Hip Hop (Part 1 of X) : A Miner 7th Revelation

Okay – so I’ve got to thinking about hiphop. What is the nature of the art form and what are the fundamental differences between how it’s done in the US vs. the UK. What's real what's hype.

I’ve decided that this is a multi parter.....so this is one of X.

I got to thinking about all of this because hip-hop in the UK for me has been a circle leading back to the beginning. Music and culture styles and ideologies are a right old mix of things.........

I got into hiphop in the early 80’s while a nipper growing up in Cowdenbeath. Cowdenbeath is a little place just outside Fife, Scotland and probably not even known about beyond the Scottish borders except for terrible football results. It appeared on government charts and was only ever statistical fodder on a spreadsheet to the powers that held sway over the loosely United Kingdom. Life was hard but regular and the work was predominantly mining and factory work.

Cowdenbeath back then even had enough work to spare and over the years Polish emigrants fleeing oppression began to arrive and pepper the towns surnames with things like Groncowski and Lesnik. Life was happy. Eventually a killer blow was dealt by the evil witch of the South when Maggie Thatcher swept down on her broomstick in the 80’s, hovering above the town square and put the ‘shut the industry down’ spell on everyone. Those get rich quick short terming bastards really put the boot into the old town. You see, those filofaxes only planned in terms of a year or so. These types never really thought 20 years down the line. ‘I want mine now and fuck the future’ would have been a good t-shirt to get printed up in those days. My dad became very politicised during this period and attended strikes, rallies and many running battles with the police. He’d relay the collective despair back to my mum while we listened and knew to shut our whining gobs.

The town was smirched as being communists by the ministers in the pockets of London when they desperately tried to band together and get some radical changes made. It wasn’t hard to brand them all dangerous lefties with all the Polish contingent in town. It wasn’t about politics for the town it was survival and the problems the town was having were in much quicker bursts than the slow and lethargic place of the ‘man’ in London. There were soup kitchens aplenty in the town. Cowdenbeath flailed like a stuck bull and nobody it seemed gave a shit. This wasn’t exclusive to Fife or even Scotland – the North of England got it in the neck too. I'm only telling what I saw.

Cowdenbeath began to look like those Cowboy towns that I had seen in the American movies. Tumbleweed blowing through the main street, pawn shops, lone men mumbling in anguish and pubs with regular fights outside them.

My mate Brian was the son of a pub owner and he lived along with me in Cowdenbeath or ‘Cowden’ as we called it. When the locals couldn’t get into The New Goth to drink on a Sunday afternoon we were allowed to have the keys to play pool and listen to the jukebox. The jukebox had all kinds of things on it and when I think of it that old jukebox really was my blinking tardis into a world into the different flavours of music. From Queen’s kickass rock of “Seven Seas of Rye” to New Editions electropop “Candy Girl”. Classic rock, reggae crossovers, folk and punk.

Brian never knew this but I used to nick records from that jukebox – it’s how I got my collection started. and I figured then, as I do now, that his dad could afford it … plus his dad used to make comments like “are we feeding the whole street?” whenever Brian and me were eating something in his kitchen. That just panders to my DickTurpin instinct….anyways alot of the singles in my collection had that telltale massive hole in the middle meaning it’d been punched out to fit in a jukebox.

If I hadn’t liberated those records then I never would have been able to obsess over one of the records that became my door into the world of America outside of Elvis and the movies. It was ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash. I listened to it over and over again until I knew all the words and not only that – the growls, roars and inflections.

Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs,
you know they just Don’t care
I can’t take the smell,
I can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out,
I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkie’s in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far
Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car
Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to loose my head

As the record was nicked there was no sleeve so I had to make one myself and before you knew it the pens were out and my first attempts at graffiti kickstarted and all my graphic design drive. The graffitti never went much further than nicking some gold spreay paint from Halfords and trying to do our ‘piece’ a bus stop in the dark. I did the whole bit and got the cardboard out - I had flipped over into obsession. Years later and I have jammed and recorded with countless DJ's, electronics freaks, rappers, verbalists, MC's and the like.... and recently did a record in Oakland, California with some mates called Elemental. Yes that is a plug.

I've been checking out DJ's and rappers at some live shows in Manchester so my head is on all this stuff. When hiphop first hit in the UK in the early 80's it took years for anything to transpire in terms of home-grown performers and culture - we were all punters. Everybody was too scared to rap and because ecstacy hadn't 'transformed' the twitchy British youth people weren't yet funky enough - the kinetic energy of punk was still buzzing in their body shapes. It's the weather as well of course. In the early 80's people in the UK got their underground vibes through mods and punks.

HipHop in the UK got better and better though in the 90's after some daliances with DrumNBass (me included) and now I'm looking at it again in 2006 with Roots Manuva, Dizzy Rascal and The Dirty Diggers and it looks as healthy as it's ever been and in no danger of stopping. UK oiky technology based music I think is fresher than the Americans - they're jaded now that their icons that kicked it off have fallen so far like IceCube and Missy Elliot etc - serious lack of content in their products these days . In the UK people have reconciled that they can rap in their own accents and are revelling in it....admittedly the South London thing is bit literally hackneyed but the stuff up north is poetic. If John Lennon was around today he'd probably be rapping in the North of England somewhere.

All kickstarted by inspiration from the children of the children of those Africans……

Now I don’t mean the rich Africans in Africa that originally sold their kinsmen on for gold to the slave traders. I mean the poor ones that were sold. This terrible collusion of the African chiefs and the slave traders is one of the sharp points between powerful Africans in Africa and educated African Americans today – no bloody wonder. The whole how dark or white is your skin thing rages between Africans and Indians aswell – battling for either side as being the most righteous is again madness to me and just for the record I’m peach in colour.

In fact in 2006 the African lineage that was sold into America has a lot more in common socially with their similarly shat on brethren around the world than they do with the same lineage back in Africa. So I’m thinking that being African isn’t really the sole genesis of this whole hiphop gig. It can’t be cos ‘Africans’ got separated not just by geography but by class when those ships disappeared off into the terrible horizon.

The British goivernment outsourced most of the slavery to the colonies so the UK is nowhere near as 'blended' as the US. All the slave labour was kept in their native country and managed by a blend of locals and Brits. The geographic size of Britian was always smaller than it's colony and 'staffing' ambitions and this is a HUGE difference in context between the UK and the US.

Then you look to the UK and you see that the hiphop that is really happening is happening in the North of England and Scotland. The divisions here are tribal enough but the only colour difference is that they people get a blueish white the further you go north. London, the epicentre, of the UK's traffic has always had hiphop action of a sort and today the powers that be are all centred there. Dancehall offshoots and garage rhythms are a London thing but lyrically I'm finding myself responding to the folks up North. It might be grim but it's real up north.

Do I have white guilt? Do I fuck. Does anyone have Irish Guilt or Indian guilt? What about Iraqui guilt? The list of who got fucked since time began is long and bloody – me and my people didn't do it so I’m don't feel on trial and would take particular umbridge at anyone trying to have that pop. For me it’s got to be a person to person thing and an event to event thing. Ask my my mum about equal rights and she’ll tell you about the signs in England and Scotland in the 60’s that said “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs”. They weren’t just making that shit up you know.

I empathise with poor people getting shafted and managed like livestock. I empathise with powerless victims of the violent PR techniques employed by right wing states. I empathise with creating something from nothing and rising out of your situation. Don’t play the black and white game like chess. We think we are playing the game and moving the pieces but in fact we are the pieces......

The truth of it as Melle Mel simply puts

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under….

It's all shades of green in the jungle and it aint just the red things that are dangerous...

I might not have understood all the references at that age but Cowdenbeath was definitely a fine context to hear hiphop.

So I break it down like this for those that have skipped to the summary

1. It doesn’t come with colour it comes with your story. That means you can only deal with ‘hiphop’ ideologies on a person-to-person basis – otherwise you are a lunatic.
2. Stations or product streams called Black Music this or that are mentalists. How can a music wave or particle have a colour? Was Jimi Hendrix’s band one third black? Will these stations hive off into Beige Music and Dark Chocolate music in order to further differentiate the coloured demographic. Where’s my Peach Channel? A record made by Snoop Doggy Dog talking about cars and bitches...that's isn't African music.
   
3. ‘Urban’ as a term increasingly means fuck all – half the world is full of concrete and computers and khaki green is all the high street stores – posh and otherwise. The grit-E urban reaLITee is in all modern composers work – it’s just different instrumentation and a cognisance of the role that it plays that differs. Urban is the term they use to give street cred to some bollocks normally.
   

That’s it – hiphop is contextual – that means “it depends” on who/where/when and it certainly doesn’t have a template or way of automatically being born into it.

Part Two next titled ‘Subverting Tools is Cool’.

Check out this great summary page of UK hip hop