Brass Trax

Like any great storytelling genre, the history of hip hop is written in its best tunes. Today, with hip hop holding a dominate position in the world of popular music, it’s hard to imagine its origins on the streets of the South Bronx. It’s hard to conceive of how contingent hip hop was. In the beginning, it was just a thing that kids did to kill time, a way to make the party more dope. But, when hip hop was finally committed to wax it escaped the neighborhood and altered American culture forever. If you listen to the early, old school jams carefully, you might just hear how that happened.

“Rapper’s Delight”

The Sugarhill Gang

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Purists like to talk about old school rap as if it were a pristine and noble scene, free from bling, sell-outs, and phonies. But hip hop has always included all of those things. It’s always been a careful balance between art and commerce, authenticity and artificiality, social consciousness and irresponsibility.

Consider “Rapper’s Delight,” the first commercially successful rap single. Released in 1979 by Sugarhill Records, a small, black-owned independent label, “Rapper’s Delight” showed would be record moguls that hip hop could make money. Its success probably kept the art form from dying out in the parks and community centers of the Bronx. But it is a sham from the first groove to the last.

The Sugarhill Gang were posers; rap’s version of the Monkees. None of the crew’s members had ever rocked a stage before. They weren’t even from New York! Sugarhill’s mastermind Sylvia Robinson found the members on the streets of Englewood, New Jersey, and she chose them for their good looks and their abilities to ape the flow and vocal styles of the most popular rappers across the Hudson.

The Sugarhill Gang didn’t even write its own rhymes. “Rapper’s Delight” is word-for-word bite of a well-known routine that the Cold Crush Brothers had been performing for a year in the Bronx. There is even a glorious moment in the track where Big Bank Hank, the most talented of the Sugarhill Gang, spells out the name of Cold Crush Brother DJ Casanova (later known as Grandmaster Caz).

Was old school hip hop free from bling? Consider the evidence. Cold Crush/Sugarhill Gang boasts, “I got bodyguards, I got two big cars that definitely ain’t the wack. I got a Lincoln Continental and a sunroof Cadillac…Hear me talking about checkbooks, credit cardsd, more money than a sucker can ever spend.” It’s no surprise that kids growing up amid the squalor, violence, and injustice of the Bronx might use luxury goods for boasting, but it does nobody any good to pretend like shiny materialism was not a part of hip hop from the beginning.

“That’s the Joint”

Funky Four + 1

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The relationship between rap music and disco is a fraught one. Without disco, rap literally would not exist. Funk breaks by James Brown, George Clinton, and the like, while hardly absent from old school hip hop, were not nearly as common as lengthy excerpts from popular disco songs. The first rap songs were written to move crowds at dance parties, and disco is what people in the late seventies danced to.

“That’s the Joint” was built from the cocaine-flattened funk of “Rescue Me,” a massive dancefloor hit by the disco outfit A Taste of Honey. Old school tracks went on forever, and this tune is no exception. Clocking in at nine minutes, it is basically an entire routine, as the Funky Four + 1 would have performed it at a block party. Old school rap singles were, by and large, too long for airplay, but they did document the art form as it was practiced on stage. (One of the keys to Run-DMC’s crossover success is that its tunes were boiled down to the length of pop songs.)

Old school rap was made by crews, not individuals, and you can hear the high degree of collaboration required for a routine like “That’s the Joint.” Members of the Funky Four + 1 finish each other’s rhymes and rap in rounds. Women were not excluded from early rap crews in the same stark way that they would come to be, and some hip hop historians believe that the Funky Four’s “one more,” MC Sha Rock, was the first female rapper recorded to wax.

“Feel the Heartbeat”

Treacherous Three

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Still on the disco tip. Taana Gardner’s disco masterpiece “Heartbeat” provided the rhythm for many old school tracks. Her label, West End Records, even cut its own rap remix of the tune. But none were so successful as the Treacherous Three’s “Feel the Heartbeat.”

The Treacherous Three brought a new level of lyrical sophistication to its recordings. The crew’s routines were elaborate, and members wouldn’t just alternate lines, they would sometimes alternate phrases within a line. It’s a task that requires an unerring sense of rhythm, close attention to the work of your collaborators, and lots of practice. It’s even harder when you rap like the Treacherous Three did. It may not sound this way to contemporary ears, but compared to its peers, the Treacherous Three rapped fast.

The group’s lyrics were much more formally interesting than its competitors. Special K, Sunshine, and Kool Moe Dee might not have had the best snaps, but they had the most rhythmically complicated ones. They would chop up lines, adding internal rhymes and cascades of rhymes over the same syllable. It made their raps sound less like plodding.

“Spoonin’ Rap”

Spoonie Gee

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Spoonie Gee’s solo career was the great exception to dominance of the rap crew. An original member and, later, a collaborator of the Treacherous Three, Spoonie Gee’s best material was released under his own name.

Spoonie Gee was dirty. The Cold Crush/Sugarhill Gang might have been rapping about “Super Sperm,” but that’s kid’s stuff compared to what Spoonie Gee would have in store. The “baby-maker,” “woman-taker,” the “cold-crushin’ lover,” Spoonie Gee rapped about having sex in cars, on dancefloors, and more or less anywhere else he found himself. He would become the inspiration for dirty minds everywhere, from Too $hort to 2 Live Crew.

Spoonie Gee is on the mic for nearly the entirety of the seven-minute-long “Spoonin’ Rap,” and it is unusual to hear a single rapper flow for that long on an old school track. Spoonie Gee’s presence on the mic, friendly but confident, makes listening to his rhymes easy. His flow darts around, playing with the rhythm, picking it apart. And the production on “Spoonin’ Rap” gives him an assist. Spoonie Gee’s vocals are heavily processed, veiled by a layer of echo. It gives his voice heft, but it also allows it to glide along with the backing track, meshing, at times, into a single aural surface.

“Funkbox Party”

Masterdon Committee

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The aesthetic boundaries of old school rap were actually quite wide. “Funk Box Party,” Masterdon Committee’s b-boy classic, sounds like proto-electro. The backing track is exclusively percussion, and the rhythm has an uncanny resemblance to Washington D.C.’s go-go. The track, despite its vintage, sounds quite modern. It connects the dots between the electronic funk of Cameo and Prince, the downtown NYC disco scene, and the block parties in the Bronx. And its stripped down production, the work of overlooked producer Pumpkin, would influence a new generation of hip hop producers, from Run DMC to Mantronix.

Masterdon’s unique sound may have had something to do with the group’s diversity. Featuring Latinos alongside African Americans and, like the Funky Four + 1, a female vocalist, the Masterdon Committee looked and sounded like the creolized hodge podge that its native Harlem had increasingly become.

“The Message”

Grandmaster Flash

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The first conscious rap ever to make it big. The secret about tracks from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is that Grandmaster Flash rarely made it to the recording sessions. A pioneering DJ who invented many of the basic turntable techniques, Grandmaster Flash did not rap. New York’s record labels weren’t willing to bet on a sizable audience for turntablism, so Flash’s appearances on the singles and albums that bear his name were fleeting and limited to a couple of turntable flourishes.

“The Message” is really Melle Mel’s show. Melle Mel may not have had the slick flow of Spoonie Gee or the sense of rhythm of the Treacherous Three, but he did have a way of piling detail onto detail to evoke a place or situation. In “The Message,” he does both. The Bronx of the 1970s looked more like a warzone than a North American city, and “The Message” is journalism straight from the heart of the beast. It would inspire countless subsequent rappers, from Public Enemy to N.W.A., the Coup to the Geto Boys, to offer accounts of poverty, anxiety, and crime.

“Death Mix”

Afrika Bambaataa

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Like Grandmaster Flash, turntablist pioneer Afrika Bambaataa didn’t get much space on his official recordings to strut his stuff. But “Death Mix,” released in extremely small numbers as an EP, shows the master at work.

Bootlegged for decades and kept with the jealous reverence that medieval Catholics would bestow on bone fragments of saints, “Death Mix” is a live recording, from beginning to end, of a classic battle between Bambaataa, DJ Jazzy Jay, and DJ Red Alert. The number of breaks that the trio fit into the two sides of the record is astounding, and the level of technical sophistication is unbelievably advanced. Everything that most DJs will ever need to know is included, and the recording, as an early document of live hip hop, remains an important historical artifact.

“White Lines”

Grandmaster Flash

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There is no avoiding the impact that drugs have had on the development of hip hop. Funding, subject matter, inspiration, status, and tragedy have all come from a baggie of white powder. “White Lines” was Melle Mel’s tribute to cocaine, a somewhat ironic dissection of its effects on the mind, the body, and the willpower. It’s a celebration of the drug and a chronicle of its deleterious effects. After he cut the recording, the executives at Sugar Hill Records forced him to add the admonition “don’t do it,” to make the track more marketable.

“White Lines” was recorded just before the crack epidemic would make New York City virtually unlivable, but the effects of the drug world on hip hop were already becoming visible. Melle Mel’s friend, the Brooklyn DJ Junebug, was shot dead in his home weeks before “White Lines” hit the streets, the victim of a drug deal gone bad.

“White Lines” was hardly the first rap about coke, but it would become one of the most enduring; its equivocal message still resonates long after the crack epidemic. And its message certainly outlasted its record label. “White Lines” was built around the bassline from “Cavern,” a tune by NYC post-punk band Liquid Liquid, whose label brought a lawsuit against Sugar Hill records over the swipe. The cost of litigating the suit became one of the factors that bankrupted the label.

“Beat Bop”

Rammellzee and K Rob

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In 1982, Rammellzee was a graffiti writer with a beef. Jean-Michel Basquiat was the toast of the NYC art world on the basis of a somewhat dubious past writing graffiti. Rammellzee called Basquiat a fraud. Basquiat, in turn, claimed that he could out paint, out dance, and out rap anybody, including Rammellzee. Rammellzee took him up on his challenge.

Weeks later in a recording studio, Basquiat had not even finished reciting his first sixteen bars of lyrics when Rammellzee and his friend K-Rob locked him out of the room. When Ramm and K-Rob had emerged from behind the locked door, they had recorded “Beat Bop,” the Ulysses of rap music. Longer than ten minutes, it has everything: stream of consciousness, gangster slang, party rhymes, street reporting, and a duck voice. Basquiat designed the record sleeve and got the production credit, but Rammellzee claims that Jean-Michel did nothing but foot the bill.

“Money (Dollar Bill Ya’ll)”

Jimmy Spicer

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Jimmy Spicer can never get enough love. Before Russell Simmons had T La Rock or Run DMC, he had Spicer, a tongue twisting lyrical assassin, Spicer was the first great rap storyteller. His 13-minute-long track “The Adventures of Super Rhyme” includes a superheroic alien rap master, Howard Cosell, Count Dracula, and a disco. Its convolutions and unlikely characters would shape the lyrical careers of Slick Rick and Dana Dane, among others. But, it’s his track “Money (Dollar Bill Ya’ll)” that always finds its way back to the Brass Trax turntable.

With a slick electro backing track and a helping of humor, Spicer traces the influence of money on daily life, a litany of things that money will buy you, from a mousetrap to an army tank, to a “a psychiatrist if you’re acting ill.” It’s a meditation on economy that could just as easily be the theme song for New York City, the capital of global finance. And, like the best old school rap, you can still dance to it.

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