experimental early hip hop / electro / turntablism

[Guest]

Prolly not that innovative, but I saw a bunch of Marley Marl recently added to the thread and wanted to add my two sense:

 

 

Marley Marl is such a hero:

 

[Guest]

^ Yeah he seems cool in that interview. At least in the first 9 min I watched before getting intimidated by the length lol.

 

[Guest]

Never listened to T La Rock before, sounds nice, thanks! 

 

Anyone notice that there seemed to be a trend in late 80s Hip Hop where there would be a song on each LP which would feature the DJ out front as the main event of a track (as opposed to vocals)? 'Mister Cee's Master Plan' on Big Daddy Kane's Long Live the Kane is a cool example, as is this:

 

 

[Guest]

Yeah good point, says it all doesn't it. The timbre of the scratching on the one from Paid in Full is great to me for some reason. Sort of epitomizes the era's sound for me, idk.

 

Another dj-in-focus track:

[Guest]

Nice! Premier is one of my favorite beat-makers. Recently got into his first version of Nas' 'Memory Lane' 

 

[Guest]

was starting to lose interest in this stuff (I mean, there's not THAT much of it) but fuck, I'm all in again after hearing these

 

[Guest]

found an interesting Simon Reynolds write-up on Todd Terry from his 'energy flash' blog:

 

 

 

Although it was Chicago acid house that ignited the firestorm of rave culture in the UK, British rave music would ultimately be influenced more by the sounds coming out New York during the late Eighties. The Northern “bleep” style associated with Unique 3 and Warp acts like Sweet Exorcist and LFO owed a massive amount to the New York post-electro label Cutting and its acts like Nitro Deluxe, whose “Let’s Get Brutal” pioneered a style of bass-heavy and skeletally minimalist house music. And the breakbeat-driven hardcore rave style was hugely influenced by Todd Terry’s mental merger of house and hip hop. Remote in sound and spirit from the house styles we usually associate with New York (i.e. the soulful, lushly produced garage of labels like Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove), Terry’s music was brash and street-raw, a fast-money music of uncleared samples, phat bass, and kickin’ beats. Just as Terry’s hybrid sound was vital impurist, so his insanely prolific output (the “various artists” on this overview are all him operating under different aliases) was fueled by an impure mixture of mercenary and artistic impulses. The muddy motivations proved to be fertile soil though, because even when recycling his own most successful riffs, he invariably reworked them and made them even deranged. Terry’s production of the Jungle Brothers’ “I’ll House You” basically super-imposed the group’s hip-housy rapping over his own Royal House track “Can You Feel It”, which had been a monster UK hit in the acid house-crazed summer of 1988. But he’d already versioned that track once before as the incredible “Party People”, a sort of drastic dub of “Can You Feel It” that turned reverbed after-traces of piano and vocal hubbub into a juddering pulse-riff. The effect is at once slammin’ and ethereal, like the air itself is wracked and palsied with disco fever. On this track and other early Terry tunes, the production has a curious cavernous, clanking quality, making you feel like you’re in a bunker-like space full of sound-reflections and muffled noise. Whether deliberate or a by-product of lo-fi studio conditions, the effect of playing them in a club must have been to double the “in the club” feel.

With this thrifty trackmaster (““I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble”, he once said) you don’t get any of the preciousness associated with, say, the Detroit techno auteurs. Terry wants to rock the party and he wants to get paid in full; his avant-gardism is almost a byproduct of the drive to catch listeners ears with crazy-making effects. Where your average New York producer would coat Dinosaur L’s mutant disco classic and Paradise Garage anthem “Go Bang” in an aspic of veneration, Terry eviscerated its nagging vocal riff for use in his own “Bango”. There are too many classics on this comprehensive anthology to list, but one deserves special mention: Black Riot’s “A Day in the Life”, its nagging techno motif and “fee-eee-eel it” sample-riff essentially making it the first UK hardcore track.

 

 

reynolds talks about how terry's complete lack of inhibition in repurposing his / other people's musical ideas produced some really interesting results. more broadly, he points out that the whole 'sonic hooks as reusable memes' dynamic is a major way in which hip hop / NYC dance music influenced the UK rave scene. hadn't thought about it before but that has to be right.

this approach is probably frowned upon by some of watmm though. I mean, it's not a like a certain duo who are very popular here would ever take inspiration from it on their latest 8-hour album, right?

[Guest]

Don't know much about old stuff, sorry, but these guys are making really nice electro.

 

been thinking about stuff like this, in some ways it's the opposite of what the thread is about. seems so much 'underground' dance music these days that gets hyped on RA, etc. is like this: hipsters making very reverent imitations of music styles that developed probably before they were born. electro seems particularly susceptible to this, for some reason--maybe because it doesn't take a ton of effort to make something passably similar to the older stuff.

 

anyways I don't think their music is inherently bad or anything, it's just that when you have tons of people whose creative efforts amount to "retromania", things get kind of boring and stale. ironically, they imitate the style of 80s electro but completely lack the adventurous spirit that allowed it to develop in the first place.

 

edit: actually seems like they're more 90s drexciya influenced. which these days is even more cliche.