‘It was freaking bananas!’: rap luminaries on the defining moments from 50 years of hiphop
DJ Spinderella on the ‘community spirit’ of block parties
I must have been only five or six when I attended my first block party in the mid 1970s. I was riding on my big wheel bike and from behind the handlebars I looked in awe at these turntables that were out the front of my high-rise, building number nine of the Pink Houses projects in Brooklyn. The power leads went all the way up through a window to an apartment on the fifth floor. The turntables belonged to this crew called the Together Brothers. It was like one big free party – all the adults were dancing and partying, smiling, drinking alcohol.
Hip-hop was this new sound, so it wasn’t being played in clubs yet. The block was our club, and the whole hood would come out to dance. Later on, the block parties and the jams in the five boroughs turned into shootouts. You had people messing up the vibe! But in the beginning, it was all about community spirit.
I didn’t start DJing properly until I joined Salt-N-Pepa in 1985. One day I was in maths class, the next I was spinning on our first world tour. I remember the men used to say I couldn’t spin properly and was only there because of my looks, but I didn’t need my looks to get the party rocking! Salt-N-Pepa wasn’t just about having fun, but empowering women too, and I guess I was one of the first visible female DJs in the mainstream. Those block parties were the start of something special.
DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill on the arrival of the E-mu Sp-1200
Once Marley Marl started sampling, it really flipped the whole rap game on its head and created this new artform.
Even if I only had $20 to my name, I would go to the 99 cent van and buy 20 records to sample, based on how cool the artwork looked. That’s the beautiful thing about sampling: the sense of discovery. It made us appreciate hip-hop’s roots in blues, jazz, soul, and funk.
Everyone was sampling James Brown, so the challenge was digging deep in the crates so you could find something new. Back then you weren’t allowed to sound like anyone else. If Cypress Hill sounded the same as NWA we would have been booed off the stage! You couldn’t dress like anyone else or use their slang either.
It was the arrival of the SP-1200 in 1987 that changed things. You might have a jazz song that’s 14 minutes long and there’s a one-second chord change that sounds really special. With the SP-1200 you could extend and loop that one moment until it becomes this whole other musical world. Me, Alchemist and Madlib might all hear the same song, but be inspired by different sections and each use different samples. That’s the beauty of the sample. When you found the perfect sample and flipped it into something new, it was like discovering a piece of gold! For rap producers it remains the best feeling in the world.
DJ Shadow on the power of the first Def Jam Tours
The Def Jam Tour was hitting Oakland, which was about a 90-minute drive away. I told my parents I would do all the household chores for two months if they let me go. It was 1988 and I was only 14. It was also a school night, but I really laid it on thick to the point where they had no choice but to say yes.
I had become obsessed with hiphop a few years prior when I heard The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five on the radio; it sounded like the truth in musical form. I recorded it on cassette. What I really loved was the mysteriousness of the DJs. On Run DMC’s album artwork you never saw Jam Master Jay, but it made him feel like this magician or director who was pulling the strings from the shadows. That’s why I called myself DJ Shadow.
We never made it to the show, as my mentor Oras Washington’s car kept breaking down. We did make it to the afterparty, though, which was held at a Holiday Inn next to a freeway. There I met EPMD and Chuck D and Flava Flav, who previewed Public Enemy’s Rebel Without a Pause to everybody on his boombox. A fight broke out, so Oras