#He's also adding it to his mental lexicon he will absolutely use that later

[lesbianwyllravengard]

Wyll clearing his throat awkwardly after you make a comment about making a banshee whimper is so so cute and an obvious tell of him being flustered but that's exactly why I think it's actually just him trying really hard to say what he'd meant to say with sincerity and not get sidetracked by the funniest fucking thing he's ever heard

[hiphopandtheirishquestion]

The Birth of Def Road

It all started sometime around 1985. As a music journalist and chancer, my brother Johnny rarely paid for anything. I grew accustomed over the years to standing by the entrance while he negotiated free passage into whatever gig we were at.

- ‘I’m on the guest list  

- You’re name’s not down

- I rang ahead. I spoke to the manager. I’m doing a write up for Hot Press.

- No one told me’

... and so the drama would unfold, me standing there like a lemon (the +1) thinking ‘can we not just pay the fiver in?’ But inevitably they crumbled and in we went, journalist +1.

The experience would stand him in good stead as he set about liberating the music companies of New York of their choicest cuts. Zip, Buck, Artie and the boys were no match and he returned with a veritable treasure chest of records, none of which he'd paid for. The vast majority belonged to a genre called hip hop, or sometimes rap. Wasn’t that just talking?

By 1985, the Irish Republic had been in existence for nearly 50 years. The Brits, may God’s curses, shit, piss and jizz rain down on them, had long since been kicked out. Ireland was now, finally, in the hands of the Gaels - who immediately palmed it off to the church.

And New York was in my hands. The city, it seemed, consisted mainly of black lads in tracksuits and gold chains. Their ‘music’ involved a DJ stealing the best parts from other people’s records while a rapper bragged in rhyming couplets about, amongst other things, how great he was. The other things could be anything from the size of his cock to how much weed he smoked and on to race, crime, politics, cars, shopping malls, guns, hookers, snot, STDs, cars, watches...the list is long.  

Introspective it wasn’t. Feelings and inadequacies rarely entered the lexicon of that first wave of MCs. They spoke with absolute certainty and iron resolve. Self-doubt was an ailment the rapper didn’t appear to suffer from. It was all fierce confusing.

‘No one understands me’, went the lament of angsty teenagers like me. ‘I’m gonna lock myself in my room and listen to The Smiths. Girls are so pretty – if only I could talk to them. Who am I? What’s it all about?’

‘Yo! Everyone look at me, screamed his black NY counterpart. ‘I got the best clothes, I even got jewellery. Girls? Fuck, man. Dime a dozen. Life is so damn straightforward. I’m the coolest, smartest best looking bastard going’.

At first glance, Tramore, Co Waterford seems quite different to the ghettos of New York. People from our neighbouring estates did not spend their time ‘dissing’ each other. Sweetbriar residents did not wish to ‘take out’ motherfuckers from Moon Laun. And gunshots were almost never heard at the Friday night GAA Discos. This could not stand. The ‘boroughs’ of Waterford would have to be re-classified, starting with my hometown.

What is Tramore? Upwardly mobile Gardaí and Secondary School teachers were by now colonizing it's burgeoning estates. A beautiful beach, amusements for the kiddies, pubs, pissed up jackeens in the summer, and now lots and lots of new homes, from where people set off for the bright lights of Waterford City every day if they were fortunate enough to have jobs in 80s Ireland.

We were a bit wussy – just didn’t have that hard edge that came so naturally to people from the barrios of places like Lisduggan and Ballybeg. We weren’t the Bronx. Long Island was seen as being a bit ‘soft and country ’ by New Yorkers. Culchieville, or at least suburban. But it was also where Public Enemy came from, along with De La Soul, EPMD, and Eric B & Rakim to name a handful. They didn't like the name, so they changed it. Long Island became Strong Island.

Tramore, or Tra Mhor as Gaeilge, meaning 'big beach', would now be Strong Beach. Kinda shit, but still better than Tramore. My home address of Cliff Road was renamed  Def Road – considerably better. The newly-drawn boroughs of  Waterford began to take shape.

It was an era that came to be known as hip hop’s Golden Age. Ireland had once had a golden age of it's own. The Island of Saints and Scholars we had been called, as the Christian Brothers were quick to remind us. Alas that time had long since passed. When darkness prevailed in Medieval Europe, Ireland had been a beacon of light, home to the dopest lyricists and flyest artwork. And as recessionary 80s Ireland trundled on hopelessly, we could at least pat ourselves on the back in the knowledge of our glorious past.

Through the lyrics of the likes of Chuck D and Krs-One I discovered black America was prone to leaning on a similar crutch. The extremist Nation of Islam claimed that the great kingdoms of Africa had thrived when we Europeans, or cave dwellers as they called us, were still running around on all fours. Take that whitey!

Ireland’s time as the foremost creator and preserver of the written word ran from about the sixth to ninth centuries. Missionaries from Christian monastic schools went forth from the motherland into the wild lands of Western Europe; writing, learning and being generally noble as they went. The Roman Empire was falling and the barbarians were ransacking the once civilized and ordered cities of Europe. It was left to a previously unheralded wee island to preserve the written word. Which, miraculously, it did. But no one outside Ireland seemed to care.

It’s a state of affairs that many pan-African movements would empathise with. They often claim history is written by the white man, cynically removing their own people’s contributions from the record books. We break it down a step further. White Anglo-Saxons and Protestants decree what is history – the achievements of the paddy man and the black man just don’t make the cut. And so we glory in our past deeds, with a healthy balance of chips on either shoulder.

The pinnacle of Ireland’s Golden Age would come to be seen as The Book Of Kells, a kind of Three Feet High And Rising of its time. There for all to see in Trinity College - proof of our glorious past. Suck it up, ye bastards!

Hip hop travelled a fair old road to reach its Golden Age, if not quite as far back as the Vikings. But just like the Irish scholars of medieval Ireland, in that second Dark Age of the mid-eighties, hip hop was a beacon of light. As mediocrity thrived all around them, the ghettoes of New York became the ultimate seat of motherfucking learning.

The New York we saw on our 80s TV screens pre-Giuliani and zero tolerance seems barely believable now. Apolcalytic, Mad Max style urban wastelands. Anything went, or so the schoolyards of Tramore CBS would have it. There was never any graffiti on the Tramore-Waterford bus route, aside from the odd ‘Paul is gay’ or ‘Sharon Loves Browner’, but New York?

-‘Sure the whole feckin’ subway is full of it! Can’t even see out de windows.  Me uncle works there and he says there do be gay lads stalling the heads off each other on the street. Full of black lads too but they love the Irish so you’re alright there’.

Mental, like. And it was into this environment that one Clive Campbell, soon to be better known as Kool Herc, rocked up on the streets of the Bronx in the early 70s with his quare Jamaican ways.

Quare Jamaican ways that included sound systems – very, very big sound systems – which he used to rock parties all over the neighbourhood. He occasionally employed a rapper, but more importantly began cutting up records.  He played the funky, instrumental bit of the tune and then played it again, and again and again if the vibe was right. The break. The two turntables were now an instrument.  This was the cue for the b (for break) - boys to do their thing on the dance floor. Or breakdance. The big eejit from the Caribbean had only gone and invented hip hop.

A boyo called Patricius had a gameplan of his own when he rocked up in Ireland with his big Welsh head on him around 432 AD. This was his second trip. First time round he had come as a slave, and spent his days working his hole off high in the mountains, tending sheep and the like. Fuck this for a lark, he thought. And like so many convicts down the years, he turned to God for help.

And he was rewarded with a vision, enabling his escape. Six years swotting up in a French monastery, a brief trip home to check in with the folks, and back to Ireland. ‘ Right. I’m gonna Christianize these chumps’, he vowed to the man above as he returned and set to work.

Patricius was a good egg, albeit one with a bit of ‘previous’. As a former slave, he empathised with their plight, a borderline pinko stance unheard of in those brutal days. The Black Panthers had MLK and Malcolm X, we had Saint Patrick.  And he was a hard bastard. Slavery, the monastery and then 30-odd years trundling across the wild lands of Eireann spreading the word. No choirboy either. Some unexplained sin, committed at the age of 15 and later confessed to, racked him with guilt. At least one historian hints at murder. Ireland, denied the ‘civilizing’ influence of the Roman Empire, was no place for the faint-hearted.

The original Paddy may not have driven any snakes out, but if he’d wanted to those slimy fucks wouldn’t have stood a chance. And neither did the pagans. With the bold Patricius at its helm Christianity stomped all over them. Like Ray Houghton a couple of centuries later he had earned his spurs. He was now one of us – an Irishman, and a proud one

Kool Herc was good, but he was no Saint Patrick. He needed help. And two others would rise from the East (Coast) to create a glorious triumvirate. Hip hop now set about crushing the faggoty, silk-shirt and gold-medallioned world of disco.

Afrika Bambaata (or Kevin Donovan as he was then) hadn’t required enslavement to have his eyes opened. He won a motherfucking essay writing contest, motherfucker, first prize being a trip to Africa. Bam’s eyes were opened and he returned with a new vision. No more gang banging – it was peace, love, unity and having fun from here on in.

St. Patrick may have passed on the ‘having fun’ aspect of Bambaata’s message. There was already far too much of that in early 5th century pagan Ireland. But otherwise he surely would have concurred with the mission statement. Patrick had come to enlighten and Christianize, Bam enlighten and Africanize. Peas in a pod. Kind of. Patrick wanted less of that kind of thing, Bambaata probably a bit more. He formed The Universal Zulu Nation, a broad church of hip hop, spirituality and all things Africa.  

Joseph Sadler was a wiry little bollocks. Like Herc, he was originally from Jamaica, and was good with his hands. Not only could he spin records, he was a qualified electrician. So it should come as no surprise that it was he who first succeeded in wiring two turntables to a mixer.

-‘Janey Mac’, he said to the waitress at his local cafe , ‘I’ve only gone and opened the door to sampling, changing the face of contemporary popular music, perhaps forever. Not bad for a wiry little bollox from de Bronx, wha’?’

-‘Fuck you on about? she replied.

And he was no mere DJ, either. Herc played his records, Bambaata enlightened, but Grandmaster Flash was a showman. He span the records with his feet, pirouetted, spliced, diced and generally acted like a prize chimp in the DJ’s booth.

- ‘Tell ye what, dat’s savage’, noted Walter ‘the bomb’ MacKenzie to his fellow Bronxian Rashid Washington Jr at one of Flash’s jams.

- ‘Ye not wrong there, so you’re not’, replied his pal. ‘Dem Jamaican lads are at it again. Must be something in the air out there – or maybe the grass, if ye know what I mean. Ay? Ay?

- ‘Ha ha. Ah will ye stop. Tell ye what, though. I predict this will change the face of music as we know it. It won’t be long before it’s threatening the higher echelons of the charts. DJs will now be limited only by their imaginations and the size of their record collections’.

- ‘It will and its bollocks’, replied the less-effusive Washington Jr.

But history shows Mr McKenzie's statement wasn’t a ‘will and its bollocks’ at all. Far from it. Flash, Bam and Herc – the holy trinity, as hip hop lore would have it. The disaffected youth of New York now had a voice, and its name was hip hop.

There would be others. Run DMC duetted with Aerosmith and got heavy rotation on MTV. They even played Live Aid, not that you were likely to see it.

- ‘Run DMC? You fuckin’ kiddin’ me’? We’re trying to raise money for staving Ethiopians. Last thing we need is people ringing in kicking up shit about two black lads in Adidas tops grabbing their balls’. They were the only Live Aid act not shown live on TV, the risk of bollock-grabbing too high.

But it couldn’t stop the juggernaut. And it would culminate in a spotty teenager in the arse end of Ireland being beholden to the sound of black men in sportswear and gold chains rhyming over pre-programmed beats.Watching The Sunday Game one summer’s evening in the late 80s, he realized why.

-Michael, I’ll tell ye now why hurling is the greatest sport in the world. Are ye listening now? I’ve watched some desperate games over the years. Brutal, only brutal. But I’ll tell ye this. No matter how bad it got, there’d always be something. Some lad would crack over a point from 65 metres, or cut one over the bar. Something to have you saying, ‘Holy God, that was savage good.

‘Compare that now to foreign rubbish like soccer. No goals at all in some games. Sure they all have long hair and they wear shinpads. Bunch of Nancy boys. I’ll tell ye know, if I got my hands on....

-‘Thanks Ger/Ogie/Denis/Micheal/Mossie (can't remember who), the point is well made though. Hurling is clearly the world’s greatest game because even the most boring game can be enlivened by a bit of trickery or magic. Ireland and the Irish are great!’

- ‘That’s exactly it Michael’.

This got me thinking. Krs One had a track called ‘Part-time Suckers’.  It consisted mainly of a serious of dictionary definitions, intended presumably to illustrate the superiority of his vocabulary over that of his less educated contemporaries. It sounded a bit like the speak-and-spell gizmo that Elliot gave ET to help him phone home. It was pretty shit, in all fairness.

But the last minute or so made it all worthwhile – a DJ workout, scratching the bejaysus out of a line from an old Smokey Robinson song. The half-way line cut over the bar, the point from the impossibly tight angle – the otherwise ‘brutal, only brutal’ track enlivened by a bit of DJ tomfoolery. It all made sense!

Hip hop was the hurling of the ghetto – the black man and the paddy man once more inextricably linked. Def Road would bear witness.