1. Strong Island – J.V.C.F.O.R.C.E.
2. Freedom of Speech ’88 – Just-Ice
3. See More – Kool Rock Brothers
4. Strictly Business – EPMD
5. Beats to the Rhyme – Run-DMC
6. Something Fresh to Swing To – Levi 167
7. Talkin' All That Jazz – Stetsasonic
8. It Takes Two – Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock
9. Terminator X to the Edge of Panic – Public Enemy
10. Follow the Leader – Eric B & Rakim
10. Follow the Leader – Eric B & Rakim
11. Give it a Rest – She Rockers
12. D.C. Jail – DJ Daddy
13. Free – MC Duke
14. Northside – Demon Boyz
15. Style Wars – Hijack
16. Express Yourself – N.W.A.
17. Bring Forth the Guillotine (Darkside Mix) – Silver Bullet
18. Eye Know – De La Soul
19. What U Waitin’ 4 (Jungle Fever Mix) – Jungle Brothers
20. We Rock the Mic Right (12" Mix) – Redhead Kingpin and the FBI
21. You Played Yourself – Ice-T
22. The Formula – The D.O.C.
23. Underwater Rimes – Digital Underground
24. I Come Off (Southern Comfort Mix) – Young MC
My early forays into musical archiving consisted almost exclusively of hip hop – in particular, ‘golden age’ hip hop, running from the late 1980s through to the early ‘90s. This span was a prolific and innovative period for the genre but not so successful commercially. Although some acts undoubtedly prospered – Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest – hip hop was generally a minority interest. My fandom had been based initially on the fact that a lot of this stuff was actually fairly popular among my peer group, but prevailed merrily once the cool kids dropped hip hop for house, leaving me perplexed that a liking for a particular kind of music could be repudiated on an apparent whim. (Later, some of these same lads, who maintained a lesser interest in parallel, would end up borrowing from my collection, as opposed to the other way around, which had previously been the case.)
Mix-tapes have since been superseded by the digital playlists, and my old compilations need re-compiling, for posterity and to collate lost fragments. The original cassettes went missing a long time ago. I’m no hoarder but nor do I ruthlessly dispose of things as poignant as mix-tapes, so I’ve no idea where they went. It’s possible that I still have them somewhere, buried deep beneath less interesting detritus. Because of this, I’ve had to work from memory, but I've done my best to arrange the songs in the order I came across them. The Golden Age of Hip Hop – Volume 1 covers a period beginning in early 1988 that runs through to late 1989, whereupon I discovered Jeff Young’s 'National Fresh' on BBC Radio 1 and began to put some effort into making my compilations.
Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys was the first rap album I possessed, but there was never a question of me nailing colours to any mast; I didn’t identify it as being part of a scene. I recall liking 'The Show' by Doug E Fresh & the Get Fresh Crew, released in August 1985, and Run-DMC’s mash up of 'Walk This Way', but both were perceived as novelties, by myself and probably the general British public. (See also '(Nothing Serious) Just Buggin'' by Whistle and 'Wipeout' by The Fat Boys – rap tunes enjoyed by people who didn’t really like rap music. This might apply to Salt-n-Pepa too.) 'I Need Love' by LL Cool J had the capacity to be taken seriously, but not by me. The point being that hip hop wasn’t respected in the same way other musical forms were. It was nothing more than a passing fad, and often derided (see Morris Minor and the Majors).
Public Enemy changed all this. Their first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, passed me by, but their second, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back changed my life, awakening me to the genre’s wider, and more sincere, potential. One of the cool back-row boys recorded it for me onto a TDK 90 that I would later pad out with tracks recorded off the radio. In the meantime, I set about acquiring analogues material.
Plymouth's 'Graffiti Hall of Fame'.
Whenever I hear the opening bars to 'Unhooked' by Freda Payne I automatically expect 'Strong Island' by J.V.C.F.O.R.C.E to kick in. I came to know this tune by way of a Street Sounds compilation prosaically entitled Hip Hop 20, purchased from a small record shop in Plymouth’s old Drake Circus. This tape also included 'It Takes Two' by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock, which will be well known to anyone around at the time and many more who weren’t. The kid who lived across the road from me then invested in Hip Hop 22 (didn’t either of us fancy Hip Hop 21?), from whence 'Strictly Business' by EPMD, 'Freedom of Speech ’88' by Just-Ice and 'See More' by the Kool Rock Brothers come from. The former is a bona fide hip hop classic built around Eric Clapton’s cover of 'I Shot the Sheriff' by Bob Marley. Just-Ice had connections with KRS-One, as well as an aggressive delivery – ahead of the curve in that respect – and a moderately successful musical career. The Kool Rock Brothers are more obscure and don’t seem to have released much else beyond the track I’ve included on the first volume of my anthology.
I was mesmerised by the graffiti clad covers of these compilations, for it wasn’t just the music that appealed but also the clothes and the accompanying subculture. This was early 1988, during my third year at secondary school. It was quite normal to try your hand at a bit of graffiti on paper, and a few of us even gave it a go on actual walls (at the dilapidated former zoo around the back of Plymouth Argyle’s football ground where the council dumped wood-chippings, compost and suchlike, which was I suppose still technically illegal). Trainers were coveted, especially Fila and Troop, although most of us wore Adidas, Nike or Reebok. Silky tracksuit tops were worn, or hooded sweatshirts. Again, Nike and Adidas were standard issue, later Champion, Stussy and Russell Athletic (aside from a myriad of obscurely labelled clobber bought from places like JC Conway on Cornwall Street). In winter, Capri ski jackets, for school children only ever wear coats in the most inclement of conditions.
As with sport, such enthusiasms can cut across classroom hierarchies, making you less vulnerable to being picked on. I was probably immune to this anyway due to the fact that I liked football and was prone to a bit of mischief (although everyone gets beset upon on at school at some point or other). For myself and the disparate crowd of inbetweeners I hung out with, a typical lunchtime might include: water-fights in D-Block toilets; collecting jars and bottles from around the place, taking them down to Stonehouse Creek and throwing stones at them; depositing empty deodorant cans on the fire lit weekly around the back of the school canteen and waiting for them to explode, which they did; heading down to the rarely used weight-lifting room in E-Block, lining barbells up against the wall, spinning the weights on their axis, knocking down said barbells to create a hellish racket, and then running for our life; chucking fruit through open windows, preferably two or three storeys up.
The water fights in D-Block toilets were a particularly common occurrence. About six or seven of us would enter tentatively, probably because one of our number actually needed to utilise the antiquated facilities (our school – Devonport High School for Boys – was a former military hospital built in 1797 and moved into after World War II). Generally, whoever it was that needed to would be allowed to relieve himself before battle commenced. Rough paper towels would then be cupped under a tap, filled with water, tied off to form a sort of grenade, and then thrown at one another. Someone might pick up the permanently plumbed-in hose and twirl it around their head to release the water that trickled steadily along its serpentine length. If someone happened to be sitting in one of the cubicles then our missiles would instead be lobbed over the top onto the unsuspecting, helpless student.
I look back upon such waggery with a mixture of fondness and approval. Despite its benefits, formal education is not the natural state of things. A child is not designed to keep still and concentrate for hours at a time; attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a reasonable condition. The best teachers were those that recognised this and said things along the lines of, 'I know you’d rather be doing something else, but we’ve got to get through this,' as opposed to censuring the apathetic individual as some sort of miscreant and an affront to authority.
Yet I never viewed my liking of hip hop as an act of defiance or rebellion, even though it obviously was from the point of view of many of those who were making it. I saw it as an art form, and an ingenious one at that. Take Public Enemy's 'Terminator X to the Edge of Panic': a strange, minimal fusion of staccato horn samples, sparse beats and ambient noise; a collage of sounds that seems increasingly abstract the more you listen to it. Nothing in the charts sounding anywhere near as sophisticated or as odd.
Run-DMC’s Tougher than Leather, released in May 1988, was the first rap album I actually owned, as opposed to being taped off of someone else. The general consensus among the cool/hard kids in my class (it’s hard to know exactly how they wanted to be perceived) was that Run-DMC were passed it, that it was all about Public Enemy and NWA. Chuck D of Public Enemy begged to differ and rated Run-DMC’s fourth album very highly. I wasn’t so impressionable that I'd take everybody else’s word for it, and the guy I caught the school bus with – one my closest friends – was as impressed with the record as I was.
'Something Fresh to Swing To' by Levi 167 was made available on Street Sounds' Hip Hop 20 in 1988 but released as a single a year earlier. Levi 167 had been a member of the short-lived Scott La Rock and the Celebrity Three along with KRS-One, and his career as a solo artist appears to have been equally brief. Unlike that of Eric B & Rakim, who Chuck D, no less, credits with changing hip hop. 'Follow the Leader' was certainly ahead of its time.
Tracks 11-15 were taken from the same Music of Life compilation (which I chanced upon in 1999 while wandering about Spitalfields Market with a monstrous hangover) entitled Hard as Hell Volume 2. Music of Life was a British record label run by DJ, producer and remixer Simon Harris and provided an outlet for British rap which it probably wouldn’t have otherwise had. For me, Hijack’s 'Style Wars' was the stand-out track. It sounded weirder than other tunes included on the compilation, but musically they weren’t doing anything that PE hadn’t done already. Style Wars even mines exactly the same sample as 'Public Enemy No. 1' – Fred Wesley and The J.B.'s' 'Blow Your Head'.
Acid House, rave, the second summer of love. It escaped us, we were too young – 13 going on 14. Nor do I recall anyone being into The Stone Roses or Happy Mondays. The tunes doing the rounds were things like 'Beat Dis' by Bomb the Bass, 'Good Life' by Inner City, 'Keep on Movin'' by Soul II Soul, 'Pump up the Jam' by Technotronic – early signs that hip hop was on the way out, to be displaced by various forms of dance music.
But not just yet. The guy I caught the school bus with returned the favour and bought the album 3 Feet High and Rising. De La Soul, alongside the Jungle Brothers, represented an emerging strain of rap that would assert itself towards the end of 1989 and into 1990, paving the way for groups like A Tribe Called Quest and a whole sub-genre of hip hop offhandedly referred to as jazz rap. In the meantime, this was the sort of hip hop almost anybody could get on with.
It was about now that I discovered National Fresh. I assume one of the cool/hard kids let me in on it, although it was unclear as to whether anybody else in my class – or even school – was tuning in as religiously as I was about to. I knew of Silver Bullet because he’d managed to make the Top 40, and because '20 Seconds to Comply' contained a sample from RoboCop, and I loved the film RoboCop. I didn’t like 'Bring Forth the Guillotine' at first but the Darkside Mix that Jeff Young played was a big improvement. So too was the Jungle Fever Mix of 'What U Waitin’ 4' by the Jungle Brothers, although I didn’t know this because I hadn’t heard the original.
Redhead Kingpin and the FBI were part of that new jack swing scene, where hip hop and R&B coalesced. It wasn't my thing, but the 12" remix of 'We Rock the Mic Right' errs towards the side of hip hop. Ice-T's song 'New Jack Hustler', written for the film New Jack City, has nothing to do with this sub-genre, although they probably share an etymology. 'You Played Yourself' is from Ice T's third studio album, entitled The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! and is indicative of the man's style.
The D.O.C. was an original member of Dallas act the Fila Fresh Crew. This credential brought him recognition and he was soon penning tracks for N.W.A. before going it alone and releasing No One Can Do It Better in the summer of 1989. (Although not initially released as a single, the album track 'Portrait of a Masterpiece' was later remixed by the London-based house DJ CJ Mackintosh, acquiring the status of 'hip-house’ classic in the process.)
What on earth were Digital Underground all about? Ostensibly they were a substantial collective. However, Shock G, the group’s de facto leader, would adopt a miscellany of personas, Humpty Hump being the most readily identifiable (due to the comedy Groucho nose-and-glasses set and his nasal delivery). 'Underwater Rimes' features another Shock G alter-ego, the underutilised MC Blowfish. The group were mired in a different sort of funk to Public Enemy – P-funk, which means anything associated with George Clinton and his twin acts, Parliament and Funkadelic, although Public Enemy certainly borrowed from this genre too.
Young MC’s original version of 'I Come Off' was nothing special but CJ Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell’s Southern Comfort Remix was, utilising the bass-line from 'Hercules' by Aaron Neville. Despite the house music connection, this is pure hip hop, anticipating the trend for jazz-rap that was just around the corner.
[Listen to here.]
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