is, “Oh, the kids are poor,” you know what I mean? Not even thinkin’ about it. Just like, “Well, that must be it: they’re poor!” (DJ Kool Akiem 1999)
As Prince Paul continues, in addition to broad social and economic trends, there were also significant aesthetic, personal, and even romantic factors that came into play when hip-hop was being developed:
Deejay stuff was more expensive back then than it is now. I mean, like, way more expensive. So for them to even say that is crazy. [Hip-hop] was cool! It’s like: we liked the music. Deejaying was cool….
Yeah, there’s some socioeconomical issues and everything else that goes on, but that wasn’t everybody’s, like, blatant reason for making the music. There’s some other stuff that people don’t talk about. Like showing off, you know what I’m saying? There’s stuff like girls. Loving the music in general. It’s just the feeling that you get when you deejay. Especially back in the days. You can’t even describe the whole feeling of how it was, because everything was so new and so fresh…. It was all about fun. And it was a lot of fun. (Prince Paul 2002)
In 1986, when sampling achieved its initial popularity, the least expensive version of the E-mu SP-121 carried a list price of $2,745—well beyond the budget of most inner-city teens (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). And while the current popularity of hip-hop music has led to an increased demand for inexpensive equipment, the Akai MPC 2000 (the most popular digital sampler used by hip-hop producers at the time of this writing) lists for $1,649 (Musician’s Friend Catalog 2002). The enormousness of the initial investment required of hip-hop producers raises another question as well: how does one develop the capital and infrastructure necessary to make beats? Most of the producers I spoke with worked long hours at mundane jobs, received the equipment as gifts from their parents, or were given used equipment by older siblings or peers who had lost interest in using it. In other words, the reality in most cases is precisely what hip-hop’s critics would presumably like to hear: a story of hard-working, close-knit families with a certain amount of disposable income and a willingness to invest that income in their children’s artistic pursuits.2
Collective History
The rap DJ evolved from the party DJ, whose ostensible role was merely to play pre-recorded music for dance parties; like their audiences, these DJs were consumers of pop music. Yet by taking these musical sounds, packaged for consumption, and remaking them into new sounds through scratching, cutting, and sampling, what had been consumption was transformed into production. (Potter 1995: 36)
The basic deejay system consists of two turntables and a mixer that controls the relative and absolute volume of each. Using this equipment, a new record could be prepared on one turntable while another was still playing, thus allowing for an uninterrupted flow of music. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, the central innovation of early hip-hop was the use of this system with two copies of the same record for various effects, particularly the isolation of the “break.”
As Toop relates,
Initially, [Kool DJ] Herc was trying out his reggae records but since they failed to cut ice he switched to Latin-tinged funk, just playing the fragments that were popular with the dancers and ignoring the rest of the track….
A conga or bongo solo, a timbales break or simply the drummer hammering out the beat—these could be isolated by using two copies of the record on twin turntables and, playing the one section over and over, flipping the needle back to the start on one while the other played through (Toop 1991, 60)
Tricia Rose notes that these breaks soon became the core of a new aesthetic:
Samplers allow rap musicians to expand on one of rap’s earliest and most central musical characteristics: the break beat. Dubbed the “best part of a great record” by Grandmaster Flash, one of rap’s pioneering DJs, the break beat is a section where “the band breaks down, the rhythm section is isolated, basically where the bass guitar and drummer take solos.” … These break beats are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms are brought center stage. In the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap DJ’s mixing strategies. Playing the turntables like instruments, these DJs extended the most rhythmically compelling elements in a song, creating a new line composed only of the most climactic point in the “original.” The effect is a precursor to the way today’s rappers use the “looping” capacity on digital samplers. (Rose 1994: 74)
The development of elaborate deejaying techniques in the middle and late 1970s lead to an increased intellectual focus on “the break.” Deejays, who are acutely conscious of audience reaction, now realized that they could play a good break even if the song it came from was not considered worthy of listeners’ energy. Breaks—played in isolation—came to the fore. Songs, albums, groups, and even genres receded into the background as units of musical significance.
This, in turn, inspired deejays to cast an increasingly wide net when looking for useful breaks. Since they were only playing a few, often unrecognizable, seconds from each song, they were no longer bound by the more general constraints of genre or style; All that mattered was a good break. In fact, many deejays are known to have taken a special delight in getting audiences to dance to breaks that were taken from genres that they professed to hate.
Pioneering deejay Afrika Bambaataa made precisely this point to David Toop in 1984: “I’d throw on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ —just that drum part. One, two, three, BAM—and they’d be screaming and partying. I’d throw on the Monkees, ‘Mary Mary’—just the beat part where they’d go ‘Mary, Mary, where are you going?’—and they’d start going crazy. I’d say, ‘You just danced to the Monkees.’ They’d say, ‘You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.’ I’d like to catch people who categorise records” (Toop 1984: 66).
The breakbeat focus of the Bronx deejays set in motion a number of social trends that would give birth to the music now known as hip-hop. These included the development of a substantial body of knowledge about the nature and location of breakbeats, an oral tradition and culture to preserve this knowledge, a worldview that valorized the effort necessary to find breaks, and an aesthetic that took all of these concerns into account.
The looping aesthetic in particular (which I discuss more extensively in chapter 6) combined a traditional African American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of making mu sic. As breaks are torn from their original context and repeated, they are reconceived—by performer and listener alike—as circular, even if their original harmonic or melodic purposes were linear. In other words, melodies become riffs. The end of a phrase is juxtaposed with the beginning in such a way that the listener begins to anticipate the return of the beginning as the end approaches. Theme and variation, rather than progressive development, become the order of the day. And, although it would be easy to overstate this aspect, there is clearly a political valence to the act of taking a record that was created according to European musical standards and, through the act of deejaying, physically forcing it to conform to an African American compositional aesthetic.
At some point in the late 1970s, the isolation of the break, along with other effects (such as “scratching,” “cutting,” and so on), began to be considered a musical form unto itself. In other words, hip-hop became a musical genre rather than a style of musical reproduction when the deejays and their audiences made the collective intellectual shift to perceive it as music. This is often portrayed as a natural evolutionary development, but, as Russell Potter (1995) points out, it requires a substantial philosophical leap, one whose implications could not have been foreseen even by those who were at its forefront. One important force in the shift from hip-hop-as-activity to hip-hop-as-musical-form
