Boom Bap Backstory: From the South Bronx to Young Money
“If the Quest don’t look good, then Queens won’t look good
But since the sounds are universal, New York won’t look good”
-Phife Dog, A Tribe Called Quest, “God Lives Through,” Midnight Marauders, 1993.
Welcome. In this, the first Boom Bap Backstory, all the readers out there deserve an explanation. Some of you out there might be asking, “what is boom bap, and what’s its backstory?”
Boom bap is one of the sounds of hip-hop: steady, pounding, swinging drums. Any hip-hop song from New York from 1989-2000 that you’d call an anthem is most likely boom bap.
The term boom bap also has a connotation of classic-ness. And therein lies the aim of this column. I take the hip-hop of today, and add in the “Boom Bap Backkstory” to it. I want to show the roots and long-term trends that have led to what’s present within the music today. The point is to tie everything together, and make hip-hop of different eras and styles more accessible. But enough meta-talk. Let me get into the column already.
The geographical origin of hip-hop is New York. As much as hip-hop has spread across the world and diversified over the past few decades, the original home of hip-hop is unquestioned. Hip-hop gestated in the boroughs of New York for about ten years before it really blew up across the country and world.
According to the developing mythology, hip-hop’s birth even has an address: 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the South Bronx, where on August 11, 1973 DJ Kool Herc is claimed to have introduced the foundations of hip-hop DJ’ing, and Coke La Rock may have performed the first raps.
Regardless of the truth of this tale, the placing of hip-hop’s birth in the South Bronx is important. As it developed, local identities found their ways into the the lyrics and styles of early rappers.
One of the most important rap feuds of the late 1980s was between KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions crew from the South Bronx, and MC Shan’s Juice Crew from Queensbridge. As they traded dis records, much of the insults were against the other’s borough. In the 1986 song, “South Bronx” KRS-One calls out MC Shan for suggesting hip-hop might have began in Queens, rapping, “so you think that hip-hop had its start out in Queensbridge / if you popped that junk up in the Bronx you might not live.” In New York City’s years as the unquestioned center of hip-hop, the boroughs and neighborhoods were mythologized, defended, and attacked.
The insularity of New York hip-hop did not last. The sentiment of the the Phife Dawg line which opens this piece, that New York was the entire universe of hip-hop, was already anachronistic when he spoke it in 1993. For at least five years, rappers across the US had been successfully adapting the styles of New York’s hip-hop music to fit their own circumstances.
LA was the first area outside of New York to make a significant impact on the national hip-hop scene. In 1988, NWA’s album Straight Outta Compton made an enormous impact on the development of a distinctive mainstream LA rap scene, based on gang-affiliations, weed, and 40s. During the early 1990s, West Coast acts such as NWA, Dr. Dre, Snoog Dogg, Ice Cube and 2Pac brought the West Coast to the top of the rap world with the gangsta rap style prefigured by NWA (which Dr. Dre and Ice Cube were members of).
The 1990s were the height of regionalism within hip-hop. The East Coast (in hop-hop, that means the Northeast) and West Coast had distinctively different styles, and members from the two coasts rarely collaborated. One notable attempt to bridge this divide was 1997′s supergroup The Firm, led by East Coast star rapper Nas and executive produced by Dr. Dre, the leading West Coast producer. This album was a critical failure and a commercial flop. More common was competition between the coasts. The well-known 2Pac-Notorious B.I.G. feud was just one part of this interaction. New York felt that the LA rappers were stealing their prominence, and, most importantly, abandoning the foundations of the culture which had been created in New York. LA rappers thought that their music was just as legitimate and was not getting enough respect from the New-York based hip-hop establishment.
A similar dynamic played itself out in the late 1990s and early 2000s between a resurgent New York with rappers such as Puff Daddy, Nas, Jay-Z and DMX being challenged by the South. Acts from the South, like the Cash Money Millionaires, Geto Boyz, Outkast, and Lil Jon felt like they had been ignored throughout the 1990s because of where they were from. By the late 1990s, the different regions of hip-hop were becoming more integrated among the most successful acts, as evidenced by the Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent’s Shady-Aftermath-G-Unit empire spanning New York, Detroit and LA. The South was still somewhat excluded, however, and within New York’s thriving underground scene, however, there was a sense that the rise of the South signaled the death of “real hip-hop,” as complex lyricism took a backseat to booty-banging beats and growling sex anthems. This was a somewhat misplaced concern, but New York’s resentment of the loss of its unique place within hip-hop has never fully gone away.
Today, the internet and mainstream acceptance have smoothed out hip-hop’s regionalism, for better and for worse. On the positive side, it has allowed rappers from cities without a major hip-hop scene to get national exposure. KiD CuDi from Cleveland, Wiz Khalifa from Pittsburgh, and J. Cole from Fayetteville, NC are some of today’s most successful rappers, but during the 1990s they would have found it much more difficult to get on.
At the same time, the regional flavors of hip-hop have diminished significantly. This is natural, as rappers no longer define their allegiances regionally, but rather based on record labels, crews, and personal friendships. This can be seen in the labels of Lil Wayne and Kanye West. Lil Wayne, from New Orleans, has Drake, from Toronto, Nicki Minaj, from Queens, and Cory Gunz, from the Bronx. Kanye West, from Chicago, has signed artists from Chicago, Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and California. These personal networks are beginning to influence style much more than where someone’s been born at.
- Tad Bell, host of The Good Hip-Hop Show, Tuesdays at 10pm on WGTB
Tune in this week to hear about the story of New York through hip-hop.
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