Obvious economic / convenience reasons apart, I never got why live drumming never quite took off in hiphop. When employed by the likes of the brilliant-but-underrated Stetsasonic, it sounded awesome. They were quite open about trying to capture the 'live' power of War, Mandrill and Earth, Wind and Fire; while also using the talents of production legend Prince Paul. And though the drum machine break from Schoolly D's 'PSK: What Does it Mean?' has been used all over the place (including on Siouxsie's 'Kiss Them For Me'), its the live drumming on Saturday Night: The Album that makes it date a lot less than other hiphop albums from the 80s.
However, the great Aaron Spears has beat a considerable reputation for himself playing for various hiphop / R'n'B acts...
According to one's prejudices, current occupations in New York could be the inspiring harbinger of further insurrections, or little more than the last gasp of hipster indulgence; before further lockdowns are consolidated. Although some have pointed to the lack of a coherent agenda, a common consensus is now becoming apparent; with specific demands. One things for certain: It's not just those traditionally designated as 'the poor' being hit hard - and enraged - by the abuses and crimes perpetrated by Wall St. The current crisis - or perhaps the global swindle presenting itself as a crisis - is reaching a much wider range of victims than any other recession in living memory. The net is being cast ever wider, and it may not be so much a case of a 'squeezed' middle as an endangered middle. In western nations at least, more and more of the middle class are being proletarianised. Their presence as a stabilising force in society is diminishing rapidly, as the social ladder is kicked away from beneath their feet. Last year, student protests in the UK taught a similar lesson: privileges that many once took for granted are far from guaranteed. They may not be feeling the force of impoverishment, enclosure and crackdown as severely as the 'underclass' has; but the middle classes can easily be brutalised and criminalized if it suits the interests of the powers-that-be. Many a respectable, affluent parent is learning the hard way that police are willing to treat their children in a similar manner to the way they have kids from the 'wrong side of the tracks'. It remains to be seen how this rupture in the social contract plays out.
Watching footage of the above protests, it was (at least initially) striking how very white and middle class the protesters appeared; especially since they take place in one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. One huge reason for this may be gentrification. A particularly notorious example of this is Brooklyn, site of the bridge face-off. Mayor Gulliani's 'clean-up' of New York was marketed as a brave new world of opportunity, order and cohesion, but for a silent (or rather, marginalised and ignored) majority it was a social nightmare. 'Zero tolerance' didn't just mean cleaner pavements and renovated crack houses. It was also a gloves-off clampdown, enacted by a militarised police force in the name of property and plunder. The cultural vibrancy that attracts the wealthy to once-affordable urban areas became a casualty of asymmetrical class/race warfare as much as civil liberties and public services. Many a major city in western Europe has experienced a similar process, with discord being sown long before the credit crunch. The issues raised by recent riots in London made this discord unavoidable. Despite the speeches of politicians, it will become harder to explain away social unrest with the usual cheap rhetoric of law'n'order and moral decline. Even for those supporting their solutions, at least some antagonisms at the heart of this unrest are apparent.
Until the 90s, Brooklyn was experiencing something of a renaissance, with many of the nation's leading black and hispanic intellectuals, film-makers, artists, musicians and novelists emerging from there. In 1991, Brooklyn's Bed Stuy was billed by Essence magazine as "the happenin' hood". This is no longer the case, as the affordability attracting creative people to an area can be easily transformed into cynical property opportunism, and what amounts to ethnic cleansing in all but name. Corporations and peddlers of luxuries inevitably followed the money; bringing in plastic surgeons, expensive accountants, estate agents, exclusive restaurants and the familiar shop-front brands that have turned so many cities into shadows of their once-exciting selves. Homogeneity is rarely a fertile ground for innovation. The hated figure of the hipster - a paradoxically monocultural subculture, that convenient whipping post of cultural decline - may now be finding that life isn't all about the LULZ, and their days as apathetic servants of accumulation are numbered. Brooklyn's hipster set may not be inheriting the Earth after all. I expect the generation following them will be less defined (or stereotyped) by privilege, smugness and resignation, and rather more by anger and desperation. With neoliberalism's collapse, the social conflicts it (vainly) tried to brush under the carpet are returning with a vengeance.
So, this being an 80s blog, we'll return to the earlier days of the neoliberal 'experiment', to a time when Brooklyn was a site of cultural vibrancy; the kind of innovation that can emerge from social tension, community identity, and alienation from the mainstream. To a time when popular culture had a bit more moxie, and Reagan's victims found ways to express themselves on a popular platform; for all kinds of purposes. Like early rock'n'roll, country or soul, hiphop made its mark with the 'answer record': where a performer takes umbrage to the statements of another performer; then upping the ante in anticipation of another answer in return. It's a handy way to establish an emerging genre, as it creates a sense of immediacy and anticipation. Their public rows keep the music in the present tense, with listeners positioned as witnesses to a lively argument. It's an extension of the live sporting challenges that are still a key aspect of the genre. As with sport, it has its fair share of regional loyalty.
Of course, as in real life, if dragged on too long it can become tedious and overstated; if not downright unpleasant and violent, but at least in the initial stages it can be fun and entertaining. The below records represent a far less brutal kind of hiphop rivalry than the far more publicised/mythologised ones of the 90s. They were part of 'The Bridge Wars', a feud where two regions laid claim to the creation of hiphop itself. There was some class tension to this, as the Bronx experienced harsher social devastation than Brooklyn since the 'drop dead' 70s. This is reflected in the lyrics, where Brooklyn rappers are dissed as somewhat effete and pampered, in comparison with the more authentically 'hardcore' Bronx. On that count, the Bronx won the feud. However in light of the decades that followed, within the context of future struggles, these tracks gain an unexpectedly mournful tone. Their regional differences melt into air when we take the bigger picture into account. The gentrification that followed - and the Wall St. protests - are but different theatres of attack, enclosure and resistance. There's always the wider war, ready to incorporate and exploit our everyday battles.
Despite its bad press these days, through a perspective that binds it so closely to the ravages of neoliberalism, at the time I could feel the appeal of postmodernism. With youth and receptive innocence being so important to how we respond to pop music, the records below may represent the best examples of its overtly self-conscious, postmodern 80s variety. High-concept po-mo pop (including short-lived sensations like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but mainly miserable failures like Sigue Sigue Sputnik) reached saturation point around mid-decade, with a plethora of acts borrowing their template for marketing gimmickry from Malcolm McLaren. The British music press between 1983-87 was full of talentless chancers armed with nothing more than a slogan, a haircut and gaudy graphic design. McLaren's role in the great punk swindle has been over-documented to death elsewhere (not least by himself), so perhaps it's time to view his entire career for what it actually was: a risky celebration of play for its own sake; the basic lesson any clever art school kid learns. It was all a game to McLaren and it was obvious that, unlike more famous contemporaries, he thoroughly enjoyed playing the overgrown child. The staged battles over his little pranks, the cod-situationist aphorisms, his many daft interviews, and his somewhat unsavory fixations (namely, a recurring focus on pubescent girls' sexuality) didn't take away from his cunning pop smarts. He acted as role model to all kinds of of zeitgeist-chasing wannabes, the vast majority of whom fell flat on their faces trying to emulate him. Maybe it was because they lacked enough conviction in their silliness.
Although already familiar with rap, watching the video for 'Buffalo Gals' on kid's TV or Top of the Pops brought home the (then) disconcertingly alien aspects of hiphop as a subculture. For everyone who saw it as a particularly annoying novelty hit, there just as many who saw it as heralding an important cultural shift. It paid more attention to hiphop's more avant-garde aspects than earlier attempts at appropriation by trad-bands like Blondie or The Clash, who couldn't escape obedience to the 'rock band' superego. With so many different voices moving in and out of his solo records, McLaren didn't feel as much need to constantly claim centre stage. He presented himself as just another character, leading the dance. True to the historical mix-n-match of late capitalism, the rhythmic juxtapositions and lyrics of 'Buffalo Gals' placed it in a continuum of earlier American folk-forms - pop culture as rest and recreation from matters of manifest destiny (the inherent violence of which played as much a role in hiphop's later development as it did in country and western decades earlier). To UK audiences at least, it briefly 'made strange' American popular culture; something that's rarely happened in the charts since the 80s. To many a young ear, it piqued our curiosity. It's still as oddly compelling as it was three decades ago.
Of course, a true postmodernist like McLaren didn't just use history for his box of Lego. He did similar with geography too. 'Double Dutch' brought together strands of the Black Atlantic diaspora, from the urban playgrounds of New York to the brutally oppressed townships of Soweto (the colonial allusions to both places are in the title). It used South African styles with less morose vanity than Paul Simon's more celebrated Gracelands, and with arguably more sensitivity to the political struggles at stake. Unlike more pompous 80s performers (some of whom are sadly still with us), it didn't wave these struggles around as flags of convenience. That would have been too redolent of grown-ups too self-important or pretentious to be 'in' on his big punk prank (I liked to imagine him using a hand-buzzer to shake hands with Richard Branson). He simply acknowledged that those struggles took place in a world we all shared. Despite the horrors of this world, there was still fun to be had in the most unlikely of locations. After all, kids can be skipping in South Africa as much they can in North America. In contrast to the 80s, we're now less likely to accept what po-mo sometimes justified its own existence with: The (perhaps vain) attempt to s(t)imulate empathy via the use of play between divergent cultures and time periods, that may otherwise have seemed distant from - or opposed to - each other. However limited this approach may have ultimately been, it was certainly less offensive than stadium pop turning clear and present political emergencies into promotional pieties, and much less pseudo-aristocratic as a creative space. Not so much we are the world as you are the world. It was a respite from cultural and historical context into something less antagonistic, stratified or burdensome.
This was the stated purpose of McLaren's concept album Fans. It attempted that most po-mo of tricks; dated in the obviousness of its concept, yet an approach now commonplace beyond all novelty: Harmonizing the highbrow and lowbrow, by applying pop R'n'B production to opera classics. A gimmicky move, sure, and perhaps distasteful to more devoted fans of either. However, it managed to serve up one of the most sublimely ridiculous, memorable and weirdly touching confections to grace the 80s pop charts; while doing it on the safe side of embarrassment or pretension. It granted opera more dignity than FIFA ever did, anyway. When I hear 'Nessun Dorma' nowadays, images of a drunken Paul Gasgoine wearing plastic tits to entertain the lads are sadly unavoidable. McLaren's 'Madame Butterfly' conjured up something altogether more beguiling and evocative; fusing high'n'low with more panache than so many other 80s attempts. The knowing world-weariness of the lyrics worked well, emerging as they do from the cheeky innocence of its conceit. For all of McLaren's unashamedly gauche childishness, moving on from the confrontational aspects of his earlier projects was his way of growing up in public. He learned the basic lesson that so many of us do past a certain age: Pop music should be fun, it should be inclusive, and all the rest is propaganda. It's not there to feed the world, but it shouldn't heave-ho its partners either. What the listener takes from it is what matters. McLaren just wanted to play, and anyone was invited to join in if they so wished. You'd have to be a pretty sour old punk to object to that, really.
Just to continue the go-go tip, and because it's still as awesome as it was in 1987. I recall it was on the budget-price Def Jam Sampler Vol. 1, which introduced a lot of British kids to hip-hop. Despite sharing space with Public Enemy, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys all in their prime, it was the best track on it. Made by kids aged 8-13 from the Barry Farm Housing Project, Washington DC; with toys, trash and common household items. Considering that and its urgent, hard-hitting lyrics, you can't get more 'punk' than that...
The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods. It is a true part of the culture of a confused society.
A north Hampshire town in 1984, the usual Saturday traipsing shopping streets behind mum. I was waiting outside one shop when three or four older, harder, cooler, more confident boys surged past – one carrying a huge ghetto blaster blaring out these taut rhythms, icy synth lines and robotic voices. It was a moment, and I had to have that sound (the tune was Man Parrish’s Boogie Down Bronx). This was my first ticket out of the suburban quotidian: electro music had entered and would never leave. I had no real idea of its provenance other than it was American but to an 11-year-old lack of details were no barrier to imagination. Only superficially was it dumb party music bragging about girls, and it laid the groundwork for my perceptions of popular music, and particularly the divide between dance and rock, years before I was ready to process those ideas.
A Damascene moment it may have been but electro was no early stage, esoteric cult. After punk had razed the ground but also made yet more variations on rock ‘n roll palatable to the wider world only as pastiche, a New Pop which the newer, cheaper synth technology facilitated had arrived. With real instrumentation less in favour, the funk quota that most bands still strived for was also more easily achievable through this route. Many a rock outfit had a makeover and descuzzed their sound. Blondie rapped about Flash and Fab Five Freddy. It was also well served on film with the likes of Breakdance Electric Boogaloo and Wild Style. So any near-adolescent wanting to appear a la mode had to have a passing acquaintance with it, just as any with-it band – say The Clash – would pay respect to the culture and dabble in the sound.
My own causal, if very tonally different, link was the beguiling sights and sounds of synth Britons such as the Human League, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode on Top of the Pops in 80-81. Turned out these groups were also enormously influential among black Americans too. Paradoxically getting into it when I did would save me from the worst stylistic excesses of the New Pop which would begin to lose its way; I’d leave the Now tapes to my elder sister and her cronies.
As legacy I would take just the music from this era, but this was a well rounded culture encompassing the four corners of breakdancing, graffiti, MCing and DJing. We were in a ‘crew’ of course, with the hi-top boots, jeans with decorative zips in, the fat laces and the (rarely unfashionable since) two-tone Nike cagoules, although only one of us had any real skills on the lino. For a while all this completely took over – I’d write long graf lists of all the words associated with the genre (smooth/tuff/wicked/etc); tap my pens a lot on school desks in mimicry; adapt Whodini’s Freaks Come out at Night to our tent’s travails on our school camping holiday; spend way too much time with my mate in the hi-fi shops checking out the nice eject actions on blasters we couldn’t afford. I boldly pronounced to my mum that this electro-breaking lark was the future, ‘here for ever’ or something. Well not quite, but while all the elements reduced in relevance most of them have refitted and resurged more popular than ever.
The chaotic scratching, blunt industrial beats and MC reportage would offer fitting representation of the Bronx and other districts being torn down. What passed for the banner of ‘Electro’ was a much wider genre encompassing the escapist post-Soulsonic forces stuff, Run DMC’s stripped back bluntness or the even more basic drum machine minimalism of Roxanne/UTFO. In ’85, as this DJ Revlution comp would attest, synthesised riffs were losing out as virtually everyone was rocking hard bass kicks and snares backed up with electronic handclaps, scratching and riffs broken down and exploited for pure rhythmic import – when much of the subject matter being spat was still quite prurient such force could seem a little bewildering. And though there were gritty tales as made most obvious by the likes of Grandmaster Flash’s The Message I was pretty much out of there when the stuff started going gangsta for reasons I’ll explain later. Yes there was also shit like the Fat Boys giving it a bad name, and all manner of prurient eccentricity before that became uncanny and hip. There were a few popular long-running themes such as the welter of battle rhymes/answer records between Roxanne with UTFO and Roxanne with Roxanne Shante; apparently there was a version with swear words on it which had to be tracked down. For my own part, I was also on a quest to find the most perfect scratch sound, and I located it in NYC Cutter’s DJ Cuttin’s licks contorting the sounds of brakes being slammed on.
This was a shortlived spell like the most intense obsessions; I was on the sound probably from late ’84-late ’86. Enthusiasm for playing and watching football dropped as my interest in hanging round crappy precincts listening to music and talking about breakdancing – but never having actually any burns – increased. Crucially, this would be an early sign that in any such scene the music would be my over-riding concern. That did not mean I would slip into fanboy obscurantism – to have the prime cuts from each act would be enough.
What stays with me from this scene today? Almost embarrassingly so, much of it is note-perfect thanks to regular trips back to the sound (a friend ripped me a CD-rom’s worth of all of the Electros), but the ones I offer up as examples are:
Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde were a double act in at the start of the scene, and therefore not totally transformed by the takeover of drum machines and Bambaata type electro. ‘Fast Life’ is a Kurtis Blow production with live bass and synth sweeps offset by the electronic handclap machine on random, a fine background for Andre Harrell and Alonzo Brown to divert from the usual rock the party rhymes to deliver a cautionary tale about a kid who ‘grew up much too quick’. Harrell went on to form Uptown records where the duo’s corporate livery was more suited to its New Jack Swing.
Marley Marl is deservedly cited as a leading light. With his cousin MC Shan here, we have ultra tight beats, big ups to self, not a chord or melody in sight. As head of the Juice Crew, Marlon Williams’ style was an arrogant and assured anti-music. He also led the late 80s evolution of hip-hip with his work for Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Kool G Rap & Polo, Masta Ace and others. That DJ Cuttin record is his too. And you must check his harsh brutalism on MC Craig G’s Transformer – a late appearance on Electro 10 but a bleak and ugly slab of shifting sledgehammer beats, shock instrumental stabs and the shapeshifting daemon himself coming through the vocoder.
Then there was there more straight-up electro bounce LA sound – the pre-NWA explorations of Dre in the World Class Wreckin Crew and Professor X as the Arabian Prince, as well as the Unknown DJ. And the guy who stands out with his consistent Pharonic concept was Egyptian Lover. These days those pitch-bent riffs, queasy voices and druggy beats are the meat and veg of the fidgety pop world; back then I used to find Greg Broussard’s material dangerously exciting and disturbing as I’d listen to a tinpot tape-player or radio under my sheets.
I also retain big love for Aleem – twins Taharqa Aleem and Tunde Ra Aleem with 70s soul-disco man Leroy Burgess who peddled emotionally charged electro soul that through its energy sat better with the Electro compilations than the slicker, high-tech soul of its Street Sounds cousin (one of which actually I got in error after I instructed mum, obviously shopping alone in Aldershot that Saturday, to come home with any Electro she saw in Our Price). They also produced for acts such as Captain Rock.
More well known than all of these with his highly distinctive electrofunk, it’s hard to avoid Mantronix as a considerable auteur. Kurtis el Khaleel epitomised the rise of the singular producer who like Marley Marl would release under different guises/styles and work with a range of rappers and vocalists. I choose Ladies, standard girl-talk for sure but with a weird atmosphere catalysed by slower than usual polyrhythmic drum patterns with real percussion, minor keys and echoed MC Tee rhymes.
If 82-84 saw the emergence of this futurist thrust, then 1985 was the year of take-over, certainly that DJ Revolution comp would suggest it was a big year. That meant consolidation was round the corner; by ’86 the purer electro sound was getting overexploited (Paul Hardcastle’s 19, anyone?), while the industry had seemed only to raise the profile of the dumber stuff (Fat Boys, LL Cool J – anything past Rock the Bells is cack), get behind acts past their sell-by date (Roxanne, Kurtis Blow) or usher others into more soulful, rockier or mainstream material such as Run DMC or Mantronix, in stark contravention to where the culture was actually going. With New York repurposed as a city of service and finance capital, those industrial slabs of rhythm, wreckin shop scratching and block rockin lyrics that purveyed a tumultuous city with considerable heterogeneous cultural force were out of place – it was now the job of rappers to talk about the crack zones left behind. For that true ‘hip-hop’ itself was coming to the fore. Boogie Down Productions was one of the first of the new school – and as with so many KRS-1 would soon have his own tale for summary inspiration after Scott La Rock’s death. The braggadocio of the frontman gripping his johnson had been replaced by an in-your-face bad boy with deadly intent. Either as preacher man, griot or grisly celebrator of the life, rappers (no longer just plain old MCs) had stories to tell beyond girls about using guns and selling drugs and for this his ‘cadence’ was all-important and the return to musicality served that – sampling took over and the real funk of the 70s was plundered – I’m tempted to think because you needed a fun counterpoint to all the lyrical brutality.
By its twelfth edition it was ‘Hip-Hop Electro’ 12, and by 17 it had lost any mention of electro at all – while nominally the term did not fit everything in this wide range of emerging sounds it had been accurate enough; by now it was outdated. The modern shapes and blocks of colour were also slowly edged out, and with this loss of consistent corporate identity the game was over. Or rather it had changed. The strictly entertaining party elements took a back seat until consumer capitalism was ready to re-embrace them. I corresponded by having a period out of the game – a spiritual penance if you like away from other people’s hyper-reality (the music I chose for this interlude was mostly U2, the Minds and Jean Michel Jarre! Oh what scars in my collection!) before Public Enemy and others such as Eric B bought me back in time for hip-hop’s golden era to follow. But that’s the music of another decade. 25-30 years on electro music’s legacy is strong. The reliance was still on the ever fertile production line from America but for Britain’s multi-culti teenagers always so achingly keen to be on-trend, this was the first visible subculture to explicitly refute live music and be all about DJs, producers, labels, the latest up-to-the-minute beat (a more visible cousin to the necessary occlusive soundsystem-based dub reggae culture). The notion of the b-boy still has a very strong hold on how up and coming British producers present themselves. You can view it as pre-nuum in this respect, possibly with even more direct linkage than the more naively utopian, therefore less streetwise, rave.
Personally, electro/hip-hop goes far beyond being my first window on the black American world and a companion in my adolescent stirrings – ‘Electro is aural sex’ they used to print on the inlay of the tape covers. I still exercise an over-reliance on the compilation method of accumulation Electro introduced me to – picking the best artists with no particular need to discover the full blown artist album where your loyalty is frequently let down by lack of quality/overindulgence. And while Rubin and co were introducing elements of rawk as it collided with the MTV generation, these few years precluded any liking for metal/rock/indie and coloured my perceptions of those genres for years afterwards. Hearing this blunt but emphatic anti-music as my source material would make my inherently distrust the vaunted ‘emotion’ of the troubled rock artist, or the value of all the ever diminishing repetitions of musicality the bands behind him present. Since I have realised the pointlessness of relativity in relation to disparate musics I have opened up my ears, but in many respects it’s still all about the beat. And yeah sad to say I still annoy a lot of people by beatboxing too often.
In terms of the music itself, well from Dizzee’s bite of the Roxanne/UTFO beat on Fix Up, the Chemical Brothers’ use of the Roof is on Fire or any number of wholescale lifts from those Brighton Go! Team merchants who wear the influences very visibly on their chests – very little of it that was any good hasn’t been appropriated. On one hand the pulse beat seemed to served the rather dull breaks genre, on the other austere and enlightening Detroit electro from Aux 88, Mike Banks’ various guises, Drexicya and the broadening out from electroclash artists like Peaches. Bear in mind what was called electro-house very rarely had that pulse-beat but still traded off the genre’s schlock value. The breaking, popping, graffiti and so on are so thoroughly re-entrenched in a now officially sanctioned Street Culture that for originals like me to call its bluff and claim it’s nostalgic would be nonsense. A kid (or more likely, a student wearing a rucksack into the scene) can immerse themselves in this life more completely than we ever could and, with ever more distance from the original Bronx explosion of the late ’70s, questions of cultural theft seem much less relevant.
With any retrospective of a once vital culture we have to be careful not to lurch into nostalgic soft focus or use it as a validator of once vibrant lives, like the way pissed Dads attempt the moonwalk, the body pop or, no! please don’t!, the crazy legs at a wedding. Or the way Vernon Kay endlessly evokes the spirit of rave as if he’s a Haciendia veteran. But if you deghettoise the sound – not necessarily think of it as childish electro but straight-up dance music – then much of it competes with all the myriad disco/funk/early house stuff of the Dance Decade. Generally, all the genre’s trademark sounds have been back in vogue for a good 10 years so the more pertinent question is when will it stop being so influential.
An Electro 10 MC Craig G – Transformer Imperial Brothers – We Come to Rock Aleem – Release Yourself Captain Rock – Cosmic Blast Cybotron – Clear Egyptian Lover – My House on the Nile Marley Marl ft MC Shan – Marley Marl Scratch Man Parrish – Boogie Down Bronx Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde – Fast Life Roxanne Shante ft Biz Markie – Def Fresh Crew
For a short while there, I thought these guys were the coolest motherfuckers around. In the mid-80s, critical consensus wasn't afraid to describe them as 'the future'. The marketing genius of Def Jam and/or Rush Artists Management knew the value of a grinding riff; to shove that previously-dissed 'fad' onto MTV and the front pages of the music press. I've left the obvious choice off this post (surely we got sick of hearing it at the 100th student disco?). Lest we forget 'Rock Box' posed a serious challenge to 'The Message' as the first and last word in hiphop (the aging hippies/thrusting yuppies at Rolling Stone certainly paid attention). The racial politics of riff-value are beyond my caffeine-addled comprehension right now, but the below tracks had a lot more riff/solo moxie than so much poodle metal of the time. Not only a producer with the golden touch, Rick Rubin was a damn fine axeman. Although pricking the ears of white America to open its wallet, the rock metal crossover was (thankfully) the road less travelled. But late 80s hiphop always supplied something bigger and deffer to make sucker MCs of last month's kings (its continuous discordinant shifts a suitable soundtrack for the growing pains of 80s adolescence). With the arrival of Schoolly-D, Public Enemy, NWA, etc. RUN-DMC's star faded fast: Now familiar to teens as reality TV fodder, if at all. But in terms of establishing hiphop as an album genre, as an international top ten staple - they were the Kings of Rock. They certainly made the summer of '86 more fun for yours truly.
