#kool moe dee

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

Kool Moe Dee was born August 8, 1962

[soupy-sez]

Kool Moe Dee – I Go To Work (1989)

[colinodonoghue]

via Kevin Sharpley's Instagram story on July 30, 2023.

[djevilninja]

Livin’ like Givens schemin’ on Tyson, But she got lucky, ‘cause he was a nice one. But I ain’t nice and I don’t play that - If it ain’t tax, I don’t pay that.

Kool Moe Dee - They Want Money

[lookninjas]

Anyway, someone brought up SisQó as part of this whole Kendrick/Drake thing (Drake fucking wishes), and it reminded me of this perfect performance. The horse! KOOL MOE DEE! Dru Hill! Surprise Stevie Wonder at the end! The pageantry! The showmanship! The Janet Jackson reference! The fucking purple suit!

[principiumindividuationis777]

Hip Hop's Greatest MC's (Ever)

I am including rappers based on lyrics and delivery, in combination. I am not including mixing and producing abilities, the realm of the DJ. Without further ado...

(#1: Christopher "Big Pun" Rios)

(#2: O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson Sr.)

(#3: Marshall "Eminem" Mathers)

(#4: William "Rakim" Griffin)

(#5: Donnie "Mad Skillz" Lewis)

(#6: Tupac Shakur)

(#7: Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace)

(#8: Calvin "Snoop Dogg" Broadus)

(#9: Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson)

(#10: Mohandas "Kool Moe Dee" Dewese)

[possible-streetwear]

[vintagehiphopmusic]

[mudwerks]

(via How Ya Like Me Now - Kool Moe Dee (1987)

[schooloftuneage]

Lesson 3: This is not a test...

CLASS IS IN SESSION

Rick Rubin is one of the most influential producers in the music biz. He turned Linkin Park from what could have been a two-album flash in the pan into one of the deepest acts in alternative music (no kidding, A Thousand Suns remains one of this berk's top 20 albums of all time). He introduced the world to more iconic acts than I can count. And before all that… he was in a shitty punk group that was more known for fake fights and fake arrests than anything else. (His dad was a policeman and would pretend to arrest Rick when he got into planned altercations with planted hecklers - an attempt at getting traction that failed.)

But at the same time, Rick was keeping his thumb on the pulse of the New York music scene, and when he found out about a few rapidly growing groups that were turning out incredibly danceable music with an antiestablishment ethos, his first thought on listening to them was that it was Black Punk Rock.

The music in question was, of course, hip hop.

Let's delve in.

Hip hop was influenced by numerous sources - talking blues, disco, R&B - and tracking all those down would be great, but we're going to truncate slightly today, because A) I'm saving a lot of that for a later lesson, and B) because the most pertinent one is actually disco, believe it or not. See, like punk rock, there was a single spark that ignited the movement, and while it was slower to burn, it had the perfect kindling. The place was in the slums of the south Bronx, in a rec room at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue. The person was DJ Kool Herc, who spun records for dance parties there.

The above documentary gives us a good glimpse at how Herc did his thing. Today we just know it as basic mixing, but back in the day, this kind of thing was revolutionary. Add in an emcee - Coke la Rock - who would handle the microphone while Herc was mixing, and you had the first emcee-deejay combo.

Over time, more groups came together. Grandmaster Flash picked up Herc's skills, and then hammered them down, bringing them to new heights of awesomeness. He couldn't even try to get on the mic while he was mixing, too focused on the beats he was crafting, so he got an enterprising B-boy they called Cowboy to do the honors. Over time he amassed a group of five emcees to work with him - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The Treacherous Three, the Funky Four (Plus One More) - you can see a sort of theme in these early groups. Rap battles were a thing, inheriting a little bit of gang battle ethos from their founders - early rap adopters the Zulu Nation were ex-gang members who were trying to veer into a more constructive direction, and they did so well.

But for most, the genre was locked away. Sure, rapping was easy enough to do, but to be a real hip hop artist you needed a deejay, and that equipment was expensive. As I said, the spark was there, but it needed kindling.

And just as punk had its watershed moment in 1977 in London, so hip hop did in 1977 in New York. On July 13th, NYC had a city-wide blackout that lasted just over a full 24 hours. A mob mentality decended over the city, with widespread looting… and in the aftermath of these riots, a lot of expensive sound equipment made its way into the hands of enterprising would-be deejays, either through their own actions or through pawnshops who didn't ask questions about where the equipment came from in the weeks after the blackout.

Now, there is much - MUCH - to say about this scene… but as I'm delving in, I'm realizing that someone else has already done this lesson, and arguably done it better than I could ever dream of doing it. Cartoonist Ed Piskor has done a series, Hip Hop Family Tree, that chronicles the early rise of the scene beautifully. And in the spirit of the early rap bootlegs that we're going to be discussing… you didn't get it from me, but hereyago:

That's twelve issues of greatness right there.

Now, with THAT link dropped, let's talk seminal moments for the origins of hip hop.

The first track on wax that was nothing but a deejay showing off their mixing prowess? "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel". This one was even more notable because Sugar Hill Records didn't like paying royalties to artists that they sampled, and tended to use original compositions rather than having Flash or other deejays mix in the background (which, yes, was kind of insulting to the art of the deejay…). Also, please note, there are NO editing tricks here. This was just Flash at his best, and he laid the whole track down in only four or five takes.

The first rap "superstar", arguably, was Kurtis Blow. At the very least, the man was both responsible for the first gold record in the hip hop genre and the man who brought it to Soul Train, with "The Breaks".

And now, we're going to zig-zag-zig back to an earlier point.

The early hip hop scene was full of bootlegs. Some were recordings of live events - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had a full live track that had never been released recorded, and it's still more popular, as the studio version lacks the passion of the live recording. (Bozo Meko's version of 'Flash it to the Beat', fyi.) Unscrupulous producers would record artists in the studio under the guise of 'letting them play around' and release their work under different names - and again, that happened to the Furious Five, with "We Rap More Mellow" being released as the work of The Younger Generation. And then there were bootleg compilations released for the deejays - packages of "essential" disco songs pressed as unofficial collections, distributed behind the counter of record stores.

Our TRACK OF THE WEEK is the first of those. A recording of a live event - something that we now recognize as the first rap battle, Busy Bee Starsky vs. Kool Moe Dee. A battle that Starsky phoned in because he assumed he'd have no real competition, and Moe came loaded for bear for. This one's a slaughter, kiddos.

And we're gonna have a lot to say about hip hop in the future... but for now, that gets you to the starting line.

Class dismissed.

[culturalappreciator]

Throwback Hip Hop Video of the Week

Kool Moe Dee- How Ya Like Me Now (1987)

[soupy-sez]

Kool Moe Dee, © Perry Thompson

[deliciousllamalamppandabanana]

[ourladyofomega]

[culmer]

https://www.madina.co.uk/shop/latest/who-got-the-props-yellow-hip-hop-t-shirt/

[247liveculture]

August 8, 1962, Rapper Kool Moe Dee was born!