Your HIPHOP Baptism?
batmon
27,574 Posts
When was your first close encounter w/ HipHOP? Whether it was the clothing,music,dancin' etc....?Tell me your story. 
batmon
27,574 Posts
Comments
I never saw the dance w/ the music. SHAZAM...I was open.
Another classmate showed me that my B-boy name would be Davey-D 'cause of my first name. I wouldnt keep that shit cause Davy-D canonized it himself.
Then my moms brought me a pair of Brown on Brown Leather British Walkers - and all my classmates were on my shit. The rest is history.
I had other 12"s like "Rapper's Delight" and other soul music (just for the fact that I love music- Thanks Dad!) but I didn't realized that I infused myself with Hiphop until 1982....which was my first vivid memory into the culture.
Anyone remember when Tower Records (at least in the US) had 45's on the wall and new release albums on the ground- still in their shipping boxes, and albums were taken out for display/purchase?
1983....breakdancing (what I called it back then) at Kings Skate Country....having three/four fat laces in my Pumas with different designs
early 80s...having a Realistic mixer and two home turntables...
yes! i bought a whole bunch of euro imports from them back then.
in 6th grade ronald clark stood on the desk in front of class and announced that anyone who wanted a dub of raising hell just needed to bring hium a blank tape.
6th grade i started noticing kids wriiting grafiti in their notebooks and talking abou tdoing pieces, but i was never deep into that stuff...strictly basketball for me
It would usually consist of popular disco cuts of the day and the occasional Sugar Hill or Enjoy record being horribly cut back and forth on belt drive turntables.
But since I never heard anything like it, I was very intruiged.
Later I would get tapes of good local DJs, like Mastermind, Blade, Ernie Vines, Eddie On and (my namesake) Kid Nice.
Took me quite a while to figure out how they were actually making the scratching sound.
A couple years later when Flash on the Wheels of Steel came out, that's what officially made me take the next step and try to fuck with my dad's turntable.
I can't begin to count the number of times dad let me have it after he would find out I lied to him and messed with his stereo.
To this day I could never figure out how he knew. I mean, I really tried to be super-secret-squirell about shit too.
I think I bought the VHS of this for a mate's birthday. Does it have Darryl Pandy and The Surf M.C.s "Surf or Die" on it?
It was the graf that got me into it. I was working on my "Chrome effect" letters for my tape covers and then there was some graf documentary with breaking etc. and those kids had it all taken to the
IIRC Peter Powell (yes, Anthea Turner's ex) was the first mainstream UK DJ to play The Message back in the day on Radio 1. Obviously at 10 or 11 I was not too busy "Checking the pirates". I could bullshit I was into Clyde Stubblefield since a foetus, but then I'd sound like one of those DJs that claimed to have been playing Ibiza so long they must have been there before it rose from the sea.
Plate tectonics headz to keep the deal to themselves.
I can't remember if it was through my Aunt and Uncle's record store, or just before the first breakdance craze. But, I do remember when one of my best friends came back (Fam trip to NYC) with a tape with just "The Bronx" graffitied on it was when I was hooked solid.
or
Young MC- Stone Cold Rhymin' (radio hits aside, this was and still is a great album)!
I'm apparently a youngster.
Was it simply a song that brought you in or were there other factors. Older cats in your hood? Breakdancin' on TV shows? Mall dispays w/ hiphop manakins?
not as far as i remember mate. it had moe dee "go see the doctor", dana dane "cinderfella" ... um... yazz? shit, i can't remember. i have the original tape somewhere though
see that's what i'm talking about. i used to tape westwood on radio 1 (though i wasn't recording when KRS made his legendary appearance years latee, despite listening to it at the time) but i'm in south yorkshire man, i'm not going to throwdowns in covent garden and shit. if it was goin off in the parks, it meant white lightning (or whatever alcohol we could get), soap-bar/BnH 100s and benches - not b-boys and battling! even in sheffield, it wasn't all about that. yeah, there were graf jams in the basketball courts and you'd get djs down there sometimes, but that was years after that.
i'm living in barnsley, dammit, if you wanted to be up on shit you needed to go out there and find it yourself. i used to go down to london as much as i could but i had next to no cash, once i'd paid for bus tickets and all that. i could get a few albums at the most, and that was it, so you know i chose carefully on those shits. i remember coming back from tower records with dah shinin, reading the cover inside and out & wishing i didn't have to wait 4hrs + before i could play it! fuck an ipod, fuck a download - by the time i had chance to hear that i knew who'd produced it, i know who'd guested, i knew who'd been thanked and why (and who to check out next time i was at the store, if i liked the lp). i liked the fact that i was an anorak about that shit, that i knew about smif-n-wessun because of black moon, heltah skeltah because of smif-n-wessun and ogc because of heltah skeltah etc. it worked back then. nowadays you pick up the lp of somebody who's guested on a dope lp and it's been hatched out before it was ready. shit is done in an instant now, no waiting for skills to mature. so many artists are chewed up and spat out before they're even ready to comprehend what an LP should be... despite them having already recently one
(side bitch #1: 74mins of music doesn't mean you made an lp)
(side bitch #2: 90% of albums were better when you could fit 2 on a c90)
I remember at a battle, this crew had an mc that would rap about their crew. I was like, damn, that's
Later I got Run DMC's tape and was inspired by Jam Master Jay's manipulation of the record. Since I had been fucking with records since i remember, that was the logical step. Who woulda thought that there would be a place to go from spinning records backwards, or repeating parts, cutting the line on the reciever. I still have some of the evidence. My moms destroyed funk records in my bins. Discovering that you can hear the record using a sewing pin didn't help any.
I thought Run-DMC's word play was dope and other rappers were funny, good, or whatever but Rakimshowed me a whole deeper level in that shit. Structurally, and conceptually. Plus it was