So today is, by some measures, Hip-Hop’s birthday. Of course, there are other candidates too, and I’m nothing like an expert on this, so I won’t try to argue it one way or another. I’ll just note that the 11 August 1973 date comes from a party that Kool Herc and his sister threw outdoors. And that Herc is supposedly the man who invented “the merry-go-round” - a technique of having one record playing the break section of one song on one turntable while cueing the break section on a second record to pick up when the first one finishes. Before all the portable sophisticated mixing equipment we have today, this was a homespun way of extending the cool (read funky, danceable) bits of your favorite songs indefinitely (put the same record on both turntables…). Only … well, he didn’t. Read some history and learn something interesting: Francis Grasso had been doing this since the late 60s, in fact. And actually, he probably picked it up from Terry Noel (whose job he stole at Salvation), but slipcueing and beatmatching seem to have been contributions of his own. The problem with saying all this out loud, of course, is that Francis Grasso is mostly associated with Disco - and that doesn’t really fit with Hip-Hop’s image much. Nevertheless…
Of course, both disco and hip-hop were originally fragments of the DJs’ imaginations and fingertips: In the early days, it was the respective DJs’ taste that determined what was or wasn’t a disco or hip-hop record. Like all twins (it’s up to you which one sports the pencil mustache and wears the black leather jumpsuit a la Michael Knight’s evil twin in everyone’s favorite episode of Knight Rider), hip-hop and disco share the same DNA - the break, the short section of a record where most of the instrumentalists drop out to “give the drummer some.” … However ridiculous the imagery may have been, disco was fixated on a romantic vision of the good life - the syrupy strings and lush chorales were the aural equivalent of the soft-focus boudoir photography. Hip-hop, on the other hand, was about the here and now and self-determination; there was no time to waste on romance.
That’s Peter Shapiro on their shared roots. To be fair - Kool Herc’s gym parties seem to have been in part an anti-Disco scene. Before there was really Disco or Hip-Hop, granted, but both were in their infancy at the same time (1972), and Herc didn’t feel at home in the crowd of somewhat older sophisticates that what was to become Disco appealed to, so he started throwing parties for the younger, less successful people that would become the Hip-Hop crowd. Call them Disco dropouts. What’s essential to Hip-Hop isn’t the break mixing, but the choice of tracks for the break - and all the shouting and rapping over it. That sound probably did originate with Herc and people like him (not that I would be the one to ask). But that doesn’t make it any less funny to remind the Hip-Hop crowd on this one of its plausible birthdays that Hip-Hop and Disco are joined at the , erm, hip. And no, not just because the Sugarhill Gang sampled Chic - it goes back to the roots. Including the invention of modern DJing in the first place - which is Disco’s contribution, not Hip-Hop’s.
So Michael Jackson’s gone - and there’s really only two routes you can take on commentary. Either he’s an immoral freak, and good riddance, or it’s worth acknowledging that he was a great pop star and stellar performer in spite of everything. I’ll opt for this latter.
Look, all kinds of famous people are shady characters. If this is suddenly a problem for you in Michael Jackson’s case, then it’s completely out of the blue. Whoever you are, you regularly enjoy music from all kinds of people you wouldn’t share a bus seat with. All that’s going on in Michael Jackson’s case is that it got a lot more publicity. And the fact that it got so much more publicity says everything you need to know about how talented he was.
I have a special soft spot for him, though, because he punches a hole in two kinds of 60s-era hipster baby-boomer vanity. And there is nothing, NOTHING, in the world more satisfying than putting hippies in their place.
First, he puts the lie to this increasingly annoying argument from baby boomers that you’re not allowed to dislike the Beatles because they’ve stood the test of time. See, apparently if anything at all stands the test of time, it’s ipso facto great art and above criticism. It isn’t the argument that I have a problem with so much as the fact that the people peddling this don’t really mean it. If they meant it, of course, then Michael Jackson is a greater artist than John Lennon could ever dream of being, because he outsold, out-influenced, and will in general outlast the Beatles (and certainly Lennon’s solo career). Ask how many people have heard of Sgt. Pepper and how many of Thriller, and the numbers are impressive in both cases, but there is a clear winner, AND it happens to be the right one (score one for the wisdom of crowds after all). But you will never, ever get anyone who lived through the 60s to admit that Michael Jackson is, on their own terms, a better artist than John Lennon, and that is because they are simply LYING when they offer this argument. ‘Nuff said.
Second, he wrote great Disco music. Of course, the people who say there was never even one - not a single - good Disco record are the same people who think John Lennon was Beethoven reincarnated, so these are really two prongs of the same attack. Fact is, there was some solid gold in with all the crap, and Off the Wall is one such example.
Musical style is a funny thing. We all remember the great Queen/Vanilla Ice controversy over Ice’s sampling of the bassline from “Under Pressure” for “Ice, Ice Baby”. Originally he denied it (claiming he had modified the line). Later he had to recant, said he had been joking, and ended up paying Bowie and Queen rather than face a lawsuit. Any doubts that the song Ice was claiming was “completely different” was not, in fact, the same song as the Bowie/Queen song can be laid to rest by any number of YouTube mashups, of which this one is one of the better-timed:
So that’s a totally different song that is in fact the same. The motive is not mysterious.
What doesn’t make as much sense is songs that are trying to be another song and just aren’t. Yes, I’m talking about “covers” that - aside from possibly the lyrics - are not the original song at all. Here’s one by Nevermore (video by mamapacha) - an attempt at a heavy metal version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” that, aside from the lyrics and the first few measures, is just a typical Nevermore song - nothing even remotely in common with S&G:
I mean, the lyrics make good metal lyrics (not that lyrics are anything other than beside the point in metal), but why “cover” this if you’re not going to, you know, cover it? It’s not the same song.
That’s how it’s done. Same song(s) - all recognizeable - redone in the style of the band doing the playing at the moment. That’s what covers are.
Or … well … I guess sometimes they’re “reimaginings” of the original - like XTC’s rather brilliant cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (which I’ve linked before and won’t do again today). That one’s on the border for me, but still this side of not being a cover. It’s radically altered but manages to be the same song - to my ears, anyway. It has all the crucial musical ideas of the original song - just done (very) differently. (Not that you would necessarily recognize it immediately if no one told you what it was…)
But Nevermore’s “cover” of “Sound of Silence” is just NOT. A. COVER. Sorry. It’s no more “Sound of Silence” than “Ice, Ice Baby” is not “Under Pressure.” Read it twice.
We’re getting on December, which means Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voting time. Not that I should care - but this year I kinda do, and that’s because I notice that Chic has been nominated again. Actually, this makes the 5th time. They were also up in 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2008 - which is, to put it in perspective, well over half of the years they’ve been elligible (to the extent that I understand these things, they’ve been elligible since 2002 - their first single having been released in 1977), and the third year in a row.
The case for Chic makes itself. Influence? Hell yes. At least three acts that are already inducted - Blondie, Queen, and Grandmaster Flash - owe them a lot. Alright, Queen maybe not so much, but I had to throw that in there just because in all the fuss about Vanilla Ice having ripped off the bass lines from “Ice, Ice Baby” from Queen’s “Under Pressure” (anyone alive in the early 90s will remember this), no one ever mentions that Queen ripped off the bass line of its biggest selling single EVAR - “Another One Bites the Dust” - from Chic’s “Good Times.” That and because I really hate Queen.
It isn’t just these three, though. Chic went on to produce just about everyone in the 80s - and if we’re sticking to Hall of Fame inductees this includes David Bowie (they practically wrote Let’s Dance for him), and most especially Madonna, who partly owes them her breakout (they inspired and then produced, at her request, her Like a Virgin album).
But the real reason, influence-wise, is that hip-hop is based on this. Quit denyin’ it. Yeah, I know, P-Funk and all that. And that’s true - P-Funk has more to do with how hip hop turned out than anyone. But Chic was important too, if not as often acknowledged.
So why all the nominations but still no cigar? Simply put, it’s because they’re a disco band.
I will never understand what it was about Disco that so offended the Rolling Stone snobs - but history speaks for itself. There was The Disco Demolition, Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti, all those “Disco Sucks” T-Shirts and buttons… Maybe this was just 60s rock realizing 10 years too late that it was dead and gone - that the hippies hadn’t managed to change humanity and bring about their twisted idea of utopia - and thank fucking God for that! There was punk, but Rolling Stone was a late adopter there too. Still, the Clash and the Ramones were eventually revered. Disco has never been forgiven … for whatever it was that it was supposed to have done.
Alright, I get it. Polyester leisure suits are silly. Yeah, but so is the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, not to mention everything Paul McCartney ever wrote with Wings, and people still see the good in the Beatles. Every genre has its great artists and its plastic commercial album fillers, and Disco was no different. There was a lot of shit, but there was a lot of really good stuff too. Really, really good, actually. And Chic is one of those.
Give them the award already. They deserve it, you at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame know it, and the only reason you won’t is because you’re still too childish to admit you all overreacted to Disco.