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TO THE BREAK OF DAWN
WILLIAM JELANI COBB
TO THE BREAK OF DAWN
A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic
For Don-Dee & Deb:The Best Man & Woman
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org
© 2007 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cobb, William Jelani.
To the break of dawn : a freestyle on the hip hop aesthetic / William Jelani Cobb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-1670-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-1670-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Hip-hop. I. Title.
ML3918.R37C63 2006
782.421649—dc22 2006029844
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In spite of and because of marginal status, a powerful, indigenous vernacular tradition has survived, not unbroken, but unbowed, a magnet, a focused energy, something with its own logic, rules and integrity connecting current developments to the past. An articulate, syncretizing force our artists have drawn upon, a force sustaining both individual talent and tradition.
—John Edgar Wideman
You criticize our methods Of how we make records You said it wasn’t art So now we’re gonna rip you apart
—Stetsasonic, “Talking All That Jazz”
Microphone Check
An Intro
NEW YORK, CIRCA 1986
That was us: the sweat-baptized, blue-light basement apostles of the breakbeat. We, the b-boy delegates of our five-borough universe, eyes hidden beneath baseball caps pulled low, uniformed in ?Guess, Kangol, and Adidas Olympic Team training gear. Our ranks cued waaay back to the subway lines that had delivered us to this place: Union Square, the nightspot deriving its name from the section of Manhattan where it was located. If you came from around our way, South Queens, specifically, then you gathered your tribe at 163rd Street and Hillside Ave and took the E to Lexington. Then you caught the downtown #6 to 14th Street, which delivered you to the far end of the Square.
At the front you encountered Muscle D, a brother swollen to a rippled abstraction, barely contained by his nylon tees and capable of literally moving the crowd. Down below was a consecrated dance-floor, the theater for our repertoire of movements: the Wop, the Rambo, the Fila, the Biz, the Prep. The true disciple could tell you that Rakim was there, the headlining act on the opening night at Union Square. That disciple would know that Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince were to be the second act. Or that Biz-Markie rolled up in that spot on the reg, self-advertising with the boldfaced B-I-Z emblazoned on his cap—as if he was worried you would mistake him for Kool Moe Dee. You would remember the smell of it, if you had ever been there, the blunt-heavy air mixed with sweat, leather, Polo cologne, and some other indefinable element—a calibrated cool, perhaps—that we were so filled with that it must have seeped from our pores into the atmosphere also.
This is my romantic memory of the distant past. But the charitable will indulge my personal mythologizing for a moment.
The truth is that we seldom understand what era we are living in until that era is over. At the time I thought I was merely experiencing a hot moment in Manhattan, but across the span of two decades it has aged into … something else. A mental placeholder for a hundred other forgotten memories. The signpost for an innocence that long ago disappeared into history. The space that was Union Square is now a pet store, one of those national chains hustling overpriced canine couture. Our Benetton-and-Kangol gear has long fallen into disfashion and our once-young delegates to the five-borough assembly are now men and women approaching middle age.
And still something of it remains real.
There is an inventory of rhymes, some over twenty years old, that remain cataloged and stored in my memory. I can replay, line for line, Kool G. Rap’s classic “Poison,” or the infamous battle between Kool Moe Dee and Busy Bee. Name a track and I can tell you where I was when I heard it for the first time. “Rapper’s Delight,” the Sugar Hill Gang, 1979, a yellow house on 200th Street and Hollis Avenue. “Lights, Camera, Action,” the Treacherous Three, 1982, basement apartment on Foch Avenue, off 142nd Street. “Sucker MCs,” Run DMC, 1983, on the 8th-grade senior trip at a roller rink on the north side of town. “Ego Tripping,” Ultra Magnetic MCs, Union Square, 1986. “Rebel without a Pause,” Public Enemy, corner of Linden and Merrick boulevards, 1987.
In the ultimate equation, place and time don’t matter, though—the book of Rakim teaches that it ain’t where you from, it’s where you at. But a brother still has love for the local. On the streets of South Queens, New York, in the mid-80s we honed verbal skills, traded our elementary freestyles, and chased after reputations for lyrical flow. At the part of Hollis Avenue that runs past the park on 205th Street, they used to steal power from the street lights and throw illegal jams back when Hollis Crew and Southside Posse were still civil warring. At I.S. 238, on Hillside and 179th Street, an eighth-grade nemesis named James Todd Smith handed me his autograph, saying that he would be famous one day. The signature read simply: Cool J—this was in the days before he prefaced his name with the Double Ls. Along Farmers Boulevard cats used to get their rhyme skills (and chins) tested on the Square. Liberty Avenue was where some of the illest did their dirt and whose residents always rolled deep to the shows at Club Encore.
Hip hop culture is a four-legged stool, its artistic pillars of deejaying, graffiti art, rapping, and b-boying coming into existence in rapid succession in the early 1970s and each influencing the ways in which the other evolved. In those early days, before artistic apartheid took hold, it was nothing for a rapper to moonlight as a graffiti artist or for a b-boy to also be known for ripping microphones. Long before low-wattage celebrities thought to brand or cross-promote themselves, artists were rapping and tagging graffiti under the same alias as to ensure that one’s rep received its maximum dissemination.
Recognize: before middle-aged pundits started lamenting hip hop’s “values,” before rappers became unpaid boosters for the booze du jour, before ice was anything but frozen water, there was this: two turntables and a microphone. Before hip hop was old enough to see over the dashboard of America, the battles weren’t between rappers in different time zones—it was all about inter-borough strife back then. Them Brooklyn cats had it in for the brothers from uptown; Bronx heads were constantly flexing on Brooklynites and nobody was feeling Queens. I remember when deejays at spots like Union Square and the Latin Quarter would ask if Queens was in the house as a semi-joke. Asking if Brooklyn was in the house was always a rhetorical question. In those days, our Kazal-goggled, black bomber-wearing assemblies kept our mouths shut fearing larceny from the Bed-Stuy, Harlem, South Bronx axis of evil. To cut to the quick: Queens was known for getting played.
Run & them changed that though.
I speak of the trio that put Queens—a borough that isn’t even completely on the New York City subway map—on the musical one. Kicking open the doors for acts like LL Cool J, MC Shan, Salt-N-Pepa,