enduring refrain “It's like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” which was probably the first classic hook in the art form. His mic skills allowed his indictment of the cancerous ways of Reagan-era America to initiate a genre of overtly political hip hop.
Even outside of “The Message” it would be hard to overstate Melle Mel's impact upon the early evolution of the art. (Kool Moe Dee would later point to Mel as the single greatest MC in the history of the music.) In the years, now decades, following the ascent of Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, there would be dozens of rappers who might be considered to be better than Melle Mel was, but none has been as far ahead of their peers as Mel was circa 1982. His was an unimpeachable position atop the lyricist food chain—a spot he held at least until he ran up against Kool Moe Dee, who had set his sights on Mel's crown after having verbally humiliated Busy Bee. The fact is that for the Melle Mels and Kool Moe Dees there were no precedents; they were artists who had to first create their art form itself before getting down to the business of creating actual art. Every subsequent generation of MCs had a whole genealogy of artists to define themselves against. Melle Mel had a pen, a pad, and an idea.
Run DMC is to hip hop as BC and AD are to history. The emergence of the Queens duo and their insistent opening statement “Sucker MCs” signaled a new era in the music commercially as well as aesthetically. Everything down to their ascetic sartorial choices indicated a shift in priorities. Where Afrika Bambaataa's Soul Sonic Force performed in costumes worthy of George Clinton, Run DMC and Jay opted for the solemnity of all-black outfits offset by black fedoras. Prior to them, hip hop acts blew on stage with Parliament-sized delegations; by the mid-1980s, their format—two MCs and a sole deejay—had become the standard. Not only did the revenues get divided into fewer hands, the structure of their songs changed as well, becoming more individualistic and defined.
But what made the era they inaugurated worthy of the term golden—an adjective gleaned from that longest glorified of precious metals in hip hop—was the sheer number of stylistic innovations that came into existence. The era witnessed the emergence of definitive influences, Big Daddy Kane, Queen Latifah, Ice Cube, the Ultra Magnetic MCs, Main Source, 2 Live Crew, Cypress Hill, LL Cool J, MC Lyte, Slick Rick, Too Short, KRS-One, Doug E. Fresh, EPMD, Kool G. Rap, Ice-T, Biz-Markie, NWA, Rakim—almost all of whom were under twenty-one years of age when they made their debuts.
Artists spend years trying to cultivate a unique approach to their chosen form; in these golden years, a critical mass of mic prodigies were literally creating themselves and their art form at the same time. In addition to verbally decapitating MC Shan, for example, KRS-One, the Bronx-born, Jamaica-descended sage and MC, returned hip hop to its Caribbean roots. On tracks like “The P Is Free” on the debut classic Criminal Minded, KRS fused bottom-heavy dancehall riddims and patois seasoned flow with the standards of hip hop articulation. The same would have to be said for Just-Ice, who in addition to pouring the foundation for gangsta rap had blended ragga stylings of his Jamaican ancestry on 1986's Back to the Old School. It came as no surprise then that KRS and Just-Ice would find themselves trading island-inflected verses on the 1988's “Suicide.”
A Tribe Called Quest constructed an impossibly original sound based on H2O cool melodic structures that complimented their smoothed-out rhyme patterns. It's hard to believe that their 1990 debut album People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm was crafted by artists who were less than two years out of high school. Tribe not only distanced itself even further from the tradition of rhyming routines that sustained the early rap acts, their individual members didn't even necessarily appear on the same songs. On tracks like “8 Million Stories” from Midnight Marauder and “Luck of Lucien” from People's Instinctive Travels, Phife and Q-Tip delivered distinctive solo lyrical efforts. There had been precedent for this: “The Message,” which was released under the name Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, featured only Melle Mel rhyming. But that solo performance had underscored rising tensions within the group and factored in their breakup later that year. At the same time as Tribe, De La Soul, their fellow members of the Native Tongues collective, produced Three Feet High and Rising which took rhyme to new degrees of abstraction, running extended, elusive metaphors like “Potholes in My Lawn” for the length of an entire song.
The thematic boundaries of what constituted hip hop were not the only thing expanding. Hip hop's relationship to female practitioners of the microphone craft had always been ambivalent at best. And unlike blues, which is literally incomprehensible minus its female articulators; or soul, in which women artists are arguably more aesthetically influential than males; or gospel, where women absolutely are more influential, hip hop's boundary-stretching visionaries were overwhelmingly male. Hip hop's early development had no female artists who were as proportionately influential as Bessie Smith or Aretha Franklin in their respective genres (though, ironically, Sylvia Robinson of Sugar Hill Records was arguably the most important industry executive in the early history of the form). The Golden Era witnessed the ascent of female artists like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah as both artistically and commercially significant, Roxanne Shante as a lyrical assassin with no adjectival modifiers preceding her name, and a regiment of second-tier female MCs like Antoinette, Monie Love, Ice Cream T, and Sparky D. At its core, hip hop was still about a cornered black masculinity using verbs and nouns as a means of defending itself—but the Golden Era brought with it a (grudging) respect for a small collection of women MCs.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
