A Geek History of Time - Episode 207 - The History of Hip Hop with Dr. Manuel Rustin Part I

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

You know, Stalin and the Nazis were these welfare state types. One of us is a stand-up comic. Can you tell me it is? Ladies and gentlemen, everyone, brick. Um. But the problem. Oh my god. That's like, I could use that to teach the whole world. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha 1.5-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1- This is a K-3 of crime.

Where we connect to your green to the real world, I know you've had a lot, so I'm just going to do this teacher here in Northern California. And as far as what's been going on in my life lately, I have had the opportunity now to start playing in the new D&D campaign that I mentioned in earlier episodes that was getting started up. And I had forgotten how how how smoothly Roll 20 can make things go when you choose to use it as a tool. I'm not getting paid by

Roll 20 to say this yet, although I realize that might be a direction I need to reach out. But yeah, it went it went very well. Differences in DMing style are a thing. It took probably an hour and a half for our new my new partner DM to kind of get his feet under him. But yeah, we're having a lot of fun and I'm happy to report that's going pretty well. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a US history and soon to be done with it Latin teacher here up in Northern California at the high school level. Matter of fact, I gave my final Latin lesson last week on Latin conditionals. What's cool is in English, we have to use tone of voice to communicate

the impossibility of something. Look, if you grew wings, you could fly. Absolutely intoning that it's impossible for you to grow wings spontaneously and then immediately back for it enough and flying. But if you punch me, I will punch you, is much more tonally like that will happen, right? Yeah. And Latin, They do it through the grammar which is fantastic like by tense and by mood You can get to oh they clearly mean this sarcastically So when liby writes for three chapters of what would have happened to Alexander would have turned left instead of right He's like well if he would have turned left we would have kicked his ass in, there's no way the dude could have won. So I gave that lesson the other day. Yeah. And then tonight, actually, my son and my daughter and I, we all sat down and watched a documentary

on Cheetahs, as you know, my son loves the animals. Yeah. And afterwards, of course, the Cheetah's biggest problem turns out to be humans and who are effect on the environment. And he went to bed of kind of depressed. And I said, I'll tell you what, man, why don't you ask your science teacher, you'll have your science teacher on Tuesday and say, hey, is there any way that, are there any resources you could give me so that I could make it so that humans could be less of assholes to nature? And he looked at me, I'm like, okay, don't ask that way. But that's, the specificity of wording is important here. Maybe don't quote me. But at the same time, there's a part of me that really wants them to do that. So, well, yeah. As a middle school teacher, how would you react to that?

Again, the world's sweetest child has proven by science. Yeah. Yeah. No, as we all say, Mr. Blaylock, is there a way that could be we could be less of assholes to each other? What would you do with that? I would, I would assume that that's, that's, that's a phrase's a phraseology that is acceptable in the child's home. Okay. And if it wasn't in open classroom circumstances.

No, I have more hopes. Yeah, if it was if it was if it was one on one, it'd be like, well, all right, here's here's some ways we can be less that way. If it was in open court, as it were, there'd have to be a moment of, well, let's let's watch our phrasing about that one a little bit because, you know, we're in school and we need to use more academic language than that. But okay. And that and that'd be about it. Like I'm only I'm a I'm really only going to ding a kid for for that of language if they're using it as a weapon against another kid. Sure. You know, if they're calling another kid an asshole.

All right. You know, but... Pull it back. Yeah. I had a kid ask me just before the pandemic when I did my lecture on the British East Indies company. So really, these people are assholes. Exactly. Exactly. Pretty much.

I'm not allowed to say it that way in front of the room, but yes. Right. Now I do. Yeah. Well, yeah, you unlike me have permanent status. Also true. Also true. So we have in here, actually, with us, I guess, who very politely has just been kind

of nodding at our stupidity. We have a gentleman I used to work with a thousand years ago, but now has gone on to do great things. He's got his own podcast. Oh, also he's got an advanced graduate degree. Ladies and gentlemen, here too, talk to us tonight about the history of hip hop is Dr. Manuel Rustin. What's going on?

What's going on? So happy to be here with y'all. Happy to politely nod my head at all the cuteness of the middle schoolers and little ones. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, it's been a minute. We started out teaching and that was like a peak no child left behind. Early mid 2000s. Yeah, most learning communities as a goal. Yes, yes, a lot, a lot. But now I'm down here in the Los Angeles area and I teach ethnic studies and and let's see, I'm teach at the alma mater of Jackie Robinson and Octavia Butler and Ronnicking and a lot of really notable people and I'm loving it. It's good to see you. Nice, you too, you too. Very good to have you here. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Thank you. Last time we talked, it was about union stuff because we were talking about the discussion to go back and how some of you were actually keeping students safe. And that was, yeah, I think that, yeah, that should mark the time for us as far as how long ago that was because we've all been back. Yes indeed. Yeah. So you I remember when we taught together, there's a student that you taught who then became friends with me as an adult, who is now a professional wrestler. Yeah. Which is so many levels of awesome.

He's also been a champion on my pun tournament. I did not know that. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And my daughter actually borrowed a phrase from Ed from this podcast to critique his outfit in the ring. She said, wow, that looks like sparkly murder gymnastics. Wow.

The result has been, he has sparkled up his shoes and he said that has given me a direction to take this character. So there's this real weird vortex going on here. Yeah. Wow. But so he actually went on to do a lot of DJ work too, DJ Blacklight and his own, he's produced his own, I think two albums as well as his own single that is pretty good.

I've played that for my students a number of times, but he did that partly because he was inspired by a class that you taught at the time, which was, it was it the history of or introduction to hip hop? It was a little bit of all that. It started off of, we were already making music after school. I had some recording equipment. As advisor for the BSU, our fundraiser at the time was to make student mix tapes, where students were making their own songs and selling the CDs as a fundraiser for the Black Student Union. And eventually, I think we had some grants or some after school thing came to our campus and they were looking for after school stuff to offer and I was already doing that but it

needed to be a little more formalized and so it became a class and I think I called it not, I don't think, I little more formalized. And so it became a class. And I think I called it, not I don't think, yeah, I called it hip hop in America. So it was a little bit of studying the history of hip hop and also, you know, contributing to the legacy of hip hop by making our own stuff. So yeah, that's me. I borrowed that model later on because we had an after school program. At that point, I'd got turned into something called assets, which is after school, safety, educational, something or other. I always, if it's more than three letters, I'd got turned into something called assets, which is after school safety, educational, something or other.

If it's more than three letters, I tend to lose most of what comes at the end, which is funny, given my inability to pronounce French. But I did comic books in America. And so taught them a history of comic books and the theory of comic books and in a way that, you know, for an after school program. So very much worked out, you know. But and the end result was they produced their own comic books. So nice.

Yeah. So, but we've talked a lot about comic books here. We actually a while back talked about punk rock here, and I realized there's another type of music that I do not, I honestly don't know much about any other music either come to think of it. So we may well have a bluegrass person come on in about, you know, a month and two months or something, but because of that, I wanted to bring in people who already have experienced teaching about music. And so you're here tonight to teach us the history of hip hop in America, presumably. So yeah, for so off that syllabus and tell us what you know. Yeah, so I can only assume that this is partially because we are this year celebrating the 50th

anniversary of the start of hip hop. Are you talking about the New York blackout? Well, actually, I mean, that was around the time, but that same here. But yeah, this marks 50 years of hip hop. And for there to be like a real definite, like a greed upon start date or start time, really a start date like this specific date, August 11, 1973, let's just know that something really, really special happened on that one day that is like, that have many witnesses, many of whom, most of whom are still around to tell about it. And that's one really beautiful aspect of Okay Poppins.

It's so young, like 50 years is, I mean, these folks who made it are still around talking about that, that faithful night. So, seeing how much has happened within the, within the music and, in 50 years, it's really wild. But, but yeah, we know where it started. I, I presume when I say we, I mean, those of us here on this podcast, please don't do them actually. Yeah. I like that. I like that. So like a good teacher. So me being a, you know, 19 year or 20 year classroom that it's important to start with a bit of a pre pre-quiz pre-assessment to kind of see where we're folks are at. So we know that story set. Yeah, there we go. So do we know what city it started in? I'm going to say in one of the five burrows of New York, because I connected it to the New York blackout. On off the top of my head, I want to say Brooklyn, but I could be thinking of run DMC, which is no, but they weren't Brooklyn. I don't know who I'm thinking

of, but anyway, yeah, they were Hollis Queens. Yeah, and you know, I'm a West Coast person. I mean, I know both the artwork here on the West Coast. So my New York geography had always been fuzzy until like I really don't even to hip hop. But it started in the South Bronx. And actually, that's really important because when I teach this to students, part of it is like what happened the night

it got invented so-called because like what made it so different than everything else. But also like why the Bronx, like who are these folks, these teenagers who created this and how did they end up in that spot. So when I teach this to really anybody, you know, I kind of approach it, you're Latin teacher. Was that story structure where you start like right in the middle of action and then it takes you back to the beginning, like N,

Midi as Rez or something like that. Yeah, and we're just teacher and media rest. Yes, there you go. 100%. So I teach like that. So we start with August 11th, 1973 and then we wind it back to the 1950s like how the hell did did all these folks go to be so in any case long story short August 11th, 1973, teenagers through party to raise some funds for some back to school clothes and this party famously took place at a apartment complex at 15 15 20 seduic app which the city was going to demolish some years back but folks organized to preserve it as a historical landmark. But in any case the DJ at that party his name is Clive Campbell but folks knew him as cool Herc, Herc short for Herculees,

because he was a pretty buff dude. He was trying hard to be a successful DJ, and this was the disco era, and like anybody who's really trying to master their craft, he really studied the impact that his different records had on the audience, and really tried to maximize the peak of audience's enjoyment. So at the time disco funk records, they would have a breakdown section that like for whatever reason and I still don't understand why, but the breakdown section where the beat really simplifies and it really emphasizes the percussion,

that's the part that drove everybody wild. So that's the part that had everyone running to the dance floor doing the wildest moves and those breakdown sections usually were pretty short 15 seconds to maybe a minute times and then the rest of the band comes in and then and all that and then folks are kind of like chill out. So he noticed that the breakdown was everybody's favorite part. to kind of like chill out. So he noticed that the breakdown was everybody's favorite part. But extending the breakdown, trying to maximize that with a turntable is something that he didn't know how to do, no one really knew how to do. So he got a second turntable. And usually only at that time, only like the really big disco clubs had DJs that have multiple turntables to like transition

between song to song, but these little teenage parties, like they have one turn table and there'd be a little gap of silence while they, you know, changed the records or whatever. So he got a second one and timed it out to be able to take two of the exact same record. So he got two copies of the exact same song. And while one break was happening on one turn table, he was timing up that same break to start on the second turn table and switching back and forth. So he called it the merry go round technique. So what happened is instead of just 15 to 30 seconds

of a breakdown, it could extend for however long he could keep up his energy to do that. So as he's got one coming forward. He can pull the other one back to start back up and and he's hearing both beats in his ears. So he's able to match him right on the right spot. And then I had a CD skip like this once and it extended a a drum solo on a nine inch nail song called the perfect drug and it extended it just perfectly for an extra 30 seconds and everybody was like, Oh my God, this is a great cover. Where'd you find this? I'm like,

I literally just scratched, but, but same idea, um, just mine was purely accidental. But I'm glad you brought up funk as well because I know that disco was really big in the 1970s, but also in that era, you had a lot of funk and a lot of costumery and things like that. And I was thinking about how, because I always go back to pro wrestling, how it chased stadium in Chicago in the mid 1970s, where they had also had this huge, and this is several years later, but they had this huge, a huge match where Hogan fought Andre for the first time, and body slammed him, turns out that happened

before WrestleMania three. But they had this huge thing at Shay Stadium where they did the death of disco, and it was a DJ from a local radio station in Chicago and they blew up a bunch of disco records, you see, because they hated disco and all that. And I was like, wow, these Midwesterners really don't like disco. Why is that?

And I started looking at like all the pictures and the videos of people dancing disco. And it was very much influenced by other types of music. And I also noticed that in addition to the massive amount of cocaine that people were enjoying at the time, it was largely queer, black, and brown music. It was seen as such. And then white people would dip in and dip out, probably to do a key lump and then take off again. But so I'm noticing that you're having these very

what sort of I'm looking for outwardly and unapologetically black and brown musical influences coming into play. And then as you were saying, they were looking to demolish a building that later got me into a landmark. At the time of massive urban blight was starting to be a real term that was being used. We talked about that in the Punisher episode. Yeah, so it makes a lot of sense that funk would have also been in there and you've got that ostentosity going on

within the music. Ostentatiousness? I guess. Yeah, okay. Okay. And that really stuck around until run DMC, run DMC sort of epitomized the stripped down. Yes. Yeah. All black, just some adidas. Yeah. All right. But yeah, that night. So in doing what he did, too largely disco and funk and

doing what he did to largely disco and funk in. The young kids, these were all like, 15, 16, 17 year olds. Cool Harco was a little bit older. It was his sister's back to school party. So he was just a DJ for her, but they called it breaks. So the breakdown was just known as the break. So his beats, his ability to put all these breaks together or to extend a break for however long. That

became known as a break beat and the dancers who danced to that were break dancers. And which is what made us so special was, I mean nobody had heard these breakdowns extend for so long. So like the way people reacted to it, it was just like their minds were blown to hear this. And on top of that, he was also a really brilliant, curious young person. So his DJ equipment was louder than everybody else's because he took his dad's home. What did they call him back in the day? They didn't call him home theater systems at the time, but... Or like his high-systemer. His, you know, the big, they were technically they're sure public address PA columns, but just, you know, the big towers, big towers,

these speakers that are like, you know, a four feet tall or whatever. So he took those and opened them up and rewired them to get rid of the whatever electronic limitation was placed in there, so the speakers went below. So he's where able to get louder and have more bass and actually he picked that up from growing up in Jamaica because he was an immigrant.

He came from Jamaica, he had Caribbean roots and in the Caribbean, really big part of Caribbean culture are these outdoor parties with booming, booming sound systems. So that's what he was used to. So the combination of these breakbeats and having the best salving system on the block or in the neighborhood made these parties like to go to event.

But the thing is, it takes a lot of concentration to create a breakbeat, to time it and to keep going back and forth. And there's a whole party going on. So you need somebody to manage the crowd, something while he was locked into what he was doing with his marigold round technique. So his buddy, Copa Larak, who's there at that first time that

co-herk did this, picked up the habit of being on the microphone and speaking to the crowd and joking with the crowd, calling out his friends and then putting together these small little rhymes and eventually that evolves to break beats with somebody on a microphone dazzling the crowd and that is like the creation of hip hop. So the first time that folks witnessed it happen live was August 11th, 1973, but the next six years after that, it spread like wildfire throughout the Bronx and folks were having outdoor parties. This first one was in his apartment complex, but after that, he took it outside, you know, would take over parks, plug the systems into light posts, and

it just took off. So let me, let me ask you a couple things. There are number one. Is this where we see the beginning of the MC and the DJ. So you got the master of ceremonies, running things on the mic, and then the DJ performing the music for you. 100%, 100%. And at the time it sounds like the MC was ancillary and supportive to the DJ. It was the music that mattered,

not necessarily the lyrics lyrics were, hey, I'm going to riff right now to keep everybody going. Yeah, absolutely. And there's famously, you know, a name is that anybody could search up online of like, they, the party flier for that particular party, it was on an index card. You know, it's just scribble scratch. They just took a bunch of index cards and wrote the information or whatever.

And it's a DJ cool, hurt party. And at the bottom, it's like featuring and has like all his buddies in Coke, LaRocca's one of them. His name is just Coke, go on that index card. But it took some time before the MC became the main event. It was actually they were behind the DJ for quite a few years. Wow. And then the next question is, they've got these parties

in the park and you said they plugged in How did the municipal authorities react to these? I assume unpermitted parties Um, I mean was there even an infrastructure? Yeah, was there even an infrastructure to throw at them? Uh or or to uh to buy into or like how did how did the municipal authorities respond to this? And that's why it's so important that this started in the Bronx. What the Bronx was experiencing in the 70s is a story that goes back to the 40s and

50s, but the Bronx was Jeffrey Chang. He was a professor at UC Berkeley, author of Canstop Won't Stop, which is like the definitive history of hip hop. He refers to the Bronx at that time as a necropolis, like a city of death. If you Google, if you just Google Bronx in the 1970s, like the images you see, it looked like a war zone at the time, folks were calling it Bay Root,

because I was the big conflict at the time. But, you know, and I could definitely go into why it was like that. But it was absolutely neglected and forgotten and left behind. There's a memo to Richard Nixon, basically saying that the efforts that the municipal government and national government were making to try to provide resources for the Bronx, this, that, whatever, were too expensive and really weren't making a dent. And if these people in the Bronx are going to destroy their own property and have all this violence anyways, you might as well pool resources.

And that was, you know, turned be nine neglect. So be nine and leave just neglecting the area and letting it crumble on its own. And on that memo, he writes, you know, see his handwriting says, I agree. And then they start shutting down fire stations. They shut down seven fire stations, even though the Bronx was suffering from a massive wave of arson. They're some folks, both of them.

I was gonna say, most of that arson was the owner of those buildings collecting on insurance, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Something like 30,000 fires over the span of a couple years when hip hop was created. 30,000 in any city. I know the Bronx is massive. I don't know, maybe folks don't realize how massive it is. It's massive, but 30,000 fires set largely by slum lords and other real estate investors who would rather collect insurance money than try to upkeep and actually do right

by the people there. So they would pay local gangs to go in and set these fires. So yeah, as far as someone coming around to say you can't plug in into this freaking light post man The block is burning like the bronzer's burning. That's you know oftentimes this area is this this time period is referred to as the bronzer's burning Which is based off of World Series broadcast. There was a Yankee game happening a world series in it The camera pans out and you can see the Bronx and you see all these fires everywhere The announcer out I'll remember who was on the call that night, but he says, and the Bronx is burning. So ever since then, that air has been known

as the Bronx is burning. So wild. But yeah, that's like when the time you're talking about too, is the what's his name, Lindsay and beam, I think, were the two mayors that handed off power, I think, right around, it was probably in December or January of that year. But so you've got two mayors who are kind of do nothings?

Because you get basically the LaGuardia era, right? And then you get some forgetables where basically the the port authority runs the whole city and uh, God Moses, what's his name? Uh, yes. Robert Moses just screws everybody out of being able to get to the beach, if they're black, and by building bridges lower. It's straight up just like, oh, or make it so the buses can't go there. And then, and creates all the subway stuff that we see now, like, because they never did anything after that, really. And then, and it's right before the Ed Koch era. So it's like this, this era of just like you said, benign neglect, I would certainly call it neglect.

I don't know. I don't know if I'd qualified is I think the people who were doing it wanted to call it benign to cover their own, cover their own moral failing, but yeah. But they are two of the more forgettable guys when it comes to like, you know, big city mayor personality types. And they kind of just let the technocrats puff up different places. You know, there was a, there was a, what do you call a real estate developer, who was really focusing everybody's attention on Queens and then his son also on Manhattan.

And, you know, so they got to get away with a lot of stuff. Yeah. And that's why when I engage students with this learning, that's why we start in, you know, at that party, but we wind it back to see how the hell the Bronx got that way in the first place. Like, how did it get this bad? And how did this room full of black Puerto Rican, Jamaican, teenagers, like, you know, what brought them there? Because then if you go even further back and look at what the Bronx looked like, you know, in the 20s and 30s, you see white people everywhere. So it's like, okay, how does none of this, it doesn't just magically happen. So hip hop is a wonderful entry way

to try to study like, okay, like what exactly was going on that led to this faithful night. And so then we whited back and learn about, Robert Moses and Cross-Bronze Expressway and Whitefly and Leviton and Rachel House and Covenant and all the things that hyper-se neighborhoods and all that right and then and then we get back to cool Herk and then we go forward into the 80s when things didn't they didn't get better so

Okay, so that's got us in 1973 I'm a lawyer alert. Yeah. Yeah. So that's got us in 1973. I believe the Punisher comes around right around that same time, where, and you get your guardian angels, I think, get going as well, where a lot of people are, you know, we're going to take back this city. And it's like, like, there's a part of me is like, well, if the police aren't doing what

they said that they should do, then perhaps the distance should step up, but it is interesting specifically who is doing these things and you start to get movies like Death Wish and shit like that, where it's a lot of white rage at what they consider to be the cause of urban light, which is apparently Jeff Goldblum and Lawrence Fishburn, yeah, half shirts. Yeah, But I'm sorry I got stuck on the image of Goldblum wearing a half shirt that yeah, wait, what? Okay, and it was mesh too. So, oh, because of course it was because this is 78, 77. Yeah, well, there were so many different, well, yeah, I mean, the death wish film. Yeah, but I think, yeah, the one with him

was I think in the late 70s, yeah. And then you get a very hairy, right? The TV series, or the movie Warriors, which was about the blackout. And shockingly, there's just a gang of white guys trying to get to get home. And, you know, the gang of white guys trying to get get to get home and you know, the danger of baseball clowns.

So. Well, I mean, you can't ever be too vigilant about the dangers of baseball clowns. I just want to make sure we all actually the ones on roller skates. Yeah, mobile. Terrifying. So just trying to get to Coney Island, man. Yeah. All right. So, uh, carriers forward, uh, tell us more. We'll just interrupt with real non-secwaters that have

nothing to do with much of anything. But that is, when you said long story short, I almost stopped with like, do you know what we do here? Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, obviously so much more to it. And, you know, Coke LaRoc takes credit for being the first person to be what we consider a MC to create wrapping in the style. But there's other folks who say they were the first. And, you know, there's multiple parties happening. And then, and then the, this, that, that actual technique, that vocal technique of spoken word poetry goes away before a cool hurricane and some trace it all back to Africa and African Grille to where the storytellers and oral tradition.

But in any case, so for the first six years of its existence, hip hop was you had to be there to hear it. It was all live performance. They weren't in a studio. They weren't recording under this in any kind of real way. So you had to be at these parties and it's really specific to the Bronx. So even folks right across the water in Queens, they were hearing about this at first, but it was quite a while until they actually experienced it because it was so dangerous. Like the Bronx itself was so dangerous. Black, my black neighborhood, my neighborhood that, you know, if you didn't know somebody, it's, you know, similar in a lot of ways to parts of L.A. In the 90s, like if you didn't know somebody from that neighborhood, you weren't going through that neighborhood to get to any party, like forget about it. So it took about six years before it finally was taken into a music studio

to be recorded. So for those first six years, rumors were swirling about this new hip hop stuff, and people have really low quality cassette tapes that they would try to record the party that's happening and all that. And then... Sorry to cut you off, but were they referring to it as hip hop that early? And that's another another part of the story that's like it kind of depends on who you ask. Most folks who are actually there weren't calling it hip hop. The phrase hip hop picked up a lot after the first recording of it because that phrase comes up in the recording. So it's one of those things where like maybe it kind of got that official label once it started being commercialized and profited off of.

But yeah, the folks at the time, they were, I have to have it really come across any like single word for what was happening. These were cool hurt parties, these were break B parties. Certainly folks were calling it hip-hop parties, folks were rapping, but it wasn't anything like any formal. That's the one thing, that's it right there, especially since it was changing so much. The verses, what the MCs were doing, became much more more complex and actual groups forming of different MCs who would battle each other and all that. So yeah, and then somebody thought, huh, Chiching, there's a way to make money off of this. And a record is that basically rounded up some youngsters from the New York area, area

because the key guys were actually from New Jersey and wanted to try to create one of these types of songs that she had heard. Her nephew talking about and the first recorded hip-hop song. You've definitely heard it. You might not know like on a quiz what was the first recorded hip-hop song, but you might actually you might, but you definitely heard it. Any guesses? I'm going to say those are the breaks. Um, any guesses? I'm going to say those are the breaks. Ah, uh, uh, uh, that came soon after, very soon after. Okay. Um, but not rappers delight by the whole game. See, I didn't, didn't jump in soon enough.

I was the guy with the sweater, right? In front of people who are on risers. I've seen a video at least. There's a couple of different videos in the video. The like music video that I show students is one where the like had a pool party. It's like DJ set and nobody's dancing on beat. It's clear that the models in the video have no idea what's happening. They've never heard nothing like this.

They didn't really know what like do you dance to someone talking on a mic. Because to them, you're just talking and rhyme or whatever. It's very awkward and hilarious video. But in any case, yeah, so these three teenagers hopped on, the most popular breakbeat at the time was from the song Good Times. And the most popular break was from the song Good Times. So they had a band come in and recreate that part of the song and just keep playing it. So this wasn't quite a sample, but it's highly illegal, like, you know,

definitely copyright infringement or whatever. Right. So the band just played it, the same loop, same loop. And these three teenagers just took turns getting on the mic and nobody knew what to do or how to stop. Back then these were not hip-hop songs, these were party's events. So the break beats and the performances would go 15, 20, 30 minutes. If you watch the film Wild Style, which is an early hip-hop film that really documents what this look like,

like folks are just wrapping to the same beat for a long time. So this first, the uncut version of rappers' delight is 15 minutes long before they stop. And of course then they cut it down to four minutes for the radio, but like on any streaming app you could play the full 15 minutes. It's a long song and they just keep going and going and going. And that hit their waves and it was a wrap after that, after that everybody, everybody was wanting to wrap. And in it, a hip hop, to the hip beat, to the hip beat, like that hip hop part was one part that people that's onto.

And some say that's when it started becoming known as hip hop more formally. So. Because you were also talking, you used the word wrap. And I remember it as the genre of wrap. Like as I grew up, that was what it was called. Me too. Okay.

Yeah. And what you're talking about there, they weren't they using the baseline from another one bites the dust? That it did it done. Maybe if done, did it done, did it done? So that's all good times. We are after like one.

Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's's the so I don't know if that sampled that because they definitely sounds hell familiar but but that good time song that's the one they were trying to recreate and is that where the TV show got its name like where they just I don't know catching on to the okay because that's also set in that same area yeah yeah yeah same time yeah, I was zoomed over Yeah, I definitely I don't know. Okay. All right, so you you've got Like you said, there's this six-year gap where nobody records anything is this

Why are they? Why aren't they recording it? Is this a a lack of I can't imagine it's a lack of imagination on the part of the artists, on the part of the DJs. That being said, I have certainly squandered missed opportunities for my punch show to go to the next level, because I'm just too focused on, you know, if you're in the middle of storm, it's hard to get the weather report. Or is this then being frozen out? Right. Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Part of it is just not having the money or the equipment to even think the thought of like going into a studio like what you know, hood kids can think about like running out studio time. Right. Okay. But the it's funny because

this song like made I mean every the sugar hook game everyone at last one of them made a fortune off of this. And this is you know is even considering that they probably had a really crappy exploitative contract. Yeah, but, you know, until there, I mean, two of them are still lie, one of them passed away, but they're still torn and still making money off of it, even having paid the original folks who made good times. But when in case I say that I want to say it,

in the in the actual verses you can see that one of the rappers, Big Bang Hank, didn't write his lyrics. He just grabbed them from a friend who was a really, really good rapper in the Bronx, whose name is Grandmaster Cass, Cass short for Casanova. So in one of the verses, you know,

rappers spell their name a lot, just generally speaking in rap music, they spell their name a lot. And big. This to the this to the that, yeah. And Big Bank Hank, whose name is Hank, Big Bank for Money, he starts his verse off by spelling out Casanova

because he stole the freaking lyrics from Grandmaster Casanova. And he says Casanova, because he stole the freaking lyrics from Grandmaster Casanova. And he says Casanova several times in the 15 minute long version. He says Casanova several times. And so Casanova is furious, furious. I think still to this day, like when you see any documentary where he's in it,

he's cursing, he's like, these models, he's like, it's furious. But it says at the time, nobody was thinking about like, they didn't have the vision of this being a money-making thing. And that kind of sense. So it was like, I need to borrow some rhymes. Okay, here you go. He's my rhyme book. Like, it was like, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to be in this photo shoot. Let me borrow that shirt. You got, okay, here's the shirt. Back when you're done. That's, that's comedy back in Vodville. Hey, I'm going to do this routine tonight. Oh, I was going to do that routine. Can you do this other one? Yeah, sure. Like nobody had like their own original claim to things until your monologists kind of get in there and you're right. Find people are just picking up what they can along the way as they go.

It's nice to hear that they still made money off of it. That's usually not the case when you're the first person to the to the trough. Yeah, usually all the energy goes into the creativity. And I guess in some ways it still did because all the energy went into the creativity of the live parties. And then I Ed, does this sound parallel at all to you to what we saw in the New York scene where the punk guy created or the, or maybe it was in England, I forget where he created a boy band. Oh, yeah. No, it's 110%. It's this expestals. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me that once somebody who's in a position to make money off of something, once the attention gets paid by somebody who's like, hey, wait a minute, hold on, I can make a buck here because I'm in a position to invest the money to make a buck. Like, you know, that's the point at which things start getting manufactured.

So yeah, that, yeah, you're not wrong. This is definitely. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. No more kids, not the actual people from the Bronx. So yeah, yeah Jersey kids. I think two of the three were from Jersey in the Sugar Hill gang context at least. Okay. But yeah, once they hit the airwaves, I mean, that was such a major hit. It, I mean, it was it was over after that. Then people were making hip-hop music

all around all around all around the US for sure. And it spread internationally pretty quickly. But yeah, it was built off of that first song that even my students, I'm like, what's the, you know, what do you think? What do you think is the first thing? Then they can't even think of like conceptualize what the very first rap recorder rap song would be.

And then I play it and they're like, oh, literally everybody knows that song. knows that song. Yeah. Yeah, but um, but now as we approach the 50 year anniversary It's like the original creators DJ Coolhark. Most people don't know anything about him He had to do a go-fun me for to cover some medical bills a couple years ago because he was ill Coke, Lorac one of the first rappers. No, he really knows about him. Grandmaster Cass who wrote One of the most famous who wrote one of the most famous verses on one of the most famous songs ever. Nobody knows who the L.E. is. We actually have in-text citation for him. Like they all ate him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Basically, inadvertently spelled his name out. So yeah. So there's there's there's the thing I was going to ask it. it absolutely slipped my mind because I just realized how funny that was. So yeah, oh, the four minute thing. that's because you know the DJ has to go to the bathroom. Like that's when you hear that song. Like most songs still, I mean, if you listen to most door songs right around that same time, Jimmy gets an extra minute or so, but by and large, the four minute mark is still kind of top end. Like, you know, yeah, you look at most songs. So it's interesting that it already I mean it's also it's very what's the word I'm looking for lyrical lyrically dense right you have more words per minute in rap and hip hop than you in most songs yeah and most people don't really dig too much into the words being said, but it's an incredibly, incredibly sexist, misogynistic song, and very nasty, if you actually, if you look at the 15 minute

version and you start talking about super sperm and this and that, it's pretty explicit and I remember being a kid, and when gangster rap was like, well, yeah, being young and when gangster rap was sort of at his peak and Folks of older generation telling me like, oh, you know, right now days. Oh, it's just killing and having sex and this and that like back in the day They said rap really rapping about something and you know as a group of others like wait that the very first song was just womanizing Like you know if your girl starts acting up and then you take her friends, like what the hell, like, you know, it's just, it started out as party music. It started out bragging, raggedo show,

trying to get girls. It's teenage dudes making this music and it sounds like some teenage dudes making music from the start. And then later you get, you know, some diversification of content and subject matter. And then that's when you get some of what folks call like quote unquote real hip hop being made.

That's call it out social issues and speaking truth to power. I mean, in many ways, this is, I still think that, you know, the first one, then it's still, I mean, it literally is talking about creative juices. So yeah. Ed, I cut you off, or are you gonna? Yeah, well, what I was gonna ask was, do you think the immediate explosion of hip hop had to do with

its difference from what else was out there, or was there something else going on in urban environments that like made, I don't know. What do you think led to the explosion of the art form, the way that it experienced? Yeah, that's a great question. And hip hop is something from nothing. So something from nothing. So cool, herk and other people hosting that

party just low income, trying to scrap up some money for some back to school clothes, you know, bust an open-south system trying to, you know, enhance them and being able to create something from almost nothing, like just minimal equipment. And hip hop is that ultra-accessible form of music. You don't know how, you don't have to know how to play instruments, you don't have to know how to read music, you don't have to be able to sing. So I think the accessibility of it,

it being something that somebody in, you know, in a basement in Philadelphia could hear it. And with some just very, very basic, basic equipment can reproduce it and create something very popular and very great. So I think that's okay. That has more to do with it than anything else. Okay. Again, this is like absolutely paralleling what we and again, the same time span. It's parallel. I mean, what we're seeing, we're seeing urban youth with nothing. What did you say in that episode in a perfect world punk rock? Punk would be exist. Right. Well, yeah, in a perfect world hip hop, wouldn't have come about. Yeah, which yeah, because the resources, the resources would have been there for something else.

Right. Right. Like people would not have had to create something from nothing because they would have had what they needed. Gosh dang, that's really interesting to me. And then of course, I'm the word guy. So I do go back to them talking about the super sperms. So something from nothing. This parthogenetic kind of self creation, you know down. I don't know. Okay. Cool. Okay. So that gets us into what 1979. So that's when that hit. And then so the 79 through their early 80s 80, 81, 82, where all those really classic old school songs. These are the breaks, for example, like the road classic party type hip hop music. It took a couple years before he started to get serious music in terms of content matter. And the first officially recorded released serious quote unquote song, but by series I mean calling out systemic injustices and speaking to the conditions of the Bronx

was by Grand Master Flash in the Furious Five and that song was called the Message. I believe that was 82. I could be wrong, I could 82, 83. And broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the street. Seems like they just don't care. And the whole song from top to bottom is calling out the living conditions of folks,

specifically in the Bronx, but of course, folks in Brooklyn and Queens, Harlem could relate. And basically asking the question, like, what's going on? Like, one of the, my favorite verses of all time. So Grandmaster Flash is the DJ for the group. He's not a rapper, so on that particular song, Meli Mel, he begins a verse with a child who's born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind, and he walks this child through life in the Bronx, being young, being poorly educated by the underfunded public schools, struggling

for money, deciding to become a stick-up kid to try to earn some cash, that escalating fights, violence, imprisonment, being incarcerated, and then the trauma of being incarcerated and being around folks who are tougher than you are. thought you're tough out there on this run and by the end of the verse that that That character commit suicide and in the last lines are You know your your your eyes seem a song of deep hate and it's just You know just the tragedy of this child born when those that just blind to all the injustices, blind to racism, blind to classism and all that stuff and having such a tragic fate. And that's like powerful stuff for, you know, for some stuff for, you know, a genre that

started off talking, you know, talking about, you know, super sperm. So, you know, and that comes early, like a few years before the crack epidemic really explodes. And then, and then there's no separating the content of the music from the conditions on the streets. Is there other music at that time? Again, punk is absolutely shoving their thumb in the eyes of the powerful. But is there any other music at that time that is really pushing at this is what it's like at the ground level? Like I'm trying to think of like the other genres that are really popular at the time. It's much more glam type stuff, right? It's much more now that I've gotten success, I can, you know, I can, yeah. And for the masses, those john Rizzo are all escapism. Yeah.

Whereas this one is reflective. And I don't know, there's, there, it feels like there's some meat on that bone in terms of like the, the reflective nature of hip hop starting in like what you said was 81 82 and then it never stops being that right. Like there's there's always a it doesn't mean every song is about that because there's certainly you know you said boys and stuff like that but but there's absolutely a threat of that. More than just a threat, that's absolutely one part of the tapestry. It's very, very self-reflective. I also am noticing that it is

still locationally specific. You're still talking about the Bronx. still locationally specific you're still talking about the Bronx. Yeah. And so is that still just the locus of it and people who want to do it come there or that's just the only stuff that's getting out because it's you know. No, it spreads to the rest of New Yorkers. Spreads to the other burrows for sure and then there's a really infamous music beef between artists in the Bronx and artists in Queens. Queens did some, you know, as a non-New York person looking at what happened. It seems like

MC Shan and some other artists from Queens did some, you know, creative reinterpretation of how hip hop got started and where it got started. And they claimed Queens as really like the importance area where hip hop really got going and really grew. So, that is called the bridge. And then folks from South Bronx, Keras won, Boogie Down Productions. They respond with the bridges over and basically slam Queens into just embarrassment.

But yeah, it was happening across the burrows and there was competition between the different burrows for sure. Yeah. So how long did it take for the West Coast to get involved? Because this is all very, very intensely New York centered for. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like almost at least a decade when when do we start Hearing anything from the other side of the country. Yeah, the West Coast was late to the party

You know the most were three of us behind. I mean There you go There you go No, I mean, you know Dr. Dre the most successful West Coast artists in terms of just money and legacy, he was still making basically disco music more or less in the early 80s. And his group, the world class, I can group, is not rap sequence and just disco stuff at a time when folks were ready to move on from that.

So yeah, West Coast really gets going when gangster rap gets going. And gangster rap gets going as a reflection of the crack epidemic and the huge spike in violence and devastation in urban centers. So what you're saying is we can thank the CIA for West Coast. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay. All right. I just wanted to get that down explicitly. And okay. Thank you. I also know that with gangster rap, it's also very stripped down. Yeah. A lot of blacks, a lot of whites in terms of shirts, very simple stuff on,

you know, like similar to run DMC, which I mean, some of that might be like, okay, that's what they do. We're just going to do it without the piping. We're just going to wear a t-shirt and jeans, not a tracksuit, but at the same time, that stripped down nature seems, it flies absolutely in the face of the flamboyance. That was the word I was looking for before. the flamboyants of disco and funk. And also in the face of the elderlyness of disco and funk, because if you look at most disco and funk bands, you always have that one guy who's dressed like a space samurai, and at the same time he's got like the Moses Malone hair like receiving hairline that like yes, like backward. It's like the inverted widow's peak and It's you know three feet high and he's wearing mascara, which cool luck if you can do it, but

Hey look look up the video to the message the son. I just talked about and he's rapping about this this young man Who eventually commits suicide because of the trauma being incarcerated and the whole group they are dressed so flamboyant. It just it just doesn't add up to the content of the sorrow versus how they're dressed and students when I when students see that they're like you know students they you know they're like wait you know that know, that, what's their, what's their sexuality, Dr. Rusty? Well, actually wearing little crop tops, little back then, that was not considered at all to be tied to any kind of like, these guys are tough guys.

You step to them, they would wolf you ass. These aren't like, you know, they're not dressed like that because of what, you know, whatever, you know, homophobic thoughts you have about a tire and masculinity, like, right? Yeah. They will beat your ass in their goldfish platform. Shoot absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

So, okay. So I remember it just occurred to me, the song, White Lines. I remember seeing the video for that. And they are dressed like, they're dressed like the background singers to Parliament funcadelic like they're not quite the flashy flashy, but they're like one level below that like they could be extras in the last dragon kind of kind of thing. Okay. So and again, we're seeing hip hop going a very different way. Strip down, very basic, very, very plain. And away from breakbeats.

Like the breakbeats, that all faded away and now you had drum machines. So some of the toughest songs of that era were just very powerful drums and snares hitting very simple, simple beats that were stripped down sonically just like the visuals were. Now, is that true on both coasts or is there starting to be a difference?

And by the way, I don't mean to be coast to elite here on either end. There are other places where hip hop certainly has different things coming in. I can only imagine Miami having an Afro Cuban kind of thing going on. I can think Louisiana, probably a big port place. Houston has always been, I'm also thinking of all the places where wrestling was really big. Houston, St. Louis, Chicago. Oh, yeah, there you go. Again, I'm only thinking where wrestling was really big and Chicago wasn't a huge wrestling town exactly. They weren't. It was special, but it wasn't a common place.

But anyway, so, but are we seeing differential in styles in terms of the music, the composition at this point? Not so much yet. Not so much yet. Not so much yet. The first song that had what that would be considered gangster rap mid 80s was by Philadelphia artist Skuly D. It was called a PSK. What does it mean? Spoiler alert PSK stood for Parkside Killers, which was a local gang. First song to use the N word, first song to have, I think it was the first song to have forglet explicit language period.

And it was typical lifestyle gangster rap song, like, you know, rolling around, smoking, going to parties, having sex, getting in a shootout, going home at the end of the night, and West Coast-wise, ICT was inspired by that song and made his own version of a lifestyle gangster rap type song called Six in the Morning And it sounds very very similar like extreme extraordinarily similar to the Philadelphia the schooly D version and six in the morning Is what got it all started on the West Coast in terms of rap Iced Tea Reflecting the what crack and and gang violence was doing in Los Angeles. And then shortly after that, you get NWA. And that just takes it to a higher level, a bigger platform. And then, yeah, that's it.

So mid 80s wise, you're still not getting a ton of variation what it sounds like from one city to the next. It's a lot of folks hearing something for the first time and being blown away and then trying to create that themselves. So there's a lot of folks hearing something for the first time and being blown away and then trying to create that themselves So there's a lot of similarity with actual sounds until later in the 80s So schooly D is he part of the group that Will Smith mentions later on The gentlemen who were up to no good He

Probably would be if you timed it out right and the thing is a lot of folks don't realize He probably would be if you timed it out right. And the thing is a lot of folks don't realize fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff there, Davey record came out. I think the same day, if not the same year as NWA's, and it was just the starkest contrast between the like teenage fun still in its innocence, for rap music, and then the like,

after police stuff, yeah, very just that juxtaposition ends. We know which one won out in terms of what record labels went for and what MTV would actually play. Yeah, yeah. Hey, so, okay. So yeah, keep it coming. I'm just absorbing all this. keep keep it coming. I'm I'm just absorbing all this. It's it's I the only parallels I can draw are to things like professional wrestling and there's

there's not that much on the bone there really. So okay so you've got people you've got iced tea and scooby-d very very similar iced tea is kind of, I like that. I'm going to do that here now. I'm going to bring that to over here. And also I'm going to make money off of that, right? Is this before or after he gets out of the Navy? After. Okay.

So, because I remember that he left, he left for the Navy. And then when he gets back, his crew is there and they're, they like just pull him right back into the world for his narration. And I recognize that, you know, not necessarily a reliable narrator. But, but okay, so afterward and he's, is he part of any group or is he on his own? Yeah, he's on his own. Yeah, and it was also that era is also often referred to as like the golden age of rap because yes, the gangster rap part of it was really getting going and of course eventually going to like just take over. But you also had such diversification of sounds. You had the emergence of public enemy.

You had just brilliant poetic storytellers like Eric B. and Raqim. You had, you just had a little bit of everything no matter what your taste were. You had the fresh princess of the world with the, you know, little safer teenage type stuff. You had MC light, you had slick rig. So there was a real diversification of sounds.

The rhyme schemes were getting way more complex than, you know, the, you know, he can't do it with his little worm, but I could knock you out with my super sperm. Like that little, little, writing couplets were gone. And now you had some really like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so that's the late 80s. And by the end, you know, Jeff Jam is still the thing. And this is, you know, BC Boys have already exploded onto the scene, run DMC of course,

Ella Cool J, all them. So we're talking billion dollar industry at this point. And then it's really into the 90s that you see sort of the the emergence of sort of two wings of it in terms of like the west co-sounds and the laid back sounds with incredible violence and the still the east coast. You had native tongues. You had some afro-centrism popping up, you had folks from the South starting to emerge in the early 90s, that's where you get a lot of representation from Houston and then mid 90s, you get outcasts and Atlanta and then it's just everywhere, everywhere. I want to drill in a little bit on the, you said, you was a really really interesting juxtaposition, incredible

violence with a laid back sound. So the lyrics are speaking to the incredible violence I assume and it's being, it's being wrapped over a laid back sound. So that in itself is just fascinating to me. It's, it's, it um, Mick Foley talks about this a lot when he talks about wrestling is in that, um, he will listen to beautiful, beautiful music as he's picturing these. You've seen videos of Mick Foley getting thrown off of things and getting put through thumbtacks and things like that. He's that guy. Um, and so, but he says what gets him ready for that is like Tory Amos music and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, it's really bizarre. So, McFolk is really bizarre.

Let's not, you know, it's one of the most normal people in wrestling. He really, if you like listen to any interview with him, you know, yeah, because he gets all of that out of his system. I guess so. You know, so you've got this, I mean, is that, is that laid back sound to the incredible violence? Is that juxtaposition and artistic choice? Is that a trend that's going or is that more of where the sound is coming from compared to New York? So I'm thinking in New York, you've got the portable music, I think they called them ghetto blasters for a while,

the really big tape decks that we saw radio, Ruckian carrying and do the right thing. You've got those, those don't get carried around that much in LA, you've got a lot of sprawl in LA. So you've got it coming mostly out of cars. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Open top cars because you've got a lot of car parties and things like that. Whereas in New York, you've got the sound bouncing off of brown stones and starting on the, you know, and I'm just thinking geographically. Like, is that one of the reasons for it or what's what's going on in there?

You know, I can't say for sure. I've always thought of it as just the California lifestyle is slower and more laid back than I mean New York like yeah, I don't know either of y'all spent much time in New York like you can't even walk down the freaking sidewalk unless you're going at a very fast base because someone will run you over because everyone's Russian, everything's everything's happening all at once. It's really just the whole city is upon you whereas in the West Coast it's just different field and I always took the music to be a reflection of that, the reflection of riding around on a Sunday in your car. And yeah. There's a lot less horn-tonguing in LA. Yeah.

Yeah. Whereas in New York, that's all, that is the sound. That is the sound. I guess. Okay. And so the and the incredible violence again, that's that's a. So you don't have that in New York. You don't have the gangster rap really propping up in New York at all. It was nowhere near as explicit as the West Coast stuff. Yeah, nowhere near as explicit like the stuff. And this is like me in middle school, The stuff I was hearing was just like,

when I think back to it, it's just like ultra, ultra graphic, ultra violent stuff. And eventually once, once gangster rap was really making big money, it's almost like, you know, groups were competing to, you know, who could be the hardest, who could be the most, the most violent. And they used to go, I mean, you know, right music everywhere was violent and, who could be the hardest, who could be the most violent.

They used to go, I mean, you know, right music everywhere was violent and certainly expressing that, but the West Coast, we're also looking at a time of mass incarceration. This is when three strikes law came about because of the impact of the crack epidemic, crack epidemic brought so much money into street gangs operations as they

were competing for territory. And that money brought more violence and violence, more violence, more weapons. And the amount of folks who were killed or incarcerated during that during that era was just beyond comprehension. So the music definitely reflected that. What would be the peak of like the gangster apps and violence that you're talking about? Like how they're trying to outdo each other with how graphic. What year would you say did we get to like, and feel free to ballpark it like this year to this year. But like what would you, because I'm, I've got a theory working here. Right. How did you say the peak would be? Super unscientifically, I would say like 92 to 93.

Glad that's super unscientifically. Sure. Sure. Yeah. But you as a consumer of those goods, you might have a better, you know, your anecdote is certainly more than, you know, mine. So Ed, what was I going to say? Well, I know what immediately came into my mind when you were asking the question about the high watermark of it was the riots of 92. Oh yeah, also that. Oh, okay. Roger King.

I was gonna say ECW. Oh, of course. That's serious. Manuel, do you know ECW much? I assume the W stands for wrestling though. Yeah, it does. I don't know. Almost.

Yeah. Yes. Uh, it, it becomes like this really hyper violent. It's where you get hardcore wrestling from. Um, you have Japanese death matches prior to that, but the American importation of them is through ECW largely. And it's right around that same time. That is jumping off a balconies. Yeah, like it's in death, death blows one dives.

Yeah, there's there's a restaurant named new Jack and if you just type in new Jack balcony on a Google search or for a YouTube search, you will find it. Does somebody die in that video? Not in that one. No, no. He was trying to kill somebody. Um, it is somebody dying that video. Not in that one. No, no. He was trying to kill somebody. If you type in new Jack mass transit, you'll see him trying to kill someone. Um, but I mean, they're talking about their, they're bringing cheese graders to the ring.

They're, they're using like we whackers on each other. They crowd would like bring items for them to use. And that became kind of a thing. Um, and it's all in this early to mid 90s time, which is a thing that we focused on a lot of different times. Like this early to mid 90s time is, like you said, it's the crack epidemic, right? It's the three strike slots. It's the beginning of the Clinton era. And you see that the payoff of centrist liberalism where they're like courting white supremacist voters to shifting robots and window right.

Yeah, and you get closer to contract with America kind of shit and you get welfare reform and you get all these things that super-juice up the economy, but only for the people who are already doing all right. And everyone else, there is in almost every genre, we see in comic books, we see Lee Field in his drawings and lots of pouches, lots of knives, lots of big, really shitty feet. Yeah, no feet. You see in ECW, you see cheese graters

and blood-letting galore. You see a literal barbed wire matches where the ring has been replaced by barbed wire. And you get a guy named Sabu, you know, and he's genocidal, homicidal, and I forget what the third one was, suicidal. Because he's like using chairs, he's throwing chairs at people.

The entire crowd throws chairs into the ring and buries people in them. It's just so fucking weird. And then you get that in wrestling. You get like I said comic books. Yeah, the post, the post Rodney King stuff you get. Also you start to see that grittiness coming into Star Trek. You see just in almost every genre, you start to see all grittiness coming into Star Trek. You see just in almost every genre, you start to see all of this representation of violence.

It's inescapable. And so it's interesting to see that it matches up with hip hop as well. Yeah, that's definitely interesting. And I would say at least for the hip hop art of it, the Rondon Kean beating definitely had a lot to do with it as well because it was a reflection of LAPD tactics at the time, LAPD 80s of famously brutal even before the 80s, but especially in the 80s during the crack epidemic when it was

incredibly incredibly brutal and you see Black folks being killed left to right you love a black mother Who didn't pay her? I think it was her gas bill Was eight dollars to link with her something and and you know energy companies showed up to shut it down And she wouldn't let the man police showed up and she had a knife They they shot her dead right there on the front yard for eight bucks, like that she was delinquent on it. And then Natasha Harlands, which was a, right, you know, two-buck reference to Natasha Harlands a lot, you know, young black girl who was shot in the back of head by a store owner. And after she was leaving, too.

After she was leaving, didn't, you know, it's just a tragic case where the the store owner was convicted of murder, but then the judge had the liberty to go ahead and sentence her to only probation for shooting this, I think 13 year old, maybe 14 year old, in the back of the head. So all that and then Ron de Keen beating, which far from only beating beating but was first one on clear tape for the time and yeah Yeah, yeah, that happened like the week after the Latasha Harlan's case got decided. Yeah, I'm muted. Yeah, it's Yeah, so at the same time you also had the Tawana Brawley case in New York just a few years earlier too Yeah also had the Tijuana Brawley case in New York just a few years earlier too. Yeah, New York is no, you know, no, you mentioned to the right thing. Yeah, too long ago, but you know,

do the right thing, certainly has references to, you know, in the film, some of the graffiti on on the walls. To want to tell you what you have in there. Yeah, exactly, exactly right there. So, that we have in there. Yeah, exactly, exactly right there. So, um, so yeah, so that's certainly reflected in the music and and then of course everybody was blaming the music for inciting and people to this day still blame the music. For for the violence that's happening in cities. So, you know, that's when you got the parental advisory explicit content label throwing on CDs and you had, you know had these public events where folks were bulldozing rap CDs, and I think it was Dan Quill, fan Quill who called it a, you know, threat to our society, and they specifically called out Tupac, and Tupac, and all the rappers to call out at that time.

Wow. Tupac's the last one to call out, because he was like, you know, Brenda's got a baby, like he was speaking about like coming together and healing, and keep your head up. And like, you know, it's like a baby, like he was speaking about like coming together and healing and keep your head up and like, you know, it's like you will call him out. You got all these other fools out here, wrapping about all this other stuff. So yeah, wild, wild times and. I don't know, I just think of all the lives lost to the criminal justice system and just to the streets at that era, like, you know, we're as teachers now, you know, we're seeing the, you're seeing the grandkids of folks from that era and just that trauma doesn't just disappear into thin air, you know, carries. No, absolutely. Definitely not.

You can see that in meetings with parents and kids and you can see that in the fact that a kid suddenly is off your roster. Okay, so we're in them. We're in the late. I'd like to rewind back to the late 80s, largely because one of my favorite groups, public enemy is, is really coming up and they release what is it? Like three albums in pretty short order, right?

Yeah. The most obvious one is fear of lack of planet. But where they're, and as you said, the composition of not only their lyrics, but also the way that they're presenting them is very, very, I'm going to say groundbreaking because almost everything that Chuck D does is he's using epic meter. So Latin is here. I love that. But it absolutely changes the tone and the tenor of what he's bringing up. And he's got a hype man who is a famous personality for being a hype man despite also being a tremendous musician, right?

Flavor Flavis is an incredible musician. tremendous musician, right? Flavid Flavid is an incredible musician. He was my favorite. I mean, I was a child at the time, but like, he outflavid Flavid was my favorite. Yeah. Yeah. He's got that Austin, the flamboyance. Austin Tachiusness flamboyance. Flamboyance. He's got the flamboyance. And he's in some ways pulling from that cartoonish parents just don't understand aesthetic. And at the same time, he's acting as a hype man for a guy who's singing about a tremendous

amount of social justice stuff and about, you know, and again, with, do the right thing, absolutely popularize, fight the power and things like that. But like, you know, you get the lyrics going, you've got him hyping in the background, you got Terminator X, being mentioned quite often. And I think that's kind of the last I really hear of a DJ in a lot of things. I guess Spinderella with Salt and Peppa, but like you called out in the song. Yeah. So it's, it's they're they're they're not West Coast right they're they're over on the East Coast Long Island That's right. Okay. Um God. We're gonna cover all the burrows aren't we? So there's long I don't know what Long Island is considered. It's not considered a burrow. It's not one of the it's not one of the burrows

Yeah, it's one of the islands. It's it's yeah different It's long Island. It's in categor a burrow. It's not one of the it's not one of the burrows. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it. Yeah, different. It's long island categorization. Island. Didn't. Yes, that and I and got no love in rap music until we stained clan, but they weren't even mentioned in like when I talked about those burrow wars earlier between the Queens and the Bronx. And here's one was like man, hadn't keep on making it.

Brooklyn keep on taking it. Bronx keep creating it. And Brooklyn keep on taking it, Bronx keep creating it, and Queens keep on faking it. And I'm like, he didn't even mention that and I'm like, he didn't even mention it. It's like whatever.

Well, you know, I mean, it's a smaller area. There's not as much going on there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and Wu Tang is a very different approach to it as well. I mean, you had like,

yes, yeah. I assume we'll get to that too. But so back to public enemy, what's going on like as far as people's response to them? Are they kind of just folded into the, okay, everybody's singing about what's around them of the social consciousness thing, or do they stand out as much? Okay, they do stand out as much at the time. Yeah, heavily. They brought an air like an image of militants that went back to the black radicals of the late 60s and early 70s that echoed through everything, even how they would enter the stage and very

reminiscent of nation-it and yeah, and that, that's, there's other, you know, if you folks want to call it like conscious rap at the time, there's a lot at the time, but in terms of militant, like in terms of like, in the image of Malcolm X, now it was, it was public enemy, and you know, 911 is a joke and just, right, just like, yeah, they just speaking truth to power

in terms of interrogating the systems around us. Yeah, they were one of a kind in that regard for sure. And even just the voice, the bass behind Chuck B, and what he was saying is it all just came together, like really perfectly as a just forceful, and then when do the right thing came out and fight the power, like literally fight the power, and it's like that was the song of the summer, man. So yeah, they were, they were in a league of their own.

So do you think they're aesthetic? Like you said, the the militant kind of way they carried themselves, was that something they consciously, like, was it, was it a choice that like, no, we're going to echo the panthers and, you know, these other nation of Islam and these other movements. Or was it just, no man, we have something to say and we're going to carry ourselves this way. And that's just kind of the way you carry yourself when you're doing that. Like, right. Yeah. Now, that's a great question. Um, this, they came sort of in the right behind Run DMC. So it was a matter of melding the tough in your face, just like power of Run DMC's whole

style, but then bringing in the critical consciousness within it. So sort of an effort to take what runs EMC had done and then add the criticality to it. And that's what brings public enemy. Okay, cool. Yeah. So that's, okay, thank you for winding back to that. So then we're getting into the 90s. This is actually, God, I was like in fifth grade. So Ed was already

off to college. Oh, you. There's certain things that I have to hit certain benchmarks. I have to hit on our, on our episodes. One is teasing Ed for being literally like a year and a half older than me. Another is I have to mention wrestling at least three times. And then if it's something that I've written, there has to be every six episodes that I've written, it has to be some sort of, um, a littleeration. So I don't have to do that here. You were a two-pack item.

Two-pack loved a littleeration. I am a big fan of a littleeration. Oh, interesting. The last a littleeration I was a perfect picture. Yeah. Oh, nice. I did one about Peter Parker. Uh, comics. There you go.

But, um, okay. So, uh, we've, we've come forward into the 90s. Uh, I remember my first two tapes, two cassette tapes that I ever bought. Right. So I'm like fifth grade, sixth grade in in Florida, in Bronson, Florida, 800 people, 804 people in the whole town while my family was there, 800 when we left. There were still two cemeteries because they didn't want black people, white people rotting together. No, I don't get that separate. Exactly. I mean, obviously. Well, I mean, obviously.

And, but yeah, but that was I, I got two tapes for my birthday that year. One was skid row. And the other was tone look. And so that, that, that is blinking his eyes insanely here. All right. Yeah. So in the 90s, in the early 90s, again, like you said, it's opening up, it's diversifying quite a bit. There is, there does seem to be an undercurrent of people wanting to have fun through the rap as well. Yeah. It's not just political consciousness. It's not just gangster rap.

It's not just the observational stuff. It's also, you know, just a few years later, I think young MC came out with a one that I'm not going to mention, but it was sweet. And then a few other words, but yeah, there's, there's more of that what you talked about before like very Sajanistic and and stuff like that which is grist for the mill for for tipper goren and her crew But I also noticed that the the beat is getting slower

And and lower and the voices are getting deeper as as well Is that It is yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Definitely that was tone low tone low stain. Oh yeah. Is that why he was called tone low on every. What happened in tone low? He turned into like a lizard in Fern Gully and then beyond that, I think he helped a pet detective in Miami and we haven't heard from him since. Oh he wasn't that. I feel like when I think back to it, it almost seems like record companies were trying hard to find the next thing. And a lot of things were kind of gimmicky thinking about like Fushniggins who I loved. And they, you know, they were really fast and stuff.

Right. And they were cool. I all respect to them. But it was like kind of gimmicky, like the whole like super fast rapping. Right. The, at least the way I remember it being presented, maybe I'm wrong. Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, this is a little later.

That's more like mid-90s. Shaq dropping his own album. Didn't he work with Fushnikens? Yeah, that's what made me think of him. Because I was like, he had a song with the Fushnikens. Yeah. I actually loved his first album. I think I was, yeah, that might have been early night. No, must be a midnight. I don't know how to have you look. Well, Shaq ends up coming in the league. I want to say like 93 Okay, so that's right when he burst onto the scene because it was all about shak at the time and I think he yeah, I don't I assume he still has the the wreck the I assume he's still the only one

Professional basketball player with a platinum record because that his first album went platinum It took a very long time, but it made it And I remember hearing like he was the first pro athlete to go platinum I don't know if it's in all sports or just pro NBA player, but I had that album and I had his his Reeboks with a little pump That's time. I had a t-shirt with him on it and it gave his height in his weight and I was like wow he weighs as much as whole COVID a t-shirt with him on it and it gave his height in his weight and I was like wow he weighs as much as whole kogan. So yeah so then you had you know you had that that's hardcore gangster stuff you had some of the you know lighter maybe gimmicky or you know trying to try to build a good job on kids yeah and you had you had and then Wu Tang came out and you I mean you

had everything by that point. Right. But being a California kid, I know the most of what I consumed at the time was that California style gangster rap, especially Northern California rap had its own sounds compared to Southern California. And then of course you had Houston and Atlanta eventually. And then Wu Tang came out and was like We're harder than all of y'all and not in that same gangster type of way gang-bang and type of way but just the grimminess of

being poor in a freezing cold city where everybody's in a bad mood all the time and that grimminess like you know they They brought a lot of you know Yeah, so and that grime and this like, you know, they brought a lot of, you know, yeah. So it was out, cat was out of bag, all sorts of different genres, all sorts of different angles and a lot of money being made, not a whole lot necessarily by the artists themselves, but a lot of money being made by the big major record labels. So Wu Tang Kang clan comes out what 90 or I guess no there they're yeah I think that's like one of their first major

projects comes out and they like I said they're they're a huge departure from how groups had done before right like before you had either a single or a group right or or often you had duos, but both Wu-Teng, what was their, what was their makeup? How did they differ? Yeah, they were the first group to come out with each person also having their own solo deal. So it was sort of a real like a Voltron sort of situation

where each one had his own power, his own style, his own everything, but together they were the Wu Teng clan and the samples they were using were just mind blowing. Nobody was sampling obscured 70s kung fu flicks and stuff like that. Nobody was doing any of that. And then each one not literally every member, but like the prominent members coming out with their own solo efforts after the fact that had some of that Wu-Tang style,

but also were unique in their own regard. So yeah, that was, they were certainly the first group to have a group deal and then allow each individual to have their own individual deal with different labels. Not with, they didn't have to stay with the same label, so it was a lot of different labels. So that was definitely a very revolutionary. And that was a whole big thing. And that was a stark contrast.

But that was certainly a East Coast response to the West Coast sounds. And unfortunately, the East Coast West Coast dynamic, sort of like got exacerbated by media coverage of the East Coast versus West Coast type of sound and then the Biggie Tupac part came in, which had some personal parts to it, but also some just media height to it. And you get that rivalry. And then the South the whole time was like,

what about us? We have amazing music that doesn't sound like either one of y'all Yeah, you know, yeah Okay, so uh if we could um because this episode's coming to a close Wu-Teng Clan seems like an interesting uh break spot because like you said they they Innovated in such a way were they able to keep more of their own money each artist, or was it still the record company's just taken up 95% and then giving them the

nickel? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't have the answer to that. That's a great question. I'd never heard about any of them being in better financial straights than the right basically all my favorite rappers from the 90s like they all eventually Sad that they were basically broke that the dealers that they were wrong weren't really paying them much of anything And not just rappers either like you know TLC was you know, that's very vocal about how little money she got like I think she for one of their biggest albums

It was like you know 300,000 bucks after taxes and after like cutting everything's like damn that's it like you were a world tour yeah I think they said that they made $50,000 a year after generating 10 million like 50,000 each like so there you have you know because they got to cut it between the three of them and and after generating 10 million on on that album So actually okay, so that that actually brings me into a different question then Most of the people that we've been talking about have been men Yeah, there were women that were Early on there were there were women that were early on a Queen Latifa assault and pepper

MC like MC like yeah, yeah, they're there were there were women that were early on. Queen Latifa, assault and pepper. MC Lai. MC Lai. MC Shana. Yeah. Shana. Yeah. There. Yeah. There. Roxanne Shanta. Yeah. There were. Yeah. They they definitely they they've been there throughout, but they were very rarely given nearly as much attention, credibility or anything.

And then by the 90s, when so super hardcore, like you know, you have some pretty successful women MCs but who were sort of embodying that like hardcore type of aesthetic like De Brat, Lady of Rage for death row record. So yeah, yeah. They were present but they were not, they were definitely space wasn't held for them in any kind of like significant and successful way. And actually you're still just now barely in 2023 starting to see there be more than just a couple of women rappers out there. Right. And it's, we are, we are way past the 90s. And yeah. Yeah. We're way past the 90s and yeah, yeah

Yeah, cuz I was just thinking about growing up in San Francisco. I lived in a behind a building that had Basically fallen apart, but they hadn't demolished it so we would go in there and rip up Linoleum and then bring it out to our neighborhood cuz you could spin better on linoleum than on cargo. And which I probably dive mesophiliaoma as a result, but, but it was worth it. It was totally. That third place trophy that I got at six years old in a in the city wide break dancing competition. It's still have no idea where it went. I remember the puppet more than I remember the trophy coming to think of it, because they

gave me a puppet for it. But we would, there was somebody that had, there was a family from Detroit that lived right next door to us, and it was kind of funny because my mom grew up in deerborn, and my mom would not tell the mother of that family. That family was black. My mother would not tell the mother of that family where in Michigan she was from. And finally, she just said to her one day, she's like, you're from Dearborn, aren't you? Yeah, she's like, always can tell when someone's from Dearborn because they're ashamed of it.

But I think one of their kids, yeah, Risan, he had a tape deck and we would listen to there was a song called Supersonic and it was all William's voices on there and I think that and I think he had a fat boys tape. And that's what we that's what we break dance to. The whole neighborhood was those two, those two tapes. But I remember there were women's voices on supersonic. Yeah. But okay, so they don't, they don't really get much shrift as it were. It's, it's certainly short.

And the ones that I named are kind of the only ones that are, uh, or, or, or represent a large majority of the ones who manage to make it and really get much notice, I guess. So they didn't influence it too much one way or the other. They were just kind of, they were also ran with the genres then. I think that's fair to say. I can't really think of, in terms, yeah,

I think that's a fair assessment and that's coupled with the way women were spoken about or refer reference in most of the music at the time and still to this day for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I was I was going to I was going to ask, do you think that lack of representation is kind of rooted in the fact that this all started as something that, you know, teenage boys were doing when they were providing entertainment at parties and that adolescent male attitude is kind of the root of that whole energy. Yeah, I would definitely say that's the like the case.

And, you know, I definitely don't know much about wrestling, but I can name a whole lot of male wrestlers from the 80s and 90s and I can't name too many women. And I don't know if there's some Larry there in terms of the audience, in terms of like appealing to young boys, especially within the case of like, if you're a young boy in the 90s, like this music, like it sounds strong,

it sounds tough, and you know, it's really all the wrong messages if you're like trying to find yourself in terms of like, you know, being comfortable with who you are, not needing to be tough, which is why groups like De La Soul and Tri-Conquest are so important because they showed us another, they showed us that not everybody's just tough in all the streets, but, but yeah, I imagine that that has a lot to do with why we don't have nearly as many women in hip hop, especially at that time. Man, you just, you just brought up another like branch of hip hop that I wanted to, to query you on.

And that is, again, Dallas, Olan and Tribe Called Quest specifically, because that you'd spoken of Wu Teng Clan getting samples that were just way out of this world. And the early 90s is when you start to see sampling, like in a major, major way, right? Like they're really starting to break down. Like I'm thinking Tribe Called Quest, they break down Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side. And they use that as the background of, can I kick it?

And you start to really see people grabbing from, I think, they were like, album markets, and they would just go in and grab as many albums as they could, and then they would start pulling them apart and sampling, running them backward and forward and stuff like that. And that kind of creativity is a another departure from what we've seen in in other aspects. Um, and yeah, um, cool. He did, you know, and I don't know how much right. I've been all them knew or like, I don't know, you know, influenced by cool. He, yeah, he used to take the the labels off of his record. So that folks couldn't see what song he got that break from because he knew his competition will go on get it so you know he marked them up in a way that only he can know what's what because he was one who would go and try to find the most obscure records that have breaks in them to put together but

but yeah once the drum machine came out and run DMC and and Elo Kuzher and all that that was sort of like not really an art anymore but I would agree with you with Tribe and De La Soul and and the 90s era music that wasn't trying that was trying to provide an alternative to the hardcore like that you definitely get some some wonderful musicianship there. Yeah. And, I guess all of it is kind of storytelling lyric at that point, though. Like, now they think about it because I don't think that's a distinction that that would be fair to make because the gangster rap was telling stories. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And so, okay. So never mind that. But, um, the stories that tribe was trying to tell, the stories that nice and smooth were trying to tell, very different than the stories that NWA and, tell, the stories that nice and smooth were trying to tell. Very different than the stories that NWA and Iced-T are trying to tell. Is that, like you said, there's this beautiful music with the overlay of massive violence.

This is obviously they're trying to, are they carving out their own niche or are they experiencing things From a different background are they you know, it's kind of like yeah the Beatles were very much working class the stones were very much middle class And you can hear it in their lyrics is is is that what we're seeing or we see okay? Yeah, these are guys who are from the suburbs Okay, a lot of them folks who went off to college, not that, you know, against where folks didn't go to college.

40 went to Gramling, he just got honored. I think some sort of legacy award for Gramling University for a lot of his charity work. But in any case, yeah, those folks who didn't grow up in the hyper-violent urban centers dealing with what the LAPD was bringing on people's heads a day and a day. Not that they didn't have their issues

growing up where they grew up, but like, it was clear in the early 90s, there were some folks who were trying to sound gangster, and they became known as studio gangsters, because they weren't really out there living it. And then there were folks like Tribe who were like, we're not even going to pretend because that's not us. We have something else when we know that so many people out there can relate to us more

than they can relate to what's happening in South Central because South Central's one neighborhood and collection in the neighborhood was one region and not everybody lives there. So, yeah. Right. Yeah, you know, when just saying that part, like there's a real authenticity to tribe that there are other groups that are lacking that, I will say, generously. Well, okay, well, I think, I don't know, I think that's a good break off point. Maybe we could pick it back up in the next episode talking about the East and West Coast rivalry because I mean, that was front and center through the mid 90s.

Like that, that really seems like it was a, an important, what do you call that, Ed fixed moment in time? Is that what? Yeah, if you want to get old doctor, who about it? Yeah. Yeah, if you want to get old doctor, who about it? Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we could pick up with that and then and then go forward and see where where that takes us. So first off, thank you for doing this for and with us. I'm not adding in too much because I'm like taking notes mentally about all this stuff. This is really cool. Where can people find you

about all this stuff. This is really cool. Where can people find you in any projects it. Easiest way to find it is just to go to website AOTAShow and then click on whatever stream you have. You're like, because there's a lot of things out there called all of the above. But anyways, AOTAShow.com and everything you need to get in contact with me if you want. You can find it there. So, yeah. Excellent. And is there anything that you are reading or you want to recommend to our audience to read? Yeah, definitely.

Anybody interested in anything that was discussed today, definitely pick up. Can't stop won't stop by Jeff Chang. It's sort of the definitive history of hip hop, but currently reading the encyclopedia of Tupac or the Tupac encyclopedia by Michael Namikas. It just dropped on Amazon. Very, very great. Heavenly detailed read of for anybody who's a fan

of the Tupac, the Tupac encyclopedia. Very nice, thank you. Okay, I think that's a fan of the two-pock. The two-pock is like low-pedia. Very nice. Thank you. Okay, I think that's a good breakoff point. Everybody knows where to find me and Ed and you know when my shows are. So we're gonna call it right there. So Dr. Russ and thank you for joining us. Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

Yeah. And for Geek History of Time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Lailock and until next time, keep rolling 20s. And for Geekis Reef Time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Laylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.