Can't Stop Won't Stop (64 page)

As they left that evening, a generation seemed to have been moved.

Angela Davis would ask the hard question, “All of us have reasons to atone. But is that going to bring about jobs or halt the rising punishment industry? This march may have been the first demonstration in history where Black people were mobilized, not around any goals or political agenda, but simply because they were Black men.”
⁵³

In 1963, the March on Washington had been a watershed event, a moment pregnant with the possibility of transformation. By the hundreds of thousands, a
generation had come to make change. They were a tide that would force the leaders in the Capitol on the opposite side of the Mall to become agents of that transformation, to pass the most important civil rights legislation in the nation's history.

Thirty-two years later, the Million Man March was no less a pivotal cultural moment. But times were different. When another generation came to face the Capitol, one million strong, the white edifice was a hollow symbol and the leaders in it were mainly agents of reversal, chasing each other round in a politics of symbolism, stopping every once in a while to pass legislation that only seemed to further the devastation. This generation had no reason to expect change to come from inside the Capitol.

For weeks before the march, they had quarreled about the march's substance and meaning. But as a million men left the Mall that bright Monday, there was a new clarity. Surrounded by the symbols of American power, they contemplated their own redemption. For now, change would have to be measured in single lives.

Angela Davis felt she understood why the march had been so powerful to so many. “I think that the way the Million Man March captured the imagination of so many people had to do with this desire to feel a part of the larger Black struggle. Many people have not felt that connection for quite some time,” she said.
⁵⁴

“Now perhaps we can use that.”
⁵⁵

A generation went home with themselves, back to the business of becoming.

Bentleys and bling at twilight: David Mays (left) and Raymond “Benzino” Scott
(right), 2001.
Photo © Christian Lantry

 

 

In the home of the brave, land of the free

I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie

—Leadbelly, “The Bourgeois Blues”

. . . to fuss about the exploitation of hip hop is quite often to take sides against the hip hoppers themselves—even though in the end that exploitation is certain to prove a juggernaut that the hip hoppers (and even the exploiters) can't control. To counsel purity isn't impermissible, but it's certainly complicated, with ramifications that stretch far beyond the scope of this review, or indeed of any piece of writing of any length on any similar subject that has ever come to my attention.

—Robert Christgau, 1986

Hip-hop may have turned the world into Planet Rock, and may have had a lot to do with a million men gathering on the National Mall, but it never conquered Washington, D.C.'s Chocolate City. In the Black neighborhoods encircling the white structures of global power, the people embraced the music and culture they called go-go.

In D.C., bands had never lost their hold on the nightclub scene. Flesh-and-blood musicians still ruled. Dancers moved to two-hour suites of covers and originals yoked together with steaming fatback breaks of drums, percussion and bass pulls. DJs filled the set breaks and cursed the day they had refused to take trumpet lessons.

The godfather of go-go was an amiable gentleman named Chuck Brown. He had spent the first half of the sixties in Lorton prison for shooting a man in self-defense, but learned to play blues guitar there. He emerged into a city where the passage of civil rights legislation in the halls of power downtown had done little to change the race and class realities that had angered Leadbelly enough to write “The Bourgeois Blues.” Nightclubs were still segregated: whites went to the big clubs downtown, Blacks went to “go-gos” in cabarets, churches and community halls.

Brown found work in the go-gos with a top-40 dance band named Los Latinos, whose Afro-Cubanized backbeat enthralled him. When he formed the first Soul Searchers band in 1966, he brought together a little Latin and a little sanctified church and created a rhythm to glue together medleys that could last for hours. His beat drove the dancers crazy.

He had figured out what bandleaders in other cities would not until it was too late. Instead of the songs, he realized the transitions between the songs—the hypersyncopated breaks, hyped-up shout-outs, and church-style call-and-response—were the band's main draw. What Kool Herc was doing for Bronx partyers at the same time, Chuck Brown was doing for D.C.'s go-go patrons. Brown short-circuited the rise of the disco DJ by reinventing the dance band format with go-go music.

At the beginning of the 1980s, go-go and hip-hop music were both outsider genres, inner-city musical cousins. Go-go bands lifted rap hooks for their jams and DJs like Charlie Chase and Cash Money rocked doubles of Trouble Funk and E.U. singles. Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh, Teddy Riley and Salt-N-Pepa jacked go-go beats, while Big Tony, Jas. Funk, Lil' Benny and D.C. Scorpio moved from singing to rapping.

When Run DMC was changing the rap game, Chris Blackwell, then the owner of Island Records and Island Pictures, arrived in D.C. with a plan to launch go-go like he had reggae—via a movie vehicle, backed up with a host of band signings. Unfortunately the movie,
Good to Go
, was no
Harder They Come
. After it flopped, Charles Stephenson, then E.U.'s manager, says, “It was almost like the bottom dropped out.”

Despite the best efforts of Chuck, E.U., Trouble Funk and Rare Essence, gogo never crossed over. When the ‘90s came, New York execs rushed to sign
hip-hop acts and stopped returning D.C. artists' phone calls. Go-go survived as one of the last independent, indigenous Black youth cultures.

For its devotees in the Beltway, the Black suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, and southern Black colleges, that fact remained a point of pride. The most popular go-go bands could play to 20,000 fans every week. Clothing companies and concert bootleg (“P.A. tape”) purveyors sprung up. Rare Essence and Backyard Band recorded some of the most compelling dance music of the decade. Go-go evolved without the pressure of mainstream expectations, but it also remained a largely segregated world in a culturally desegregating era, a fiercely local scene in a globalizing era.

It was also an industrial-era music for a postindustrial era. Just as it was when Chuck Brown walked out of Lorton, bands' fierce competition to remain atop the club scene remained the primary engine of go-go music. Making records and three-minute hit singles, the thing the music industry was most concerned with, was an afterthought. Economics partly explains why, after the 1980s, hip-hop went global and go-go remained local.

But there was also something else, something which producer Reo Edwards put like this: “I was talking to a go-go songwriter one time. I said, ‘Man, you need a verse here.' The guy said, ‘The rototom's talking! Hear the rototom?' Swear to god, he said the rototom was telling the story. ‘Can't put no verse there, the rototom telling the story.' Okay. Alright. You know what the rototom is saying. Maybe the people in the
audience
know what the rototom saying. But the people in Baltimore don't know what the hell that dang rototom is saying!”

He shakes his head. “Go-go's got the same problem today as it did back then. You don't have no good storylines. Hip-hop,” he paused for emphasis, “
tells stories
.”

If go-go was a rhythm machine, hip-hop was also an idea machine. It provided a bottomless well of stories. The culture was the call and hip-hop journalism was the response. Out of this, a generation's sense of itself would begin to cohere.

When hip-hop burst into downtown consciousness in the early ‘80s, there were journalists ready to catch it, like Nelson George at
Billboard
and David Toop at
The Face
in London. Most of the pioneering writers worked for underground
papers and alternative weeklies—Steven Hager at the
East Village Eye
, David Hershkovits at the
Soho News
, and Sally Banes, Robert Christgau and Vince Aletti at
The Village Voice
. Scenester entrepreneurs like Tim Carr, Michael Holman, and Aaron Fuchs also wrote about the young scene. By the mid-1980s, British zines like
Black Echoes, Black Music and Jazz Review
and
Soul Underground
were offering features, breakbeat charts and playlists, and American rock music tabloids
Spin
and
Rolling Stone
were covering hip-hop artists.

In January 1988,
The Village Voice
, under the aegis of Doug Simmons, Greg Tate, R. J. Smith, and Harry Allen, devoted a special issue to hip-hop entitled “Hip-Hop Nation.” Wrapped behind a cover featuring a who's-who of the rap scene, the issue's point was simple: this culture could make you
believe
. In Tate's words, it was “the only avant-garde around, still delivering the shock of the new (over recycled James Brown compost modernism like a bitch), and it's got a shockable bourgeoisie, to boot.” Most prophetically, he wrote, “Hip-hop might be bought and sold like gold, but the miners of its rich ore still represent a sleeping-giant constituency. Hip-hop locates their market potential and their potential militancy.”

Outside of New York City, the hip-hop nation was not yet born. It was a unorganized mass of true believers—dancers anxiously waiting for the DJ to drop a beat that would open a cipher; aerosolists in their bedrooms tearing open parcels of graf photos from towns they had never heard of; soon-to-be-turntablists scouring the bins in tiny specialty shops in Black or gay neighborhoods for twelve-inch records that had the word “rap” on their candy-colored labels. If there was to be a hip-hop nation, hip-hop journalism might provide a hip-hop nationalism to bring them together.

In August 1988, two white Jewish Harvard juniors named David Mays and Jon Shecter pooled two hundred dollars to put together a one-page hip-hop music tipsheet which they grandly named
The Source
. Both had been raised in upper middle-class liberal Jewish families—Mays in northwest Washington, D.C., Shecter in Philadelphia—and fallen in love with black style and culture. Upon arriving at Harvard in 1986, they realized, as Maximillian Potter wrote, that they were “probably the only two white guys wearing Fila suits.”
¹

Mays was an aficionado of Chuck Brown's beat and was known as “Go-Go Dave.” Shecter, who called himself “J The Sultan MC,” had cut a twelve-inch single
for his crimson-baseball capped crew called B.M.O.C. (Big Men On Campus), rapping over Wild Cherry's “Play That Funky Music.” Shecter converted Mays to the gospel of hip-hop and they landed a weekend radio show they called “Streetbeats” on their campus station WHRB. Soon after, they launched
The Source
from their Cabot House dorm room. The tipsheet's main attraction was the radio show's “Hot Picks,” a rap singles shopping list for their listeners. In order to finance the newsletter, Mays sold ads to retailers. They netted $25 on their first issue.

This modest offering was not the first of its kind. Bay Area DJ David “Davey D” Cook, for instance, had launched a similar kind of newsletter for listeners to his KALX show on the University of California, Berkeley, campus about a year earlier. But Mays and Shecter were quick to grasp the size and the opportunity in the burgeoning national audience. Mays built
The Source
's readership from a mailing list of listeners and industry folks he kept on his tiny Mac. As his industry contacts expanded, so did the mailing list. Major labels were still figuring out how to reach rap-friendly radio DJs, promoters, and retailers.
The Source
did the work of assembling just such a national network.

In under a year, with aggressive business acumen and a swaggering editorial voice, they had moved from a black-and-white Xerox format to a full-color covered, staple-bound magazine. Soon two other Harvard students, both Black—undergrad H. Edward Young and first-year law student James Bernard—came on board and become part owners. Bernard joined Shecter in shaping editorial content. Young helped Mays sell ads and publish the magazine.

Two years later, Mays, Shecter and Young graduated and moved
The Source
's operations to New York City. Bernard moved to Berkeley to finish up law school and open a west-coast office. The staff expanded to include columnists like Dave “Funken” Klein, contributors like Chris Wilder, Matt Capoluongo, Rob “Reef” Tewlow, Bobbito Garcia and a host of passionate, big-dreaming heads. By now, the magazine claimed fifteen thousand readers, two thousand of whom were record and radio industry insiders in the rapidly professionalizing genre.