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Brian Lehrer: Yes, today is the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Today's the actual day. August 11th, 1973 was the day of that party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. For those of you who don't know it, that's right around where the Deegan meets the Cross Bronx Expressway, sort of the northwest corner of that. If you're driving toward the George Washington Bridge, but then you want to go north on the Deegan, it's like right off that ramp, just to geolocate it a little bit more precisely.

We'll talk some music history, some New York history, some American history. We'll have some enjoyable music along the way, I think we're off to a good start with James Brown, and I think whether you're a hip-hop fan or not, you'll enjoy the ride. We'll even re-air a segment that we did here on the show back in 2009 that included DJ Kool Herc himself looking back on that party in the Bronx, where people say he started hip-hop 50 years ago, and on his childhood roots in Jamaica that influenced the sound that he developed in New York. We've got some Caribbean and world history to do too.

At the end, we'll even invite you-- so start thinking about it if you think you'll be listening near the end of the show. We'll invite you to recite a few of your favorite words from any hip-hop song, as long as they're words we're allowed to say on the radio, so think about what you might cite, few words, few lines. Let's get it started.

With me now is "Davey D" Cook, co-author with Jeff Chang of the Young Adult Edition of the seminal book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He's from the Bronx, and remembers some of those early days. These days, Davey D teaches Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, and hosts the show Hard Knock Radio on San Francisco station KPFA. He's got a long history as a leading hip-hop journalist.

Davey D, Professor Cook, thanks for doing this early shot with us if you're actually on the West Coast right now. Welcome to WNYC, and happy August 11th.

Davey D Cook: Thank you for having me. Yes, and I'm out here on the West Coast as we're getting ready for our big celebrations out here.

Brian Lehrer: This is 7:02 in the morning for you. We deeply appreciate that. Can we start with a little bit of your history for those listeners who may not know you? Where in the Bronx did you grow up, and what was it like for you there?

Davey D Cook: I grew up in the Soundview section of the Bronx, right across the street initially from what is now the Sotomayor Houses, but it was called Bronxdale back then. I started out as an MC, did my first rhymes, I want to say '77, and moved out here to go to school-- well, my parents moved out here and then I followed, and went to school out here at UC Berkeley, where I cut my teeth, first, as an MC, which was very new and not a whole lot of people knew about that here, but then eventually became a DJ, and I'm a pretty established figure here now doing what I do.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I know you're very well known in the Bay Area. We'll get to some of the Bay Area stuff as we go, but let me keep you in the Bronx for a little while longer. Where'd you hang out as a teenager? Where'd you go to high school?

Davey D: Went to Bronx Science, and in my class was a kid from Kid 'n Play, and Barry B-Stro from the Crash Crew, which is one of the pioneering hip-hop crews when we talk about hip-hop.

Brian Lehrer: Do you remember some of the first music you were exposed to? Was there music in your home as a kid?

Davey D Cook: Yes. We had all the Soul records, James Brown, Sly Stone, but also Simon & Garfunkel, and Barbra Streisand also hit the thing. Carmen McRae. It was an array of music that I was exposed to in the house. Outside, we heard a lot of disco and there were two types of disco that we heard. The disco that was commercialized and highlighted with Saturday Night Fever, which wasn't really the lick for myself and a lot of my friends.

We wanted something a little bit more hard-edged and a little bit more funky, so Anita Ward that came to mind. Herman Kelly's Dance to the Drummer's Beat. T-Connection, on the Groove. There's a lot of records that I remember, which I would hear often out at the basketball courts, or just with people walking around with their boomboxes. If you recall, back in those days, everybody had a big boombox.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Listeners, we're starting to hear a little personal oral history from Davey D, and part of this music history special from now until noon is some oral history from you. We're definitely inviting stories from some of you who may remember the early days of hip-hop in the 1970s. What was your first hip-hop experience? 212-433-WNYC. Tell us a story from the Bronx, or Southeast Queens, or anywhere else, and anyone of any age, tell us a story of an important hip-hop moment for you.

You could be 13 and call with this, or you could be 83, 93, but whatever your first important hip-hop moment was that you remember, at a concert, in community, or just privately in your headphones or from a boombox, as we were just hearing, or whatever the story is. How has the music influenced you artistically, spiritually, politically, any other way? Listeners of any age. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. You can also text to that number or tweet @BrianLehrer right now with Davey D.

You mentioned some of the things you were listening to growing up before hip-hop. I started with James Brown Give It Up or Turnit a Loose because I've seen it referred to as a track that DJ Kool Herc himself listened to coming up before he developed his turntable-based hip-hop innovation. I know you refer to James Brown generally as, in a way, the true godfather of hip-hop in a prehistory kind of way. Would you talk about some of the lineage that you see before 1973 and James Brown's role in it?

Davey D Cook: Well, James Brown, definitely because he established a different type of music where he was on one, or four-on-the-floor. He changed the way in which we approached music, and that just seemed to be in lockstep with the younger generation. His music was funky and pretty accessible, and it had long percussion breakdowns, which were easy for DJs to get into, either to rap over or to cut back and forth.

James Brown is the mainstay, but alongside James Brown is Sly Stone and George Clinton. When we talk about hip-hop and just some of the precursor type of music, those three individuals are like seminal figures. You also had Jimmy Castor who was often played, and I would give a nod out to Kraftwerk as well, which I often heard coming up.

There was a lot of music, but those were some of the staple artists. Then it was up to DJs to raid their parents' record collection initially, or go to Downstairs Records over on 42nd at the time, or up into Harlem on 125th Street and find records that would have that elusive unique breakdown that you could come to a party and surprise people with because you were able to find something.

For example, there's a song by Harry Nilsson called The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. On the flip side of that, and it wasn't on all the B sides of the 45, there's a song called Rainmaker. I remember finding that record for myself and bringing it to my crew and it's like, "Man, we got to get this drum beat." It's like it had this nice drum beat. Then the lyrics start, "First day in August, last spring within May," and then you cut it back to the beginning. I remember having that record and then you wanted to hide it. You didn't want to let people know what that record was.

I think that was the case for anybody that was involved in hip-hop at that time, especially when you think about the fact that many people had different backgrounds. Some people were Puerto Rican, some people came from Jamaica. Some people were just up here from the South. I bring that up because our parents' music would probably be varied based upon the different demographics that I just mentioned. It was always a surprise to see what people would discover when they were raiding their parents' music collection, and then eventually, when you would go to record stores and try to find a funky break that you could isolate and play at a party.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and boy, you mentioned some musicians there who I would not have thought of as precursors to hip-hop in any way. Harry Nilsson, Kraftwerk, which I think was like a German techno-rock band with long groove instrumentals, but now that you say it, I could see it. You said that you came up in the later part of the '70s, so you weren't at that party in '73-

Davey D Cook: Absolutely not. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: -but you have journals that you kept from the late '70s, where you documented some of your getting into the scene. Can you give us an example of an early hip-hop event or artist for you back then, late '70s?

Davey D Cook: Yes. Well, the first time I experienced any of this was in June of '76, and it was on the Circle Line. For people who don't know, that's the boat that goes up and down the Hudson River. It was on that boat that I heard somebody playing a song called Jam on the Groove. I didn't know it was Jam on the Groove. All I heard was the constant repeating of this drum pattern, and I saw people getting down on the floor and twirling around. They weren't doing backspins, but they were doing a move where they put their leg behind their knee, go down on the ground and twirl. I think they called it corkscrewing. I'm sitting there as a kid and I'm like, "What is that?" And they go, "Oh, they're breaking." It's like, "What is that?" They go, "That's Jam on the Groove."

That was my first introduction. Then maybe about a year or so later, I started to try and rhyme, get my hand into rhyming. Prior to that, there were people in my neighborhood that were coming up and talking about this new thing that was going on. We heard the name Kool Herc. Some people had tapes that were tapes of tapes of a Kool Herc party. I also heard the name Disco King Mario. I heard the L-Brothers, which would give birth to Grand Wizzard Theodore that many people credit him as the inventor of the scratch. Those were three DJs that I started to hear a lot about. Eventually, I started to hear about Bambaataa, and then the Cold Crush.

Early parties, I remember would be at the T-Connection over on Gun Hill Road. Oftentimes, you would see Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Four performing there. They just would mesmerize the crowd with incredible routines, almost like The Temptations. They would take the melodies of commercials or popular songs and they would put their own rhymes to it. If you talk to Caz, he'll tell you that he would listen to a Barry Manilow and other people who were good songwriters and pattern some of his writing alongside- with their influence.

Those are the early memories for me. It was an exciting time. Nobody was thinking about records or that records could even be made. Nobody thought that we would be here 30, 40, 50 years later talking about it. It was just a coming of age for many people. It was an innocent time. I would also add that in retrospect, a 13-year-old or 12-year-old had a much, much different experience than somebody maybe two years older. A 15 or 16-year-old would see this very different, and an 18 and 19-year-old would see this very, very different. There were layers and levels to what we were experiencing and what we knew at that time in the late '70s.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an oral history call, Guinevere in Long Beach. That's the Long Beach, Long Island, I think, not the Long Beach, California, right, Guinevere?

Guinevere: Yes, yes. Greetings, greetings. Thank you so much for having this awesome exposé on the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. I am so proud to say I was there. I'm 62 and still kicking it [chuckles] all the way live because I'm a hip-hop grandma now. I'd like to share my story. I was the first female promoter in the hip-hop business. I did my shows that were femme fatale. That's what they were called. It was at the Roxy, Danceteria, Palladium, Limelight, and I get no props, but that's okay. Life has been good to me.

I just wanted to say I wish they would recognize the women that helped be the foundation of hip-hop to give us recognition for all that we did. I gave [unintelligible 00:15:04] her first show. I gave Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first female hip-hop was at my shows at the Roxy. It just goes on and on. I'm just so glad to see that the genre, which is an amalgamation of Caribbean, African, Latino, and music, dance and art, fashion, has become a celebrated art form all over the world.

I wish, again, that the economics would go to the originators of the music. It comes from our oppression. It comes from our pride. It comes from our resilience. It comes from our determination to survive oppression, but also show that we have joy, Black joy no matter what happens, and that we can come together and make beautiful music together. Thank you again.

Brian Lehrer: A beautiful phone call. Guinevere, thank you very much. How about some of the thoughts from that hip-hop grandma, as she called herself, Davey, including the contribution of the women?

Davey D Cook: I think she's right on point. When I talk about the beginning, and definitely in our book we talk about it's not Kool Herc only. It's Kool Herc and his sister, Cindy Campbell. When we talk about some of the early crews [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: She was the birthday girl. Cindy was the birthday girl.

Davey D Cook: Not the birthday girl, but it was a back-to-school party that was happening. It was to raise money for a back-to-school party, and it was her idea to bring it forth. She was the one that was definitely promoting her brother and making sure that he got known and the whole nine. It wasn't just a one-man affair, but it was a family affair, if you will, with Cindy being an integral part.

Then when you talk about some of the women, you got to shout-out Sha-Rock. When we were talking about early memories, going to a party and seeing Sha-Rock. I remember her crew, Funky Four Plus One More, coming to Bronx Science. You're just standing there watching this woman, her arms folded, having a certain type of regalness and just incredible presence. Also, a rhyme style that, to Guinevere's point, many people don't always give credit, but she became the prototype. She became the one that everybody was like-- well, she became one of the people that you would mimic like, "I like her rhyme style. Let me see if I could get down like that." You have her. You had Mercedes Ladies, which was an entire crew. They promoted parties, but they also had their own DJs and MCs. There were definitely a lot of women out there.

I'll just share one last anecdote. As an MC, and I guess the statute of limitations is over, I used to take the rhymes that I would hear my older women cousins do, their marry Mary Mack rhymes, and their jump rope double dutch rhymes, and repurpose them and rewrite them and keep them as my own and act like I had this creative juice, but it was really my cousin, Denise, and my sister, Robin, and others that I was, I'll say borrowing [chuckles] their rhymes that were also heard in the parks back in the days when people were having fun.

Brian Lehrer: That's such a great reference, that the boys in the schoolyard or in the park were just trying to beat each other at one kind of ball game or another, the girls were doing all this rhyming.

Davey D Cook: Yes, double dutch, and try rhyming and jumping rope at the same time with the intricacy that they were doing. That's an influence, and so the last caller was absolutely right. You cannot and we should not be leaving out any of the women who were very integral in the resurrection of this music and culture.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Timothy in East Berkshire, Vermont who wants to talk about other pre-hip-hop influences that led to the creation of the genre. Timothy, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Timothy: Yes, thank you, Brian. Good morning, gentlemen. Let's go back to Sly & Robbie, The Itals, the [unintelligible 00:19:42] and very early reggae dub influences, which I theoretically think influenced cats like The Sugarhill Gang and other early hip-hop. [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Tim, I'm going to leave it there. Timothy, thank you. Some of those, of course, already enter the hip-hop era. Reggae came a little before, and we're going to talk about reggae a little later in the show when we re-air the segment that we did that included DJ Kool Herc back in 2009, talking about how he came from Jamaica and that that influenced his development of hip-hop. He mentioned The Sugarhill Gang there, Davey, and I'm going to play a few seconds of another track since you've said you are a late '70s fan of Grandmaster Flash. Here he is with his breakout 1979 hit, Rapper's Delight.

[MUSIC - The Sugarhill Gang: Rapper's Delight]

Wonder Mike: Now, what you hear is not a test, I'm rapping to the beat. And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet. You see, I am Wonder Mike and I'd like to say hello.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Thank you, Wonder Mike. I think that might have been the first rap or hip-hop song that most of white America heard as a crossover hit. Is there anything you could say about the place of that song more in the context of the hip-hop community, Davey?

Davey D Cook: Yes, before that, I want to clarify something because a lot of folks like to look at the Jamaican influence. There's definitely an influence, but it's not the only one. Most people, especially coming up, were not hearing a Sly & Robbie, or a U-Roy, or any reggae artists when they were coming up. Many people had family members who heard rhymes, you had Dolemite, for example. You had signifying and testifying, which were rhymes that people did just as street vernacular.

When I came up, there was a gentleman by the name of H. Rap Brown who was a leader of SNCC, and he wrote a book called Die Nigger Die!. In that book, he's talking about his life in Monroe, or Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was in 1959. The reason why I bring that up because in his book, he's referencing a lot of rhymes that he was saying when they were playing the dozens and just people shooting the breeze, as many people did all around the country.

In this book, which was published in 1969, is the rhyme, "Hemp the Demp the Women's Pimp, Women fight for my delight." That's immortalized in a movie which takes that entire rhyme, which is also kind of raunchy if you watch the whole thing, but it was a movie called Five on the Black Hand Side, where you hear that. I think that movie came out in '74. The Hemp the Demp rhyme shows up in '79 in the Sugarhill song.

The reason why I bring that up is because that's not an unknown rhyme. People have always been rhyming. You can find this going all the way back to the '40s, you can find it going all the way back to other parts of the country, you can find it going back to other communities around the world. The gift of gab and being able to manipulate words is an age-old tradition, sometimes we call it the African oral tradition. That's why I made mention of people coming from different parts of the diaspora, if you will, whether it was Jamaica, or Haiti, or down South, because when you went home, you brought those influences.

Yes, when a Kool Herc goes home, he's a Jamaican, so there's going to be an influence that he brings to the forefront. You get somebody who is, say, from Georgia, or Mississippi, they have a blues, maybe, reference, and within that blues is going to be an oral tradition that they bring to the forefront. Or somebody like myself, I'm reading H. Rap Brown books, and I'm looking at the Black arts movement which are, then, Leroy Jones, and later, Amiri Baraka, and other people, because I grew up in a household like that, so spoken word was not an unknown thing.

I'll couple that with saying, when I moved out west to the Bay Area, and when we start talking about hip-hop, the reaction for a lot of people, especially in the Black community, was not, "Oh, wow, I never heard of this before. How can I do this?" It was really more like, "That reminds me of something that my uncle did," so people had a referencing point. Now we didn't call it hip-hop in the '70s, they certainly didn't call it back then, but it wasn't a foreign type of expression.

People had a dance culture, people loved funk music, and the way that it was formulated here in New York was a way in which people can say, "I can get down with that. I like how you're doing that dance," or, "I like how you are DJing, and I'm going to maybe incorporate that." The point is that we've always been rhyming, we've always been dancing, we've always had these expressions, they just didn't have the name hip-hop to it. To put it in larger perspective, I think what Herc was doing when he started that party was part of a continuum of Black expression that's been around forever in all parts of the world.

Brian Lehrer: That's great context. By the way, do you use the words rap and hip-hop interchangeably, or are they different in any way as you use them?

Davey D Cook: I mean, people generally use them interchangeably. I'm very clear that hip-hop is the culture, so it includes the dance, which is a vibrant and huge part. In many places, the dance is bigger than the MCing part. It includes the DJing and the turntablism, and many people also umbrella it with a lot of the graff-writing, which is probably people's first introduction to the culture. Rap is [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Graffiti art.

Davey D Cook: Yes. Rap is part of it, but there's many more expressions within this culture we call hip-hop.

Brian Lehrer: All right. It's The Brian Lehrer Show. A music history special on this August 11th, considered the 50th anniversary of the day hip-hop was born in the Bronx. We'll continue with more music, more conversation, more of your oral history calls, right after this.

Brian Lehrer Show, music history special on this August 11th, considered the 50th anniversary of the day hip-hop was born in the Bronx. We continue with Davey D Cook, co-author with Jeff Chang of the Young Adult Edition of the seminal book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. As I said at the top, introducing him, he's from the Bronx, and remembers some of those early days, mostly late '70s. These days, Davey D teaches Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, and he's actually very well known in the Bay Area, hosting the show Hard Knock Radio on San Francisco station, KPFA. He's got a long history as a leading hip-hop journalist as well.

Playing Grandmaster Caz there and transitioning us to the '80s. In the early '80s, you went off to college at UC Berkeley, leaving the Bronx. I see you get credited with helping bring hip-hop to the West Coast with an event on campus in 1984, where you even handed out a printed one-page intro to hip-hop. I guess you were a budding hip-hop journalist even as an undergraduate. Was it not already a thing in Berkeley in 1984? I mean, that was more than a decade after the party on Sedgwick Avenue.

Davey D Cook: Well, the Bay Area in particular has its own unique history. The way I contextualize it is that in the Bronx, when I was coming up, we might have had four five-member hip-hop crews. I was part of a crew called The Avengers out of the Promenade Marble Hill section of the Bronx. I was also part of a crew called TDK, which was in the Co-op City section of the Bronx. When I moved out here, our equivalent, our teenage equivalent had four five-member bands, funk bands. There were hundreds of funk bands the way there were hundreds of crews. Alongside those bands, they had a dancing style, one that incorporated what we call boogaloo, roboting, and strutting. Those dances go back to the '60s, and of course the bands centered their music around funk.

The reason why I bring this up is because when I moved out here, there was a scene already in existence. There was expression coming from the East Oaklands, the North Richmonds, the Hunters Points, and the Fillmores of San Francisco where the "hood" was. What I did when I came out here-- I'm on the campus, so I'm isolated, I'm running into a lot of people from LA. They had already heard of this thing called hip-hop, and they were already having a budding scene down there with Uncle Jamm's Army and what have you, so there was a scene that was already starting to emerge.

What I brought was just attention to what I knew about, and we did this concept called A Day in Hip-Hop in 1984 up in the UC Berkeley campus. I wouldn't say that I brought it to the Bay Area. I think I brought an aspect to this, and then I immersed myself in a scene that was already happening and built around that scene. If there's credit, yes, I was on the radio early on, I was a DJ early on, and I had a certain amount of influence that I think helped open doors.

You alluded to the journalism. I was documenting and writing about this, going back into the early '80s. That's the claim to fame, but I don't want to take credit for expressions that were already here. There were definitely people who were older that had already did dances and actually talked about coming to New York, or being in the Army bases and exchanging with people.

I'll just conclude by saying that around the country, when hip-hop is emerging out of the Bronx, you have go-go in DC, you have a sound that's coming out of New Orleans, you have something going on in other parts of the South, and of course you had a funk movement out here on the West Coast, and eventually those movements intersect with New York-style hip-hop. Some things get adopted, some things get built upon, and we have this wonderful thing that is worldwide with all of us under the same umbrella, speaking similar language, just with a different take or a different accent, cultural accent, if you will.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, continuing to invite your oral history calls. We're definitely inviting stories from some of you who may remember the early days of hip-hop in the 1970s. What was your first hip-hop experience? Tell us a story from the Bronx or anywhere else. 212-433-WNYC on the phones or via text, 212-433-9692, or Tweet @BrianLehrer.

Here's a couple of texts that have come in. One just says, I'm turning 50 this year, and I'm not super psyched about it, but being the same age as hip-hop means I'm pretty cool, right? Ha ha ha ha, so very funny. Somebody else writes, I wasn't there at the birth, but I moved to New York City post-college in the early '80s from way Upstate. Late one night, I was taken to an after-hours club in a deserted Soho for a breakdancing event. Lots of young kids and teams competing in an organized way with the coolest, most daring, most complex breakdance moves I had ever seen. It was totally mesmerizing. The people there were warm, generous, very welcoming, et cetera, et cetera. There's a memory.

Bobby in Union City has one too. Bobby, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Bobby: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hello, Bobby.

Bobby: Hi, good morning.

Brian Lehrer: You're going to take us back to your greatest concert, right?

Bobby: One of them. In four decades of concert going, starting in the early 1970s up until the early 2000s, I had the opportunity with a friend of mine to see Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys play Madison Square Garden. It was like, I still can't believe to this day that I was actually at that concert. Right before the show began, I was standing in the corridor with my friend, Jimmy, and we saw a group of men marching in file. They were young Black men impeccably attired in suits and bow ties. I believe they were with the Nation of Islam, and they were evidently bodyguards or security for a man.

I said to my friend Jimmy, I said, "Who is this guy?" He said, "Bobby, are you blind? That's Mike Tyson." We went inside when the lights went down, and it turned out that Mike Tyson was sitting behind us. We were one section up from orchestra. They had a bar set up behind the stage, and they had-- I mean, this was in the '80s, okay? [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Right. Bobby, I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to leave it there at the apex of the celebrity sighting. [chuckles] There you go, and thank you for that memory.

Davey D, in the book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the original book was by Jeff Chang, so many people know it. Then he got you involved for the Young Adult Edition that came out in 2021. Young adult in publishing usually means teenage, and presumably lots of your readers were already steeped in the history- or I should say, in the hip-hop of today in 2021. What were you aiming to do for that young adult audience with the book?

Davey D Cook: Well, one, we wanted to make sure that they understood there was a political and social context to the emergence of this culture. Second thing, when Jeff and I put this together, we said this will probably be one of the last times people really get to dig deep into this early history that we're talking about, the Herc, Bam [unintelligible 00:34:49] what was going on in the South Bronx, because now you're about 40 years deep with people having their own unique and vibrant histories all around the world. Philly has a history, Detroit has a history, LA has a history, Oakland has a history, Seattle has a history.

We wanted people to be able to reference this a little, but we also, throughout the book, gave a nod to these other histories that existed around the country and around the world. Not a full history because we couldn't cover that in the book, but as a way so people can have a jump-off like, "Hey, there was something going on in Philly in the late '70s, early '80s. There was something going on in Seattle late '70s, early 80s," and these are very important histories. They have unique trajectories. They have unique, sometimes overlapping political scenarios. I think it's wonderful when you dig deep into those history to look at.

That was one of the things we wanted to do. We wanted to also make sure that people understood the presence of women, so throughout the book, there is that acknowledgment of what was going on. Then we tried to bring people up to date. We wanted to let them know about some of the movements that had emerged out of hip-hop, whether it was the hip-hop political conventions in '04, '06, and '08, whether it was the Black Lives Matter movements. Ferguson, we wrote a lot about that. The Oscar Grant movement out here. We really talked about all the way up to George Floyd.

We talked about the political dance that hip-hop has consistently found itself having to deal with. We also wanted to remind people that it goes above and beyond just the rapping part, but there's these other iterations that show up, including the activism, including the commitment to bring knowledge into the forefront, and just give people a more well-rounded take. That was that.

Then the last thing we did was we filled in the gaps with things that weren't in the first book, so [unintelligible 00:36:58] the more robust chapter on Biggie, the whole Tupac situation with Biggie. We go deep into-- oh gosh, I've lost my train of thought. We filled in some of the gaps that were missing in the first [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Other politics.

Davey D Cook: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but a lot of the connections between the music as not just fun to listen to, but the political and social context is, I think, what I hear you saying.

Davey D Cook: Absolutely. Yes, indeed.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned Biggie and Tupac. In the printout that you handed out as an undergrad at Berkeley, that intro to hip-hop, one of the things you wrote, if what I saw online was a real version of it, was that hip-hop was one of the main contributing factors that helped curtail gang violence due to the fact that many young adults found it preferable to channel that anger and aggressions into these art forms, which eventually became the ultimate expressions of oneself. I'm reading from your page.

Would you elaborate on that history for our listeners? How directly or indirectly do you think hip-hop helped curb gang violence in the '80s?

Davey D Cook: Well, what we were talking about, and I didn't write all that then, there was a gang truce that emerged, and I think there was a cultural aesthetic that allowed people to re-channel their energy. That's what I really meant. I didn't have words for that at the time, but I do remember growing up and seeing, for example, the Black Spades become the Zulu Nation. I lived in Black Spade neighborhoods, and then by the time we get older, it's Zulu Nation, and you're asking, what is Zulu Nation? People at the time, it's like, we're no longer a gang, but we are now an organization.

There was a consciousness that people were trying to embrace, and that consciousness was taking that gang energy and recontextualizing it and giving it another direction. Hip-hop wasn't the sole reason it happened. There were a lot of elders and a lot of people who made a commitment to try and turn things around. You saw similar type of efforts on the West Coast in later years. Yes, it gave people another avenue. It gave people something else to do and another escape, another pathway to leave oppressive conditions. You could get your accolades and you could get your props, so to speak, by being good at this craft. Can you be a good dancer? Are you a dope DJ? Are you an incredible MC? Are you a gifted writer? Those things allowed folks to do things.

Then the last point I'll make is that you also start to have this path accentuated because it becomes commercialized, records are being made. You have this emergence of the punk rock kids who are also coming of age around the same time with the hip-hoppers. You have this meeting or this disengagement of the folks from Uptown in the Bronx going Downtown. We talk a lot about that in the chapter with your Fab 5 Freddy's, and Blondies, and Michael Holmans, and so many other people that played key roles in bringing those two worlds together, and recognizing that people felt disenfranchised on all these different levels and found some common ground with the music and with the expression.

That's what we really meant. That's what I really meant when I was saying that it curtailed it, but it was really redirecting that energy.

Brian Lehrer: More than a decade after that, I see you attended as a journalist what was called the Hip-hop Peace Summit in Chicago in 1997 after Tupac Shakur was killed. Again, hip-hop as a vehicle for resolving violence, and there's been some since. Do we also have to say that hip-hop has, besides its pro-social aspects, anti-social elements that compete with the other in a way?

Davey D Cook: No, I think what we're looking at is that it's a reflection of community, and within a community, you try to figure out how you can resolve things that exist. If one community has an opioid crisis, you would expect the entertainment or the expressions coming out of music and other things to address that. I don't know, maybe country artists do address that, or they do take it under their belt to try and resolve that. In the urban centers, you have challenges.

We can go all the way back to the early days of Disco King Mario, and you can see him on ABC News not even identifying himself as a DJ, but somebody who's sitting there as a gang member at the time in a classroom, telling people to start reading. In other words, what you're talking about is like, okay, you're older now, you have a platform. What are you doing with that platform? What are the challenges in your community? Yes, communal violence is addressed, but also education is addressed. When the AIDS crisis was big, that's addressed. Police brutality is addressed. You would hope that people who have these platforms do that, and I think folks have done that.

Yes, a peace summit after the tragic killing of Tupac, and then later Biggie, that necessitated everybody coming together and having a hard conversation and looking and seeing what roles they played not just as artists, but within the context of the community and what influence could they level on that, and I think people rose to the occasion. Shortly after that summit, Snoop went back home, and everything he said there, he did. He started coaching football. He actually put on two, not one, but two peace summits in the West Coast, and really tried to live up to the promises that he said he would. Other people went back and started to volunteer their time at organizations.

One of the things that came out of that is that, hey, you are a visible entity in the community, how are you using your influence, and what steps can you take? I think a lot of people at that time stepped up to the plate and did just that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Before you go, one more, I guess I'm calling it oral history, but it's really written history because it came in as a text. Listener writes, "A child of the '60s, I remember those early days. Davey D has hit it on the head when he said that hip-hop is part of a continuum. We were already listening to Nikki Giovanni, The Last Poets, and others in the '60s and '70s. Hip-hop is the unfoldment of the cultural movement of Blacks and Latinos that preceded it," writes listener Shirley in Harlem.

Let's end this part of the show with a little more music history. You've also spoken and written about how hip-hop not only came from other genres, like Shirley from Harlem just referenced, and we talked earlier about James Brown's funk, but also then influenced other genres. You've referred to this track from the '80s by the jazz legend, Herbie Hancock, who came from a more traditional jazz background originally, but then came through Miles Davis' jazz-rock/fusion band, and eventually to this big hit he had that was hip-hop infused. Here's a few seconds of Herbie Hancock's Rockit.

[MUSIC - Herbie Hancock: Rockit]

Brian Lehrer: As a last thought, Davey, would you use that as a jumping-off point to talk about hip-hop influencing other musics?

Davey D Cook: Well, I would say that jazz influenced hip-hop and vice versa, but shout-out to Herbie Hancock because he's a pivotal figure. I think he was always technologically advanced. I think that in his journey as a musician, it was natural for him to embrace hip-hop and give it wider exposure, along with the brilliance of DST, who was an early pioneer, an incredible dancer and a great producer and DJ.

I think if we talk about roots, you're going to look at reggae, you're going to look at jazz, you're going to look at funk, and I think hip-hop has done a dance. We were influenced by it. Then later on, as we developed our own voices, we started to influence those genres. With the jazz, when you look at Thundercat and Kamasi Washington, and so many others, Flying Lotus, yes, they're coming out of a hip-hop camp and they bring that with jazz- they bring a jazz aspect to it. A Tribe Called Quest, of course, would be somebody you have to mention along with that. We think we constantly influence each other, and hopefully, we continue that for another 50 years.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, keep going. Keep it going. Davey D Cook, co-author with Jeff Chang of the Young Adult Edition of the seminal book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, from the Bronx, remembering some of those early days. He's an Africana Studies professor now and for a long time at San Francisco State University, and hosts the long-time show out there, Hard Knock Radio, on San Francisco station, KPFA.

Davey, again, thanks for getting up early West Coast time and doing this. This was a great pleasure. Thank you very much.

Davey D Cook: Thank you, Brian. Have a good one.

Brian Lehrer: It's Brian Lehrer Show music history special. Stay with us.

 

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