Peace to this guy who had the no.1 radio program in out timeslot and that's no lie... n' that's no lie... n' that's no lie... Language Lab in effect. Homepiss had some nice lingo to. "cold crisp biscuit", "fresh murder", "super-tough def " and the ever-so-eloquent "safer than Rambo, more legal than the Old Bailey, outer national/continental in size and extremely digital" Lickwood!
In the mid-80's around the same time I was still sweating my folks for the C-3PO Collector's Case, my brother brought home a time-coded VHS copy of Ahearn's masterpiece. I remember him explaining to me that this is how shit went down in the South Bronx and that everything else was rubbish compared to Hip-Hop. It made sense.
A few years prior to this event, the ICA had hosted the premiere of Wild Style in the UK. A well-funded stomping ground for art-house cravet'n'beret wearing wino suffering media hoars and so-called intellectuals alike, the place occasionally does hip-hop if you don't mind to mingle. Their poster says it all. It always looked liked the drippy kids picture entry for the local school disco to me i.e. f*ckin sh*t.
Anyway, thanks to my brother for bringing me home the poster way back when. Here's a little snippet of the Wild Style Tour in Tokyo from 1983 that I dubbed from his tape collection. Fab 5 Freddy on the mic and the Son of Bambataa cuttin' em up. That part when Islam is backing-up the sax solo after Freddy says "Buck 4 With The Backspin" always gets me. Whilst the poster's art direction didn't quite get the picture, the Tokyo crowd sound like they had a pretty good idea what was going down.
A little while ago I got lost in some boxes of old flicks and archived efforts that haven't seen light in at least 12 years. Whilst my minds eye connected all the dots over the fly-ass collection of pictures, tapes and promo nonsense that once consumed any sense of a 13-year old's reality, my old school brain exchange had plugged in the nostalgia cables and amped that shit up!
Then just last night as I was wading through some old record lists, the BBC broadcast a documentary about New York Cityand the youth culture the monster spawned during the golden era. It was a predictable Auntie affair - put Richard O'Brien on narration, consult Nelson George and draft in stock material that debuted in Dick Fontaine's 1984 Arena special. Criticisms aside, interviews with DJ Kool Herc are always welcome and credit is due for including DJ AJ's short tour of some BX landmarks. Typically, it had me yearning for the bygone era and all that's unobtainable...
Anyway, before I write a mountain of drivel, here's one of the few radio sessions I could find from the illmatic climatic years that encompasses all that's dope about the rapper called Nas. After he was done putting The Bridge housing development into perspective and explaining to Westwood his introduction to the science of Supreme Mathematics, he rocked this piece of chemistry over the London airwaves. Like the NY documentary and all the shared memorabilia that now rests in closets and cyberspace limbo, Nas's effort resonates all that once was for the hip-hop state of mind. Recorded Friday 6 May 1994.
For more clarity, check out one of the better interviews with Nas from the first issue of Ego trip magazine by editor Sacha Jenkins from the summer of '94.
