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koganbotPasting in the Facebook convo (through early in the day, May 13) that Chuck began in regard to my q about Richard Rodgers and Dave's about whether there's any statistical support for the common assertion that the majority audience for hip-hop is white. You'll see a link to a WSJ report of an actual study, which produces an actual number (audience 60% white), but methodology seems shaky and there's no further breakdown beyond either they own hip-hop or they don't (so no record of how much hip-hop someone got, or what sort of hip-hop).
But the thread does veer off into an interesting discussion of "When did you first hear hip-hop, and how did it strike you?"
There's no Richard Rodgers discussion, though thanks to Kevin John we verified that Dorothy Rodgers did indeed tell Billboard in '82 that husband Richard was a fan of the Marcels' version of "Blue Moon."
As for my attempt (so as not to have to visit a library or make phone calls or do actual research) to find out if Richard Rodgers did actually take out full-page newspaper ads urging people not to buy the Marcels' "Blue Moon," so far Twitter and Tumblr haven't helped me verify or refute the story or, if it's false — WHICH SEEMS LIKELY — determine where the story came from. Web, you fail. Story seems false not just because twenty years later Rodgers' wife said something opposite to it, but because none of the bios I sampled on Google books mentioned the story. If Rodgers had placed the ads, that's too effortful an event for a biographer to ignore. (Although Google Books doesn't post books in their entirety, so the story may be in the bios in unposted sections, that all such references to the story would fall through the cracks in Google Books seems unlikely. And whenever I made my way to an index, the Marcels were absent.)
Here we go:
Chuck Eddy Two questions raised here. First, by Frank Kogan: Is it "mere urban legend that Richard Rodgers placed ads urging people not to buy the Marcels' 'Blue Moon'?" Second, by David Cooper Moore (and expanded on by Kogan): Where is the quantified evidence that, as many have long claimed, "white people are actually the majority purchasers of most rap and hip-hop music"? If you know answers to either of these queries, feel free to share with the class.
Brian O'Neill I think the white people thing is true just by looking at demographics: Blacks only make up less than 13% of the population and whites make up nearly three-quarters of the country. When you factor in all hip-hop, especially the stuff that sells a ton, it's damn near statistically impossible that 75% of the population is buying less than the black population.
May 2 at 12:36pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Assuming you're right, Brian, at what point in hip-hop's history do you think it become "damn near statistically impossible"? And would you say that's true for all hip-hop substyles (some of which, as Frank points out, have seemed to get this claim more than others), or just certain ones? And would you also say it's true for r&b, some of which also sells a ton? Is there any way to really know?
May 2 at 12:44pm · Like
Brian O'Neill I think it depends on when it became popular enough to cross over from the niche markets from which it was born. The same exercise can be seen in when any niche genre breaks through - at some point a country artist will be selling more records to a non-country fan-base simply by outgrowing them. At some point Metallica was being sold to more soccer moms than metal fan teenagers.
With race as a delimiter, it's even easier to crossover since at least some percentage of even the most underground hip-hop styles is Caucasian, a minority to be sure but a bigger number than zero.
May 2 at 12:47pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Well, not *all* country artists (even big stars) wind up "selling more records to a non-country fan-base," obviously. And I doubt there's any evidence that country as a *whole* sells more to a non-country audience, even if (say) Taylor Swift does (if, in fact, she does). Not sure I'm following the analogy, to be honest.
May 2 at 1:17pm · Like
Brian O'Neill The point is 13 percent of the population are not buying most of anything.
May 2 at 1:23pm · Like
David Cooper Moore Not sure of my math here, but I'm pretty sure that if even 0.1% of the population bought a given record, it would easily go to #1. Average sales in the top 5 would be closer to something like 0.01-0.05% of the population. In the heyday of 90s megasales, that number would likely get up to about 0.5-1.0% of the population.
May 2 at 2:02pm · Like
David Cooper Moore My suspicion comes from the fact that to my knowledge rap radio is absolutely not listened to by majority white audiences. (In fact, removing radio from Billboard calculations and making the audience, in effect, whiter has completely changed what the rap charts look like.) I don't doubt a LOT of white people buy rap music. I've just never seen actual demographic stats to back up the claim, which gets thrown around a lot.
May 2 at 2:05pm · Like · 3
NiceJob Einstein I got the Joel Whitburn Billboard R&B and Hip-Hop Charts, and it's utterly fascinating how some of the most "white" artists, like say Pat Boone, scored R&B hits regularly--at one point, the Hot 100 and the R&B chart were SO similar, they did away with the latter? But then you see some black artists' hits chart higher on the pop chart, like Donna Summer.
Anyway, a lot of what's said above reminded me of what takes place in this chart info--early rap hits that might be R&B top tens could be said to "stall out" at the bottom of the Top 40 ["Rapper's Delight," "The Breaks," "The Message"], but it's more noteworthy to me that these records are charting AT ALL with so much of the country probably not hearing them?
People act like rap started as something almost invisible to audiences outside New York, and as a lifelong Midwesterner I can sorta buy that--the earliest indications of a nascent "hip hop culture" this rural white boy received was the attention "breakdancing" got ca. 1983-84, and I'm pretty sure I knew about the sound of scratching records long before I was aware of rapping? Chaka Khan's "I Feel for You" figured largely in this, too, but I mostly gained knowledge that people "rapped" through low-budget home recordings sent in to my favorite DJ of my teen years... Dr. Demento. [Lost in the pre-"Walk This Way"/LICENSED TO ILL history of rap crossover: "Rappin' Rodney," "The Rappin' Duke Song," Eddie Murphy/Joe Piscopo's "Honeymooners Rap" and other comedic efforts.]
Chuck's insistence that the WHOLE rap genre is unlikely to mostly be supported by white audiences seems fair, but I wonder how much the mega-seller "crossovers" on top of the heap account for a huuuuge piece of said pie, which might also bring in parts of Brian's point--if black music fans walk into Sam Goody in 1990 and buy cassettes by 10 assorted hip-hop performers, but predominantly white music fans buy 15 COPIES of MC Hammer's tape the same day, could the rap audience suddenly be presented as being 60% white, despite the sheer variety of lesser-selling artists available?
May 2 at 3:25pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Sure, it's *possible* -- Nobody has denied that. But for starters, even in the example you lay out, you'd have to present evidence that MC Hammer's audience was primarily white. I don't know whether it was or not. To my thinking, Brian's logic, as he presents it, doesn't stand, partly because of those numbers David named above; i.e., it takes a fraction of a fraction of the population buying a record to make it huge. So it doesn't follow that white people dominate hip-hop purchases simply by virtue of their being a majority (is 75% right, by the way? I would've guess way lower), unless it also goes without saying that, say, the audience for James Brown (or soul in general) records in the '60s, or for say *Ebony* or *Jet* magazine, was also by definition primarily white; *of course* 13 % of the population (or whatever % -- I haven't checked that constantly evolving figure either) can buy most of some category. Just depends what the category is. I *assume* the percentage of white people buying hip-hop is higher now, but I don't know *how much* higher, and without concrete sales figures we don't know whether it's high enough to account for the majority of purchases (assuming we could agree on a definition of "hip-hop" in the first place, which we might not be able to). Anyway, NiceJob, if you want to learn about changes in the r&b chart over the years, you should really read this magnum opus Chris Molanphy put together a month or so back. It's very long, but it was definitely worth my time. http://pitchfork.com/.../9378-i-know-you-got-soul-the.../
Articles: I Know You Got Soul: The Trouble With Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Chart
pitchfork.com
A new methodology has rendered Billboard's R&B chart a shell of its former self, replete with dubious racial and cultural ...
May 2 at 4:33pm · Like · 5
Brian O'Neill The population figures are from Wikipedia.
May 2 at 5:15pm · Like
Steve Pick All I can do is speak anecdotally - I spent 20 years working in a record store located at the very center of St. Louis's racial divide, with a customer base that was probably 1/3 African-American most of that time. Those 20 years were from 1984-2004, so I watched hip-hop move from an extremely marginal part of the store, supported as much by white college students as by young African-Americans, to a very significant part of the overall sales in the 90s, when it was almost but not quite exclusively bought by African-Americans. Now I work in a store where the clientele is 95% white, and where hip-hop sells in miniscule quantities. I know there were certain artists with more crossover appeal - Tupac and Biggie, in particular, back in the day - but I never saw evidence to support the contention that it was mostly whites buying the music.
May 2 at 5:30pm · Like · 1
Steve Pick On the other hand, as a white 21-year-old, I was pretty much instantly aware of "The Breaks" and "Rapper's Delight," although after that first year, it seemed even the local r'n'b stations didn't play any more rap for a long time with the exception of "Square Biz" by Teena Marie (which only had one verse of rap, albeit one of the greatest of all time), and if it weren't for Blondie and the Clash, I would have forgotten the new thing entirely until about 1983.
May 2 at 5:35pm · Like · 3
Chuck Eddy "Planet Rock" and "Double Dutch Bus" not that big in St. Louis, then? (Not sure if the rap part in Lakeside's "Fantastic Voyage" counts.)
May 2 at 6:47pm · Like
Steve Pick Oh, I forgot "Double Dutch Bus." That was a big radio hit. "Planet Rock," however, was something I read about for over a year before I ever heard it.
May 2 at 7:05pm · Like · 1
Brian O'Neill Here is a researched story that takes on the issue. It's from 2005. Apparently the 70% figure was coined without empirical evidence however subsequent research went on to confirm the number wasn't that far off from reality - though it slipped to (a still majority) 60% when the company changed to self-identification. It's a pretty cool article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB111521814339424546
May 2 at 7:09pm · Like · 2
David Cooper Moore An interesting study. Although if that survey is all we have in terms of evidence for the claim, I wouldn't put a ton of stock in without knowing the methodology (random sample, overall demographics of respondents, etc.).
May 2 at 7:21pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Right, and the column admits at the end several ways in which the results are open to interpretation -- there's no way to know whether the respondents are all defining rap the same way, and even if they were, % of (at least one time)-purchasers isn't the same as % of *purchases.* Still, that's something, and kudos to WSJ for trying to trace the numerical myth's source, not just taking it at face value. Thanks Brian.
May 2 at 8:14pm · Like · 1
Stephen Thomas Erlewine The more I think about it the more the white audience buys more hip-hop story doesn't ring true. I could've sworn this angle surfaced much earlier than 2005--I would've pegged it around the second NWA album which I think was the first hardcore/gangster rap record to top the charts due to soundscan--but even so, the only reliable way to gauge the race of an audience would be through the MediaMarket survey (SoundScan never accounts for that). I know these research companies strive to get a broad sample but their response in some demographics is likely to be weak and, even if they get a fair amount of poor families, it may be skewed by wanting to sample different parts of the country equally, etc. So there are problems within who was sampled--at best they get average consumers and, if lucky, a hardcore music nut--but then the response of what is and what isn't rap would be up to the responder, which may skew things; also, the purchase of one hip-hop recording may tag the responder as a hip-hop fan. Who knows? In any case, I think there's no solid evidence to support this statistic because there is no evidence to suggest what demographic bought what--the closest we get is regional sales and airplay.
May 2 at 10:16pm · Like · 2
NiceJob Einstein Sometimes a "subculture" becomes genuinely huge without having to win over too many outside the already-converted, tho? Country/non-country audiences were addressed earlier [but if they're buying country records, are they still a "non-country" audience? Or is this a geographic/class distinction?], but I felt like Garth Brooks' hugeness didn't seem to involve much other than being the biggest fish in the underestimated-at-the-time country audience's pond--i.e., he barely touched the pop singles chart while dominating the album chart [many country artists have been Hot 100 fixtures over the last two decades, but strangely not Brooks?], I probably can't name more than two of his songs myself, and I didn't know anybody who among the millions of purchasers of his CDs. And the Cure seemed to become stadium rockers on the shoulders of their own large and devoted audience--tho many stadium patrons probably complained about the "poseurs" who "weren't into them back then" anyway! And Metallica's major label debut went nuclear on the charts without any radio/MTV support, but I don't recall anybody crediting that to anybody other than the stereotypical audience for that music.
So maybe rap is huge enough *without* having to be dominated by white listeners--certainly, it's become so ubiquitous and accepted as to seem more and more slippery to define as a genre, with acts slipping between singing/rapping TLC-style, guest raps showing up in Mariah Carey songs, etc., so it's harder to say which audience is responding to what? I remember some kids approaching me in a department store asking if we had a song title I didn't recognize--I asked what kind of music it was to jog my memory, and they called it "light-rock-slash-rap"! [It was "Don't Speak" by No Doubt!!!]
May 2 at 11:17pm · Edited · Like · 1
Steve Pick Again, anecdotal evidence to respond to the Metallica point NiceJob made. I guess it was 1989 or '90, and I was asked to speak to a high school English class to impress the kids into studying because see, they could get a cool job writing about music. The only thing that every kid in that class was impressed by was the fact that I had recently interviewed Lars Ulrich. This was the gigantic breakthrough period for Metallica, and these were not stereotypical metalheads.
May 3 at 7:49am · Like · 2
Kevin Bozelka Hey Chuck! According to a 1982 Billboard article, Rodgers' wife recalls that he liked The Marcels' version of "Blue Moon." Also, I couldn't find evidence of a negative ad placed by Rodgers in either Variety or Billboard (unless, of course, it was done under a pseudonym). Where else would he have published it? I emailed you a jpg of the article.
May 3 at 8:11am · Like · 3
Chuck Eddy Thanks, Kevin -- That's obviously the Billboard article Frank referred to right at the beginning of this blog post. I forwarded your jpg on to him.
May 3 at 7:13pm · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson More anecdote. "Rappers Delight," don't know how, made it to my Podunk, Oregon hometown. Heard it at a party in '79. When I attended a Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock show in a small club in (relatively white) Seattle in '88 or thereabouts the audience was mostly black. When I attended PE/LL Cool J/Beasties shows ar the same time, in a 3k seat concert hall, they were white majority crowds. By the early '00s, even Coup shows in clubs were mostly white. Since I started teaching in the mid-'90s teen boys, in the urban high schools I've worked, not all but certainly most often say they listen to rap the way we might have responded w/ hard rock in the '70s. So I don’t know ab 70% but majority purchasers seems to fit what I’ve seen since at least The Chronic.
May 3 at 7:35pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Steve and Jack -- Question: When both you first heard "Rapper's Delight," did you think of it as a new genre of music? Because I remember just figuring it was a silly disco novelty song where people talked instead of sang. Doubt I understood what "rap music" was until a year or 2 later. Anyway, I probably have more to comment on here, but meanwhile, you two -- and Brian, NiceJob, and Stephen Thomas -- please let me know if I should *not* transfer any of your comments above, with your names, to Frank Kogan's livejournal, where he can see them since he's not on facebook.
May 4 at 7:34am · Like
Stephen Thomas Erlewine Totally fine with the transfer
May 4 at 8:01am · Like
Steve Pick First, of course anything I say can be passed on to Frank. As for the original experience of hearing rap - it all happened so fast. I had spent almost two years discovering punk rock and New Wave, and then I stumbled across the black radio stations which were playing all that great funk from that era. I actually liked "The Breaks" more than "Rapper's Delight," but at the same time, the radio djs were doing a little bit of rapping, and even more, the listeners were calling in and rapping. I had seen P-Funk live on the 1976 Mothership Connection tour when I was working as an usher at our local Arena, and all this stuff seemed of a piece with that to me. I don't think I expected rap to become a new genre; it just felt like a variation on funk at the time. And there wasn't anybody writing about it in the rock press I was reading, unless maybe Ken Barnes mentioned it in his singles column.
May 4 at 8:34am · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson It struck me as novelty, for sure. I remember the lines ab eating mushed peas and chicken that taste like wood at a friend’s from that first listen. But I don’t think I associated it w/ disco, which I thought of as something more produced and orchestral, w/ strings and such; where the music was more forefront or at least equal to the vocals. This was an oddly different vocal sound put to some incidental Kool & the Gang or whatever background. It announced itself as rap but it didn’t even hit me as what at the time I would have identified as rap, which was more along the lines of the Jimmy Castor Bunch or some assorted Stax songs, a vocal aside, looser and more impromptu, if anything. This had a much tighter, faster, synchronized, group-vocal affect. I had no idea it was the beginning of anything but the vocals definitely struck me as something excitingly strange and new.
May 4 at 8:37am · Like · 2
Brian O'Neill I'm fine with transferring my name to anything. And also, re: Rapper's Delight: I was a 10-year old in the middle of Hollis, Queens when it came out. I recall hearing that song come out of boomboxes and cars passing my street and all of my classmates randomly spewing out the lyrics, and although I didn't know it, a few blocks from me the guys in Run-DMC were listening too, soon to bring this stuff to an even larger audience a few years later. To me (and my peers) it felt like a game changer. I think even though we were dumb kids, we were right.
May 4 at 8:54am · Like · 3
Frank Kogan Xhuxk, it's more accurate to say that, while I have a Facebook account, I'm *trying* not to be on Facebook. refuse to friend people, etc. The two I friended were Dave so he could get me on Turntable FM (which is now in the great slumber party in the sky) and Tina so I could be part of Campus Restaurant Revisited (which will only mean anything to those of you who were in Storrs CT sometime betw the late '50s and '70s). But Dave posting on this thread made it visible to me, hence I can see all the comments and participate myself. But transferring some to my lj thread might be a good idea anyway, in case some stragglers from lj or Tumblr drop by the thread and want to see.
While I'm here, let me acknowledge I still have an eardrums CD earmarked for Chuck (and another near completion), I still intend to get NiceJob the WMS info I promised two or more years ago, I'm drafting an official apology to Jack (and Scott W) to post on rockcritics.com for my uncalled for abruptness-bordering-on-sarcasm but I'm sweating over the wording, I've long wanted to send a salute to Stephen Thomas Erlewine for his thoughtful work at allmusic, so here it is -- [salutes] -- I want to thank Kevin for the Billboard JPEG, which Chuck forwarded (and Kevin, do you have any thoughts regarding Shante's bogus claim to a Ph.D that was debunked a few years ago?). Don't know if I've ever chatted with Brian or Steve (impossible to tell these things given the profusion of Internet monikers), but thank you for helping to discuss the hip-hop question. And Dave, did you notice my sly punning reference on that lj thread to [name redacted]?
Agree that the survey cited by WSJ is hardly convincing, but at least it's actual information. Of course the subject is an issue because of the presumed influence that white consumer dollars would have on the sound, style, and lyrics.
Am more taken by the Richard Rodgers story since it seems that if we ask enough people we should get a definitive answer. I don't have the time or resources to do the research myself, but this is the sort of thing the Web is supposed to be good at, right? If the ads exist they're likely in some archive, and if the story is false we may bet some idea where it started.
May 4 at 2:17pm · Like · 4
Frank Kogan May GET some idea...
May 4 at 2:18pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Frank, this is definitely the first time I've ever *seen* you on Facebook (and it's a nice surprise --- I always forget "friends of anyone tagged" can see threads like this.) But yes, I now remember that you technically have an account.
May 4 at 3:34pm · Like
Edd Hurt reading this with interest, but really can't add anything beyond the anecdotal (and stuff folks have already brought up, such as the initial impact of hip-hop on white listeners, etc.). which isn't what we need...
May 4 at 3:54pm · Like
Edd Hurt well, I say that, of course, the anecdotal stuff is valuable, I meant that I'd love to see some figures and all...
May 4 at 3:55pm · Like
Stephen Thomas Erlewine Thanks Frank--I admire your work as well
May 4 at 4:14pm · Like
David Cooper Moore Frank That pun was so subtle I blinked and missed it (but got it on second pass).
May 4 at 6:05pm · Like
Dub Dob Dee just to pop in while procrastinating on a response elsewhere to frank abt unrelated issues (except no issues are unrelated) to restate something i emailed to FK (and he posted on LJ): the "most rap bought by white teens" meme i first came across in discussions of nu-metal. c.2001/02 probably -- and was also seeing in pushback against rap from its black critics (crouch/marsalis etc, tho I don't know if either of these two actually came out and said this)
May 5 at 5:09am · Like · 1
Dub Dob Dee re the numbers game: possibly worth bringing in the sebastian bach story, where he laments that only a micro-percentage of the people who "like" him on FB have bought his new record and why is that? part of the answer being: this really isn't how numbers work -- a number i'd like to see is, if the percentage of the population (yrs or mine, i'm in the UK) who count as "the music-buying population" is such-and-such percent, how does this tranche divide up into (say) white and non-white. I'm prepared to bet that the proportions don't exactly map onto the relevant propotionality in the population as a whole; and would not be startled if they were some way different. Different sectors of the population care about music in different ways and to different degrees.
May 5 at 5:14am · Like · 2
Dub Dob Dee ^^^mark sinker for those who don't know -- i am responsible for 47.346% of all internet monikers
May 5 at 5:15am · Like · 1
NiceJob Einstein Chuck/Frank, I'm okay with any transfers to LJ as well. [Sorry about the belated response, I've been trying to stay away from FB stuff while I only have access to a near-death laptop that's missing a couple of keys. I keep embarrassing myself on FB by making all these motormouth comments where I sound totally incoherent--at least more incoherent than usual!--cuz I'm concentrating more on copy/pasting missing characters than what I'm actually *saying*... Especially, I find, on Chuck's timeline, where all the best discussion happens! ]
[And Frank, thanks for remembering the WMS stuff I asked you about--I hope we can work that out sometime, very nice of you.]
May 5 at 9:02am · Like · 1
NiceJob Einstein I'm probably at least a decade younger [and from a much less urban setting...] than many present in this discussion, so it's fascinating to hear how the dawn of hip-hop struck many of you at the time. I always wondered what Middle America made of, say, the Funky Four Plus One's 1981 "Saturday Night Live" performance? If such bit-by-bit exposure to songs like these felt to the uninitiated like another strain of Cameo-style funk vocalizing, rather than a whole new thing? Especially the pre-Run D.M.C. stuff that sounds more disco/funk-laden--the mid-'80s rap songs are more built on that big drum-machine sound, a sound that in my mind: A] formed a more distinct "sound" for rap that wasn't as apparently "musical" as the disco/funk/party sound [not better/worse, just different?]; B] caused many cynics discovering rap's presence for the first time to proclaim "that's not even MUSIC!"; and C] led the "punk rockers" in my high school to like this "obnoxiously loud" Schoolly-D-style music.
It's always been hard for me to say because I kind of learned a lot of this timeline backwards--as late as 1987/88, I was merely *reading* about many rap acts without actually hearing them anywhere, so without MTV/radio support and no internet, I could only be exposed to what that first Public Enemy album David Fricke told us about in RS "sounded like* by actually buying the thing! [Same as Husker Du, I guess--maybe this contributed to the nascent "white" rap audience for much of the country, only indie rock kids who read music zines even knew the stuff was out there! I remember the dozen or so black kids in my high school were more apt to listen to Midnight Star...] I've become more obsessed lately with tracking down those marathon-length pre-"It's Like That" rap songs, party due to Chuck and other critics talking about Spoonie Gee or whatever, but partly because it' represents such a large body of great songs I've never heard before--the building blocks of rap's "old school" happened *after* their successors in rap's "golden age," for me! But that makes picking apart both the aesthetic and popular development of the form a tad more abstract for me...
"Yo! MTV Raps!" on TV was a real life-changer--I don't think this gets talked about enough when people bring up the so-called "Golden Age of Hip-Hop" [1987-1993, depending on who you ask?], how much the rap audience increased in size but also breadth by finally getting onto MTV [I've almost never been exposed to "pure" hip-hop music, as opposed to "I Feel for You"-type genre-mixing, via the radio in my life, so this is major]. Run-D.M.C's "Raising Hell" singles dig big business, but I'm trying to recall if this led to an openness for other rappers to storm the airwaves? I feel like the commercial profile of L.L. Cool J in 1987 was significantly bigger [if not deffer!] than in 1985? It's interesting to hear the take of many who approached this, I'm assuming, as older "music fans"--as an actual teenager at the time, my peer group treated "Licensed to Ill" as our "Kiss Alive!" or whatever, maybe in more ways than one--I recall this being greeted as another "hard rock" favorite, appealing more to Bon Jovi fans rather than belonging to the same thing than Run-D.M.C. was doing? [Not just due to color, tho that might have had something to do with it, but more because of the loud guitars and familiar Zep samples--clearly, "Licensed to Ill," like rap-rockers later, sold big by speaking rock audiences' language and offering aggression through riffs as well as language.]
May 5 at 9:45am · Edited · Like · 2
NiceJob Einstein [Oh, while I'm in motormouth mode, one more thing... ]
The effort to attribute assumptions of a majority white audience for rap reminds me of things N.W.A and Ice-T used to say in interviews about their music's influence on white kids [my age, or younger, at the time, I guess]--can't recall exact quotes, but I feel like, beyond the media hand-wringing, it may have been rappers themselves who reported with post-PMRC glee that their audience was gaining fast amongst the offspring of those most concerned about the content of this dangerous stuff? [Eminem's "White America" song plays around with this, too?] Not sure if they went so far as to say MOST of their audience was white at that point, but it sure seems close to their point...
Peep this Ice-T cover for the punnily-titled "Home Invasion"--tho it might have been wishful thinking that the white kids were donning Africa medallions and reading about Malcolm X alongside the grittier aspects of their listening habits!:
http://www.musictastershop.com/files/images/3945.jpg
May 5 at 10:00am · Like
NiceJob Einstein Wow, I just remembered how much I've neglected the memory of my REAL entry point into rap music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlMdYpnVOGQ
May 8 at 1:13pm · Like
NiceJob Einstein First place I ever heard Bonnie Raitt or Lou Reed, as well.
[Also, my 15-year-old self assumed Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett was Chris Slade, drummer in the Firm/later AC/DC]
May 8 at 1:14pm · Edited · Like
Frank Kogan First rap experience: 1979, Luc Sante walks into my apt, throws "Rapper's Delight" on the turntable, says "I have just heard the disco of the future." Definitely struck us as something new, something different, even though we were well aware of the Jamaican DJ stuff that preceded it. And we knew that what we were hearing was different in kind from Isaac Hayes's "Ike's Rap" and such. What we weren't aware of was that hip-hop had already existed for something like 6 years in clubs and house parties etc. And while hip-hop drew more on funk than on disco, that's hardly an either/or. "Disco" isn't a total misnomer in relation to "Rapper's Delight," which lifted the bass 'n' guitar from a disco song, Chic's "Good Times." And of course funk of the time drew on rock and disco, and disco and rock drew on funk and on each other. And by all accounts early DJs like Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were already drawing from all over the musical spectrum, incl. Stones, Monkees, Kraftwerk. Early beats bootlegs and proto-mashups usually were in the disco sections of Manhattan record stores, presumably from disco DJs. That said, I also remember (sorry with no citation, might have been in David Toop's book) Bambaataa saying that hip-hop was definitely counter to disco, at least as a social phenomenon. I also remember (sorry again about no citation and relying on my uncertain memory) some pioneer, I think it was Kurtis Blow in the liner notes to a roots of rap compilation, saying that early hip-hop had two scenes, the more funk-derived stuff in the South Bronx, and the more disco stuff emanating from a Manhattan club that featured DJ Hollywood.
Two thoughts here: the word "crossover" usually needs elaboration: crossing from whom to whom? Hip-hop started among blacks and Puerto Ricans, but that's only a small subset of blacks and Puerto Ricans in one city. It doesn't just cross to whites but to other blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to mention other Latinos, Asians, etc. And of course gets resisted by a lot of people in those demographics as well. Don't know to what extent urban radio was initially hesitant, afraid of alienating older listeners, but I'd wager this was a factor. Not surprising that Blondie and the Beastie Boys picked up on hip-hop, since the Lower Manhattan art and music and scenes took to hip-hop early; though the Beastie Boys emerged from hardcore punk, which was at a distance from the rest of Downtown -- so the Beastie Boys first managed a *different* crossover: were one of the few that as a hardcore band had played to Downtown no wavers and such. I recall Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore as important in fostering this kind of interplay.
May 9 at 6:25am · Like · 3
Frank Kogan I don't really know the demographics, but hip-hop crossing boroughs down to Queens also was something of a cross to the middle class, right? Not that all of Queens is middle class, but I think Beastie labelmates Run-DMC and LL Cool J were. And like the Beasties, these other Def Jam guys also threw rock into their sound. As did Public Enemy, from farther out on the Island -- and "rock" wasn't exclusively white prior to this, of course, funk bands of the '70s being in part rock bands (and rock obviously having many black sources).
The spread of hip-hop into black and urban areas beyond New York isn't a simple story either. Bambaataa, from the funk side of hip-hop, ends up being the guy who uses Boston club guys Baker & Robie for a sound that has a much bigger impact on northeast club music (freestyle and such) than on northeast hip-hop, and has an impact on Miami club music but *also* on Miami hip-hop. And some of this electro-funk sound has to cross *back* to northeast hip-hop later. Other people would be able to tell this story much better than I can, and probably have.
May 9 at 6:40am · Like · 2
Frank Kogan Btw, I once saw Hose perform at Folk City. I remember them basically as a rock band. Hose member Rick Rubin went on to found Def Jam Records. Also, looking at Wikipedia, I see that Slayer was once on Def Jam.
May 9 at 6:45am · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy On record, Hose seemed as much a noise band as a rock band to my ears, though I think somebody might have reviewed them for the *Voice* alongside an early Red Hot Chili Peppers album. I actually used to own both of their EPs, before Rick Rubin got famous -- one a 7-inch (in a brown paper bag-like wrapper) which I remember being really incoherent (comparable to really early Swans records maybe -- so, there's your downtown-style art music), one a 12-inch on which they covered Rick James, Ohio Players, and Hot Chocolate. Looks like (judging from the catalog #s here) these may have been the first two records on Def Jam (which, yes, did later put out Slayer's *Reign In Blood*, which Rubin produced, in 1986, not to mention the *Less Than Zero* soundtrack which had Slayer and other metal bands -- even Poison! -- alongside Public Enemy, Oran Juice Jones, etc.) Anyway, Hose (whose records get classified here as "art-rock, noise, punk, post-punk" and "funk metal, noise, parody"): http://www.discogs.com/artist/197153-Hose
Hose
www.discogs.com
May 9 at 6:58am · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy And Frank, those distinctions you attribute to Bambaataa (hip-hop vs disco) and Kurtis Blow (South Bronx funk rap vs Manhattan disco rap) above do sound familiar, respectively, from David Toop's *Rap Attack* and liner notes to *Kurtis Blow Presents The History Of Rap,* respectively (both of which I have here, and while I see hints of what you're referring to, I can't and probably don't have time to pinpoint succinct citations -- though looks like the Manhattan club was McCoys on 43rd Street, where Blow started seeing an MC called JT Hollywood rapping in 1972 --- "not to be confused with DJ Hollywood, who came on the scene around 1973"; later, he talks about South Bronx and Harlem teens who couldn't afford admission into "expensive midtown and downtown clubs" throwing their own block parties and house parties.) But anyway, what I wanted to say is that, when I talked above about first hearing "Rapper's Delight" (probably on Casey Kasems's weekly Top 40 countdown!) as a "silly disco novelty song," it wasn't just because of the Chic bassline -- It's more because I'd only just started paying close attention to music, period, earlier that year, and I'm not sure that, at that point, *I* would have made distinctions yet between disco and funk (which, right, overlapped each other anyway, and overlapped rock too) -- actually, I believe I did buy a cassette of Funkadelic's *One Nation Under A Groove* (and something by AC/DC!) that year to complement all the skinny-tie new wave I'd been picking up, but unlike you or Jack, I definitely did not have Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Castor, or reggae toasters to use as reference or comparison context. If anything (off the top of my head), I wonder if "Rapper's Delight" might have reminded me more of Steve Martin's talk-rhymed 1978 disco/funk novelty "King Tut" -- subconsciously, at least.
May 9 at 7:24am · Like · 1
Dick Destiny I had both Hose records. Agree it was noise to a kinda shambling semi-rock incompetent beat. Don't remember the titles. Do recall the lyrics to one of them being, "Dope fiends! Buncha fags!" a few times.
May 9 at 3:02pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy In my 1987 Beastie Boys cover story for *Creem*, I described Hose as doing "grunge metal versions of Ohio Players and Rick James numbers," which is kind of amusing in retrospect. (Also -- and this addresses something Frank brought up above -- Adam Yauch tells me that the Beasties' first rap single "Cookie Puss" was "making fun of Malcolm McLaren and the whole downtown art scene that was exploiting hip-hop." Guess they wanted a piece of that.)
May 9 at 9:09pm · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson I misspoke mentioning Jimmy Castor and should have said “The Bertha Butt Boogie,” which I only knew at the time via Top 40 and didn’t really think of as rap at all but more like a funny alternative to Stevie Wonder and loverman talking interludes that were not uncommon in early to mid-70s pop. In retrospect, of course, I know “RD” was a game changer but at the time I had not much sense of that or none any sooner than did Strummer or Harry, anyway. And if “paying close attention” includes reading ab pop then I only had a year or so on you at most and was not aware of any disco sucks polemics enough at the time such that they made any difference to me. Well, I knew guys that didn’t like dance music as I did but I just thought they were slow or, more likely, possessed some kind of puritanical machismo I feared I lacked!
May 9 at 11:31pm · Like · 2
Frank Kogan So far not finding any soundclips for JT Hollywood (search confused by Justin Timberlake often being referred to as JT, plus there being *another* performer, perhaps British, calling himself JT Hollywood). Wikipedia, by the way, says it's *DJ* Hollywood whom Kurtis Blow cites as the first rapper in the hip-hop style. Kurtis Blow likely listened to both of them. In any event, DJ Hollywood himself performed in Manhattan clubs rather than in the Bronx, and like JT is cited as being in the same circle as Lovebug Starski, But *perhaps* DJ Hollywood was more in Harlem than in Midtown. The disc jockey whom Starski and JT are said to have worked with was Pete DJ Jones. Sorry that I don't have time to research this further today. The truth here is likely more discoverable than is the origin of the (I'm now assuming false) Richard Rodgers ad story, if any of you would like to be more persistent than I can be.
14 minutes ago · Like
Frank Kogan DJ Hollywood (five-foot-nine-and-a-half of bowlegged ass)
a few seconds ago · Like
But the thread does veer off into an interesting discussion of "When did you first hear hip-hop, and how did it strike you?"
There's no Richard Rodgers discussion, though thanks to Kevin John we verified that Dorothy Rodgers did indeed tell Billboard in '82 that husband Richard was a fan of the Marcels' version of "Blue Moon."
As for my attempt (so as not to have to visit a library or make phone calls or do actual research) to find out if Richard Rodgers did actually take out full-page newspaper ads urging people not to buy the Marcels' "Blue Moon," so far Twitter and Tumblr haven't helped me verify or refute the story or, if it's false — WHICH SEEMS LIKELY — determine where the story came from. Web, you fail. Story seems false not just because twenty years later Rodgers' wife said something opposite to it, but because none of the bios I sampled on Google books mentioned the story. If Rodgers had placed the ads, that's too effortful an event for a biographer to ignore. (Although Google Books doesn't post books in their entirety, so the story may be in the bios in unposted sections, that all such references to the story would fall through the cracks in Google Books seems unlikely. And whenever I made my way to an index, the Marcels were absent.)
Here we go:
Chuck Eddy Two questions raised here. First, by Frank Kogan: Is it "mere urban legend that Richard Rodgers placed ads urging people not to buy the Marcels' 'Blue Moon'?" Second, by David Cooper Moore (and expanded on by Kogan): Where is the quantified evidence that, as many have long claimed, "white people are actually the majority purchasers of most rap and hip-hop music"? If you know answers to either of these queries, feel free to share with the class.
Brian O'Neill I think the white people thing is true just by looking at demographics: Blacks only make up less than 13% of the population and whites make up nearly three-quarters of the country. When you factor in all hip-hop, especially the stuff that sells a ton, it's damn near statistically impossible that 75% of the population is buying less than the black population.
May 2 at 12:36pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Assuming you're right, Brian, at what point in hip-hop's history do you think it become "damn near statistically impossible"? And would you say that's true for all hip-hop substyles (some of which, as Frank points out, have seemed to get this claim more than others), or just certain ones? And would you also say it's true for r&b, some of which also sells a ton? Is there any way to really know?
May 2 at 12:44pm · Like
Brian O'Neill I think it depends on when it became popular enough to cross over from the niche markets from which it was born. The same exercise can be seen in when any niche genre breaks through - at some point a country artist will be selling more records to a non-country fan-base simply by outgrowing them. At some point Metallica was being sold to more soccer moms than metal fan teenagers.
With race as a delimiter, it's even easier to crossover since at least some percentage of even the most underground hip-hop styles is Caucasian, a minority to be sure but a bigger number than zero.
May 2 at 12:47pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Well, not *all* country artists (even big stars) wind up "selling more records to a non-country fan-base," obviously. And I doubt there's any evidence that country as a *whole* sells more to a non-country audience, even if (say) Taylor Swift does (if, in fact, she does). Not sure I'm following the analogy, to be honest.
May 2 at 1:17pm · Like
Brian O'Neill The point is 13 percent of the population are not buying most of anything.
May 2 at 1:23pm · Like
David Cooper Moore Not sure of my math here, but I'm pretty sure that if even 0.1% of the population bought a given record, it would easily go to #1. Average sales in the top 5 would be closer to something like 0.01-0.05% of the population. In the heyday of 90s megasales, that number would likely get up to about 0.5-1.0% of the population.
May 2 at 2:02pm · Like
David Cooper Moore My suspicion comes from the fact that to my knowledge rap radio is absolutely not listened to by majority white audiences. (In fact, removing radio from Billboard calculations and making the audience, in effect, whiter has completely changed what the rap charts look like.) I don't doubt a LOT of white people buy rap music. I've just never seen actual demographic stats to back up the claim, which gets thrown around a lot.
May 2 at 2:05pm · Like · 3
NiceJob Einstein I got the Joel Whitburn Billboard R&B and Hip-Hop Charts, and it's utterly fascinating how some of the most "white" artists, like say Pat Boone, scored R&B hits regularly--at one point, the Hot 100 and the R&B chart were SO similar, they did away with the latter? But then you see some black artists' hits chart higher on the pop chart, like Donna Summer.
Anyway, a lot of what's said above reminded me of what takes place in this chart info--early rap hits that might be R&B top tens could be said to "stall out" at the bottom of the Top 40 ["Rapper's Delight," "The Breaks," "The Message"], but it's more noteworthy to me that these records are charting AT ALL with so much of the country probably not hearing them?
People act like rap started as something almost invisible to audiences outside New York, and as a lifelong Midwesterner I can sorta buy that--the earliest indications of a nascent "hip hop culture" this rural white boy received was the attention "breakdancing" got ca. 1983-84, and I'm pretty sure I knew about the sound of scratching records long before I was aware of rapping? Chaka Khan's "I Feel for You" figured largely in this, too, but I mostly gained knowledge that people "rapped" through low-budget home recordings sent in to my favorite DJ of my teen years... Dr. Demento. [Lost in the pre-"Walk This Way"/LICENSED TO ILL history of rap crossover: "Rappin' Rodney," "The Rappin' Duke Song," Eddie Murphy/Joe Piscopo's "Honeymooners Rap" and other comedic efforts.]
Chuck's insistence that the WHOLE rap genre is unlikely to mostly be supported by white audiences seems fair, but I wonder how much the mega-seller "crossovers" on top of the heap account for a huuuuge piece of said pie, which might also bring in parts of Brian's point--if black music fans walk into Sam Goody in 1990 and buy cassettes by 10 assorted hip-hop performers, but predominantly white music fans buy 15 COPIES of MC Hammer's tape the same day, could the rap audience suddenly be presented as being 60% white, despite the sheer variety of lesser-selling artists available?
May 2 at 3:25pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Sure, it's *possible* -- Nobody has denied that. But for starters, even in the example you lay out, you'd have to present evidence that MC Hammer's audience was primarily white. I don't know whether it was or not. To my thinking, Brian's logic, as he presents it, doesn't stand, partly because of those numbers David named above; i.e., it takes a fraction of a fraction of the population buying a record to make it huge. So it doesn't follow that white people dominate hip-hop purchases simply by virtue of their being a majority (is 75% right, by the way? I would've guess way lower), unless it also goes without saying that, say, the audience for James Brown (or soul in general) records in the '60s, or for say *Ebony* or *Jet* magazine, was also by definition primarily white; *of course* 13 % of the population (or whatever % -- I haven't checked that constantly evolving figure either) can buy most of some category. Just depends what the category is. I *assume* the percentage of white people buying hip-hop is higher now, but I don't know *how much* higher, and without concrete sales figures we don't know whether it's high enough to account for the majority of purchases (assuming we could agree on a definition of "hip-hop" in the first place, which we might not be able to). Anyway, NiceJob, if you want to learn about changes in the r&b chart over the years, you should really read this magnum opus Chris Molanphy put together a month or so back. It's very long, but it was definitely worth my time. http://pitchfork.com/.../9378-i-know-you-got-soul-the.../
Articles: I Know You Got Soul: The Trouble With Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Chart
pitchfork.com
A new methodology has rendered Billboard's R&B chart a shell of its former self, replete with dubious racial and cultural ...
May 2 at 4:33pm · Like · 5
Brian O'Neill The population figures are from Wikipedia.
May 2 at 5:15pm · Like
Steve Pick All I can do is speak anecdotally - I spent 20 years working in a record store located at the very center of St. Louis's racial divide, with a customer base that was probably 1/3 African-American most of that time. Those 20 years were from 1984-2004, so I watched hip-hop move from an extremely marginal part of the store, supported as much by white college students as by young African-Americans, to a very significant part of the overall sales in the 90s, when it was almost but not quite exclusively bought by African-Americans. Now I work in a store where the clientele is 95% white, and where hip-hop sells in miniscule quantities. I know there were certain artists with more crossover appeal - Tupac and Biggie, in particular, back in the day - but I never saw evidence to support the contention that it was mostly whites buying the music.
May 2 at 5:30pm · Like · 1
Steve Pick On the other hand, as a white 21-year-old, I was pretty much instantly aware of "The Breaks" and "Rapper's Delight," although after that first year, it seemed even the local r'n'b stations didn't play any more rap for a long time with the exception of "Square Biz" by Teena Marie (which only had one verse of rap, albeit one of the greatest of all time), and if it weren't for Blondie and the Clash, I would have forgotten the new thing entirely until about 1983.
May 2 at 5:35pm · Like · 3
Chuck Eddy "Planet Rock" and "Double Dutch Bus" not that big in St. Louis, then? (Not sure if the rap part in Lakeside's "Fantastic Voyage" counts.)
May 2 at 6:47pm · Like
Steve Pick Oh, I forgot "Double Dutch Bus." That was a big radio hit. "Planet Rock," however, was something I read about for over a year before I ever heard it.
May 2 at 7:05pm · Like · 1
Brian O'Neill Here is a researched story that takes on the issue. It's from 2005. Apparently the 70% figure was coined without empirical evidence however subsequent research went on to confirm the number wasn't that far off from reality - though it slipped to (a still majority) 60% when the company changed to self-identification. It's a pretty cool article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB111521814339424546
May 2 at 7:09pm · Like · 2
David Cooper Moore An interesting study. Although if that survey is all we have in terms of evidence for the claim, I wouldn't put a ton of stock in without knowing the methodology (random sample, overall demographics of respondents, etc.).
May 2 at 7:21pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Right, and the column admits at the end several ways in which the results are open to interpretation -- there's no way to know whether the respondents are all defining rap the same way, and even if they were, % of (at least one time)-purchasers isn't the same as % of *purchases.* Still, that's something, and kudos to WSJ for trying to trace the numerical myth's source, not just taking it at face value. Thanks Brian.
May 2 at 8:14pm · Like · 1
Stephen Thomas Erlewine The more I think about it the more the white audience buys more hip-hop story doesn't ring true. I could've sworn this angle surfaced much earlier than 2005--I would've pegged it around the second NWA album which I think was the first hardcore/gangster rap record to top the charts due to soundscan--but even so, the only reliable way to gauge the race of an audience would be through the MediaMarket survey (SoundScan never accounts for that). I know these research companies strive to get a broad sample but their response in some demographics is likely to be weak and, even if they get a fair amount of poor families, it may be skewed by wanting to sample different parts of the country equally, etc. So there are problems within who was sampled--at best they get average consumers and, if lucky, a hardcore music nut--but then the response of what is and what isn't rap would be up to the responder, which may skew things; also, the purchase of one hip-hop recording may tag the responder as a hip-hop fan. Who knows? In any case, I think there's no solid evidence to support this statistic because there is no evidence to suggest what demographic bought what--the closest we get is regional sales and airplay.
May 2 at 10:16pm · Like · 2
NiceJob Einstein Sometimes a "subculture" becomes genuinely huge without having to win over too many outside the already-converted, tho? Country/non-country audiences were addressed earlier [but if they're buying country records, are they still a "non-country" audience? Or is this a geographic/class distinction?], but I felt like Garth Brooks' hugeness didn't seem to involve much other than being the biggest fish in the underestimated-at-the-time country audience's pond--i.e., he barely touched the pop singles chart while dominating the album chart [many country artists have been Hot 100 fixtures over the last two decades, but strangely not Brooks?], I probably can't name more than two of his songs myself, and I didn't know anybody who among the millions of purchasers of his CDs. And the Cure seemed to become stadium rockers on the shoulders of their own large and devoted audience--tho many stadium patrons probably complained about the "poseurs" who "weren't into them back then" anyway! And Metallica's major label debut went nuclear on the charts without any radio/MTV support, but I don't recall anybody crediting that to anybody other than the stereotypical audience for that music.
So maybe rap is huge enough *without* having to be dominated by white listeners--certainly, it's become so ubiquitous and accepted as to seem more and more slippery to define as a genre, with acts slipping between singing/rapping TLC-style, guest raps showing up in Mariah Carey songs, etc., so it's harder to say which audience is responding to what? I remember some kids approaching me in a department store asking if we had a song title I didn't recognize--I asked what kind of music it was to jog my memory, and they called it "light-rock-slash-rap"! [It was "Don't Speak" by No Doubt!!!]
May 2 at 11:17pm · Edited · Like · 1
Steve Pick Again, anecdotal evidence to respond to the Metallica point NiceJob made. I guess it was 1989 or '90, and I was asked to speak to a high school English class to impress the kids into studying because see, they could get a cool job writing about music. The only thing that every kid in that class was impressed by was the fact that I had recently interviewed Lars Ulrich. This was the gigantic breakthrough period for Metallica, and these were not stereotypical metalheads.
May 3 at 7:49am · Like · 2
Kevin Bozelka Hey Chuck! According to a 1982 Billboard article, Rodgers' wife recalls that he liked The Marcels' version of "Blue Moon." Also, I couldn't find evidence of a negative ad placed by Rodgers in either Variety or Billboard (unless, of course, it was done under a pseudonym). Where else would he have published it? I emailed you a jpg of the article.
May 3 at 8:11am · Like · 3
Chuck Eddy Thanks, Kevin -- That's obviously the Billboard article Frank referred to right at the beginning of this blog post. I forwarded your jpg on to him.
May 3 at 7:13pm · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson More anecdote. "Rappers Delight," don't know how, made it to my Podunk, Oregon hometown. Heard it at a party in '79. When I attended a Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock show in a small club in (relatively white) Seattle in '88 or thereabouts the audience was mostly black. When I attended PE/LL Cool J/Beasties shows ar the same time, in a 3k seat concert hall, they were white majority crowds. By the early '00s, even Coup shows in clubs were mostly white. Since I started teaching in the mid-'90s teen boys, in the urban high schools I've worked, not all but certainly most often say they listen to rap the way we might have responded w/ hard rock in the '70s. So I don’t know ab 70% but majority purchasers seems to fit what I’ve seen since at least The Chronic.
May 3 at 7:35pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy Steve and Jack -- Question: When both you first heard "Rapper's Delight," did you think of it as a new genre of music? Because I remember just figuring it was a silly disco novelty song where people talked instead of sang. Doubt I understood what "rap music" was until a year or 2 later. Anyway, I probably have more to comment on here, but meanwhile, you two -- and Brian, NiceJob, and Stephen Thomas -- please let me know if I should *not* transfer any of your comments above, with your names, to Frank Kogan's livejournal, where he can see them since he's not on facebook.
May 4 at 7:34am · Like
Stephen Thomas Erlewine Totally fine with the transfer
May 4 at 8:01am · Like
Steve Pick First, of course anything I say can be passed on to Frank. As for the original experience of hearing rap - it all happened so fast. I had spent almost two years discovering punk rock and New Wave, and then I stumbled across the black radio stations which were playing all that great funk from that era. I actually liked "The Breaks" more than "Rapper's Delight," but at the same time, the radio djs were doing a little bit of rapping, and even more, the listeners were calling in and rapping. I had seen P-Funk live on the 1976 Mothership Connection tour when I was working as an usher at our local Arena, and all this stuff seemed of a piece with that to me. I don't think I expected rap to become a new genre; it just felt like a variation on funk at the time. And there wasn't anybody writing about it in the rock press I was reading, unless maybe Ken Barnes mentioned it in his singles column.
May 4 at 8:34am · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson It struck me as novelty, for sure. I remember the lines ab eating mushed peas and chicken that taste like wood at a friend’s from that first listen. But I don’t think I associated it w/ disco, which I thought of as something more produced and orchestral, w/ strings and such; where the music was more forefront or at least equal to the vocals. This was an oddly different vocal sound put to some incidental Kool & the Gang or whatever background. It announced itself as rap but it didn’t even hit me as what at the time I would have identified as rap, which was more along the lines of the Jimmy Castor Bunch or some assorted Stax songs, a vocal aside, looser and more impromptu, if anything. This had a much tighter, faster, synchronized, group-vocal affect. I had no idea it was the beginning of anything but the vocals definitely struck me as something excitingly strange and new.
May 4 at 8:37am · Like · 2
Brian O'Neill I'm fine with transferring my name to anything. And also, re: Rapper's Delight: I was a 10-year old in the middle of Hollis, Queens when it came out. I recall hearing that song come out of boomboxes and cars passing my street and all of my classmates randomly spewing out the lyrics, and although I didn't know it, a few blocks from me the guys in Run-DMC were listening too, soon to bring this stuff to an even larger audience a few years later. To me (and my peers) it felt like a game changer. I think even though we were dumb kids, we were right.
May 4 at 8:54am · Like · 3
Frank Kogan Xhuxk, it's more accurate to say that, while I have a Facebook account, I'm *trying* not to be on Facebook. refuse to friend people, etc. The two I friended were Dave so he could get me on Turntable FM (which is now in the great slumber party in the sky) and Tina so I could be part of Campus Restaurant Revisited (which will only mean anything to those of you who were in Storrs CT sometime betw the late '50s and '70s). But Dave posting on this thread made it visible to me, hence I can see all the comments and participate myself. But transferring some to my lj thread might be a good idea anyway, in case some stragglers from lj or Tumblr drop by the thread and want to see.
While I'm here, let me acknowledge I still have an eardrums CD earmarked for Chuck (and another near completion), I still intend to get NiceJob the WMS info I promised two or more years ago, I'm drafting an official apology to Jack (and Scott W) to post on rockcritics.com for my uncalled for abruptness-bordering-on-sarcasm but I'm sweating over the wording, I've long wanted to send a salute to Stephen Thomas Erlewine for his thoughtful work at allmusic, so here it is -- [salutes] -- I want to thank Kevin for the Billboard JPEG, which Chuck forwarded (and Kevin, do you have any thoughts regarding Shante's bogus claim to a Ph.D that was debunked a few years ago?). Don't know if I've ever chatted with Brian or Steve (impossible to tell these things given the profusion of Internet monikers), but thank you for helping to discuss the hip-hop question. And Dave, did you notice my sly punning reference on that lj thread to [name redacted]?
Agree that the survey cited by WSJ is hardly convincing, but at least it's actual information. Of course the subject is an issue because of the presumed influence that white consumer dollars would have on the sound, style, and lyrics.
Am more taken by the Richard Rodgers story since it seems that if we ask enough people we should get a definitive answer. I don't have the time or resources to do the research myself, but this is the sort of thing the Web is supposed to be good at, right? If the ads exist they're likely in some archive, and if the story is false we may bet some idea where it started.
May 4 at 2:17pm · Like · 4
Frank Kogan May GET some idea...
May 4 at 2:18pm · Like
Chuck Eddy Frank, this is definitely the first time I've ever *seen* you on Facebook (and it's a nice surprise --- I always forget "friends of anyone tagged" can see threads like this.) But yes, I now remember that you technically have an account.
May 4 at 3:34pm · Like
Edd Hurt reading this with interest, but really can't add anything beyond the anecdotal (and stuff folks have already brought up, such as the initial impact of hip-hop on white listeners, etc.). which isn't what we need...
May 4 at 3:54pm · Like
Edd Hurt well, I say that, of course, the anecdotal stuff is valuable, I meant that I'd love to see some figures and all...
May 4 at 3:55pm · Like
Stephen Thomas Erlewine Thanks Frank--I admire your work as well
May 4 at 4:14pm · Like
David Cooper Moore Frank That pun was so subtle I blinked and missed it (but got it on second pass).
May 4 at 6:05pm · Like
Dub Dob Dee just to pop in while procrastinating on a response elsewhere to frank abt unrelated issues (except no issues are unrelated) to restate something i emailed to FK (and he posted on LJ): the "most rap bought by white teens" meme i first came across in discussions of nu-metal. c.2001/02 probably -- and was also seeing in pushback against rap from its black critics (crouch/marsalis etc, tho I don't know if either of these two actually came out and said this)
May 5 at 5:09am · Like · 1
Dub Dob Dee re the numbers game: possibly worth bringing in the sebastian bach story, where he laments that only a micro-percentage of the people who "like" him on FB have bought his new record and why is that? part of the answer being: this really isn't how numbers work -- a number i'd like to see is, if the percentage of the population (yrs or mine, i'm in the UK) who count as "the music-buying population" is such-and-such percent, how does this tranche divide up into (say) white and non-white. I'm prepared to bet that the proportions don't exactly map onto the relevant propotionality in the population as a whole; and would not be startled if they were some way different. Different sectors of the population care about music in different ways and to different degrees.
May 5 at 5:14am · Like · 2
Dub Dob Dee ^^^mark sinker for those who don't know -- i am responsible for 47.346% of all internet monikers
May 5 at 5:15am · Like · 1
NiceJob Einstein Chuck/Frank, I'm okay with any transfers to LJ as well. [Sorry about the belated response, I've been trying to stay away from FB stuff while I only have access to a near-death laptop that's missing a couple of keys. I keep embarrassing myself on FB by making all these motormouth comments where I sound totally incoherent--at least more incoherent than usual!--cuz I'm concentrating more on copy/pasting missing characters than what I'm actually *saying*... Especially, I find, on Chuck's timeline, where all the best discussion happens! ]
[And Frank, thanks for remembering the WMS stuff I asked you about--I hope we can work that out sometime, very nice of you.]
May 5 at 9:02am · Like · 1
NiceJob Einstein I'm probably at least a decade younger [and from a much less urban setting...] than many present in this discussion, so it's fascinating to hear how the dawn of hip-hop struck many of you at the time. I always wondered what Middle America made of, say, the Funky Four Plus One's 1981 "Saturday Night Live" performance? If such bit-by-bit exposure to songs like these felt to the uninitiated like another strain of Cameo-style funk vocalizing, rather than a whole new thing? Especially the pre-Run D.M.C. stuff that sounds more disco/funk-laden--the mid-'80s rap songs are more built on that big drum-machine sound, a sound that in my mind: A] formed a more distinct "sound" for rap that wasn't as apparently "musical" as the disco/funk/party sound [not better/worse, just different?]; B] caused many cynics discovering rap's presence for the first time to proclaim "that's not even MUSIC!"; and C] led the "punk rockers" in my high school to like this "obnoxiously loud" Schoolly-D-style music.
It's always been hard for me to say because I kind of learned a lot of this timeline backwards--as late as 1987/88, I was merely *reading* about many rap acts without actually hearing them anywhere, so without MTV/radio support and no internet, I could only be exposed to what that first Public Enemy album David Fricke told us about in RS "sounded like* by actually buying the thing! [Same as Husker Du, I guess--maybe this contributed to the nascent "white" rap audience for much of the country, only indie rock kids who read music zines even knew the stuff was out there! I remember the dozen or so black kids in my high school were more apt to listen to Midnight Star...] I've become more obsessed lately with tracking down those marathon-length pre-"It's Like That" rap songs, party due to Chuck and other critics talking about Spoonie Gee or whatever, but partly because it' represents such a large body of great songs I've never heard before--the building blocks of rap's "old school" happened *after* their successors in rap's "golden age," for me! But that makes picking apart both the aesthetic and popular development of the form a tad more abstract for me...
"Yo! MTV Raps!" on TV was a real life-changer--I don't think this gets talked about enough when people bring up the so-called "Golden Age of Hip-Hop" [1987-1993, depending on who you ask?], how much the rap audience increased in size but also breadth by finally getting onto MTV [I've almost never been exposed to "pure" hip-hop music, as opposed to "I Feel for You"-type genre-mixing, via the radio in my life, so this is major]. Run-D.M.C's "Raising Hell" singles dig big business, but I'm trying to recall if this led to an openness for other rappers to storm the airwaves? I feel like the commercial profile of L.L. Cool J in 1987 was significantly bigger [if not deffer!] than in 1985? It's interesting to hear the take of many who approached this, I'm assuming, as older "music fans"--as an actual teenager at the time, my peer group treated "Licensed to Ill" as our "Kiss Alive!" or whatever, maybe in more ways than one--I recall this being greeted as another "hard rock" favorite, appealing more to Bon Jovi fans rather than belonging to the same thing than Run-D.M.C. was doing? [Not just due to color, tho that might have had something to do with it, but more because of the loud guitars and familiar Zep samples--clearly, "Licensed to Ill," like rap-rockers later, sold big by speaking rock audiences' language and offering aggression through riffs as well as language.]
May 5 at 9:45am · Edited · Like · 2
NiceJob Einstein [Oh, while I'm in motormouth mode, one more thing... ]
The effort to attribute assumptions of a majority white audience for rap reminds me of things N.W.A and Ice-T used to say in interviews about their music's influence on white kids [my age, or younger, at the time, I guess]--can't recall exact quotes, but I feel like, beyond the media hand-wringing, it may have been rappers themselves who reported with post-PMRC glee that their audience was gaining fast amongst the offspring of those most concerned about the content of this dangerous stuff? [Eminem's "White America" song plays around with this, too?] Not sure if they went so far as to say MOST of their audience was white at that point, but it sure seems close to their point...
Peep this Ice-T cover for the punnily-titled "Home Invasion"--tho it might have been wishful thinking that the white kids were donning Africa medallions and reading about Malcolm X alongside the grittier aspects of their listening habits!:
http://www.musictastershop.com/files/images/3945.jpg
May 5 at 10:00am · Like
NiceJob Einstein Wow, I just remembered how much I've neglected the memory of my REAL entry point into rap music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlMdYpnVOGQ
May 8 at 1:13pm · Like
NiceJob Einstein First place I ever heard Bonnie Raitt or Lou Reed, as well.
[Also, my 15-year-old self assumed Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett was Chris Slade, drummer in the Firm/later AC/DC]
May 8 at 1:14pm · Edited · Like
Frank Kogan First rap experience: 1979, Luc Sante walks into my apt, throws "Rapper's Delight" on the turntable, says "I have just heard the disco of the future." Definitely struck us as something new, something different, even though we were well aware of the Jamaican DJ stuff that preceded it. And we knew that what we were hearing was different in kind from Isaac Hayes's "Ike's Rap" and such. What we weren't aware of was that hip-hop had already existed for something like 6 years in clubs and house parties etc. And while hip-hop drew more on funk than on disco, that's hardly an either/or. "Disco" isn't a total misnomer in relation to "Rapper's Delight," which lifted the bass 'n' guitar from a disco song, Chic's "Good Times." And of course funk of the time drew on rock and disco, and disco and rock drew on funk and on each other. And by all accounts early DJs like Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash were already drawing from all over the musical spectrum, incl. Stones, Monkees, Kraftwerk. Early beats bootlegs and proto-mashups usually were in the disco sections of Manhattan record stores, presumably from disco DJs. That said, I also remember (sorry with no citation, might have been in David Toop's book) Bambaataa saying that hip-hop was definitely counter to disco, at least as a social phenomenon. I also remember (sorry again about no citation and relying on my uncertain memory) some pioneer, I think it was Kurtis Blow in the liner notes to a roots of rap compilation, saying that early hip-hop had two scenes, the more funk-derived stuff in the South Bronx, and the more disco stuff emanating from a Manhattan club that featured DJ Hollywood.
Two thoughts here: the word "crossover" usually needs elaboration: crossing from whom to whom? Hip-hop started among blacks and Puerto Ricans, but that's only a small subset of blacks and Puerto Ricans in one city. It doesn't just cross to whites but to other blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to mention other Latinos, Asians, etc. And of course gets resisted by a lot of people in those demographics as well. Don't know to what extent urban radio was initially hesitant, afraid of alienating older listeners, but I'd wager this was a factor. Not surprising that Blondie and the Beastie Boys picked up on hip-hop, since the Lower Manhattan art and music and scenes took to hip-hop early; though the Beastie Boys emerged from hardcore punk, which was at a distance from the rest of Downtown -- so the Beastie Boys first managed a *different* crossover: were one of the few that as a hardcore band had played to Downtown no wavers and such. I recall Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore as important in fostering this kind of interplay.
May 9 at 6:25am · Like · 3
Frank Kogan I don't really know the demographics, but hip-hop crossing boroughs down to Queens also was something of a cross to the middle class, right? Not that all of Queens is middle class, but I think Beastie labelmates Run-DMC and LL Cool J were. And like the Beasties, these other Def Jam guys also threw rock into their sound. As did Public Enemy, from farther out on the Island -- and "rock" wasn't exclusively white prior to this, of course, funk bands of the '70s being in part rock bands (and rock obviously having many black sources).
The spread of hip-hop into black and urban areas beyond New York isn't a simple story either. Bambaataa, from the funk side of hip-hop, ends up being the guy who uses Boston club guys Baker & Robie for a sound that has a much bigger impact on northeast club music (freestyle and such) than on northeast hip-hop, and has an impact on Miami club music but *also* on Miami hip-hop. And some of this electro-funk sound has to cross *back* to northeast hip-hop later. Other people would be able to tell this story much better than I can, and probably have.
May 9 at 6:40am · Like · 2
Frank Kogan Btw, I once saw Hose perform at Folk City. I remember them basically as a rock band. Hose member Rick Rubin went on to found Def Jam Records. Also, looking at Wikipedia, I see that Slayer was once on Def Jam.
May 9 at 6:45am · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy On record, Hose seemed as much a noise band as a rock band to my ears, though I think somebody might have reviewed them for the *Voice* alongside an early Red Hot Chili Peppers album. I actually used to own both of their EPs, before Rick Rubin got famous -- one a 7-inch (in a brown paper bag-like wrapper) which I remember being really incoherent (comparable to really early Swans records maybe -- so, there's your downtown-style art music), one a 12-inch on which they covered Rick James, Ohio Players, and Hot Chocolate. Looks like (judging from the catalog #s here) these may have been the first two records on Def Jam (which, yes, did later put out Slayer's *Reign In Blood*, which Rubin produced, in 1986, not to mention the *Less Than Zero* soundtrack which had Slayer and other metal bands -- even Poison! -- alongside Public Enemy, Oran Juice Jones, etc.) Anyway, Hose (whose records get classified here as "art-rock, noise, punk, post-punk" and "funk metal, noise, parody"): http://www.discogs.com/artist/197153-Hose
Hose
www.discogs.com
May 9 at 6:58am · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy And Frank, those distinctions you attribute to Bambaataa (hip-hop vs disco) and Kurtis Blow (South Bronx funk rap vs Manhattan disco rap) above do sound familiar, respectively, from David Toop's *Rap Attack* and liner notes to *Kurtis Blow Presents The History Of Rap,* respectively (both of which I have here, and while I see hints of what you're referring to, I can't and probably don't have time to pinpoint succinct citations -- though looks like the Manhattan club was McCoys on 43rd Street, where Blow started seeing an MC called JT Hollywood rapping in 1972 --- "not to be confused with DJ Hollywood, who came on the scene around 1973"; later, he talks about South Bronx and Harlem teens who couldn't afford admission into "expensive midtown and downtown clubs" throwing their own block parties and house parties.) But anyway, what I wanted to say is that, when I talked above about first hearing "Rapper's Delight" (probably on Casey Kasems's weekly Top 40 countdown!) as a "silly disco novelty song," it wasn't just because of the Chic bassline -- It's more because I'd only just started paying close attention to music, period, earlier that year, and I'm not sure that, at that point, *I* would have made distinctions yet between disco and funk (which, right, overlapped each other anyway, and overlapped rock too) -- actually, I believe I did buy a cassette of Funkadelic's *One Nation Under A Groove* (and something by AC/DC!) that year to complement all the skinny-tie new wave I'd been picking up, but unlike you or Jack, I definitely did not have Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Castor, or reggae toasters to use as reference or comparison context. If anything (off the top of my head), I wonder if "Rapper's Delight" might have reminded me more of Steve Martin's talk-rhymed 1978 disco/funk novelty "King Tut" -- subconsciously, at least.
May 9 at 7:24am · Like · 1
Dick Destiny I had both Hose records. Agree it was noise to a kinda shambling semi-rock incompetent beat. Don't remember the titles. Do recall the lyrics to one of them being, "Dope fiends! Buncha fags!" a few times.
May 9 at 3:02pm · Like · 1
Chuck Eddy In my 1987 Beastie Boys cover story for *Creem*, I described Hose as doing "grunge metal versions of Ohio Players and Rick James numbers," which is kind of amusing in retrospect. (Also -- and this addresses something Frank brought up above -- Adam Yauch tells me that the Beasties' first rap single "Cookie Puss" was "making fun of Malcolm McLaren and the whole downtown art scene that was exploiting hip-hop." Guess they wanted a piece of that.)
May 9 at 9:09pm · Like · 1
Jack C. Thompson I misspoke mentioning Jimmy Castor and should have said “The Bertha Butt Boogie,” which I only knew at the time via Top 40 and didn’t really think of as rap at all but more like a funny alternative to Stevie Wonder and loverman talking interludes that were not uncommon in early to mid-70s pop. In retrospect, of course, I know “RD” was a game changer but at the time I had not much sense of that or none any sooner than did Strummer or Harry, anyway. And if “paying close attention” includes reading ab pop then I only had a year or so on you at most and was not aware of any disco sucks polemics enough at the time such that they made any difference to me. Well, I knew guys that didn’t like dance music as I did but I just thought they were slow or, more likely, possessed some kind of puritanical machismo I feared I lacked!
May 9 at 11:31pm · Like · 2
Frank Kogan So far not finding any soundclips for JT Hollywood (search confused by Justin Timberlake often being referred to as JT, plus there being *another* performer, perhaps British, calling himself JT Hollywood). Wikipedia, by the way, says it's *DJ* Hollywood whom Kurtis Blow cites as the first rapper in the hip-hop style. Kurtis Blow likely listened to both of them. In any event, DJ Hollywood himself performed in Manhattan clubs rather than in the Bronx, and like JT is cited as being in the same circle as Lovebug Starski, But *perhaps* DJ Hollywood was more in Harlem than in Midtown. The disc jockey whom Starski and JT are said to have worked with was Pete DJ Jones. Sorry that I don't have time to research this further today. The truth here is likely more discoverable than is the origin of the (I'm now assuming false) Richard Rodgers ad story, if any of you would like to be more persistent than I can be.
14 minutes ago · Like
Frank Kogan DJ Hollywood (five-foot-nine-and-a-half of bowlegged ass)
a few seconds ago · Like
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Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-14 02:27 am (UTC)Re: Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-14 03:31 pm (UTC)Davey D's hiphopandpolitics.com seems like a good source of reliable info on the early years, though since I'm so ignorant myself I can't actually vouch for the reliability.
Re: Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-14 04:24 pm (UTC)So, who's the very important early '80s — as opposed to late '70s? — MC who got in touch with you out of the blue?
Re: Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-15 02:25 am (UTC)http://www.myvideo.de/watch/4877961/Funky_4_1_Thats_The_Joint_On_Saturday_Night_Live
After I'd started the thread with this clip featuring Sha-Rock, instead (since the SNL "That's The Joint" is never on youtube):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpnoVKmulZM
Re: Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-15 02:28 am (UTC)Re: Chuck's followup facebook comment
Date: 2014-05-15 04:29 am (UTC)E.g., <lj-template name="video">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpnoVKmulZM</lj-template> gets you this error message:
[Error: unknown template video]
whereas <lj-template name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpnoVKmulZM</lj-template> gets you the vid:
[Error: unknown template video]
As for non-YouTube vids, I don't know if livejournal allows you to embed them in the comments. They didn't used to, though I can embed them in the initial posts, assuming that pasting in the embed code provided by whatever site I'm embedding from actually works. (E.g., to embed videos from dailymotion I had to go back to some of my old posts to find their old embed code, and that one worked.) But let's see, here are two attempts at the SNL on MyVideo. Crossing my fingers:
[EDIT: Using MyVideo's old embed code without using https works, but using the old embed while using https doesn't, nor does the new code whether or not you use https.]
no subject
Date: 2014-05-14 01:09 pm (UTC)She's just bein' Miley
Date: 2014-05-14 04:01 pm (UTC)See from Generasia's Wiki that five years ago Sori was a guest on E.via's (Tymee's)
rather drippyheart-rending "Diary."no subject
Date: 2014-05-14 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-20 10:28 am (UTC)Incidentally, Sori's song is called "bitter sweet" and the MV was directed by Kim Soonwook (Metaoloz), who directed Sori's Dual Life as well as just about every Girls' Day MV, and who just happens to be BoA's brother.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-21 09:15 am (UTC)P.S.
Date: 2014-05-20 11:56 am (UTC)