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Dad, what came before Snoop Dogg?

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Offspring the Younger asked me over dinner this evening: “Do you only like music with instruments, or do you like sampling and beats?”

After a bit of “Well, Screamadelica’s one of my Desert Island Discs”, “I bought the first Streetsounds Electro compilation” and “I saw Dream Warriors, Public Enemy, Stereo MCs…” he looked at me like I was talking a foreign language. And then asked “can you send me some Youtube links?”

I call upon the hive mind of The Massive to post some old-skool hip-hop (and suchlike) with which to educate a youngster in the musical ways of the olden days.

Here’s Paid In Full (Seven Minutes of Madness) to get things started

1

Comments

    • They sampled some great stuff. I’m hearing Ray Barretto El Watusi on that one, I think they sampled Quincy Jones’ Soul Bossa Nova on another hit. That has reignited my interest,I shall research what else they used.

      • That was My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style. I discovered recently that Soul Bossa Nova was used as the theme tune of a long-running TV game show in Canada, which is why the Dream Warriors sampled it and Mike Myers used it in the Austin Powers films.

    • No mate, that’s deffo Golden Age. It stops at The Chronic, two years after this.

      Quest for me are the only example of a watched kettle that boiled. They’d been heavily trailed on the Jungle Brothers and De La’s records for over a year before their first record came out in July 1989. By the time their album came out eight months later we blithely expected it to be brilliant and thankfully it was – and they went on to become the hip-hop act for people who don’t like hip hop. Yes we can indeed.

  23. As luck would have it this thrilled me when it came up on shuffle during my afternoon constitutional yesterday and I found myself thinking how sweet it would be if Moose were to launch a thread schooling us on the Old Skool* as I only really got into this music when Nation Of Millions dropped and I’ve not done a very good job of filling in the gaps..

    Man Parrish – Boogie Down Bronx
    (*or another AWer – but it was ‘im with the antlers that came to mind)

  24. Tell your son to ignore the bragging and bling and follow the good Reverend’s message – the only rap record I believe that recommends keeping your hair combed.

  28. If you haven’t watched Hip Hop Evolution on Netflix, start now. Watch it with the kid.

    And while you’re about it, have some of these:

    Here’s Quest with the best thing they ever did in a career that redefines “embarrassment of riches”:

    Latifah, queening it:

    Not golden age but deeply necessary: Mos Def

    And finally: post-Chronic but so what:

  29. I knew some nineties nonsense would start creeping on to here. Let’s go backbackbackback…

    …so the album that inaugurated the New School starts with a pretty good approximation of hip hop as it existed in 1975 (although it wasn’t called hip hop until ten years later, pedantry alert)

  35. I recently did a Spotify playlist of this sort of thing, which features many of the above, but I will now have to go through this thread and add a few more. Here it is:

    Annoyingly, there’s a distinct lack of De La Soul on Spotify because of licensing problems I believe, otherwise there would definitely be more of their first album on here.

  40. I’ve refrained from posting any Public Enemy, it’s like posting The Beatles on a thread asking for Good Guitar Groups. But here we go…

    Most people say their best single was Fight the Power. I don’t even think it was their best single of 1989. This was.

    • The best kind of bandwagon jumper, Adam (whose work was already full of chants and spoken delivery) got in before the end of 1981 when (to borrow a phrase) it was neither popular nor profitable (slight exaggeration, but A.R. did come between the Ants’ last two number ones and before his first solo number one).
      In retrospect there was a lifetime (in pop terms) of almost three years between biggies Rapper’s Delight and The Message hitting the U.K. charts – during that period, as a for instance, Depeche Mode formed, made their debut LP, Vince Clarke left, recruited Alison Moyet for Yazoo, both new bands made albums and had further hits from said albums.

    • Mentions Fab 5 Freddy who was a hip-hop legend even though at the time he was basically not much more than a well-connected graffiti artist. A “scenester” along the lines of Don Letts, say.

      Debbie improvised the rap in the vocal booth, completely naked*

      (*part of this sentence I made up, can you tell which bit, readers?)

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