations and it became less of a culture and more of an industry. And by that, what I mean is the aspects of the culture that were less lucrative started to fall to the wayside or started to become marginalized, started to become more kind of fringe and less central. So you started to hear less consciousness in the mainstream music.

And what you heard a lot more of in the mainstream was kind of more pop sounding whatever was selling i mean that's the logic of industry is whatever is selling you create and sell more of that and whatever's not selling as much kind of gets bumped to the margins but in terms of culture some of that stuff in the margins is really important to kind of the totality of it to the actual culture of the thing. I kind of want to zoom out for a second and look more broadly at the music industry. So in 2004, rock and roll turns 50. And the music industry then was in a really different spot back in the 2000s, like early 2000s.

So this is before streaming. A lot of things have changed. So maybe as kind of the first line of thought here, maybe we can talk about what the industry conditions were like for rock and roll back then when it turns 50. What was the industry like? Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting comparison to make. So 2004, I would say in terms of rock music, just before that, there was quite a bit of anxiety about whether or not this is the end of rock music. So Radiohead had put out OK Computer and Kid A and it seemed to signal that rock music was maybe done. maybe done. But then you have this explosion that happened with the Strokes and some other band, trying to think the White Stripes and artists like that,

bringing some more energy back into the genre. Also in terms of the industry, this was just post Napster. So downloading is really disrupted the traditional music industry. Napster is enabling millions of people to get free music with just a few keystrokes at their computers. The idea is deceptively simple. It's called file sharing. And so you have this independent movement of music that's starting to develop around that time too, that's also bringing a lot of energy. other thing i think in terms of comparison by that point in the history of rock music rock had subdivided into all of these

different interesting sub genres right you had punk rock you have heavy metal people were talking a lot about indie rock at that time hip-hop by comparison think, is still sort of talked about as this one uniform thing. It doesn't have the same, I guess, system of sub-genres or way that we conceptualize it. Even though the music really has evolved in that way. in that way. If you think about an artist like Kendrick Lamar and what he's doing creatively and conceptually versus a new younger artist like Yeet, for example, you can hardly compare the two. What their creative aspirations are are so different. And yet we still talk about them under this one umbrella of hip hop as if they have the same creative goals. under this one umbrella of hip-hop as if they have the same creative goals you know so so that's a that's a big difference um to me that i think is not good for hip-hop i think we really need

to start to think about hip-hop we need to have the the proper respect for hip-hop like we do for rock music in order to think about artists differently think about um uh these sub genres a little bit differently and then the industry is in a very different place right 2004 as you said there was no streaming and now we're we're fully in the streaming era we've been there for about a decade and and hip-hop has proven to be really popular uh on streaming so yeah it's interesting to to look at the two very important genres in popular music and where they were at 50 years in. And I guess just a little further, like on those differences, and I guess I'm asking you to speculate or prognosticate in an impossible way, but I'm curious about the longevity. Like, what do these differences mean for hip-hop going forward do you think well streaming definitely is going to help

the longevity of any genre right because stuff can literally live i mean at least right now we're imagining that it will live forever on streaming these different songs right um it does some interesting things to the history uh and the way that history is kind of archived so the example that's coming to mind is de la soul who this year just finally got their music this is a very important act in terms of hip-hop but their music wasn't on streaming because of some complicated legal issues their music wasn't on streaming until this year. So what that does in terms of preserving the history properly,

sort of archiving streaming, presents some potential challenges. The other thing I think of in terms of longevity, so 50 years of rock and roll. Well, when rock and roll started, I don't think people were really talking in terms of, oh, this music is just going to be a fad it's not going to be around but that really was the conversation with hip-hop for 10 20 years maybe um into hip-hop and so for hip-hop to reach 50 years to me feels like a greater milestone because of how much it was debated and dismissed for probably about half of its existence. It makes 50 years feel like that much more significant of a milestone. And then, as I was sort of saying as well, 2004, a couple years prior, they thought rock and roll was maybe dead. And hip hop seems to

be thriving as much as ever 50 years in. So that's another, to me, interesting point of comparison. Just before we part ways here, as an artist, you've talked to some incredible people. Is there a moment in these 50 years of hip-hop that kind of left a big impact on you personally well one thing i was struck by working on on the series um was really how young artists are in hip-hop and what they're able to do at such a young age i'm thinking of grandmaster flash all the way at the origins so So at 13, 14 years old, he was grabbing his parents' tools and going inside of mixers and turntables to see how they work, to actually change how they work in order to make this equipment do what he wanted it to do. He was 13, 14 years old. He was cutting slip mats out of felt.

There weren't slip mats for turntables that's something that you put on top of the platter between the record and the and the platter he was cutting that out of felt uh on on the floor and his in his parents apartment because he had figured out that that material is is the right material to allow the record to spin but allow him to manipulate the record with his hand without damaging the record. So all these innovations coming from kids. I think about Tupac, who died, I want to say, in his mid-20s.

24, 25, right? The kind of music that he was making, how prolific he was, the kind of consciousness that he brought at such a young age. What would he have been doing now if he was still alive? So that's one thing that has stayed with me throughout my life as a fan and as someone that makes hip hop, but also working on this series. It was just reinforced for me how amazing young creativity is in this form. I can't think of a better spot to end it than that. That's great. Shad, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, thanks.

Appreciate it. That's all for today. You can find Shad's series, Hip Hop Evolution, on Netflix. Frontburner was produced this week by Rafferty Baker, Lauren Donley, Shannon Higgins, Joyta Shingupta, Matt Muse, and Derek Vanderwyk. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty. Music by Joseph Shabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao.

Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening. We're taking a break early next week. We'll be back on Wednesday. So from all of us here at FrontBurner, have a great holiday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.