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in the Day
By
Erik Hage
Yes
Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s
First Decade
Edited by Jim Fricke and
Charlie Ahearn • Da Capo Press, 224 pages, $25
In
the canon of hiphop books, Yes Yes Y’all assumes the
role of Old Testament—or more precisely, the book of Genesis.
Depending on how you look at it, the Bronx in the mid-’70s
was either the least likely or the most likely place for the
seeds of a musical revolution. (Perhaps as likely a breeding
ground for hiphop as late ‘60s Detroit was for the proto-punk
fury of the Stooges and the MC5.) The borough, the condition
of which was immortalized in the film Fort Apache: The
Bronx, had all the devastating proportions of Dickens’
London, and then some. High infant-mortality rates, malnutrition,
abandoned buildings, rampant violence, drug abuse, civic corruption,
and ludicrously high concentrations of residential fires were
facts of life.
Into
this landscape crept the first shadows of a movement that
has thoroughly saturated our culture and become, in fact,
a global phenomenon. Yes Yes Y’all deals only with
the earliest formative years. In fact, it ends where old-school
begins, with the advent of Def Jam Records and artists such
as Run-DMC and LL Cool J. (To put it more succinctly: The
artists covered in these pages were in the game before there
was money to be made at it.) The volume is an oral history,
with such important innovators as Grandmaster Flash, Afrika
Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc and countless others giving voice
to the movement. This format works well: Hiphop is, after
all, an intensely verbal idiom. (In an oft-quoted statement
in the late ‘80s, Public Enemy’s Chuck D predicted it would
become “a Black CNN,” and while current artists such as Nelly
and Eminem may have diverged from that blueprint, socially
conscious groups like the Roots have certainly kept the mission
afoot.)
In dealing so thoroughly with a period that is largely unfamiliar
to the commercial public, and by allowing those who rose up
from the street with the movement to narrate that history,
Yes Yes Y’all fulfills a valuable need in hiphop scholarship.
And it’s not unreasonable to say that there has been a dearth
of decent books about hiphop. David Wallace and Mark Costello
made an early stab at it with 1990’s Signifying Rappers,
a highly academic tome in which two ultra-educated white
guys explored their own affinity for the genre. The volume,
set up as a “sampler,” offered such pithy insights as “The
MC’s Alice Toklas-esque DJ hovers ever nearby over his buffet
of connected turntables.” (So would Run be Gertrude Stein?)
It also gloried in such ham-fisted observations cloaked in
deconstructionist gobbledygook as “The rhetorical relation
of Part to Whole symbolizes (and so captures!) all too well
rap’s multileveled superiority to late-70s Punk. A synecdoche
is a part so powerful symbolically as to be eligible for the
conceptual absorption, containment, and representation of
what it’s Part of.” Next.
For 1999’s The Vibe History of Hip-Hop, editor Alan
Light yoked together a bunch of decent essays from a variety
of writers. That volume, while insightful, wasn’t cohesive
enough to serve as a proper “history.” Not surprisingly, the
best work of its ilk was 1999’s Hip-Hop America by
Nelson George, who has remained the finest hiphop writer across
three decades. In that book, George, who actually provides
the intro to Yes Yes Y’all, serves up frank and insightful
analysis along with history, often wrestling with his own
mixed feelings about hiphop culture.
To its credit, Yes Yes Y’all doesn’t try to match that
accomplishment. In fact, there’s nary a mention of the artists
that dominated the genre from the late ’80s on. Editor Jim
Fricke, who is curator of the Experience Music Project’s Hip-Hop
Nation exhibit, has sculpted the commentary from a vast
array of players into a compelling narrative, allowing juxtapositions
and contradictions in memory or opinion to remain in place
and fuel the conversation. Many of the people giving voice
to the history were obscure and commercially unsuccessful;
in fact, many weren’t even rappers or MCs, but graffiti artists
and b-boys. In this way, the old adage about victors writing
history crumbles, as does the idea of a written history and
its problematical relationship to “Truth.” The multiple views
in Yes Yes Y’all are its prime strength: It is a single
history that emerges from numerous contexts.
Reading the book, one can feel the urgency in the voices.
These folks have had 20 to 30 years to think about their early
roles and to observe hiphop’s subsequent permutations and
growth into a corporate behemoth. And they have a lot to say,
much of it downright astute. (With occasional exceptions,
such as Grandmaster Flash on the mechanics of early rapping:
“I’ll take a sentence that hopefully the whole world knows:
‘Eeny meeny miny mo, catch a piggy by the toe.’ So they devised
it where Cowboy might say ‘Eeny Meeny’ and then Creole would
say, ‘Miny,’ and then Mel would say ‘Mo.’”)
For those unfamiliar with hiphop’s infancy, there is much
to be learned in these pages. For instance, the movement’s
initial focus was the DJ, and it took a while before MCs were
added and then, eventually, brought out front. Many may also
be surprised to learn that female MCs were prominent as early
as the late ’70s, with the Funky 4 + 1’s Sha-Rock an early
pioneer. DJs also rapidly developed during this time. Grandmaster
Flash was the first to cut a breakbeat back and forth, while
his protégé Grand Wizard Theodore invented scratching and
perfected the craft of dropping the record needle directly
on the breakbeat. One of Bambaataa’s major contributions was
his unrestricted approach to record collecting; his use of
early Kraftwerk albums not only kicked off his well-known
Planet Rock phase, it anticipated subsequent developments
in techno music.
A collection of remarkable photos and artwork rounds out the
story. Photo editor Charlie Ahearn has the volume bursting
at the seams with previously unseen photographs and flyers.
All of this amounts to one of the better hiphop books to emerge
in recent memory, with the publication’s narrow scope actually
one of its greatest attributes. I’ll take this one over the
recently released and much-publicized Hip-Hoptionary.
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