Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Hip-hop Works

Episode Date: September 10, 2017

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.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week's Saturday edition of Stuff You Should Know, the Selects edition. This is my pick this week, and I'm gonna 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 mic one, he's on mic three.

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 was 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, it's like I grew up with it, so I took it for granted, but with many things as a grown-up now, I'm looking back, and that was pretty amazing. Yeah, I'm still gonna go with Terminator X,

just by fractions of a point, though. Yeah. I put them at the top. Yeah. Not like Cool Herc. Hey, Cool Herc, 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 then, man. We're cool to cool. Is that cool? Okay, you don't have any business doing that. 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. 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, like the square and the rectangle. See, 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. Then 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. Electronica, 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 combine, 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. The four 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. Crumping's pretty cool. It's unbelievable. It's just somebody going nuts. It's awesome and so like, herky jerky, yet controlled, and I could never in my

wildest dreams do it, so I think that's why it appeals to me. But that's, yeah, 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 style, which is, of course, fashion and just the hip-hop style in general, everything from clothing to bling and 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. 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, hip-hop style dance. Not very much. Absolutely. Yeah. Right.

So you've got this presence of what's now an African American, I guess, style or cultural identity that's evolved out of Africa, and music and movement and drum rhythms are a big part of it. Right? Yeah. And, of course, call and 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 soldiers 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. So 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-Madi-Aid? Oh, yeah. So like, 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, 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, you know, 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 dub version. Right. Right? So all this is going on in Jamaica. Yeah. 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, you know, 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. That's cool 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 the role. So people just showed up en masse to see who this famous tagger was, like DJ Cool Herk's 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. 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. You know, maybe if they were good, it was like the next one came on 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. It 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. 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 the graffiti tag or herk, they came up against this DJing and that was that. Yeah, it's called a breakbeat 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. 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 talkover. 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 the crossfader. Yeah. And like he was really into electronics and figuring that junk out. Right. And 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. 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 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, which is 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 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. I don't like the extended version of Rappers Julye, but one of those really early songs, like they talk about going to your friend's house and his 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, 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. He's putting 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 an mom came into his room and told him to turn it off. 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. They created the beatbox was just hooking a drum machine up to your turntables and just

go into town. Yeah. And I think that would help segue from one song to another to create just like a seamless effect. Yeah. All right. So this is all going on in the early 80s. Then they started, these are 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 was a hip hop show and then MC started kind of coming to the forefront more as like 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? Did they?

Yeah. They named it 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. 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. Because his were all about 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 and some genuine

stars start to kind of pop up on the scene, like Run DMC, Fab Five Friday, LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Pete Rock, and Seal Smooth. We already mentioned the Sugar Hill gang, right? I don't think we did. We have to mention the Sugar Hill gang. Yeah, of course. They had the first hit rap record ever, 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. So of course, 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. I mean, the Fuji's had that one album. There's quite a few rap groups that had 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 artist. 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. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you, and so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never get ever, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. So where are we? What's the story behind that? In 1988, Yo MTV Raps came out, and I remember being so happy that that happened. I remember beating that age and thinking, where are the rap videos? Come on, MTV, waiting for them to do this, and they finally did. Then after that, it was like, okay, you can start playing these through the day, and then they finally did.

A year later, apparently, according to this article. Yeah, after Yo MTV, it was exclusively on Yo MTV Raps. Which was like a half hour an hour, and that was it. 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 alongside of Def Leppard, 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 break the cell walls between these genres on MTV, you know?

Yeah, I think for sure. Yeah. It knocked down some walls. Run DMC, super pioneers. Knocked down walls. Remember the video? Yeah, they kicked walls down. They kicked walls down, literally.

Metaphorically and figuratively. No, wait, I messed that up, big time. Literally and metaphorically. Right, I said metaphorically and figuratively. And literally. Yes. All three. We are now progressing on to Gangster Rap, NWA, of course, and ICT, 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 his stuff. Yeah. 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, and then they were, they were another group that broke up into 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 about 18 months in college. And then 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, they just had a show at the Fox like two nights ago. What?

LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy, 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 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. 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. Like in a big way. Like eating food that you liked and talking about it. Cheerios for breakfast. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You were pretty on the outs as far as hip hop was concerned when NWA came along and started

talking about Gangster Rap, right? Well, they were side by side there for a while. Right. And then Gangster Rap won out. Yeah. Because people are cynical. And of course, gang violence and drug dealing and poverty and misogyny were all hallmarks of Gangster Rap.

Yeah. Which is still very much around today. Oh yeah. And even though what's interesting, it's like Gangster Rap was a subgenre of hip hop that eventually came over and 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. Yeah. And now it seems to be more like I'm rich. Right. You know. But I'm still like hail from the ghetto. So I've got cred. True.

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 being, having money ever because they didn't. Right. They were just... Like they're early in their careers, 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. Yeah. And De La Soul and Farside who either had a positive message or were just like Farside and 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. Stuff holds up too I think. Yeah. Totally. Wu Tang came around and of course they launched the careers of like a dozen guys it seemed like. Yeah.

They were kind of a hybrid. Like they would talk about violence and misogyny and all that as well. But they also... It wasn't all it was about. No. They 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 that stuff. You know what I'm saying?

Like he never... Yeah, that's true. And he wore like floor length mink coats and stuff like that. That butts and buttermilk biscuits are the name of your rap album. Yeah. 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. I love you down productions. And then both Gangstar and Blackstar, I was a big fan of at the time. Yeah. 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. Okay. And it was like... And I like Guru, but the two of them together, it was always weird to me.

It was so... Yeah. I was never like really... Even though I really... I think Gangstar's Code of the Streets is one of the best rap albums I've 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. But like you said, more sub-genres like combining rap with hard rock music and metal music. Yeah. It was a big deal. Body count.

Ice-T's a little band. Yeah, I saw them. Did you? Yeah, at 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 New Orleans bounce, and I think that's where crumping came from, too, is the South, right? I think so. I'm not sure, though.

Do you know? No. Okay. I asked. 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 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. 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 pillars of hip-hop and people who are into hip-hop say, shut up. It is too.

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? Taki183. T-A-K-I. Not Turk182. 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 scanned in there, it's kind of cool to read, from 1971, called Taki183 Spawns Penpals. And it was the first... 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. Well, he also got kind of good at making it look a little pretty. Yeah. It wasn't just... He didn't write any cursive or anything like that.

He developed what became a tag, like it was the same thing every time after a while. And Cool Herk actually became a tagger. And from that started emulating Taki183, and that was how people came to know Cool Herk before he was a DJ. That's right. And of course, 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.

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, 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, and graffiti galleries all the time. And there's 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 hip-hop and graffiti. If you go through his stuff, it's pretty neat. Yeah, he did the Check Your Head font. Yeah. And he was also, I guess, into photography, too, because some of the album covers he did, he did the fonts for him, or whatever, but he did Public Enemy.

He did Young MC. Oh, really? Yeah. He did Tone Lokes albums. So he's doing all these album covers, and he's a tagger. So 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 it ended? You're like, that's the name of the movie. I don't remember that. But remember the Young MC, when he did the corporate party? He did Busta Move? No, I don't remember that part. They crashed the corporate party, and he was like the entertainment for the night.

That was in Up in the Air? Yeah. I thought that was an episode of Scrubs or The Office. No, no, it was in Up in the Air, and it really just sort of nailed that whole like, you know, Verizon's going to do a party, and they're going to hire a rapper. They get Young MC. Right. It was pretty good.

Yeah. Are we to dancing yet? I think we are. We've covered the music. 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 need to see how far off everybody was from the actual Harlem Shake.

People in Harlem were actually getting mad, like, what are you doing? Like, 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. I've never 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. Headspins, backspins. Tell them about that video you sent. The windmill.

Oh, yeah. Just get on YouTube and look at break dance 1940s. And that's it. That dude is break dancing. 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 break dancing. Yeah.

Like at first I was like, oh, that's sort of break dancing. And then he got on the floor, and I was like, that's totally break dancing. Right. So it's been around. He does the worm. Yeah. He sort of did the worm, and he was doing that. He's 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 was the problem. Oh, I was.

I took break dancing lessons. I made it on the front page of the peach section, which was the entertainment section of Toledo Blade. I was break dancing and like a track suit. 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. I wasn't as into it as at all. 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. When you get a good windmill going, that's like really impressive still to me today. I could never do that. I 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 a pretty cool move. That's the one where the guy, basically, she says back flip, but I've most often seen it as a front flip. You 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. I 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 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 people from all over the world who were like the best at breakdancing were just there in breakoffs and stuff. We just stood around for like eight hours and watched like the best breakdancing you can possibly imagine. That's awesome. Right there.

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.

You can put any halfway decent song to like a Soul Train lineup and it's just brilliant after that. Yeah. 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 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, like Kung Fu was really big in that community, and so like Bruce Lee and all these guys, they tried to like emulate those dance moves. Yeah. They 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 oh no, you're not. That's it. That's as far as it goes. Good clean fun. Yeah. I'm going to out dance you.

Yeah, 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, then the break dancing aspect of it. Yeah, agreed. And crumping today used to 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. Man, 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 break in? Maybe so or no. I was just, I was listening to the Almond Brothers and stuff. I got you.

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

Burger King commercials. Yeah. Apparently Wrangler had a line of jeans ready to go in 1984 called Rapid Transit, starting with the W, like Wrangler, that didn't get off the ground. The Moonwalk, 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 as good as Michael Jackson's? Can anybody top Michael Jackson's Moonwalk? It's not as good, but he clearly Moonwalks. It's not like, well, this is a version. I mean, he Moonwalks off the stage in 1950s. Right. Well, okay.

So Moonwalking goes back to the 50s. I 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 Moonwalking, by the way. 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, 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. Things 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 late-ish 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. That's what makes it so great to me, I think. Crumpin's pretty great, I think we can all agree. So are we on to fashion?

I think we are. 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 have 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. Where are they from?

Are they west coast? 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 in me 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 worldwide. They were worldwide, 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. Did you see 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 Kangols and Ernest and the big rope gold jeans and lots of them. 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. Just bold prints and all that. Like everything Kim Play were wearing. Yeah, yeah. There was a dance too where they jumped through, they'd hold their foot with an arm and I could never do that.

There's no way I could do it now. I would like to see it. I killed 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. 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 breakdancing, hip-hop style became a pretty big business commodity too. Yeah. So yeah. 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 smart to maximize their brand. Yeah. It says here that Jay-Z sold rock-a-wire for 204 million bucks. Wow. 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 we saw 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 think that was a lot. I still like to do the right thing, but... Sure.

Just like him branching out. I hear you. And also, designer labels became a big thing like, Tommy Hilfiger and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. Became really popular. Yep. 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. I agree. Two against? Two against? We got electronic music to do next. All right, we did 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. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step

by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. And now listen to our mail time. Josh, since we're talking about international things toward the end of that show, I'm gonna give a couple of international shouts because we like hearing from our listeners in foreign lands. Yes, we do. So, uh, the first one is from France.

And we actually asked in our three musketeers cast, we had French listeners, hi guys, just want to drop you a few lines, because I was just listening to your podcast on the three musketeers. You were wondering if there were any French up there listening to you. I am one of them. I've been listening to all of your podcasts from the beginning, when even the podcast was not even the great pair of you. I am talking about your podcast to all my friends, and I feel that I know you well from

all these hours spent with you. I always laugh when you make fun of the French and our accent, and do not always understand your 100% US references, but love to hear about new things. Take care from Paris. And that's Julie. Thanks a lot. And then, uh, hi guys, Josh, Chuck, and Jerry. My name is Daniel.

I live in Jerusalem. I work in a bakery in the city and love listening to you guys while I work. I want to share a funny little story. One day at work, my boss got mad at me and told me I can't have my headphones during work. And then I told him I was listening to a learning podcast and not music, so to prove I'm not distracted. Okay, is the boss like nerds ratchet or something like that? I guess so.

Uh, to my surprise, he asked what's the name of the podcast, confused me a little bit, but I told him it was S-Y-S-K, and I was really shocked when he took out his own phone and showed me his iTunes library, was packed with the stuff you should know. So you guys have helped me get through long depressing shifts with your humor and knowledge. And that is from Daniel in Israel. Hi, Daniel. Thank you for that. Daniel and Julie.

Yeah, from France. Thanks, guys. We appreciate you listening over there and standing up to your boss. Yeah. And he's all like, hey, you can listen to music, but you can't listen to stuff you should know. And bake. Like, uh, international ambassadors, basically. Agreed.

Uh, if you want to tell us how we're ambassadors in some weird way, we want to know that, okay? What's the problem? Just do it. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast, you can go to Facebook.com, you can go to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. I'm ready for this one to be done. Maybe you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.