HIP HOP HISTORY
Eatmon sets the record straight
For Duke Eatmon, the pattern was set early. Very early.
His Afro-Canadian father and Native Canadian mother named him Duke Edward in an inversion of jazz giant Edward (Duke) Ellington. They also made a point of taking their son to concerts: He saw Chuck Berry in Atlantic City when he was two. (“My father put me up onstage with Chuck. I duckwalked with him.”) Shortly thereafter he saw James Brown at the Forum and again at Place des Arts, where the Godfather of Soul, faced with a police presence attempting to enforce a midnight curfew, said to the crowd: “There’s 12 of them and 3,000 of us, so when I say ‘Stand on up!’, what are you gonna do?”
Talking with the loquacious 48-year-old broadcaster, promoter, educator and proselytizer, the stories just keep on coming. It’s hardly a shock that he was named anglophone radio personality of the year last spring at the inaugural Montreal Gala Dynastie, the closing event of Black History Month.
On the day we met at a café on Mont-Royal Ave., his thoughts were partly occupied by preparations for the music column he does as part of CBC Montreal’s afternoon Homerun radio program: Malcolm Young of AC/ DC, jazz singer Della Reese, soul singer/producer Warren (Pete) Moore of the Miracles, and country singer Mel Tillis, who had died that week; Eatmon was getting set to pay on-air tribute to all of them.
Such Catholic tastes are a good cue for the reason we’re meeting: Eatmon’s central part in the research, compiling and writing of Chuck D Presents: This Day in Rap and Hip-Hop History (Black Dog & Leventhal, 342 pages, $38.99). Five years in the making, the fruit of a professional connection and friendship Eatmon formed with Public Enemy’s visionary leader in the late 1990s, the book is a crucial addition to the music’s literature, its historical scope visually enhanced by the participation of graphic artist Shepard Fairey, whose Hope poster of Barack Obama is one of the iconic images of the 21st century.
The years of the book’s purview, 1973 to the present, are a reminder that hip hop, for all its current pop culture hegemony, is still a relatively young form. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the music gained its initial foothold despite the best efforts of the music industry establishment to stifle it: MTV played rap videos only after labels threatened to withhold their white superstars’ product in protest, while the Grammys didn’t introduce a rap category for years, then declined for several more years to make the rap presentation a part of its televised ceremony.
“I’ll be honest, I thought it was a fad,” Eatmon said, recalling a period after the first rap wave of the late 1970s and early ’80s. “There was even a time that I stopped listening to it, but then I thought LL Cool J saved hip hop from its redundancy.
“Rap lyrics, up to that point, had been very sparse, but he brought so much more into it. But the constant braggadocio got kind of tiring. Then I heard Chuck’s voice, sounding almost like a rap version of Muddy Waters, in an afterhours club on Park Ave. called Checkers, in the spot that was later a McDonald’s. It was like a religious epiphany, bringing back a lot of the Black Power things that I’d been raised on. And then (De La Soul’s 1988 debut) 3 Feet High and Rising came out, and that opened a whole other door musically, with all the samples they were bringing in. It was like listening to the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix.”
Eatmon could go on, and indeed he did, riffing on hip hop history like the obsessive he is. It’s an enthusiasm that infuses the new book, a project conceived, he said, to fill a void.
Though there have been books that attempted an overview of hip-hop nation — Jeff Chang’s sociological history Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Shea Serrano’s The Rap Yearbook — no one had thought to apply the almanac approach.
“We were shocked during our marketing research to find that this kind of thing hadn’t been done,” Eatmon said.
Another spur, even if it arrived fairly late in the process, was provided in 2015 by Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, Peter Guralnick’s biography of the producer and label owner who discovered and nurtured Elvis Presley. That subtitle raised Eatmon’s hackles.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute here,’ ” he recalled. “I don’t want to happen to rap what happened to rock ’n’ roll. Elvis wasn’t the first (rock ’n’ roller), and Eminem didn’t invent hip hop. Chuck and I were determined that hip hop would be the first AfricanAmerican form not to have its origins rewritten. Do what you want with this music, build on it if you can, but know where it began.”
While accepting that the book has its inevitable occasional omissions, Eatmon expresses particular regret that much of the CanCon presence didn’t survive the editing stage.
“I don’t understand how Maestro (Fresh-Wes) could be left out, considering he had a big hit in the United States. Michie Mee, too, and CatBurglaz from Montreal. And Dubmatique, who might not have reached far beyond the francophone world, but still sold 100,000 copies. But you know, the book could have been like this,” he said, holding his hands apart to indicate something several times bigger.
Looking ahead, there’s every reason to expect future editions: this music isn’t about to dry up, as Eatmon is frequently reminded in his own West Island home. His teenage son introduced him to the work of future soul diva Janelle Monáe’s protégé Jidenna, whose Long Live the Chief Eatmon hails as the equal of anything from hip hop’s golden era. His daughter hipped him to North Carolina rapper J. Cole.
“My parents did it for me, and now my kids are doing the same,” he said. “It goes both ways generationally. Music transcends.”