IT’S HIP TOP
Evers’ special marks urban sound’s ascent
LISA EVERS remembers when hip-hop culture couldn’t get arrested. Or wait, maybe it could. Either way, Evers has put together a special Thursday for “Good Day, New York” (Fox/Ch. 5, 9-10 a.m.), celebrating the 40th anniversary of hip hop.
“Even up into the 1990s, people would tell me it was just thug music,” Evers says. “But look around today. It’s the dominant music in our culture.
“It’s black, white, every color. It’s multiracial. It’s international. It’s part of our language. It’s setting fashion trends.”
Yet for all its global reach, Evers notes, “It’s still the music of New York. It started here, and this is still the heart of it.
“Just listen around New York today. You’re hearing new styles, new sounds.”
Evers’ guests Thursday will include music historians and rappers like Biz Markie, Naughty by Nature, Black Sheep and Kool Herc, one of the artists who started it all in the early 1970s.
“That’s one of the amazing and great things about hip hop,” says Evers. “You go back to the Bronx in the ’70s, with house parties and basement clubs and DJs plugging turntables into lampposts.
“It was all about making do with what you had. That’s pure city, pure street. No matter what they throw at you, you survive and thrive.”
Hip hop has registered milestones over the years, and Evers will touch on both the good and the troubling.
“You can’t do this history without talking about the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur,” she says. “A lot of people thought that was the end.”
Evers suggests one key point of hip hop’s entry into mainstream culture was 50 Cent’s 2003 album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.”
“I remember interviewing him just before the album dropped,” says Evers. “You heard how articulate this guy was, how much he had to say.”
That didn’t surprise Evers, who for years has done a Sunday night show, “Street Soldiers,” on hip-hop radio station WQHT (97.1 FM, Hot-97).
Evers says hip-hop artists have disproved every negative stereotype about the music and the artists. “You look at the longevity of careers like Kanye West or Dr. Dre,” she says. “You look at how Diddy or Jay Z built up an empire.
“Or you look at the hip-hop artists who have become TV and movie stars, like Queen Latifah and Ice-T — or LL Cool J, who’s on one of the biggest shows on TV,” referring to “NCIS: Los Angeles.” She notes that none of the stars has run from his or her roots, most of which lie in New York.
“I was at [the Hot 97 annual] Summer Jam for Fox 5 a couple of years ago, and there was LL Cool J backstage,” Evers recalls. “He said he just liked to hang out.”
Just like hip hop, which has now been hanging out for four decades.