Hip Hop's major influence on me (& you?)
MR_ZIMMS
210 Posts
Way back in 1988 I was hunting down the records (samples) that were used on "Critical Beatdown" by the Ultramagnetic Mc's. Since then I got hooked on Funk, Jazz-Funk, Jazz, Blues etc. etc. etc. Never stopped listening to Hip Hop though...
Who else started out in Hip Hop to eventually become a lifetime funkateer? If yes, what group or which record?
Who else started out in Hip Hop to eventually become a lifetime funkateer? If yes, what group or which record?
Comments
one of my first and still best...
The chef and school's idea was to make kids battle for lunch cards, cause Hip Hop could be used as a learning tool to feed the children.
Usually the kids brought their own records, but the chef would occasionally while bring his Funky Black Man Soul records and play some of the beats that were behind our favorite jams.
This really got me so hooked. Most of the records I grew w/ were Engleberg Humperdink, Neil Sedaka, and The Eagles. One of the kids a school got me high for the first time and I soon started hunting down Reggae stuff while Funk Hunting. I recall going to the ghetto to purchase War and Mandrill from a friends Ex-Con Uncle who claimed to play the kazoo on Freedom - Get Up And Dance.
But it really wasnt until my first year of college until I really embraced my Fonk-E-Ness, thanks to a Blond Dread Aussie Electric Boogie Champion Girlfriend, who I showed my 12" to.
Comedy Gold
I'd also massively loved (but didn't know why) Shirley Ellis' Clapping Song and Dizzy by Tommy Roe -- especially the drums.
The first seed of funk as a sound, and sample curiosity was planted when I heard the ending bars of Magic Number by De La Soul in about '90/'91-ish.
That was the exact moment that I realised they'd actually made a song out of other songs. That made me go all Mixmaster Mike and start playing with double cassette decks to loop the parts of songs I liked.
My first sense of specifically identifying and liking 'funky hip hop' as a style came in 1992 when I heard Man's Final Frontier by Arrested Development playing in a clothes shop (cause it was all cut and pastey just like the end of Magic Number by De La Soul). So I bought '3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... by Arrested Development' the same day.
Then there was a hip hop hiatus when I got into rave for a few years :oof: . Bear in mind, I wasn't aware of the Hip Hop Lessons by Double Dee & Steinski until 2000. If they would have surfaced in my little world back then, I would be saved!
I was rescued from rave again in 1994 when I saw DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince's 'I Wanna Rock' on Beavis and Butthead... this was my first taste of turntablism.
This finally kicked off a real interest in hip hop (only that which sounded funky and used organic samples though). I bought Code Red by Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and a tape called 'Rap Attack!' which was a comp of popular rap tracks, but the remix versions (like the Boilerhouse Mix of Can I Kick It by ATCQ - another cut and pastey type track). I also bought Buhloone Mindstate by De La Soul and Bumrush The Show by Public Enemy.
My first taste of original funk came in 1995 when I heard Sex Machine by James Brown on a Demo DVD for the new DVD player my friend'd Dad had just bought.
I thought it was immense but I didn't know it was the tip of a much bigger iceberg (which I had no real access to anyway as the net was in its infancy and I'd already been sucked into the great grunge vacuum).
It wasn't until I heard Marlena Shaw's California Soul on a mix tape by David Holmes in 1999 that my interest in funk and soul got well and truly sparked.
I then bought David Holme's Essential Mix and was loving it non-stop.. even all the eclectic stuff like Contact by Brigitte Bardot. This mix also featured J5's Lesson 6 (but I still didn't know there was a Lesson 1, 2, 3, Cut and Shadow's separate 4's etc..)
The straight-up bust-a-nut moment came when I tuned in by-chance to a David Holmes set on Radio 1's Breezeblock in 2000 and I heard this (although it took me 2 years to find out the name of it and a further 2 to cop a copy)
That was it - I bought Technics 1200s, discovered the Hip Hop Lessons, Return of The DJ comps, started collecting funk... and the rest is history.
I was actually only going to poast a one-line answer.. meh...
on one random night i went to Halifax in 1988, i remember walking past this club and hearing rap music blasting out of the front doors, this place was called Cafe Ole and it changed the scene here entirely, and was my intro into Buck65, Sixtoo, Hip Club Groove and a whole local scene i didnt even know existed, i remember seeing JoRun scratch records for the first time (not on some "rockit" video type steez on tv) and watched people take turns on the mic, and from that point on rap and hiphop was bigger then life to me as it wasnt sumthin that was just happening in NYC or on TV it was going on right here in the city i lived in.
1990 i got my first set of turntables and start collecting records, by the time 1993 rolled around i had started painting graffiti with this cities first graffiti crew called Halifax Riters Association (HRA) and later that year bought a Yamaha 4 track an old Yamaha sampler a midi keyboard (yamaha dx-7-loved that thing) and an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer and a Roland TR-505
sadly around 1996/1995 i also got into the rave scene here in the city as the dudes i was rolling with were hiphop heads that also were into "rave music" the culture, the drugs and whatever else ravers did back then, by the time 1999 rolled around i was getting booked weekly for shows and start to make a lil name for myself, the shows i played seemed to get bigger and bigger and 500 person shows turned into 5000 person shows. i had entered into a few dj competitions the ITF which featured the invisabl skratch pikls and a few local contests around that time frame as well, but kept getting beat out by this new guy who named himself "Scratch Bastard" lol
i would confusingly jump back and forth from hiphop to rave music at shows i would do, and every so often grab the mic and drop a verse or 2 or 3 or 4 over some jungle or drum and bass, by the early 2000's i got tired of the rave scene and watching people tweak out on drugs weekend after weekend and left the scene to get back to hiphop.
only thing i really liked about playing shows was getting out and being able to meet djs from out of town, i was lucky enough to play shows with a shit load of people, although i never really was into the bar scene i still sorta wish i would have kept playing shows.
That's an underrated album. It's actually quite good.
Actually, I was into records as a child. My dad signed my brother and I up to the Columbia Record Club (pops picked the LPs at first until we got older), and my uncle Phillip (pop's younger brother) put us up on cool music check out since he was a DJ. I took up collecting seriously in my teens, before I got into hip-hop. Also, I played drums and DJ-ed before jumping full-fledge into making beats, say around 15-years old. So, I'd say music collecting influenced my hip-hop sensibilities more than the other way around.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak