Democracy of Sound (34 page)

The uptick of piracy in the late 1980s resulted from both legal and technological changes. The United States received a wave of imported bootlegs from Europe due to a legal quirk—the so-called “protection gap” that allowed European copyrights to lapse on many recordings that were still protected in the United States. Previously unreleased Beatles recordings known as the Ultra Rare Trax series helped spark interest in imports upon their release in 1988.
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The eighties also witnessed the zenith of the easily recordable cassette’s popularity, as the vinyl LP declined and the music industry promoted the new compact disc. In New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities, vendors sold bootleg tapes on the street for half the price of a regular cassette. Rapper Joseph “Run” Simmons of Run-DMC reacted to sidewalk pirates in much the same way that Westerberg responded to bootlegs in a record shop: when a vendor set up shop right outside
the offices of his Manhattan record label, selling copies of the album
Back from Hell
a week before it was even released, Simmons exploded. “I just took it from him,” the rapper said. “He was taking money out of my pocket.”
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The Hip-Hop Mixtape as a Bootleg Medium

A pirate copy of
Back from Hell
was not the only place one might find Run’s voice. Starting in the 1970s, hip-hop DJs produced and distributed mixtapes—hodgepodges of recordings by various artists that circulated in the underground hip-hop scene of New York City. The initial tapes captured the unique combinations and sequences of borrowed sounds that DJs assembled in live performance, much as tapers documented the improvisation of the Grateful Dead. The pioneers of hip-hop used new media to disseminate music at the same time that rock fans developed their tape-trading communities. As Jeff Chang observed in his history of hip-hop:

Live bootleg cassette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash and Furious 5, the L Brothers, the Cold Crush Brothers and others were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folks across the city. The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long Island’s Black Belt. Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx once possessed all to itself.
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Such recordings were doubly bootleg. The tapes documented the performance of the DJs who played records at parties and the emcees who rhymed over the music—but they were also copies of the artists whose recordings were chopped up and recombined by the DJ. The result was a new mélange of music that could shade from one song to the next almost imperceptibly. In the process, the early performers of hip-hop were bootlegged even as the records they used were also bootlegged. What began as a local phenomenon of recreation and live entertainment became an art form in its own right, for the DJs who spun records as well as the vocalists who accompanied them. Word of hip-hop spread out of the Bronx—at first informally, in the form of bootleg “party tapes,” and later as mainstream entertainment, particularly with the success of the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 single, “Rapper’s Delight,” in which a trio rapped over a rhythm copied from the funk band Chic’s hit “Good Times.”
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Neither the Bronx nor any particular technology can be said to have spawned the musical innovations of hip hop. Sound systems, rapping, remixing—each had roots in the musical culture of Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, where the
genesis of reggae furnished the practices that would later evolve into hip-hop in New York City. The saga of sound systems began when Arthur “Duke” Reid set up a record player and a battery of speakers in his Kingston, Jamaica, liquor store, hoping to lure customers with the sounds of American R&B music. Reid loaded the system on to his truck and began winning fame and fortune by playing at parties around the country in the late 1950s.
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Reid used his profits to build a recording studio in 1964, and there a seminal cultural event occurred by accident three years later. Sound engineer Byron Smith forgot to add the vocal track to a recording of “On the Beach” by the Paragons, and Reid’s partner, Ruddy Redwood, played the disc at a party later that night. Redwood realized that they could use the instrumental track as a B-side for their records, instead of spending money on recording a whole new performance. Different singers subsequently performed over the same sounds, while DJs and sound engineers tweaked the track to make their own distinctive versions, leading to the spacey, producer-driven genre of music known as “dub,” made famous in the 1970s by eccentric personalities such as Lee “Scratch” Perry.
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These ways of reusing records migrated from Jamaica to New York—literally, as a twelve-year-old boy brought his experience with sound systems to the Bronx when his family moved there in 1967. The boy was Clive Campbell, who won fame DJing parties as Kool Herc in the early 1970s. Herc noticed that people particularly enjoyed dancing to the brief instrumental breaks in songs, where often only bass and drums remained in the mix. He realized he could prolong those portions of the songs by playing the two copies of the same record simultaneously, on two turntables; as a few seconds of rhythm ended on one record, he started from the beginning of the same passage on the other, building an ongoing beat out of one short segment of a recording. This method, known as the “Merry-Go-Round,” created the musical framework of hip-hop, providing an intense, repeating rhythm over which DJs and MCs would speak, shout, and rhyme.
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As other DJs copied and improved Herc’s techniques, some began to tape their performances. Grandmaster Flash started recording his live performances in 1973.
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Spinners such as Harlem’s Brucie Bee and the Bronx’s Starchild began recording their live performances and selling tapes of the sound collages they had created to promote their talent as DJs. Handwritten labels on cassettes often listed the occasion for the recorded sounds, such as “Doug E. Fresh Birthday Party, Vol. 1.”
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Some took cash for agreeing to shout out someone’s name on the mic during a night of spinning records. Whether sold or circulated for free, mixtapes helped build a DJ’s fame, bringing people out to his shows. Afrika Bambaataa’s mother gave him two turntables upon his high-school graduation, and the hip-hop pioneer made his debut mixing records at the Bronx River Community Center in November 1976. Bambaataa’s performances melded together sounds from diverse sources, beginning, for example, with the theme
music of TV’s
The Munsters
before blending in a James Brown recording or switching to the beat of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman.”
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The first hip-hop recordings formally released by record labels captured this playful recycling of music and other popular culture. Sugar Hill Records scored the breakthrough 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight” after co-owner Sylvia Robinson heard about a young man named Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, who managed several rappers in New York and was known to rap over bootleg hip-hop tapes at the New Jersey pizza parlor where he worked his day job. Jackson was also employed as a bouncer at several clubs in the Bronx. Svengali-style, Robinson recruited two other amateur rappers to record with Jackson; on the resulting single, which clocked in at fifteen minutes yet still became a huge radio hit, the trio was accompanied only by an imitation of Chic’s funk hit “Good Times,” already a live favorite of rappers and DJs when Robinson orchestrated the recording of “Rapper’s Delight.”
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The recording succeeded because it captured the zeitgeist of a critical moment: the pivot when hip-hop metamorphosed from live party music into a recorded art form. Many rappers and fans in New York wondered how an improvised, hours-long DJ performance could be compressed into the length of a regular disc or tape. In fact, “Rapper’s Delight” achieved almost unprecedented radio success for a track of its length, yet followers of the nascent hip-hop scene were more surprised that the music could actually be cut so
short
.
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The record’s content also embodied the difficulties of translating hip-hop to the studio. Over the years, numerous scholars and journalists incorrectly identified the instrumental accompaniment of the song as a direct sample from Chic’s recording, but Robinson insisted that her house band re-performed the rhythm of “Good Times” in the studio. Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the songwriters behind Chic, still sued Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records on the grounds that “Rapper’s Delight” violated their copyright for the written composition of “Good Times,” and they ultimately won songwriting credit for the hip-hop breakthrough that recreated their sound.
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The advent of digital samplers in the early 1980s soon made it easier to construct elaborate collages of recorded sounds, borrowing not just a song’s rhythmic break but also snatches of melody and other sound effects. One of the earliest digital samplers, the Emulator, was released in 1981 by E-mu Systems, a synthesizer manufacturer based in California. By storing and replaying small sections of recorded sound, the sampler allowed artists to “loop” a sound over and over—accomplishing what Herc had done manually with his turntables, and permitting the simultaneous layering of many different sounds.
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Bambaataa’s landmark 1982 recording “Planet Rock,” for instance, combined the synthesizer melody of “Trans Europe Express,” a recording by the German electronic group Kraftwerk, with the rhythm of Captain Sky’s 1978 funk hit “Super Sporm.” Starting with
the familiar hip-hop pattern of a repeating snatch of rhythm, producer and DJ Arthur Baker decorated the track with electronic video game–like noises and distorted voices that intoned, “Rock, rock with the Planet Rock,” as Bambaataa repeated the phrase “the rock it don’t stop,” producing a sound that was staccato, foreboding, and exuberant—an echo of the spontaneous concoction of sounds created by DJs and MCs in live performance.
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Most histories of hip-hop devote little space to the role of mixtapes in the development of the genre throughout its evolution. Bruce Bee, Starchild, and other mixtape pioneers are not easy to find in these works, as the narrative arc moves swiftly from the experiments of Herc to the mainstream success of “Rapper’s Delight,” and from the initial popularity of mid-1980s acts like Run-DMC to the rise of “gangsta rap” and the commercial empires of moguls such as Puff Daddy in the 1990s. The move is, thus, from the music’s modest but innovative birthplace in South Bronx parties to its acceptance and ultimate co-optation by established corporate interests in the music industry. As a persistent offshoot of rap’s disorganized origins, mixtapes do not figure prominently in this story. Journalists Jeff Chang and S. H. Fernando make occasional reference to the importance of bootleg tapes in spreading the word about innovative performances by Herc and Bambaataa, when the infant genre of hip-hop had not yet seen the inside of a recording studio. However, scholars, journalists, and filmmakers have recently begun to study the cultural influence of mixtapes in the wake of the more recent success of artists such as Funkmaster Flex, DJ Clue, and DJ Drama.

Mixtapes continued to be made in the intervening period, cultivating new talent and providing an outlet for experimentation in hip-hop as multimedia conglomerates began to exploit the profit potential of rap music, especially with its rising popularity in the 1980s and near-universal acceptance in the following decade. “While I was home it was only me, Kid [Capri], Star Child and Star Ski that I knew of,” Brucie Bee recalled. Brucie did a brief stint in prison, and when he got out the scene had changed. “When I came home in 1993 there was all these other D.J.s. It was Doo Wop, Triple Cee and Buck Wild.”
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Both mainstream commercial hip-hop and the New York mixtape market were booming. His friend Kid Capri won a record deal and issued his first official album, aptly titled
The Tape
, in 1991. In the same period when Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and other rappers found massive popular success, the
Village Voice
observed:

Mix tapes … have changed the soundscape of New York City in recent years.

Their fast-chat patter and aggressive shout-outs (‘Big up to my G’s from the Polo Grounds uptown! Big up to my real niggaz in Brooklyn!’) have become a striking element in the noisy urban mix Mayor [Rudolph] Giuliani wants to muffle.
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Indeed, B.I.G., or “Biggie,” secured a record deal after his own demo tape circulated among the editors of
The Source
magazine and executives at Uptown Records in 1992.
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Originally rare documents of fleeting performances, the tapes gradually became commodities that circulated outside the scope of copyright law, an adjunct to the urban economy of parties and live performance. They were one piece of a larger complex of jobs and businesses that New York youth created for themselves, whether it meant starting a record label, getting a record deal, mixing music at clubs and parties, or selling bootleg tapes on the street. “Hip hop has … created a lot of jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist,” Kool Herc argued in 2005.
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Scholars have sometimes romanticized the idea of sampling and mixing as natural responses to conditions of poverty, yet DJing and producing hip-hop tracks were hardly cheap enterprises.
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It could be as simple as the two turntables and a speaker used by Herc in the early 1970s, but successful artists started small and reinvested their earnings in technology. An E-mu sampler in 1986 cost at least $2,745.
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“‘They were too poor to get instruments.’ Yeah, right,” said DJ Kool Akiem of the Micranots in 1999. “They were too poor for classes.… Man, those samplers were [expensive] back then! I mean, you gotta have money, some way, to put your studio together … I mean deejaying, if you’re serious, you’re gonna have to spend a thousand dollars on your equipment. But then every record’s ten bucks. Then you got speakers and blah, blah, blah.”
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