Rap’s Golden Rage

A cultural tourist reflects on hip-hop’s late-’80s heyday BY CHARLES AARON

As an unrepentant hip-hop obsessive who was a resident of the culture’s relative epicenter circa 1988—living in a clumsily gentrifying New York neighborhood where sidewalks were speckled with colorfully capped crack vials—I sometimes get asked what it was like during the much-mythologized Golden Age (especially amid this year’s marginally celebrated 20th anniversary). If I’m true to the game, per Ice Cube, I say, “Ask somebody who wasn’t high, white, and clueless.”

But if they persist, I babble, falling back on some comic, culture-clashing
anecdote or another: Like standing in line for drinks at the Milky Way party,
in the gym of the former P.S. 160 on Suffolk Street on Manhattan’s Lower East

Side, when humongous, hardrock Brooklyn MC Just-Ice (of “Cold Gettin’ Dumb” semifame), sporting a brown leather-and-suede ensemble crowned by a brown leather-and-suede Rasta hat with JUSTICE emblazoned on the front, literally elbowed my bony ass out of the way, burled up to the bar, and announced gruffly through his shiny, gold-capped grill: “Gimme five muthafuckin’ piña coladas!” He didn’t pay.

To an awkwardly enthused cultural tourist—a Mr. Peepers immigrant from Georgia—here was the Golden Age in all its absurd glory, an astonishing, hilarious, combative carnival of seemingly random signifying events that always made me wanna grab two fistfuls of piña coladas and run back toward the stage before MC Lyte ripped “Paper Thin” live (how did a voice so magisterial come out of a tiny 17-year-old in a white sweat suit?), or before Kool DJ Red Alert dropped JVC Force’s “Doin’ Damage” (they sampled “Louie, Louie”! Dag!). Fresh, fawnkier genres and styles and languages and politics and ways of making music and partying and bullshitting (that still hold sway today) were being formulated virtually every week.

But what was it like Well, with a nod to the
era’s postmodern hooey, here’s some seriously
scattershot fragments that may (or not) help
approximate the (or my) truth.

POINT OF ORDER: Though it peaked in ’ 88, the Golden Age really began in ’ 86, when Eric B. & Rakim’s Walkman-mandatory first singles freed James Brown by way of Confucian conundrums (Rakim on “Follow the Leader”: “Am I eternal / Or an eternalist?”), and ended toward the close of ’ 89, when X-Clan called everybody “sissies.” Vainglorious.

STOP THE VIOLENCE: In late-’80s New York, it made sense to be dancing in a club
to KRS-One rapping about watching “someone’s blood just spill out.” Racially
tinged, tabloid-stoked incidents—from Larry Davis to Howard Beach to Tawana
Brawley to the Central Park jogger to Bensonhurst—gave the city a nasty day-
to-day edge that nobody should romanticize.
KING ASIATIC NOBODY’S EQUAL: Big Daddy Kane—the Golden Age’s velour
griot—wasn’t fully appreciated in his prime, and even now his classic tracks “Set
It Off,” “Raw,” “Word to the Mother (Land),” and “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’ ” aren’t
even available on i Tunes. Perhaps his ferocity was too elegant or his elegance too
ferocious. But when Kane and his dancers got loose over pioneering producer
Marley Marl’s chop of “Hot Pants…I’m Coming, Coming” (by James Brown pro
tem Bobby Byrd) at the Apollo (see flier below), it was like the seats were hot-
wired; I can still feel the juice. Long Live the Kane is peerless MC-vs.-breakbeat
jujitsu, and it somehow motivated me to seriously consider Afrocentricity,
pimpin’, and Red Lobster as philosophical constructs.

NO TAKE-BACKS, G! Did you know Socrates bit the lyric “Man, know thyself” from a common inscription on Egyptian temples? (Note: I read this charge in a Village Voice record review.) More plainly, payback is a bitch. The Golden Age crew implicitly questioned ownership—who writes history, controls means of production, distribution, etc. It was the first time jacklegs in power realized that hip-hop was more than a sub-R&B novelty substitute for disco. It was a rhyming eviction notice, and these kids who weren’t “real” musicians were holding the door.

IT AIN’T WHERE YOU’RE FROM, IT’S WHERE YOU’RE AT: Clearly, some of us hip-hop junkies were more observers than participants, more willfully deluded than truly informed, but we were all explorers, diggin’ in crates for vinyl breaks as well as identities—“What’s that sample?” crossed with “Who the fuck am I?” What were all these forgotten young kids and forgotten old records trying to say? Eight years of Ronald Reagan (and 11 of Mayor Ed Koch) left a lot of lost souls.

SOUL SISTAS: Reflecting on two decades of priapic rap blather, the Golden Age was perhaps the most exciting period for female voices in hip-hop history—Salt-N-Pepa, Roxanne Shanté, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Antoinette, Sweet Tee, the Real Roxanne, Finesse & Synquis, J.J. Fad, 2 Much, Ice Cream Tee, Oaktown’s 3-5-7. Props to Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, who produced more tracks by more of the above MCs than anyone. SIREN SONGS: Because Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was such an undeniable statement—with its rhythmic production collage, steamrolling poetry, politicized worldview, and dark wit—hip-hop finally succeeded punk as the most convulsive post-’60s musical subculture.

Somewhat true, this was the sort of bloviating,
get-a-late-pass bullshit that older, usually white
critics shoveled at the time to not look out of
touch. Simply, as pissed-off, pro-black college
men, PE were feared (and respected) because
of who they were; N. W.A., whose Straight Outta
Compton was the West Coast gang-related flip
side, were feared (and dismissed) because of
who they seemed to be. Either way, ’ 88’s two best albums ate your hate like love.
THE AGE FOR A NE W S TAGE OF FIEND: Crack was a color-blind plague—two top
employees (both white) at my first post-college job spent a year’s worth of
weekends clutching glass pipes—but it sparked a racist drug policy that packed
prisons with nonwhite youth. It also brought fast money, a craving for manic,
digitized beats, wild-ass dreams, death wishes, and, well, shit got vexed.
THANKS FOR SHARING: During an ’ 88 interview with jazz legend Max Roach and
Yo! MTV Raps host Fab 5 Freddy, Spin writer Frank Owen asserted that hip-hop
isn’t a purist black art form because rappers sample riffs from white rock groups.
Roach called him a “supremist cocksucker” and threw him out of his house.

Ah, the good old days.
Charles Aaron is Spin’s music editor.