Way Of The Walk
Yes, y’all.
Let’s start with some updates.
Beat-maker extraordinaire Jel recently posted a photo on his Instagram that generated a little buzz. Take a look:
I won’t say too much about it right now. When the time is right, I’ll tell the whole story. But something is cooking. It’s coming soon. It’s a long time in the making. The days I recently spent with Jel and Doseone were some of the funnest of my whole life. My body still hurts from laughing. Why do Dose and I look fat in that photo though?
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The week before hanging out with the old homies, Live Convention went down in Toronto. Everyone who was there seems to agree that it was the best event since it kicked off in 2016. The Q&A with Diamond D was very enlightening and entertaining and his DJ set was straight hip hop joy. At the record sale, I set up a museum of holy grail-level records and to my surprise, everything sold. It was fun putting hallowed records into the hands of legends and deep music-lovers from all over the world. There were many epic hangs fueled by great conversation and the exchange of ideas. It was a weekend I’ll remember for a long, long time. Hi, Clint.
As I write this, lyrics for six songs for the next album are written. That’s a good chunk. I think that puts me a little further ahead of schedule and I now have a full head of steam. If all goes well, I’ll be able to knock out close to a song per day until the writing is done. By the middle of the month, I should be ready to do all the detail work and then mix the thing.
The focus of most of the songs I’ve written so far is on technical rapping. I’ve been feeling inspired to rap my ass off lately. I’ve been listening to lots of Myka 9 and JID and Coast Contra and Lord Sko and MF Doom and Billy Woods and Blu and others. I want to continue to bring new flows and deliveries. But I’m also making an effort to write a few songs that are about something. Topics. And I think I’m going to allow myself to get a bit weird here and there. All-in-all, I want to continue down the path of King Of Drums and Super Dope while bringing a few new looks to the party. It’s going to be good.
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About a month ago, I visited my father and spent part of an afternoon looking through old photographs. One of my favorites is this one of Donna (my childhood best friend) and I. I appear to be telling the photographer to get the bozack.
This past weekend, I drove out to the country to an antiques market to do some digging. I found a few decent records. There was a surprising amount of 80s and early-90s hip hop stuff. But the real score of the day was a nice framed print of the classic kitsch painting, Chinese Girl. I had been looking for one for about 30 years! I can’t believe I finally found one. And I got it at a great price. Psyched.
My OG homie Sixtoo is moving to Japan. I went over to his house to pick up a load of stuff from the Sebutones days that he doesn’t want to lug halfway around the world. Master tapes of the albums we made together and a bunch of his solo joints are now in my care. He also laced me with a bunch of old gig posters. Here’s a dope one:
Okay, let’s talk hip hop for a sec. I’m still thinking about and processing stories from the book The Come Up (again - highly, highly recommended). Here’s an interesting quote from the pioneer Rahiem, who was a member of the Funky Four and then the Furious Five:
“To us, Run-DMC helped white people figure out how to rap. And that was a good thing and a bad thing to us at the time. It was necessary in order to push the culture forward and develop its growth. But when you have something organic, as soon as the corporate world puts two dollars into it, it changes the nature of what that thing was forever.”
Man-o-man, there’s so much I could say about this. First of all, the book raises several “what if this never happened” questions. All fascinating to consider. Some pertain to people and events that arguably saved the culture from certain doom. Others pertain to occurrences that shifted the art in arguably detrimental ways. Run DMC is a monumental force in hip hop because they made game-changing impacts several times. There seems to be little debate that hip hop music was in danger of dying before the song “Sucker MCs” was unleashed on the world. People talk about how it was utterly unlike the records that came before it. It was stripped-down and raw. It was hardcore. I would argue that “It’s Yours” by T La Rock checked off all the same boxes and more but I digress.
[Check out my buddy Vinnie Gallo introducing Run DMC on Graffiti Rock]:
It’s interesting to me that Rahiem equates Run DMC with “the corporate world”. He’s not explicit about what he’s referring to, specifically. Run DMC’s records came out on Profile Records which - until they partnered with Arista/Sony in 1998 - was a small independent label. They weren’t exactly rolling in money in the early days. I suspect Rahiem is referring to the involvement/interference of Russell Simmons. It’s well known that Simmons had big ambitions for hip hop. You could argue that he single-handedly brought the culture to mainstream America. His first big power move was to organize the Fresh Fest tour in 1984. It was the first big national hip hop tour. Kurtis Blow, The Fat Boys, Whodini and Run DMC were on the bill. They played cities all over the United States. For the vast majority of people who bought tickets, it was their first opportunity to see hip hop music performed live.
The story goes that Russell Simmons was shocked and amazed to see white kids - lots of them - in the audience each night. He suddenly realized that the business of hip hop was ready for the big time. Perhaps it would be logical for a mover-and-shaker working behind the hip hop scenes to say, “Hey! White kids love hip hop! Let’s keep making dope records!” And maybe they’d leave well enough alone or maybe look to expand distribution and marketing in the wider market a little bit. But you know what Russell Simmons did next? He said, “let’s make some music especially for the white people!” and then cooked up a collaboration between Run DMC and Aerosmith. Friggin’ Aerosmith! That collaboration was recorded in 1986. You know who was big in pop/rock music in 1986? Madonna. Peter Gabriel. Huey Lewis. Bon Jovi. Duran Duran. John Cougar. Genesis, for frig sakes. You know who wasn’t big? AEROSMITH! They were washed up and hadn’t had a hit since the mid-70s. What the entire hell? I’ve heard the story that Jam Master Jay cut up doubles of the original version of “Walk This Way” years before. Maybe that’s true. Maybe. But “Walk This Way” was never one of the classic breaks. And Run DMC had a street classic with “Here We Go” the year before. In that recording, Jay cuts up “The Big Beat” by Billy Squire. So by that logic, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to team up Run DMC with Billy Squire? He was still somewhat relevant. “Rock Me Tonight” was a huge hit in 1984.
If you ask me, the Run DMC/Aerosmith collaboration was a harebrained idea and it kinda drives me nuts that it actually worked. The “Walk This Way” remake was a massive hit. But I’m not entirely sure that was a good thing for hip hop in the grand scheme of things. And I suspect that’s at least partly what Rahiem had in mind when he said Run DMC was good and bad.
In the early chapters of The Come Up, several key figures comment on the parallels between the hip hop and punk scenes in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. The prevailing idea was that - in essence - hip hop was Black and Puerto Rican punk. That idea makes a lot of sense to me and I think it’s a beautiful notion. I think you could argue that “Walk This Way” played a big part in killing the punk spirit of hip hop. I kinda wish it never happened.
Maybe we’ll talk more about the punk thing in the next post.
Until then.