The Tanning of America (4 page)

I laughed out loud. As the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. The world is smaller all the time.
Bling
. Universal. Timeless. That's how far hip-hop culture had infiltrated, through the process of codification, conveyed via a language and infrastructure built on the same pillars that create governments and religious institutions and global economies. Because Madison Avenue and others in corporate America were late to understand the code, youth culture got to call the shots and shape the game. We could then say to those who missed out:
You could get it, but you didn't want it. I couldn't get it, so I took it. We're in the same place. Tanning.

M
ost cultural movements that go on to have staying power begin in the grass roots. They may appear to come about by accident and more or less spontaneously. But more often than not there is an underlying need that summons the energy required to build a movement. As anyone who was around in hip-hop's formative years can tell you, it was born from the need to know how to rock a party. Plain and simple. That's how tanning really was propelled. And before the terms “hip-hop” or “rap” officially existed, that's what a handful of resourceful individuals understood and did to get the whole ball rolling.

We're talking generally about the year 1970—the same year, by the way, that I was born. But it wasn't until I was nine years old, late in 1979, that I even heard the words “hip” and “hop” strung together or was able to grasp the notion of what being a rapper actually meant. That was when, fatefully, I heard a record that changed my life (and pop culture) forever.

Like it's yesterday, I can still remember that moment over at my aunt's home in Brooklyn—where it seemed there was always a party under way with relatives and neighbors hanging out, a great spread of food, and new, hot music on the record player. Most stereo systems in those days could be adapted for the single two-sided records that were smaller and had the big hole in the middle (45 RPM) as well as the bigger records with the small holes (33⅓ RPM)—which were the full albums that had several songs on each side.

But as the intro plays to what I recognize as “Good Times” by the group Chic and I'm drawn into the living room because it's a familiar hit song from the previous summer, I encounter a record on the turntable that defies categorization. Instead of the sweet female lead vocals of that disco smash, I hear something totally different and spot a baby-blue label on the black vinyl record I've never seen before. Even though it's a twelve-inch disc, the size of an album, as I listen to the rhyming words being spoken—“
Singin' on 'n' 'n' on 'n' on / The beat don't stop until the break of dawn / Singin' on 'n' 'n' on 'n' on on 'n' on / Like a hot buttered a pop da pop da pop dibbie dibbie pop da pop pop / Ya don't dare stop”—
it hits me that this entire side is one long song.

Almost fifteen minutes long as it turns out. Or, to be exact, fourteen minutes and thirty-six seconds of pure fun laid over the thumping bass beat from the break of “Good Times” with sing-along words easy to remember and repeat. The record, I discover, is by an unknown group, the Sugarhill Gang, and is called “Rapper's Delight.”

From then on, nobody ever has to tell me what rap is. It's whatever words are spoken, chanted, or talk-sung, or whatever philosophies, stories, or ideas are espoused, by the house party Master of Ceremonies (the emcee, also known as the MC). Halfway through this first hearing I'm hooked and start playing the song over and over again until I have it memorized, beginning with the invitation to the party that needs no translation: “
I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop / A you don't stop / The rock it to the bang bang boogie /Say up jumped the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.”

Hip hop? There it was. For most of us this was the first general public outing of the hybrid word. People disagree about who exactly coined the term but most sources cite Lovebug Starski as the DJ/MC who, in the early seventies, started referring to the house party scene as cultivating a
hip-hop
culture. Kids would bring their boom boxes or a DJ would show up with his gear and the party could rock. “Rapper's Delight” used music that was already in the vernacular (the familiar “Good Times” by Chic) and added new ingredients in the form of spoken-word lyrics made out of fresh expressions. Code. Even if you didn't know what a “
sucka MC
” or a “
fly girl
” was, or how a rhyme could be “
vicious
,” “Rapper's Delight” put the language into context and passed the expressions along.

What I loved at nine years old was how the lyrics were really funny nursery rhymes, easy to memorize and repeat. Phrases like “
Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn
” just stuck in your brain, as did the humor of rhyming “
hands in the air
” with “
shake your derriere
” or getting sick “
from food you ate
” and running to the store
“for a bottle of Kaopectate.
” There was no real social protest. Rap wasn't there yet. But there was already an authenticity in a brand being shouted out. And the situations were ones that even I at age nine had experienced: “
Have you ever went over to a friend's house to eat and the food just ain't no good? / I mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed and the chicken tastes like wood . . .”
On top of all that, it was exciting to think that you could be part of a crew, have a record, just from making up poetry and chanting about stuff that happened all the time. That was fly, seriously fly.

Obviously, I wasn't the only one who thought so. Within a few weeks, it seemed like every kid in Queens had memorized the words to “Rapper's Delight”—no easy feat for a song that had no bridge or hook—and we would hold battles to see who could recite it from the top without messing up. We were extending our own breaks on the playground or after school, using a popular record to bring fun and meaning into our lives.

However, as I noticed at my aunt's house in Brooklyn, not everybody dug the free-form storytelling and irreverent rhyming. Made no sense. After all, if you listened to the words, you'd hear that the invite was to come one and come all:
“I like to say hello / To the black, to the white, the red, and the brown, the purple and yellow.”
If Sugarhill was shouting out all colors, it would follow that all generations were welcome too.

Maybe, I concluded, there was some frequency level coming from this record that could only be appreciated by the young and the hip and would otherwise fall on deaf older ears, the way a dog whistle can only be heard by canine ears. No doubt this must have been the same reaction older generations had when soul singers like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke started taking music out of the church, or earlier when Charlie Parker and Miles Davis broke from the standards of big-band jazz to bend notes and clash chords.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, with “Rapper's Delight” exploding onto the scene, blasting out of boom boxes, car radios, and record stores, pumping out of windows onto the streets, the generational gap showed itself in the marketplace. Before long, the dog-whistle effect had permeated barriers of color and geography and transformed one of the first-ever rap records from a word-of-mouth success to certified gold. After hitting number four on the R&B list and as high as number thirty-six on the pop list, “Rapper's Delight” became an anthem for a changing era. It was buoyed by the outdoor fitness craze starting up, including skate and surf culture, along with a growing market for cassette tapes instead of records, and the advent of the Sony Walkman and other personal listening devices. Soon folks of all backgrounds in the cities and suburbs of America were on the move like never before, rocking their own parties and heading into the uncharted waters of the 1980s. The Sugarhill Gang had lit a tanning spark.

Ironically—and this is not the only part of the story that is ironic—the three MCs were newcomers who had only performed together as a crew for the first time on the same day as the actual recording session. To explain how that turned out as well as it did, some background is in order.

Whenever we revisit history or examine the forces that launched a cultural movement, we naturally speak of the heroes who led the way. So the question of who invented hip-hop is in order. But the question to ask first should not be
who
so much as
what
invented this culture. And that answer, easily, bluntly, is the force of aspiration. It's the power that turns nothing into something, that creates worlds and paves destinies, and changes the have-nots into the have-somes and occasionally the have-it-alls. Without it, I should add, the field of marketing would become obsolete. Aspiration. It's a mix of desire, hope, imagination, creativity, fearlessness, and a few other ingredients, among which last but not least is belief—specifically, a belief that whatever it is that's the focus of the aspiration is obtainable.

In the late sixties and early seventies, when hip-hop was gestating in pockets of activity scattered around New York's inner city—with the Bronx at the epicenter—the house party scene had elements that were definitely aspirational. By that I mean if you were network-connected, hooked up to the right people who were at the forefront of seeing who could rock the best parties, that would set you apart, lend you stature, and give you a local calling card. With concerts, clubs, dance halls, and discos propelling existing musical genres into the mainstream, another function of the house parties was to create the newest counterculture. It had aspects of being an underground society, accessible to younger generations in communities of color who couldn't get into those other venues because of age or disinterest or racial barriers or inability to pay cover charges and afford the nicer clothes those venues required.

Youthful rebellion that had fueled movements of the sixties and earlier could have an outlet now as part of the house party counterculture—much like the punk rock scene that was starting up in European cities. Not surprisingly, this was the same steam being vented in the breakout days of ghetto graffiti—known as “writing” and sometimes “tagging”—that revealed another aspect of the aspiration to go against the grain, to gain credibility for having something to say, for saying it with bold lettering, pictures, symbols, and other abbreviated code, and even for breaking the law to say it. Without a doubt, it was vandalism. But it was also, without a doubt, art.

In the 1990s, when I started traveling to other cities in the U.S. and abroad, graffiti on unfamiliar walls was a sight for sore eyes. It made me feel at home, regardless of the language, like somebody was there who understood my conversation, my experience and background, and I could understand theirs. Global tanning. And by then, graffiti had become inextricably woven into hip-hop culture, considered one of its four intrinsic elements right alongside DJing, MCing, and B-boying.

All of those elements, combined with the energy of youthful aspiration, were in the recipe back in the burgeoning house party era. Add to that the music and attitudes of newly arrived immigrant populations, bringing the strong island flavors of reggae and ska, mixing with the rest of hip-hop's musical melting pot inheritance. Who wouldn't want to be around for that? Plus, being part of something you needed a pass to attend gave you credibility, proved that you knew the code, that someone had given you the lowdown. Like most parties in most eras, your coolness quotient would be determined by whether or not you showed up in style, by your ability to hold court (especially with the opposite sex), and absolutely by whether you could hold your own on the dance floor. But to really be the man (or the woman) at any house or yard party, the ultimate aspiration was to control the turntables and/or the mic. The DJ/MC—often one and the same in the early days—was king.

In the South Bronx at the time that my generation and I were toddlers, three such kings—known forevermore as the holy trinity of hip-hop—were DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. Historically, each played a distinct role in pioneering and expanding the musical/cultural field that grew out of the house party scene. Though they battled for supremacy in terms of local appeal—sometimes with literal DJ battles where sheer volume usually ruled the day—each needed the other two to push his own game forward.

True to his name, Flash took the basic elements of rap and turned up the wattage on performance and production values. As a DJ, he put himself front and center, over and above his playlist, inventing certain scratch-and-mix techniques almost singlehandedly—like the day when he accidentally dropped the needle on a record and had to hustle to move it in sync to the beat. Flash also increased the number of rappers onstage with him, making the inclusion of a crew of MCs with showmanship skills a rap mainstay.

Afrika Bambaataa was a mash-up maestro, playing everything from soul to salsa to disco, from rock, pop, funk, and reggae to TV theme songs. A former gangbanger, he also used his prominence as a DJ to convince some of the warring gangs to take their battles onto the mic or the dance floor. To create order for these functions, Bam went on to devise his own set of rules. As one of the first to codify a means for building the youth movement, Bambaataa would be credited with identifying the required elements that constitute hip-hop.