When Culture Went Commercial (cont.)
Original hip-hop journalist details how Sugar Hill wrestled rap away from the DJ.
Charnas, Dan. The Big Payback: The History of The Business of Hip-Hop. New American Library, (2010).
Words by RIP NICHOLSON
Images supplied by BMG/Rhino Entertainment.
Charnas, a veteran on the business side of hip-hop has worked for Profile Records and Rick Rubin’s Def American as a talent scout before writing for The Source and Village Voice as one of the original hip-hop journalists. His accounts detail how Sylvia Robinson had engineered a sound of hip-hop by session musicians reproducing the samples and cuts of Flash’s wheels of steel. Grandmaster Flash would be utilised as naming rights for the track alongside his Furious 5. It has been this side of the story that has never sat well for many hip-hop purists, casting Robinson forever the villain. However, NME’s Val Wilmer, (1982) presented Robinson in the light of someone who forged a niche in the market for hip-hop’s early incarnations to become a viable product, and that in a culture where money was scarcely earned, perhaps her vision came as a blessing. Wilmer had praised ‘The Message’ as being “the first really big political record since James Brown’s 1970 ‘Say It Loud’” declaring it something to which everyone in America could relate. Charnas’ research shows these early machinations of hip-hop on record to have formed the roots through which rap music thrives today, to every beat since the needle dropped on a 45 fabricating an expression of youth culture.
Image above: 7″ sleeve for ‘We Don't Work For Free’ by Grandmaster Melle Mel And The Furious Five. Produced by Clayton Savage, Sylvia Robinson for Sugar Hill Records, 1984.
Grandmaster Flash was no longer in the group. In 1983, he had sued Robinson and Sugar Hill Records for unpaid royalties amounting to $5 million.
A cultural shift: first-hand accounts to weigh a ton dropped on Rip Nicholson from two of the most immovable forces in hip-hop.
Bambaataa, Afrika. (2013). Afrika Bambaataa: Poppin’ and Lockin’. Time Off, BNE, Street Press Australia. Interviewer: Nicholson, Rip. Retrieved from http://hiphop.sh/intbam
KRS-One. (2012). The Teacha Introduces Rip Nicholson to his School of Hip Hop. Drum SYD, Street Press Australia. Interviewer: Nicholson, Rip. Retrieved from http://hiphop.sh/intkrsone
Words by RIP NICHOLSON
For MUSC2000 Wk 10.
At the back-end of the industry of hip-hop stands, immovable, two of the foremost authorities on the culture of hip-hop, MC and activist campaigner, and one third of Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One and of hip-hop’s holy trinity and founder of the Universal Zulu Nation worldwide movement and creator of hip-hop, the almighty Afrika Bambaataa who, in 1982, took on Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records when he jacked German synth-based act Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’ melody and a drum pattern on a Roland TR-808 to create ‘Planet Rock’ for Tom Silverman’s Tommy Boy Records. Village Voice’s Steven Hager’s ‘Pied Piper of Hip Hop’ article, (1982) documenting hip-hop’s evolvement stressed “Bam's role in shaping and encouraging the early hip hop movement has been vastly under-appreciated.” Interviews with both practitioners reveal true insight to when the culture moulded for a profit venture fitting. And what KRS-One had laid out was a solution to artists recovering control of their own publishing to subvert the profit-sharing from the likes of Jay Z’s Tidal and other external corporations that have been constricting the fate of hip-hop since ‘Rapper’s Delight’.
Image above: 7″ sleeve for ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force. Produced by Arthur Baker for Tommy Hill Records, 1982.
