BC014 – Five Mixes from John Klaess’s 'Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City'
Listening to, and reading about, hip-hop’s rise through vintage radio sets, 1983-93.
“Despite a lack of institutional archives,” the Boston writer and independent scholar John Klaess writes in the introduction of his new book, Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City, published in September by Duke University Press, “the efforts of fans, collectors, and artists” have ensured that “the history of rap radio in New York is exceptionally well represented by extant recordings of broadcasts.” Klaess’s book smartly argues for those broadcasts, traded and sold by fanatics to others, then passing down the Web for a generation afterward, as historical markers. “If the direct lines of circulation aren’t so easy to recover,” he writes, “the fact of their historical circulation is important.”
Which isn’t to say Klaess doesn’t attempt to trace at least some of those lines. “Across the 1980s, listeners actively recorded transmissions of rap radio programs to cassette tapes,” he notes, with some doing so “in order to duplicate and sell the recordings, or to mail them to kin located outside of New York.” Another important node came through the early-eighties European tours of the Zulu Nation revues led by Afrika Bambaataa, where DJ Afrika Islam handed out tapes of his Zulu Beat Show to audiences. Over time, Web trading and uploading would do the rest. Klaess spotlights one site, the now-defunct old-school-hiphop-tapes.blogspot.com, which at one point “housed the largest collection of tapes on the internet.”
Mercifully, Klaess’s brief book sticks with “three radio stations with distinct sonic and business profiles: WBLS-FM 107.5, WRKS-FM 98.7, and WHBI-FM 105.9,” pointing out that “these stations were the first to air rap music.” There’s also a coda dealing with a better-known and later hip-hop show, hosted by Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito. Breaks in the Air has a lot to offer anyone interested in hip-hop’s rise, as well as anyone fascinated with the larger stories of Black music and American radio. But it’s also a book explicitly about DJ sets, which the author has listened to so closely it can be boggling. It seems apt to look at the book through a handful of them.
Here is a YouTube playlist with the first four sets.
DJ Marley Marl, Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack (WBLS-FM, New York, late 1983)
“When we listen closely to a December 1983 broadcast, we can hear that the way Marley Marl and [Mr.] Magic mixed the music was as important to the overall experience of a transmission as were the individual tracks,” Klaess writes of this two-part set. He listens deeply, as on part two’s “mix [from] ‘Fresh’ into . . . ‘Hard Times’” (@ 9:00):
During the track’s outro, handclaps and sixteenth-note synth toms pan from left to right, ear to ear, and back again. Marley Marl takes this four-measure idea and loops it. With each new repetition, Marley Marl decreases the tempo of the beat. The effect of such repetitions is subtle: if you’re not purposefully attending to the slowing tempo, you’ll probably miss it. After four successive decelerations, Marley Marl abruptly cuts “Fresh” from the mix and releases “Hard Times,” allowing the record to enter the broadcast with one of the single’s iconic synthesizer hits. It becomes clear, in retrospect, that the changes in tempo were the DJ’s way of creating a clean transition between the adjacent tracks—a classic tactic of aligning BPM.
What jumps out to me about part one is “You Can Do It,” a good, hard electro-funk record whose booming, stiff drums have way more rhythmic give than that description suggests—particularly the line “Never let Ronald Reagan pull you behind,” good advice then and now. (Incidentally, this song is from 1984, throwing the broadcast’s date into question. I found the set after searching for the title in Klaess’s notes).
One aspect of YouTube as historical device that can leave one hanging is the invasive use of copyright bots to cancel out large chunks of old mixes. It’s good to have these things up in any form, but it’s a buzzkill when things suddenly go silent for long periods. On part one, “No Sell Out” is silenced for large but not entirely continuous (or sensical) chunks: 8:57-10:08; 10:26-11:11; 11:34-12:23; 12:41-12:50; 13:28-14:02. It’s disorienting, anyway.
DJ Marley Marl, Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack (1986) Pt. 1 (WBLS-FM, New York)
Same DJ, three years later, and everything’s changed. (It might be four, actually—“I Ain’t No Joke” was a 1987 release, though it’s logical that Marley might have it early.) Rakim is on the rise and the level of lyricism was ballooning by the month even without him.
The story of WBLS, per Klaess, is the book’s most fascinating and exciting, not least because Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm & Blues and Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback have already set the table for it.
WBLS was owned and operated by a consortium of New York’s Black elite. Headed by Manhattan borough president Percy E. Sutton and funded by a who’s-who of African American professionals under the banner of the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation . . . They were also the first commercial station to program a rap radio show. In contrast, WRKS was a commercial media property par excellence. Operated as part of the national RKO network of broadcast properties, the station was run and programmed by a team of radio professionals—the highest achievers in their domain. This group came to rap through musical savvy, a close connection to club culture, and a small fortune’s worth of market research.
When the station became the New York market’s top rated, an executive declared, “We’re not the number one Black station. We’re not the number one FM station. We’re number one.” This was consonant with the upwardly-mobile triumphalism prevalent in late-seventies Black culture: Gamble and Huff, The Jeffersons. “An early WBLS programming manager remarked, ‘Our idea is to create an image, and to destroy an image that has been created.’” And rap did not fit that image. But by 1986—even if the adults in the room didn’t realize it yet—hip-hop that would fit that image had begun to emerge, Rakim most of all.
But Klaess notes this particular show date because it shows:
two approaches to the combination of prerecorded sound evident in Marley Marl’s mixing. The first is characteristic of his interpolation of prerecorded vocals on top of a single record. In this approach, the DJ allows one record to play while manipulating another layer of sound on top of it, in this case the words “wanna go,” “rap attack,” and “rock it.” This technique was, by 1985, common across hip-hop. We might call this approach “protosampling,” or the extraction of small units of music or sound from one record to be interpolated over another without the aid of digital sampling technology. But something different is happening in the transition from “Have You Seen Davy” to “Rock-n-Roll Dude.” In this uncertain space, both records are subject to constant manipulation. Both records are altered in timing, leveling, and cut such that they create something new between them.
Kool DJ Red Alert, Live on Kiss-FM in NYC (December 1984)
Jumping two years back, we have landed on a commercially viable sweet spot. At only twenty minutes, it ends before you want it to. Let Klaess take it away:
In his early sets on KISS-FM, Red Alert’s programming drew from this combination of genres and styles. Some sets were top-to-bottom explorations of the era’s rap tracks, like a 1984 set that mixed Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “Step Off” into the Fat Boys’ “Place to Be” into “AJ Scratch” by Kurtis Blow. . . . Though it was a title devised by the KISS’s marketing department, Red Alert’s sets lived up to their title of “Mastermix Dance Party.”
As the author recounts, Red Alert’s career has been a fascinating one: “By 1979, Red Alert was spinning at Zulu Nation parties by night and working as an assistant to a broker on Wall Street by day. On nights when he wasn’t spinning, he traveled across New York, following the music, keeping up with DJs . . . Red Alert did more than just attend shows; he developed a habit of taping them. Before long, Red 103 had accrued a collection of hundreds of live performances, and a reputation throughout the five boroughs as the source for hot and rare tapes.” It wound up getting him a job as Afrika Bambaataa’s studio assistant on WHBI-FM. “What I was doing was paying attention to what other people were doing in their mixes,” Red Alert said. “Not only what Jazzy had done or what Marly did, but what other guys did in the past, namely the disco DJs.” The author notes, “By the mid-1980s Red had toured with new wave and alternative acts such as Devo, Talking Heads, Bow Wow Wow, and Nina Hagen.”
DJ Red Alert & DJ Afrika Islam, Zulu Beat Show on 105.9 WHBI (NYC, July 27, 1983)
“Airing for the first time in the spring of 1983, the Zulu Beat captured a moment of unprecedented social and stylistic convergences,” Klaess writes, recapitulating 1982 as hip-hop’s annus mirabilis: the Roxy, the Uptown-Downtown convergence, “The Message.” And here, on this July set, we hear the Bronx roundabout (“merry-go-round,” per Kool DJ Herc) style that changed the world: back-and-forth mixing of the breaks from “Get Up, Get Into It, and Get Involved” and “Tramp” (@ 4:00), either live or from one of the Zulu Nation parties Red Alert was recording. In fact, chunks of this episode are recognizable to me for also showing up on Afrika Bambaataa’s “Death Mix” that same year—a bootleg of Zulu parties, recorded in 1979 at James Monroe High School and issued by Paul Winley, who’d issued the first Bambaataa 12-inches with the Cosmic Force. So either these are from the tapes, or they’re from the 12-inch; quite the flex, either way. Was 1983 the year hip-hop started feeling nostalgic for its own old school?
Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito feat. Black Moon and Smif-N-Wessun, WKCR-FM, New York (June 10, 1993)
Our survey ends here because the book also does. A decade passes. Klaess concentrates on the eighties because that’s when hip-hop is taking off. The Stretch & Bobbito Show is on its way to becoming an institution; the Bobbito-directed documentary Radio That Saves Lives is easily the best of the recent spate of musical auto-docs I’ve seen (not a long list, admittedly), a real joy to watch, something I’d see again anytime.
Nothing sounds remotely like 1983 here, starting with the lead-off, “Come Clean.” “Stretch spins a set of New York singles, many street-edged and no less mob-centric than Los Angeles or Miami’s inflections of the subgenre,” Klaess writes. “When they do spin West Coast rap, it’s back-to-back tracks from the Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II.” Klaess points out the ways in which the guest MCs, Black Moon and Smif-N-Wessun, utilized violent imagery in their freestyles—
The MCs take turns spitting their verses to the single and then exchange freestyle verses. . . . They’re about what you’d expect from a New York gangster rap single. Body shots to dissing MCs, reports of quotidian ghetto violence, the ebbs and flows of the drug trade, misogynistic asides—these are some of the defining tropes of gangsta rap, and they’re all here. . . . If your ears aren’t tuned to this genre’s conventions, it can be unnerving. . . . The thrill of hearing these rappers bring this art form to life on the radio was lost in the disappointment they felt at Black youths’ perceived inability to rise to the political moment. I wonder what they would have thought about the music and the young people who made it if they heard what I and countless others heard in the show. I wonder what they would have heard if they listened, knowing that a city full of other folks like them were tuned in at the same time, just as excited by what was coming through the stereo. I wonder what they would have heard if they had listened past the surface.
—a well-drawn line between the suspicion of rap by early-eighties radio bizzers and that of hip-hop’s ultimate triumph, as well as later crusades against it.