Brass Trax

When the Arabian Prince cut his first record, few people east of San Bernadino had ever heard of the City of Compton and nobody had California in mind when they mentioned rap about street gangs.

To an outsider, the scene in L.A. might have looked corny. Jheri curls, drum machines and dudes dressed in purple. Rap music was, sometimes literally, a joke. Bobby Jimmy and the Critters, a novelty act fronted by present-day shock jock Russ Parr attracted the best producers in Southern California, including Egyptian Lover (”We Like Ugly Women,” 1984) and Arabian Prince (”Big Butt,” 1984, Ugly Knuckle Butt LP, 1985). What actually went off in the clubs, however, was no laughing matter.

Listen to “Big Butt” by Bobby Jimmy and the Critters

Electro spread across the U.S. much more quickly than rap did. Even though everybody from the Cold Crush Brothers to Run DMC got love outside of the Five Boroughs, regional rap scenes were in their stunted infancy. (That a few notable exceptions exist, Ice T in L.A. and Too $hort in Oakland, proves rather than flaunts the rule.) Electro, on the other hand, set off dozens of scenes across the country. It was easy to make, after all, and easy to dance to.

After Afrika Bambaataa introduced b-boys to Kraftwerk by sampling the krautrockers on “Planet Rock,” producers and performers all over the United States took the sound as their own, weaving their own Afrocentric space myths, rewriting the future, and, in some cases, the past. Newcleus brought the sound from the Bronx to Brooklyn with “Jam On It” (1984). Jonzun Crew rocked Boston with Lost in Space (1983). Detroit’s Cybotron gave the style a midwestern twist, slowing it down a step and adding nods to their homeboys, Funkadelic, while setting the stage for Detroit techno. In Miami, electro diverged along racial lines. African American producers cranked out bass, and Latino crews devised Latin freestyle.

Listen to “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force
Listen to “Numbers” by Kraftwerk
Listen to “Jam On It” by Newcleus

Electro was a bridge between the street music of hip-hop and the soul music that big budget record producers were making. It’s where Melle Mel met Prince, where the Treacherous Three tangled with Cameo.

Southern California was part of that trend. Uncle Jamm’s Army was the epicenter of the scene. It started as a sound system at the end of the seventies, playing house parties, bringing east coast flavor to west coast throwdowns, and attracting the most talented DJs in greater Los Angeles. By 1983, with Egyptian Lover and Ice T on the roster, the crew started turning out its own jams.

It wasn’t long before Egyptian Lover blew up. His hit “Egypt, Egypt” filled dance floors from coast to coast and inspired local boys to follow suit. Among his followers was Mik Lezan, a young rapper from Compton who would soon become the Arabian Prince. Long a rap trivia answer—Arabian Prince co-produced J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic” with Dr. Dre and was an original member of N.W.A.—Lezan’s music can now be judged on its own merits, thanks to Innovative Life, a compilation of his electro just released by Stones Throw records.

Listen to “Egypt Egypt” by The Egyptian Lover

If Lezan and Egyptian Lover had not been on such good terms, there would be something desperate about the Arabian Prince’s stage name, an obvious bite on that of the more established performer. But it wasn’t just the name that Lezan swiped. Listening to “Strange Life,” with its cosmological opening and setting in “Pyramid City,” it’s obvious that Arabian Prince also appropriated Egyptian Lover’s philosophical leanings and sense of geography. (The other obvious victim of Arabian Prince’s pilfering was the actual Prince, whose sex drive and love of all things purple the Arabian Prince suspiciously shares.)

Listen to “Strange Life” by Arabian Prince

If Arabian Prince could be corny, he could also sweet talk a lady. Electro parties in LA had been x-rated affairs, with rappers chatting explicitly about sex. The music that made it to wax tended to be considerably tamer, but tracks like “Take You Home Girl” retain vestiges of that dirty talk, never mind the fact that the song’s title looks like it was ripped from the b-side of a New Edition single.

“Innovative Life” and “Situation Hot” are the strongest claims Arabian Prince has on electro greatness. The former track has a breakneck tempo, ridiculous drum fills and sampled heaving breaths. It sounds like Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” experienced under the thrall of PCP. “Situation Hot” accommodates three different styles, from east coast hip-hop—and an LL Cool J dis—to a pop refrain that could have been shipped across the Atlantic from Italy and a bridge that breaks as hard as anything that was being played on the dance floor of the Paradise Garage in New York.

Listen to “Innovative Life” by Arabian Prince
Listen to “Situation Hot” by Arabian Prince

Arabian Prince would never move as many units as he did in the mid-eighties, and his biggest hit, “Supersonic,” would become a byword for the sort of pop rap that his collaborators and homeboys N.W.A. would make obsolete. But his music opens a window on the correspondence between rap and soul during the eighties and allows a glance at a hip-hop dead-end that used to be big.

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