To research and report on the history of hip-hop -- from its modest New York beginnings in the 1970s at parties in uptown Bronx recreation centers and parks, to its impact on mainstream marketing, advertising and global culture -- is a huge undertaking. In Dan Charnas' exhaustively researched The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New American Library/Penguin), he does exactly that.
Over the course of 600-plus pages, Charnas, a veteran of the hip-hop music business (talent scout, record promoter, journalist), traces the evolution of rap music, which emerged from the ashes of the late 1970s disco scene. The Big Payback, which Spin magazine called "Pulitzer-level reporting," not only chronicles the fascinating stories of early trailblazing hip-hop recording artists (Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, among them), but all the way through to some of today's biggest hitmakers/dealmakers (Jay-Z, Eminem, 50 Cent). The book also tracks the colorful, often shady, constellation of managers, promoters, label executives, attorneys, journalists, publicists and others that grew up around this urban American success story.
So many moments woven throughout the book's narrative are both historical and exciting. Among them: descriptions of early uptown park "jams," where good music kept kids engaged and off the streets; the revelation that the first American label to take a chance on a British R&B group called the Beatles was African-American-owned Vee-Jay Records; how hip-hop grew in prominence in early 1980s New York City, merging with art, fashion and downtown cool-hunter culture to create the most potent arts scene of that era; how 1985's Fresh Fest became the first corporate-sponsored stadium rap tour, drawing mainstream media attention; and the creation of The Source magazine, started as a newsletter by Harvard students, that went on to become one of the most successful media outlets to reflect hip-hop culture and politics, only to crash and burn spectacularly due to greed and staff infighting.
Full disclosure: I worked in the music industry for over a decade (from the early 1990s to the mid-aughts), first as a freelance journalist and then as a PR agent, both independently and in-house at record labels. Having known, met or worked with several of the people profiled in The Big Payback, reading it now gives me flashbacks of good and bad memories, working in a creative art form started by kids who fused beats and rhymes to give the disenfranchised a voice, that became a worldwide phenomenon that everybody wanted a piece of (and a check from).
I appreciate Charnas' level of detail, gleaned from over 300 interviews over a seven-year period. The book's eight main chapters, or "albums," cut a wide swath through the personalities, rivalries, thrilling successes and sad failures, that were all part of a music genre that literally pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to become a culture emulated around the globe.
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Larry Marion: The Lost Beatles Photographs (PHOTOS)
Interview: Dan Charnas, Author Of The Big Payback: The History Of The Business Of Hip-Hop, Part 1 http://t.co/BgmKPDo
Interview: Dan Charnas, Part 2 on ANDYOUDONTSTOP hosted by Chuck D http://t.co/f68tDtg
CRAP HIP HOP = Kanye West, Drake, Lil Wayne, and pretty much all of these mainstream artists who think they are good, when in reality, huge record sales mean squat...
In the black community, "rapping" once meant the words a potential lover used to woo the object of his affection; but over time came to be associated with any type of spoken word performance accompanied by music or a beat.
Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" is often credited as the 1st popular, mainstream rap record; but long before that, some DJs would grab a mic and interject spoken word interludes between songs played at dances.. The success of records by Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow, GrandMaster Flash and the Furious Five paved the way for DJs to market their extemporaneous musings during dances as music itself, IMO.
every commercial mainstream rapper pretty much is terrible, except for say Eminem....and even he has fallen off a little, but the radio garbage, known as LIL Wayne, Drake, and Kanye West sucks......oh yeah and Jay-Z is still pretty good.....but trust me when I say the best hip hop is far behind us, today's hip hop is terrible, at least the mainstream
I have never heard The Beatles referred to as a British R&B group. Their songs, imo, were primarily Rock and Roll. But then again, I see Smokey Robinson and the Miracles as more of a pop group than R&B.
Maybe if hip-hop were a sub-genre of rap, it would make more sense as a label to me.
Mary J. Blige is called the queen of hip hop but she doesn't rap and she doesn't always have rappers on her songs. Her music is probably labeled most as R&B. People might say that the way she dressed early on in her musical career was part of the hip hop thing so is she no longer the queen? Is New Jack a sub-culture or sub-genre? (No response needed).
My point is that the whole thing is clearly not for people like me. I will stick to calling the music rap and leave the whole hip hop thing to the people who find it revolutionary.