Stuff You Should Know - How Hip-hop Works

Episode Date: July 11, 2013

In this week's SYSK Select, what you hear is not a test, instead it's Chuck and Josh discussing the cultural history of the Hip-Hop movement. Born out of the South Bronx, by way of Jamaica, Hip-Hop culture grew up suddenly as DJs learned to use two turntables at once. Check out this episode of Stuff You Should Know to learn about the origins and evolution of Hip-Hop. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And I'm going to go with how hip hop works from July 11, 2013, a little more than four years ago. And I just remember this being a great episode. I learned a lot about it. Now with someone who was into the music side of hip hop in college. But hip hop is much more than music. It's about an entire culture which encompasses many different things. So give it a listen.

And as always, if you've heard it once, you might find something new upon a second listen. And I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm on Mike 1. He's on Mike 3.

Jerry's on the Wheels of Steel. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. That's right. Terminator X is to our right. Yes. That's you, Jerry. That's my favorite DJ. Is it?

Oh man. Unbelievable stuff. I think DJ Hurricane is pretty great. Yeah. It is pretty great. True. Yeah. I mean if you go back and listen to Beastie Boy's stuff, the stuff that he was doing.

Yeah. It's like I grew up with it. So I took it for granted. Sure. But with many things as a grown-up now, I'm looking back and like that was pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm still going to go with Terminator X. Just like buy fractions of a point though. Yeah.

I put them at the top. Yeah. Not like Cool Herk. Hey, Cool Herk man. He's what they call the OG Chuck. Spoiler alert. Yeah. We should say that we're forayin' into territory where we have little and no business because

we're pretty square. But we can still talk about hip hop. That's not true. I was into this stuff at one point. I was into it too. I'm still square. Yeah. But I think we have business just as much business as we would any other music.

All right. Fine. We're cool again. We're cool to cool. Okay. Is that cool? Okay. You don't have any business.

So we're talking about hip hop today. It has a very long tradition that dates all the way back to Africa, which as we'll see. But then the modern incarnation is a little more recent. Still, it's kind of old. Yeah. It's got some pretty surprising and interesting roots. But we should say, and this is something that I was always hung up on for a long time, and Catherine Neer, who wrote this article, goes to point this out.

The difference between hip hop and rap, they're not the same thing. Right. It's like the square and the rectangle thing. Yeah. Exactly. So moving on, no, hip hop is more like a, it's a cultural movement. It's more than just rap. Rap is a type of music that falls under the umbrella of hip hop.

So you can say that rap is part of hip hop. But hip hop is not rap. Necessarily rap. Yeah. Like the square and the rectangle. They go hand in hand though, you know? Yeah. And you know, I was trying to find out who coined the term hip hop.

And it's one of those things where there's a bunch of people that kind of get credit for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everyone from, I mean, some people say Keith Cowboy Wiggins from Grandmaster Flash. He was definitely the one. And then other people say, no, it was DJ Hollywood or Lovebug Starsky. And other people say, what about Sugar Hill Gang or Herk?

Sure. So I don't know if it's been pinpointed, but it was used in print in 1981 for the first time in The Village Voice, although it was surely used in the late 70s and, you know, on the street. Yeah, because Herk was, I mean, he coined a lot of terms. Like this one of the interesting things about this is like we can trace it back pretty confidently and find like actual origins of this, what's become this global international cultural phenomenon. We have seen the birth of a new music form in our lifetimes, which is pretty cool.

We have. And that's the only one. No, that's not true. What about like Electronica? Yeah, I guess so. But you could also say that that was sort of the same as like Synthesizer from like the 70s. Right.

Yeah, but that was like used in Rock and Roll. I don't know. Maybe that counts. I think it counts. You do? Sure. You know, hip hop, EDM, that's Electronica, right? I think so.

Yeah. Yeah, electronic dance music. Yeah. So yeah. But I would say, yeah, I would say that qualifies. Even still, it doesn't diminish the birth of hip hop. No, of course not. I mean, there's two that's better than one, right?

That's right. So, Chuck, when you're talking hip hop and you talk to a cultural historian about hip hop and say, what is hip hop, they're pretty much going to give you four aspects that combined make up the cultural movement of hip hop, right? Yeah. And Catherine, who wrote this, is a historical cultural historist. That's what they call him. Historian.

And I can't remember her graduate degree, but it has something to do with this very closely. I just can't remember exactly what it was in. So that's why when you read this, you're like, man, Catherine really got into this article. For sure. You know? It's pretty broad and there's a lot of info here.

Yeah. So we should get to it. Yeah, things. And it started out as just like graffiti, breakdancing, emceeing and deejaying and rapping. These days, you might see it portrayed more as visual arts, graffiti included in that, but film and other graphic arts, written in spoken word, so not just rapping and emceeing, but performance poetry, physical movement, which is not just breakdancing, but a lot of dance styles, including my favorite, the crumping.

Things pretty cool. It's unbelievable. It's just somebody going nuts. It's awesome. And so like herky jerky, yet controlled, and I just, I could never in my wildest dreams do it. So I think that's why it appeals to me. But that's, yeah.

That's the fact that it's not controlled or it doesn't appear controlled is what differentiates it from the herky jerky dancer from Mr. Show. Remember him? Yeah. And then the final one is a style, which is course fashion and, you know, just the hip-hop style in general, everything from clothing to bling and, you know, the lifestyle. Yeah. All right.

Like we said, the history of hip-hop, especially the music, can be traced all the way back to Africa. And we would trace the modern birth of it to the South Bronx, the South-South Bronx. But leading up to that, you would join the slave ships coming into the West Indies, as they were called back then. And these slaves who were captured and transported to the New World, making air quotes, brought with them this tradition called greeatism, which was a form of familial storytelling. It was an oral tradition, very frequently set to drums.

And there was also very frequently dancing. And a lot of that dancing, as you showed me, very much resembles dancing that you see today, about style dance. Not very much. Like, absolutely. Yeah. You know? Right.

So you've got this presence of this, what's now an African-American, I guess, style or cultural identity, right, that's evolved out of Africa. And music and movement and drum rhythms are a big part of it, right? Yeah. And, of course, Colin response in church was a big part of it, as well as gospel and Calypso and salsa and, of course, jazz and the blues. It's all rolled up as influences that eventually made its way to Jamaica, to soldiers who are American soldier stationed there in World War II.

Yeah. So we made our way from Africa to the West Indies, up to America. And then there was that boom, that birth of jazz and all that, that made it then down back to Jamaica, part of what were the West Indies. Yeah. It's a weird little circle. So when it gets taken back to Jamaica and World War II, there was something going on there in the Caribbean that was pretty cool.

And really, the birth of what hip hop and rap would become. They had DJs there who had these big portable sound systems, and they would go play block parties and house parties and street parties, and started a tradition called toasting, which was sort of like early rap. It was kind of like the freestyle stuff in Eight Mile. Like, a lot of times they were trying to one up other DJs or cut down other DJs. And it was included over the music. And have you ever listened to like a reggae show today?

Like reggae fire on Al-Madea? Oh, yeah. So you know how they'll just turn on the music for a second, and they'll say something, and they'll turn the music back up, and they'll turn it down again? Yeah. And I think that's toasting. Yeah. I listened to some of it, too, like the early 80s toasting.

Am I right? Yeah. Okay. And that led to two different types of new reggae music, which is talk over and dub. Talk over is kind of what we were just talking about, the toasting over music. And then dub just changed the song musically with like echo and massive amounts of bass or treble, reverb, stuff like that. Yeah.

It was like what you'd call now, like a remix of a song, but it usually followed certain lines like a lot of echo or always a lot more bass than the original version. Yeah, exactly. And they would throw that on the B sides of the record. So you'd have the regular version than the double version. Right. Right? So all this is going on in Jamaica.

Yeah. And in the 60s, there was a kid named Clive Campbell who lived in Jamaica and grew up around this toasting, street parties, portable sound systems. Talk over. Yeah. Yeah. Dub, basically changing and altering music to make it sound cooler with a heavier bass line.

Yeah. And this kid, Clive Campbell, he moved to the Bronx in 1967 and he eventually became somebody known as Cool Herk, who was the DJ, who most people say was the originator of hip hop. That's right. Cool Herk with a K. Oh, yeah. DJ Cool Herk.

He's a legend. Oh, yeah, yes. Okay. So Cool Herk also, by the way, started the tradition of naming yourself as someone else. Oh, yeah. You know, he wasn't Clive. He was DJ Cool Herk. Right.

And that became, of course, a tradition in rap and hip hop. It did, as we'll see. So he had a big gig early on. His sister, I've heard various things from birthday party to back to school party. And he was well known as a tagger, like graffiti tagger, which we'll get to in a minute, how that plays a role. So people just showed up en masse to see who this famous tagger was, like DJ Cool Herk is going to be there.

Let's go check it out. Right. So it was like a lot of folks there. Yeah. They came for the tagging and stayed for the DJ now. That's right. Because what they found at that time, when we're talking the 70s, right, maybe the mid to late 70s.

If you went to a party and the DJ was there, the DJ just played a record and then ended and maybe if they were good, it was like the next one came on, right, before the first one ended. And it was, again, if you'll listen to how Disco works episode, this is where this all came out of. Like was this block party right here, basically. Right. This is the birth of just not just Disco or not just hip hop, but Disco too.

That's right. And so they went, they saw that he was doing some pretty cool stuff. He had two turntables and a microphone. And he saw that when people were dancing, they would just kind of stand around them when like a really good part of the song would come up with lots of great beats or whatever. They dance and he figured out along the way. And I think he figured out before this block party happened that if you just take two versions of the same record, you can keep that one part going over and over again and just switch

back and forth between the records, playing that same part. And people will dance all the time. So when all those people turned out for a sister party to see that graffiti tag or herk, they came up against this DJing and that was that. Yeah. It's called a break beat and it's typically like a drum break. And that's what the DJ is doing. If you don't know anything about it, when they have the little headphones up to their

ears is they're queuing up the spot on the second record. So they can crossfade or toggle in the early ages right over to that next one without missing a beat. Right. And like you said, the dance party would just keep going on and on. Right. This is insane. Yeah.

They were like, is this record ever going to end? No. But cool. Herk also did something else too that would give rise to this, right? He was big into toasting. That's right. So he started doing the talk over. Evidently, the DJing became a little too complicated because I mean, this was, it's

much easier nowadays with your, your eye devices to fake all this stuff. Right. But back then they were like pioneering electronics and like figuring this stuff out. Yeah. And in fact, Grandmaster Flash was like the real guy. Well, he was. He invented the crossfader. Yeah.

And like he was really into electronics and figuring that junk out. Right. So because it got more and more technical, it wasn't just playing a song and then like kind of turning down the volume for a second and talking over it and turning the volume back up. Yeah. So if you wanted to toast, it was tough to kind of balance those two things. So cool.

Herk enlisted the aid of Cochlearock and Clark Kent to come toast for them. The Herkuloids. Yeah. That's who they became. And they inadvertently established rapping. Yeah. Cochlearock is generally regarded as the first rapper. That's so cool, man.

I know. DJing got too technically involved. So they had to get somebody else to toast and that became rapping. Yeah. That is so cool that like you can trace it back to that instance. Yeah. And they started freestyle dancing too and they're known as the first B-boys, which is another term I think that Herk coined.

Mm-hmm. B-boys and B-girls. Yeah. Which are breakdancers. So things start really kind of exploding from here with it on the DJ scene. Africa, Bambata, who like you point out was not born with that name. He named himself. Kevin Donovan.

Yeah. Same with Grandmaster Flash. His parents did not name him Grandmaster. His name was Joseph Sadler. Right. They were early on in the scene. Bambata was actually a former gang member and so he saw the bad effects, the ill effects of gangs and decided to form the Zulu Nation, just like an awareness group to steer kids

in a more positive direction in life. Yeah. And that was sort of the foundation of hip-hop. Yeah. Early on was positivity and... Silliness. Yeah. Doing the right thing.

Talking about food you like to eat. Yeah. Or in contrast, talking about having a bad experience during a meal at another friend's house. Yeah. Was that a song? Yeah. My bad meal.

I can't remember what song it was. It might have been like the extended version of Rappers Julye, but one of those really early songs. Yeah. It was like they talk about going to your friend's house and then mom can't cook. It was all very sweet and innocent. Yeah. Super.

And it was all very positive too. So Grandmaster Flash was a key innovator because like I said, he was really into electronics, built the first crossfader. He is the first one that started punch phrasing. Yeah. Which is usually like a horn blast and just inserting a very short, quick bit of another song over a song. Right.

It's using two records, but not necessarily the same record. Two versions of the same record, but you're still working them together. That's like modern DJing. That's right. And it's used to just like punctuate something. Scratching, he did not invent, that was Grand Wizard Theodore supposedly. Wow. And the story goes there is that he's in his bedroom playing a record and his mom comes

in. It's like turn that stuff off and he stops it with his hand and he's like, wait a minute, that sounded kind of cool and just started doing it. And then Grandmaster Flash really perfected it. That's awesome as a mom came into his room to tell the story. That's the story. Even if it's not true, I love it. And beatbox, which is not the fat boys stuff, right?

No, but they're pretty good at it. That's beatboxing. Oh yeah. He created the beatbox which is just hooking a drum machine up to your turntables and just going to town. Yeah. And I think that would help segue from one song to another to create just like a seamless effect.

Yeah. And so this is all going on in the early 80s. Then they started acting. These were just like parties at first. Then they actually started recording hip-hop music. Got played on the radio, Mr. Magic's Rap Attack, premiered in 1983 in New York City. Yeah. It's the first hip-hop show.

And then MC started kind of coming to the forefront and more as like, you know, the leader of the band instead of the DJ. Yeah. You remember the huge confusion that DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince ran into, yeah, they named with like their second album like, I'm the rapper, he's the DJ. Oh really? Yeah. Because everybody thought the Fresh Prince was DJ Jazzy Jeff because they were caught

in this transition where it's like, wait, I thought the DJ was supposed to be the front man of a group. Right. Yeah. It was the Fresh Prince. And Will Smith was like, no, no, no. Yeah. So they named an album to clear things up.

You don't remember that? I don't remember that. Yeah. He's the perfect example of those early sweet songs though. Sure. That's what they're all about, you know, I'm hanging out with my buddies and we're playing some games. Yeah.

You know. Although there's one about an extended story about a traffic accident that leads to a court case and he's sure that it's not his fault but that lady's fault. Was it like he was double parked or something? No, no, she hit him. Oh, okay. It was about a fender bender? Yes.

That's as dark as he got. Yeah. Until the millennium. Yeah. I'm just kidding. So now we're in the 1980s. Early 80s. Things start kind of crossing over, of course, with Blondie's Rapture, which we all knew

and loved. Yeah. Right. And The Clash is Magnificent 7, which is very much hip-hoppy in tone. Yeah. And some genuine stars start to kind of pop up on the scene like Run DMC. Fab Five Friday. LL Cool J.

Yeah. Beastie Boys. Pete Rock. Pete Yuck. And Seal Smooth. We already mentioned the Sugar Hill gang, right? Yeah. I don't think we did.

We do. We have to mention the Sugar Hill gang. Yeah, of course. They had the first hit rap record ever. Yeah. Rapper's Delight. Sure. And it was released, I think, in 1983.

Maybe. The same year as Rap Attack came out. Was it? And it was like that put rap on the map. Yeah. And people were like, what is this music? And Chuck, those who listened again to the Disco podcast will note that they made that record using Lechique's Good Times.

That's right. It all happened together. Yeah. Sampling, too, I think we covered that in. Yeah. Boy, this is really all coming together, isn't it? Man, it is. All right.

So the industry's changing a little bit at the time as well. Sugar Hill records closes. Def Jam pops up. Yeah. Women all of a sudden are in the mix with Salt and Peppa and... MC Light. Yeah. Queen Latif, of course.

Yeah. They paved the way for people like Lauren Hill, who I think just filed for bankruptcy. Did she? I think so. She's fell on Rough Times, isn't she? Yeah. Man, the Fuji said that one album. There's quite a few rap groups that had like one classic album, and then that was it.

Yeah. Like Black Star and Fuji's and I was trying to think of those one more. But usually they would break up like they did and become their own independent artists. That's how that happens. Right. Yeah. Like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg or NWA and Dr. Dre or Wu-Tang Clan. Wu-Tang.

Goody Mob, of course. Yeah. Selo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A day of travel brings a basket full of learning in Mississippi with family-friendly places like the Mississippi Aquarium, the Hattiesburg Zoo and Tupelo Buffalo Park. Explore today at visitmississipi.org slash family fun.

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Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jackmove

or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So where are we, oh yeah, Public Enemy comes on the scene with, like, the black nationalism movement, MTV gets on it because it spreads from the east coast to the west coast. Yeah, in 1988, Yo MTV raps came out and I remember being so happy that that happened. Really?

I remember being that age and thinking, like, where are the rap videos? Like, come on, MTV, waiting for them to do this and they finally did. And then after that, it was like, okay, you can start playing these through the day and then they finally did. About a year later, apparently, according to this article. Yeah. It was, like, exclusively on Yo MTV raps, of course, right? Which was, like, a half hour an hour and that was it and I think they started making it

more than just once a week but then finally it's just like, forget it, we'll put rap on alongside of Def Leppard and I don't think the world will end. Or we'll put Run DMC in the same video as Aerosmith. Yeah, and I wonder if that helped pave the way to just kind of, like, break the cell walls between these genres on MTV, you know? Yeah, I think for sure. Yeah. It knocked down some walls.

It knocked down some for pioneers. Knocked down walls. Remember the video? Yeah, they kicked walls down. They kicked walls down, literally. Metaphorically and figuratively, huh? No, wait, I messed that up big time. Literally and metaphorically.

Right. I said metaphorically and figuratively. And literally. Yes. All three. So we are now progressing on to Gangster Rap, NWA, of course, and Iced Tea, Snoop Doggy Dogg at first. Yes.

Now Snoop Lion. Yeah. Then Snoop Dogg in between. Right. The Dirty Dirty DOG, you see. So was it, I mean, was it NWA? Were they the first Gangster Rap? She mentioned someone called Schoolie D, who I haven't heard of, so I don't know if Schoolie

D was before. I've heard his name, but I've never heard of stuff. But I mean, for sure NWA was the first one to ever take Gangster Rap and turn it into a hit. Yeah. Nice guys with attitudes. Yeah. They were another group that like broke up into like just really successful spin off

recordings. EZE's debut album is arguably one of the best ever made. Yeah. R.I.P. Yeah. Dr. Dre. Yeah. He had a pretty successful career.

Well, the chronic was my soundtrack for like about 18 months in college. And then, you know, Snoop Dogg's was awesome too. Yeah. And Ice Cube. He discovered him. Ice Cube had a great career too. MC Wren, DJ Poo, like the whole group was just awesome. Yeah.

The show at the Fox like two nights ago. What? LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy. What? Ice Cube and like one or two other acts. How did I not hear about this? LL Cool J put it together. I don't know.

It's supposed to be pretty good. The reviews are in the AJC today. Yeah. I'll bet it was good. Yeah. It's like a seven hour show. Yeah. Well, I don't think they each played that long, but I think it's like three and a half

hours. Well, it's pretty cool. LL Cool J. So gangster rap, like we said, that was ushered in and the original intent of hip hop started to get lost at this point. Oh yeah. Looking in a big way. LL Cool J.

Like eating food that you liked and talking about it. Cheerios for breakfast. Right. Yeah. LL Cool J. Yeah. That was like you were pretty, pretty on the outs as far as hip hop was concerned when NWA came along and started talking about gangster rap, right?

LL Cool J. Well, they were side by side there for a while. LL Cool J. Yeah. LL Cool J. Yeah. LL Cool J. Yeah.

LL Cool J. Yeah. Because people are cynical. LL Cool J. And of course, gang violence and drug dealing and poverty and misogyny were all hallmarks of gangster rap. LL Cool J. Yeah, which is still very much around today.

LL Cool J. Oh yeah. LL Cool J. Even though what's interesting is gangster rap was a subgenre of hip hop that eventually came over or took over and became hip hop. And then now that's broken up into other subgenres. But the source material is typically the same. Yeah, and I think another difference too, just thinking about it, is gangster rap back

then was very much like I'm poor, and now it seems to be more like I'm rich. But I'm still like hail from the ghetto, so I've got cred, and I'm still very violent, and I carry a gun, and I'm not afraid to use it, that kind of stuff. Yeah, but like NWA and those guys, they'd never talked about having money ever because they didn't. Right. They were just poor guys. Right, and they were being kept down, and they were upset about it.

That's right. To say the least. So alongside it though, you did have some great bands like Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul, and Farside, who either had a positive message or were just like Farside just having a good time. Yeah. Well, they were from California. Yeah, I love those guys.

They had a great, their first album was Killer. Bizarre ride to the Farside. Oh yeah. Yeah, that was good. Still holds up too, I think. Yeah, totally. Wu Tang came around, and of course, they launched the careers of like a dozen guys that seemed like it.

Yeah. I mean, they were kind of a hybrid. They would talk about violence and misogyny and all that as well, but they also, it wasn't all it was about. No. There were some pretty smart guys involved in Wu Tang Clan. Oh yeah, for sure. Tupac?

Yeah. She mentioned Warren G and Sir Mixolot. I wasn't so into them. Sir Mixolot was awesome. He was like kind of a throwback, like after the transition had been made, Sir Mixolot was still like talking about butts and buttermilk biscuits and all of that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's true.

He never, and he wore like floor-length mink coats and stuff like that. That butts and buttermilk biscuits are the name of your rap album, DJ Josh Clark. I've got like an accordion on the album cover. KRS-1 was really big in my life too. I was a big fan of KRS-1. Yeah, he was great. He was in production, and then both Gangstar and Blackstar, I was a big fan of at the time. I like Gangstar too.

Yeah, they're awesome. I like DJ Hurricane, but DJ Premier. Who's that? He's the Gangstar DJ. Oh, really? Yeah, him and Guru. That was Gangstar. Oh, okay.

And it was like, and I like Guru, but the two of them together was always weird to me. Like it was so, I was never like, really, even though I really, I think Gangstar is the code of the streets. It's one of the best rap albums ever made. Yeah, I agree. It's just like, they were each doing their own thing side by side. It didn't mesh and create something together, but it was like two really talented people doing something amazing at once.

I haven't pulled that one out in a while. It's a good one. Like you said, more subgenres like combining rap with hard rock music and metal music. Yeah, it was a big deal. It was a body count. Ice T's a little band. Yeah, I saw them. Did you?

Yeah, Lollapalooza. Yeah. Yeah, that didn't count. And then things spread down south, of course, with Two Live Crew and groups like Outcast and Ludacris and Timbaland and Goodymob, yeah, very much like Atlanta based. Dirty South. Yeah, Two Live Crew was Florida, I think, but yeah, the dirty South. Well, then you have like New Orleans, Bounce, and I think that's where like Crumping came

from too is the South, right? I think so. I'm not sure though. Do you know? No. Okay. What did you ask? Things are changing back these days, I think, with regards to the gangster thing that's

still around, but there are other acts out there that Daryl McDaniels of Run DMC said that, you know, it's kind of coming back around because he's like, some of this music's great to listen to in a club, but he's like, what are you going to do the rest of the day? Right. Like we need this to be all day music. Yeah. And like Kanye West. I was a big fan of his early on, not so much now.

Yeah. And who's that guy, Drake? He's pretty good. Yeah. You listen to that? No, I haven't listened to any new hip hop in a long time. Kanye, get the college drop out from 2004. Yeah.

It's unbelievable. That's his first one? Yeah. That was amazing. We'll check it out. So that's a little bit on music. I guess we should talk about graffiti some. Well, yeah, a lot of people say, graffiti is its own thing.

It's not a part of the four, you know, pillars of hip hop. Right. And people who are into hip hop say, shut up. It is too. Yeah. And most people agree that graffiti is pretty much inextractable from hip hop, but graffiti came first. Yeah, that's true.

Modern graffiti tagging, which is another word for it. And if you're into that kind of thing, you should check out our surprisingly interesting episode on how aerosol cans work. That's right. Started in the 60s. And you can actually trace this back to its point of origin pretty much too, to a guy named Demetrius, right? What was his tag?

Taki 183. T-A-K-I. Not Turk 182. No, but was that based on him, you think? It was inspired by that. Yeah. I got you. And it was a little Greek kid named Demetrius who in the 60s started, well, he was a messenger.

He worked for a messenger service and he had a marker and he put that together with his nickname Taki and the street they lived on West 183rd Street, which is way up there. And he started leaving his tag all over the city. Yeah. And the New York Times wrote an article that you can actually get on his website. It's like scanned in there. It's kind of cool to read from 1971 called Taki 183 Spawn's Pen Pals. And it was the first, you know, it was people were like, this guy's writing his name on

things. Right. But it's not really his name. And there's numbers. Yeah. It's so funny to think about now because tagging is just so ubiquitous, you know? Well, he got, he also got kind of good at making it look a little pretty. Yeah.

It wasn't just, you know, he didn't write any cursive or anything like that. Right. He developed what became a tag, like it was the same thing every time after a while. Yeah. And Cool Herk actually became a tagger. Yeah. And from that started emulating Taki 183. And that was how people came to know Cool Herk before he was a DJ.

That's right. And of course it just, it evolved beyond tagging as everybody on the planet knows. It became an art formum to itself, building murals, entire trains, very colorful, sort of three-dimensional aspects. It's, you know, I feel like we don't, you spend too much time trying to describe it because if you don't know what graffiti looks like, then just go outside. Yeah. Unless you like living Kansas and they don't do that kind of stuff there.

It got a little reputable in the 70s when Patty Astor actually featured graffiti in the fun gallery, her art gallery. And now it's a common thing, you know, graffiti galleries all the time. And those, those hip hop historians who say, yes, graffiti is part of hip hop point to the convergence between hip hop and graffiti and say that it's centered around a tagger named Hayes, who's got a pretty awesome website. Eric Hayes. It's like this kind of throwback to, well, it's like a timeline of like hip hop and graffiti.

Like if you go through his stuff, it's pretty neat. Yeah. He did the check your head font. Yeah. And he, he was also, I guess, into photography too because some of the album covers he did either, he did the fonts for him or, or whatever, but it did public enemy. He did young emcee. Oh, really?

Yeah. He did tone loaks albums, like, so he's doing all these album covers and he's a tagger. So at, from that point on, people were like, okay, well, this is part of hip hop now. I don't care what you have to say. Did you see up in the air, the Clooney movie? Yeah. Remember, I was like, hey, how I ended, you're like, that's the name of the movie. I don't remember that.

But remember the young emcee, when he did the corporate party, he did bust a move. No, I don't remember that part. They crashed the corporate party and he was like the entertainment for the night. But that was an up in the air. Yeah. I thought that was an episode of scrubs or the office. No, no, no, it was an up in the air and it really just sort of like nailed that whole like, you know, Verizon's going to do a party and they're going to hire a rapper.

They get young emcee. Right. It was pretty good. Yeah. Are we to dancing yet? I think we are. All right. We've covered the music.

And we've covered graffiti. Yeah. Now we're on to dancing. Okay. Well, break dancing, obviously, is most synonymous with hip hop. But all kinds of other dancing, popping and locking, boogaloo, grinding, down rocking, the Harlem Shake, which is an original thing, right? Yeah.

There is a video from like 2006 or something that this guy did. I can't remember who it was, but it's like the Harlem Shake is the real one. And if you see this and then you see like all the YouTube viral videos that were going on recently, you just see how far off everybody was from the actual Harlem Shake, the people in Harlem are actually getting mad. Like what are you doing? Like this isn't, do you even know what the Harlem Shake looks like? It was almost like YouTube turned into the Bluth family and everybody was doing the chicken

dance. Right. Even though none of them had ever seen a chicken before. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. That's what a lot of people were doing with the Harlem Shake. Gotcha.

Yeah. But break dancing is what we're going to concentrate on because it's pretty cool. Head spins, back spins. Tell them about that video you sent. The windmill. Oh yeah. Just get on YouTube and look at Breakdance 1940s. And that's it.

That dude is breakdancing. Yeah. And it's clearly the 1940s. Yeah. I tried it. I was like, am I being tricked here? Is this some fake? You know.

It looked pretty authentic. I think it's authentic. Yeah. But that was full on breakdancing. Yeah. Like at first I was like, oh, that's sort of breakdancing. And then he got on the floor and I was like, that's totally breakdancing. Right.

So it's been around. He does the worm. Yeah. He sort of did the worm. And he was doing that. He was doing like windmills and stuff. Well, not quite a windmill, but close to a windmill. It was pretty close.

Windmill, by the way, I was obsessed with trying to learn that in my ute. And never came close, obviously. I too was a breaker in my youth. See, I wasn't. That's the problem. All I needed. Oh, I was. I took breakdancing lessons.

I made it on the front page of the peach section, which was the entertainment section of Toledo Blade. I was breakdancing and like attracting my mom made me by hand. Man, do you have a copy of that? I don't know where it is. It might be out there somewhere. I had a break in Ohio t-shirt. I had that cap, the French foreign legion cap.

Yeah, yeah. I had the whole, man, I was a breaker, even though I sucked at it. I was a breaker. Could you do the windmill? No. That's what I'm saying. I sucked. Yeah.

When you get a good windmill going, that's like really impressive. Still to me today. I could never do that. I'd get headaches from doing head spins and just fall over immediately, but it was fun. The suicide, too. Did you ever do that? Nope. That's the one where the guy basically, she says back flip, but I've most often seen

it as a front flip. Yeah. You'd come in and you just flip and land on your back and the whole point is to make it look painful. Like the more, the harder it is and the more people go, oh, it's like the most more successful suicide. That's when you know you got the crowd in the palm of your hand. Exactly.

You don't stop then. No way. No, you can't stop breaking. You know, you me took me to the world breakdance championships a couple of years ago, like the world. Was it awesome? It was at Relapse Theater, the old one on 14th Street. Oh, was it Atlanta?

Yeah. And they had it here in this little theater and like people from all over the world who were like the best at breakdancing were just there like in breakoffs and stuff. We just stood around for like eight hours and watched like the best breakdancing you can possibly imagine right there. That's awesome. It was very awesome. So not surprisingly, I think you even said earlier, breakdancing came from West Africa

as well. A lot of the key elements, this herky jerky all over body movement, interaction with the floor, like not with just your feet, obviously, pantomime and improvisation all came from West Africa and migrated on the slave ships, kind of joined up with some Caucasian dancing like the Lindy Hop and the Charleston. Well, a lot of those grew out of African-American dancing like Cakewalk, which is an African-American thing that actually like terribly, you should read this blog post I wrote on it once, the origin of the term Cakewalk, you'll never use it again, but the idea of people lining

up and watching other people dancing and then taking turns and all that, that comes from the Cakewalk. So like people waiting to like jump in and all that, and it was in that breakdancing 1940s video you sent, people just kind of stand aside, somebody else would come in, push somebody else to the side and they were taken over, like that comes from the Cakewalk. It's then later became the Soul Train line, which is some of the best footage like ever. Yes, you can put any halfway decent song to like a Soul Train lineup and it's just brilliant after that.

The other thing that influenced too was, came from the Caribbean as well and South America in the form of, and I even saw a video on how to pronounce this, it's a Brazilian martial art. Capoeira? Capoeira. Capoeira. Capoeira. Capoeira.

I don't think that's right. That's what he said. Are you sure? Dude, it was a video on how to pronounce the word. But I'm sure I didn't do it quite right, but yours is definitely wrong. But martial arts as a whole, Kung Fu was really big in that community and so like Bruce Lee and all these guys, they tried to emulate those dance moves. Yes, that's why you see so much like fake fighting in break dancing because they're

all really just kind of good kids. They spend all their time practicing dance moves and so like all the fighting is all just like, hey, I'm getting in your face. Oh no, I'm getting in your face now and then, oh no, you're not. That's it. That's as far as it goes. Good, clean, fun. Yes.

And like there's probably no other part of hip hop culture that more carries on the original tradition of like just, you know, don't mean any real harm or anything like that, whereas having a good time and like this is all, this is what's cool than the break dancing aspect of it. Yeah, agreed. And crumping today, you see the same thing, like it's battling each other to see who's the best. Yeah.

It's kind of fun to watch. In the 80s, it was like break dancing became a across the board commodity like big time. Again, I had a break in Ohio t-shirt that my mom purchased for me. Yeah. Probably like pennies or something. Yeah. The movie Wild Style, which is the first hip hop movie led to Star Wars break in, of course, break in two.

Electric Boogaloo. I got that soundtrack in my Easter basket one year. Beat Street. I was a little too old, I guess. For breaking? Maybe so or no. I was just, I was listening to the Almond Brothers and stuff. I got you.

That was the deal. I clearly remember my two older sisters having a conversation while we were all watching break in two and they agreed that the girl was really more of a flash dancer than a break dancer. Yeah. I'll never forget that. Well. The other one went, mm-hmm.

Yeah, flash dance had a little break in style. Everything had to. Burger King commercials. Yeah. Billy Wrangler had a line of jeans ready to go in 1984 called Rapid Transit starting with the W. Yeah. Like Wrangler that didn't get off the ground.

The Moon Walk, of course, which was not invented by Michael Jackson. No, but he was good at it. Well, yeah, he was great at it. The guy I could find was in 1955, Bill Bailey, at a showtime at the Apollo show. It's on YouTube. Is it, is it as good as Michael Jackson's? Can anybody top Michael Jackson's Moon Walk? It's not as good, but he clearly Moon Walks.

It's not like, well, this is a version. I mean, he Moon Walks off the stage in the 1950s. Well, okay. So Moon Walking goes back to the 50s. They say, and they being, I think, Cool Herker, Africa, Bombada, one of the two said that they think breakdancing finds its origins in a James Brown dance to get on the good foot. Oh, from that song?

Yeah. Which is from, I believe, the 60s that is based on that. Yeah. And backsliding is what the originators call Moon Walking, by the way. Yeah. And so, like we said, it's commodity, it's video games, it's clothing lines. They start selling, you know, gear and knee pads and special mats to use, you know. When all you need it was a refrigerator box.

Exactly. What was that for? For just to make the ground not as a, or slicker or whatever? Yeah. So you're not like doing a, like a head spin on gravel? Yeah. That was a dumb question, actually. But like I said, I wasn't into it.

I started to die down in the 80s though, sort of the late 80s. But it came back big time in the 90s. It did. Like the latest 90s. And it's still around. Like it never really went away. Yeah. And that led to crumping, like we said, which is my favorite thing to watch on the internet

right now. Did you see the crump off on Venice Beach? That one? I did see that one. That was pretty great, huh? That was good. It's just nuts. Well, it looks just so out of control, but it's, it's not.

Right. I guess it's so great to me, I think. Crump is pretty great. I think we can all agree. So are we on to fashion? I think we are a pillar four. Well, let's talk about it. Comfy clothes is really how it started.

Yeah. If you have ever seen the TV show, What's Happening? Yeah. Remember Rerun? Oh, yes. He was dressing pretty hip hop at the time. Yeah. Suspenders.

He wore a beret, but it could very easily been a Kangal hat. Yeah. I think he wore a Converse, you know, comfy shoes. Yeah. Adidas is really the brand though, or was? It was. But at the time, that was super hip hop. Yeah.

Just loose, comfortable clothing. With a t-shirt underneath. That you could breakdance to. She even contends that the comfort level of the sneakers was why they left them untied early on, just to be even looser in the shoes and not have like your shoes tight. Gotcha. I don't know about that though. Yeah.

Apparently out west, it was military inspired, and boots were a little more popular on the west coast. Yeah. Is that where public enemies from? Are they west coast? Um. They're New York, right? Yeah.

I mean, Chuck D lives in Atlanta now, and has for a while. I would like to meet Chuck D. I would too. But they were not Chuck B, meet Chuck D. Yeah. Chuck Bronson. Yeah. But they weren't from Atlanta, obviously.

Where was public enemy from? I don't know. I guess New York. But they weren't one of those that they didn't talk about where they were from. They weren't like. They were east coast west coast. They were worldwide. Yeah.

Exactly. And then Run DMC, of course, brought in the cool black jeans and black leather and. They had the movie tougher than leather. Was that a movie? Yeah. I never saw that. Yeah. I'm sure you did.

I didn't. You didn't? No. And one of the few movies I've ever walked out on in my life was Disorderly's, The Fat Boys movie. Yeah. I was in sixth grade and I was like, this is unwatchable. Well, everyone was trying to tap into that thing.

A crush groove thing? Yeah. Have you ever seen that one? Oh yeah. Crush groove was pretty good. Yeah. It was good. None of these age well, by the way.

Oh, no. I haven't seen any of them in a long time. Even the good ones don't age well. And then the Adidas, of course, with Run DMC. And they also ushered in the Kangles and Ernest and the big rope gold jeans and lots of them. Yeah. And who else did she credit with that?

Oh. Curtis Blow. That's right. Curtis Blow. We got to the bottom of that one. And along with the black nationalism and the sort of remember our roots back to Africa came a big clothing boom. I remember very well in high school, African-inspired clothing and the red, yellow and black and

green. Huge. Yeah. Everything that everybody was wearing in the late 80s was super African-inspired. Yeah. You know, just bold prints and all that, like everything kid and play were wearing. Yeah, yeah. Remember that dance, too, where they like jumped through the, they'd hold their foot.

Yeah, I used to do that. With an arm. I could never do that. There's no way I could do it now. I would like to see it. I would kill myself in no way. But Chris Cross, of course, wore backwards clothing. Yeah.

One of those guys just died. I know. Very sad. Yeah. And then the basketball jersey, really baggy, baggy clothing, started to become the norm through the 90s. And that's still sort of the style today. Yeah.

And supposedly that comes from a prison wear where you're not allowed to wear a belt. Yeah. That's where the sag came from. Yeah. That's a CNN is quoted as the source here. So take that with a grain of salt. And also with the do-rag supposedly is another prison wear thing. Yeah.

And then just like with break dancing, hip hop style became a pretty big business commodity too. Yeah. Like Russell Simmons started a fat farm, which is I think still around today, right? Yeah. If you look at most any rap mogul now, it'll say like producer, rapper, clothing designer. Right. Like they're just smart to maximize their brand.

Yeah. It says here that Jay-Z sold rock-a-wire for 204 million bucks. Everything that guy touches turns to gold. Yeah. Or platinum. Because platinum, Josh, is where the gold went. It kind of transformed into platinum. Right.

It's like alchemy. Yeah. Like shiny, silvery platinum and diamond encrusted. Grills. Bling. Grills. Very popular. Yeah.

That started out as just like the one gold cap and then turned into like the grills that you can get today are just unbelievable. And I don't think we could ever have a conversation about hip hop fashion without mentioning wearing a huge clock as a pendant around a necklace. Flave. Yeah. Or wearing a stolen Mercedes hood ornament as a necklace pendant. We did that.

The Beastie Boys. Oh, that's right. Like D. I thought you were going to say the multi-finger ring. Yeah, you got that too. That was big because of... and do the right thing. Love and hate. Oh, yeah.

The two rings. Who was it? The guy with the radio Raheem? Yeah. The one that you mentioned at the beginning of the other day, man, that movie just blows me away still. It's very powerful. I like his later work more.

Yeah, you liked it when he got away from the spike in joints. Like Inside Man in 25th Hour. I liked those a lot. I still like do the right thing, but I just like him branching out. I hear you. And also designer labels became a big thing, like a Tommy Hilfiger and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. It became really popular.

Yup. You know, of course, you go anywhere on planet Earth and you're going to see hip-hop in pretty much any country you go to. You sure are. It is all over the world. It is a global product. And hey, squares and parents, it ain't going anywhere, so just get used to it. That's right.

I think a lot of people thought it was a flash in the pan. I'm sure. You know, like this rap won't be around long. Yeah. Suckers. Yeah, it's outlasted a lot of other stuff. Agreed. So you got, we got electronic music to do next or we do have that dubstep article.

Yeah. I don't know. No, if you want to learn more about hip-hop, you can type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up this extremely large article on it. And I think I said hip-hop. So it's time for a message break. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs.

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that and I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off.

The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed.

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