Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) Read Online Free
Author: Christopher R. Weingarten
were snorting behind velvet-roped fences, Herc created a new canon smelted from old material: forgotten records, both classic and obscure, stuff that he found best resonated with hispredominantly black and Hispanic audiences. He tried reggae at first, but when that didn’t move the crowd, he pushed on to funk and soul: James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Baby Huey.
Watching the dancers get down every night, Herc saw that their limbs were loosest during the “breaks,” or isolated drum parts, when the band pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong the break? Could you make an
endless
break? By cutting the audio back and forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertently invented the “breakbeat” — two seconds of feverish climax looped eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the foundation for hip-hop music. Brown and Stubblefield may have slid off the
Billboard
charts, but Herc was keeping them alive with all the energy he could borrow from local streetlamps, recontextualizing gritty drum breaks pushed out of the spotlight by blinding glitter balls. Looking for the perfect beat, he played rock bands like Rare Earth (“Get Ready”), disco groups like Mandrill (“Fencewalk”) and Latin-tinged funk bands like the Incredible Bongo Band (“Apache”). And no one could deny the transformative power of a Clyde Stubblefield break like Herc’s break of choice: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” It’s uncertain when or how the “Funky Drummer” break entered the picture, but its rollicking presence is felt on any number ofvintage party tapes by DJs like Grandmaster Flash. By 1979, it was so engrained in break lexicon that it was immortalized as the lead track on
Super Disco Brakes Vol. 2
. White-label bootlegs of popular breakbeat records were popping up underneath the counters of Manhattan record hot spots. Capitalizing on the trend, New York label owner Paul Winley made the two lo-fi
Super Disco Brakes
comps (all pressings of the first one had a scratch in it) which allowed new DJs to ensnare bonkers beats without having to peek over Herc’s or Afrika Bambaataa’s hulking shoulders, attempting to guess what artist and song title was written on the record before they had steamed off the label.
When rappers started recording their own records in 1979, live bands played most of the music. When James Brown joined Bambaataa for the “Unity” 12-inch in 1984, the track was a mix of drum machines and tireless session dudes like Sugarhill’s house rhythm section Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc playing through a leaden version of Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.” Around that time, a few mavericks started “sampling” James and Stubblefield, but only through incredibly cumbersome, time-consuming tape edits. In 1984, audio collage artists Steinski and Double Dee set about making a compilation of Brown’s greatest grunts, and ended up with their “Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix),” a mastermix of a whole buncha Brown absurdly gyrating against Bugs Bunny, “Double Dutch Bus” and kitschy dance instructional records.“Funky Drummer” appeared on another mysterious bootleg tape-edit record floating around in 1986, “Feelin’ James” (on TD Records), a six-minute track that squeezed a sizable chunk of Brown’s discography into one monstrous mush-up. Brown felt that disco was just “bits and pieces from everybody, including me, made very simple,” 14 but this was pieces of Brown made very, very complex.
With the birth of the E-Mu SP-12 sampler in 1985, sampling became sport. Marley Marl discovered the power of sampling drums by accident during a Captain Rock session and soon, as rap journalist Chairman Mao wrote, “magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.” 15 The Clyde Stubblefield breaks
Watching the dancers get down every night, Herc saw that their limbs were loosest during the “breaks,” or isolated drum parts, when the band pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong the break? Could you make an
endless
break? By cutting the audio back and forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertently invented the “breakbeat” — two seconds of feverish climax looped eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the foundation for hip-hop music. Brown and Stubblefield may have slid off the
Billboard
charts, but Herc was keeping them alive with all the energy he could borrow from local streetlamps, recontextualizing gritty drum breaks pushed out of the spotlight by blinding glitter balls. Looking for the perfect beat, he played rock bands like Rare Earth (“Get Ready”), disco groups like Mandrill (“Fencewalk”) and Latin-tinged funk bands like the Incredible Bongo Band (“Apache”). And no one could deny the transformative power of a Clyde Stubblefield break like Herc’s break of choice: “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” It’s uncertain when or how the “Funky Drummer” break entered the picture, but its rollicking presence is felt on any number ofvintage party tapes by DJs like Grandmaster Flash. By 1979, it was so engrained in break lexicon that it was immortalized as the lead track on
Super Disco Brakes Vol. 2
. White-label bootlegs of popular breakbeat records were popping up underneath the counters of Manhattan record hot spots. Capitalizing on the trend, New York label owner Paul Winley made the two lo-fi
Super Disco Brakes
comps (all pressings of the first one had a scratch in it) which allowed new DJs to ensnare bonkers beats without having to peek over Herc’s or Afrika Bambaataa’s hulking shoulders, attempting to guess what artist and song title was written on the record before they had steamed off the label.
When rappers started recording their own records in 1979, live bands played most of the music. When James Brown joined Bambaataa for the “Unity” 12-inch in 1984, the track was a mix of drum machines and tireless session dudes like Sugarhill’s house rhythm section Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc playing through a leaden version of Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.” Around that time, a few mavericks started “sampling” James and Stubblefield, but only through incredibly cumbersome, time-consuming tape edits. In 1984, audio collage artists Steinski and Double Dee set about making a compilation of Brown’s greatest grunts, and ended up with their “Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix),” a mastermix of a whole buncha Brown absurdly gyrating against Bugs Bunny, “Double Dutch Bus” and kitschy dance instructional records.“Funky Drummer” appeared on another mysterious bootleg tape-edit record floating around in 1986, “Feelin’ James” (on TD Records), a six-minute track that squeezed a sizable chunk of Brown’s discography into one monstrous mush-up. Brown felt that disco was just “bits and pieces from everybody, including me, made very simple,” 14 but this was pieces of Brown made very, very complex.
With the birth of the E-Mu SP-12 sampler in 1985, sampling became sport. Marley Marl discovered the power of sampling drums by accident during a Captain Rock session and soon, as rap journalist Chairman Mao wrote, “magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.” 15 The Clyde Stubblefield breaks
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