[porkmarras]

David Toop (Part 1)

 

What does Grandmaster Flash mean to you?
Well, Flash was like a… flash. You know, there are a few records that came out in the early history of recorded hip hop that were like moments of real revelation. One was ‘Planet Rock’ and the other was ‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel’, because both of them were so different to anything that had gone before, that it was just like an epiphany. ‘Planet Rock’, I didn’t even like when I first heard it. It’s a classic situation of you hear something, you hate it and next time you hear it, it’s your favourite record ever. Rick Rubin said that to me once; it’s a sign that you’re really gonna love something if you hate it immediately and then suddenly you get a religious conversion to it. It’s because it throws everything out of whack in the way you feel about records and how they should be made.
‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel’ was one of those records. For me, as a personal thing, it plugged into a lot of other ideas, other histories that I’d been involved in, which was the experimental avant-garde area of music history, which was a parallel music history for me, and black music of various kinds. And it connected very strongly with that, but it also clearly was the way hip hop should be. You’d read all these things about hip hop jams and the records were like R&B disco records which translated what had gone on, but ‘Wheels of Steel’ was actually what had gone on. And the fact that the record company allowed him to do that and that it was successful record both artistically and commercially was incredibly exciting, I think.
Did you know what was going on with hip hop when you heard records like that? When did you first hear about it?
I did know a bit, because… I’d heard records like ‘Rappers’ Delight’ when it first came out and it didn’t make that much of an impression despite the fact that I’d always collected records by people like Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all the R&B records, like Doctor Horse. I had all those records and I knew all those records but, for some reason, when I heard ‘Rappers’ Delight’ it didn’t connect in my mind immediately. Perhaps because it seemed to be just a gimmicky pop record. In fact, I went to New York in ’79 but I wasn’t really aware of hip hop then. I was sort of plugged into the whole John Zorn scene and I went out there to play, in fact. But I was going out with Sue Steward at that time, and she went to New York in ’81 and came back with quite a few records on Sugarhill and Enjoy and I thought they were fantastic. And we were working together on a magazine called Collusion and we published some articles on hip hop including articles on hip hop DJing in ’82. And that was about using six decks, three DJs working at the same time, and cutting out records and collaging; all those different techniques that were part of the early history. There was a writer called Steven Harvey who wrote the piece on the disco underground…
Actually, I interviewed him recently and he said if I saw you to remember him to you.
Well, Steven wrote some really good pieces for Collusion. He wrote that piece on the disco underground, which is probably like a key piece.
Totally. And I edited that thing, because it was huge. It was like about 20,000 words long.
You don’t happen to have the unedited version, do you? He’s going to try and track down the Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan transcripts for me. I may have, in the loft. We’re having a loft conversion, so I’ll have a look. So… Anyway, I knew a bit, and I started writing about hip hop myself for a few places and then I heard those records, so there was a kind of an understanding. Not a full understanding, I don’t think I got that until I went to New York to do all the interviews for Rap Attack in ’84. But to come back to your question, Flash was a real pioneer and he was obviously one of the three most crucial people to the growth of hip hop. Very articulate, and a great spokesman. Plus, with the Furious Five he had hits that were very important as well. Lot of different reasons why he was important.
What do you think his role is in the history of music?
I think that he is the most significant person in bringing a certain approach to collaging music, through DJ methods into a popular sphere. Those techniques have been done before by composers like John Cage and they’ve been used in electronic music. And they’ve been used in fringe, marginal areas of rock music and what have you. They’d appeared in a diluted form, I guess, in music like disco. But they never really been done quite so openly in party music. And hip hop was party music. Never mind all the other stuff that we now know about, like the sociology, the politics and so on. But it was party music, primarily. It was remarkable that it was a party music that was so avant garde. Plus he was a pioneer in hip hop and hip hop has been a hugely important form of music in the 20th century up until now.
I think also he was an organiser. People tend to downplay that or they don’t realise its importance, but you always need organisers on a scene who’ll go and do things and set things up and do them properly and not make a complete fuck up of it and he was obviously very good at that. He was like a figurehead. I remember going to see the group that toured in this country as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five after they’d split and Melle Mel introduced this DJ – I can’t remember who it was – and said, ‘Grandmaster Flash!’ and it wasn’t. It was kind of tragic in a way. And ridiculous as well. What happened was a classic music business story and a real tragedy because, you know, he was a smart person. Intelligent man. I must say, I saw him DJ at this club called Broadway International in Harlem and he was just DJing. Terrible club. And it was absolutely extraordinary. In what way?
The fluidity and the invention. For me, as a personal thing, not being there at those early hip hop jams, unlike people like Tommy Silverman who were. Virtually every white person who went to one of those early hip hop jams was so completely blown away that they became important in some way in communicating about the music, or starting a record label because it was so radical. So for me the only exposure I’d had of that was seeing Flash play at Broadway International in ’84. And then seeing Afrika Bambaataa play at the Venue.

[porkmarras]

In Victoria?
Yeah. Which was quite early on. It was just so different to anything you could go out and do, whether it be bands or clubs or anything else. It was just… from anther planet somehow. We take it for granted now, but the whole way of performing DJs was just really radical.
How important conceptually?
It was very important, really, and we take it for granted. Sampling became so much part of every pop music that nobody really thinks about it anymore. At that time, to make music from other people’s records in a creative way rather than a plagiaristic way, and to create new kinds of musical form was a breakthrough. Creating new kinds of musical form is something I’ve always been interested ever since I was 14 years old and listening to R&B records. Just looking for ways that were different to, you know, European classical music… Flash and Bambaataa and Kool Herc and all the other people who were around at that time, I don’t think they really thought too much about how different what they were doing was because it was quite a self-contained world. It was developing without any help from record labels, or promoters or commercial concerns. They were having to work in clubs and pay their way in clubs but that’s about as far as it went. It was something you can’t even imagine anymore.
In fact it’s something that’s quite rare in any part of the history of popular music for something to be allowed to develop for a few years outside of that, because it was like a bubble that they were inside I don’t think they really knew how remarkable it was what they were doing. They didn’t have many commentators writing about it. There were a few people writing for New York magazines, but there wasn’t a great weight of critical theory building up. That came much later. I think it even came after Rap Attack, really. Because Rap Attack wasn’t a theory book, it was a straightforward musical history book. And all the verbiage and theorising came later by which time it was all done and dusted really.
Do you think it’s quite weird that even though it was so close to one of the media centres of the world that it remained so apart from it?
It is weird, but then that’s something to do with American society and the structure of American cities, which is very different to the structure of European cities. And that separatism is so much part of what happened before the civil rights movement and what happened after the civil rights movement and the ghettoisation that took place in American cities. So from that point of view, it’s not so strange because I think there always has been this incredible division in American cities. America itself is often ignorant of what’s happening outside of itself to an extraordinary degree because it’s so powerful and it’s so self-contained…
And insular.
And so insular in many ways. So I think it’s a reflection of that, the Bronx falling so badly into decline. And Harlem as well; being like this world of politics and culture and hope at one point and not too many decades later turning into a complete ruin. That lack of mixing, people didn’t go to Harlem or the Bronx much. Or if they did, they went a targeted way. Maybe they’d go to the Apollo, or to the Bronx Zoo, and then they’d go back home again. That lack of fluidity. And the people who lived in the Bronx thinking that going downtown was like going into some alien zone. Also that sense of deprivation, just not feeling it’s possible to own these things or to even know that they exist and that’s part of hip hop history.
Economics contributed to the decline of big bands, Slave and all those huge bands with 15 members and eight conga players [laughs]. All those funk bands, they weren’t sustainable anymore in the same way that the swing bands of the ’40s eventually died out for economic reasons. There were bands that were part of the Harlem scene, that were part of the Bronx scene that disappeared, so musicianship was no longer associated with making music in a strange kind of way, in New York. I’m still not completely clear about that in my own mind. What happened and why hip hop, after it came on record, came to depend on just a few people, like Positive Force, the guys at Sugarhill and Pumpkin, just those few musicians. And why musicians weren’t part of the hip hop scene early on at all. Do you think that they were effectively like the MFP musicians?
I think that’s a bit unfair

[porkmarras]

Well, in the sense that they were sat in the studio day after day, with a DJ coming in and saying, okay take this bit here…
Well, they weren’t even sat there. Doug Wimbish said to me… Sugarhill had two studios. They had Hugo & Luigi’s studio and had another studio, they were running back and forwards between them. Pumpkin recorded in a garage, I think. They were fantastic musicians.
Well, the MFP guys were, too.
Yeah, they were as well, that’s true. I don’t know. There’s an element of that, but it was different. They were bringing a definite style. They weren’t like hacks who could turn themselves to anything. They were, to some extent, listening to the rappers. I think there were people at Sugarhill who were like that. Jiggs Chase, who was a kind of arranger and I think they had struggles with him wanting to do things in a very slick way and the rappers kind of saying ‘do we have to do it this way?’ They were sort of functionaries, really.
We were trying to nail down with Flash exactly what role he played on those records and it’s all a bit nebulous, but one of the things he said was that he brought in records, like ‘Freedom’, for example. So I’m assuming he went in and said play this bit?
I got the sense that he began to be marginalised from day one. And that’s why ‘Adventures…’ was such an important record. It brought hip hop and what hip hop actually was back into the frame, because I think he’d been finding the breaks. He’d been the archivist, the record hunter. He was the DJ who knew what was working. He was creating all of the music in the early days and suddenly they get a record deal and I’m sure there was a tendency to say… In fact I’m sure I’ve heard it said, though I’m not sure who by so I’ll have to be careful what I say…I’m sure somebody has said to me, who was involved, ‘Well what did he do anyway?’. In a way, you could say they had a point. Once you’ve got the idea, the bit from ‘Freedom’ and learnt the chords, played it and got the vocalists in it’s like making a traditional pop record. And who’s this guy standing around? That’s what was wrong with hip hop in the early days on record.
Do you think that if sampling technology had been further down the road that he would have become their producer, in the way that DJ Premier has done?
Possibly. It’s hard to say because they were all very young and very inexperienced. They fell right into it. They got record contracts with these entrepreneurs who were very important and had many positive qualities but also were…. They didn’t know anything about this music, but they’d a lot of experience in… manipulation, let’s say. All these people, like Paul Winley, Bobby Robinson, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, that guy in Harlem, can’t remember his name… Some of these people were on the verge of criminality.
Did you read that MCA & The Mafia book? That has lots of stuff about Sugarhill and Morris Levy in it.
Yeah, the whole Mafia involvement. It’s funny… I sometimes get sent manuscripts for American university presses and they tend to be cultural studies things about hip hop, which usually claim that what a wonderful thing it was in the early days of hip hop because it was all black-owned business and you have to say, well, unfortunately, that’s not strictly true. If it was true, they tend to be criminals or semi-criminals or if they weren’t criminals themselves, then they were involved with the Mafia. So it’s a very utopian view of that period, and it’s not a good idea to get nostalgic about it because it was corrupt. It certainly did no favours for the artists.
Artistically, it did give a few favours because there was a lot of paternalism, the way they did things. There was a lot of control. They used control to manipulate people and it was even easier to do it with people in hip hop because they were so young and inexperienced and they hadn’t even had the experience of paying their dues in a funk band. They were ripe for the taking. A way of things established itself, and I think the musicians were intermediaries on a number of levels. So I think Flash, as an inquisitive and inventive person, would’ve learned to use samplers.
He was already playing around with drum machines. But I really don’t think they were given access to the technology. I mean, there were sort of samplers in those days, sampling little fragments, cos I was making a record around that time and we worked out ways of making little samples using what was around at the moment. There were Fairlights, but they were useless, and nobody had them. They were hugely expensive pieces of junk which were going in completely the wrong direction. There was AMS, a digital delay and you could capture bits of sounds and trigger them. You could do that but nobody was giving people like Flash access to the studio to experiment. You know, ‘we’re busy, we’re busy. This is how we do things.’
I suppose it goes back to ownership of the means of production!
It does! It does. All that’s completely changed now. In those days, music was made in studios, apart from things like Paul Winley’s Bambaataa thing, which was a live gig. And chaotically and badly recorded as it is, thank God it exists. And there were the bootlegs. I’ve got one or two, Live At The Convention.
Do you think if Flash hadn’t thought of it, someone else would have? You know, Walter Gibbons was sort of doing what Flash was doing.
Yeah, well disco was experimenting with it.
There are these strange and largely hidden links between hip and disco, after all. So do you think they would have?
I think they already had. Disco, as you know, had its own peculiar transformations and translations going on because there’s a commercial view of disco, a mainstream view of disco. But, you know, for me disco, the very early history of it, has very strong similarities with hip hop, in the sense that disco didn’t exist any more than hip hop didn’t exist. And people in little underground parties were playing lots of records that seemed appropriate to their scene. Like Barrabas records or African records or rock records. And that mix, is very very similar, in a way, to the mix of the early hip hop records. And then, of course, the industry caught on in the same way and gradually there became a thing called disco music and people started making disco records. But nobody was making disco records, because they didn’t exist when it first started.
I think it was to do with when hip hop started to emerge which was – I don’t know when it was really – ’75 or ’76? And at that period disco was starting to become a real commercial proposition. People were starting to make real disco records and it felt very different to the R&B tradition, and so there was a resistance which is why people like Bobby Robinson got involved in hip hop, because they couldn’t relate to that since they were so deeply embedded in the R&B tradition. I suppose the European disco records – I’m not totally sure on my history here – but I suppose the European disco records were starting to come out then.
They started to come out earlier, but the more motorised ones were about ’76 onwards, I guess.
Yeah, which would roughly coincide with hip hop establishing itself. I can imagine them thinking, a) this is gay music, b) it just hasn’t got anything we can relate to. But, at the same time, there were really strong connections. ‘Trans Europe Express’ was a big record on every scene, disco, rock, I dunno, hip hop scene.
‘The Mexican’ is another cross genre hit…
Yeah, and there’s a disco version of it, too.
The Bombers thing on West End?
Yeah, that was a big record. You could probably pull out a lot of records that were attributable to both scenes. I think the main thing was the difference of the beat. It’s interesting about Walter Gibbons with ‘Set It Off’. That was like a hip hop record, really. It was like a hip hop break record. But then it was like a disco record as well. Walter Gibbons was mixing all kiinds of breaks, which Flash was doing. And the idea of extending using breaks, Tom Moulton had done that. So in a way they had very similar histories, but the culture that surrounded them was very different. The aspirations were also different. In the end, I think disco was quite materialistic in many ways and it was about pure pleasure in many respects and escapism. I think hip hop was kind of escapism, but it had a kind of strong social aspirations, it was about a whole kind of culture.
Do you think it had many aspirations beyond let’s have a party? In the beginning, at least.
From what I can gather about the Kool Herc days it was ‘let’s have a party’. He was a DJ playing for parties. He was playing James Brown stuff and the MCs were shouting nonsense over the mic. I can’t see that there was any more to it than that. A style developed, you know, a style of clothes and dancing. Graffiti already existed anyway, that was another thing. At some point, the same people in the same scene developed this secret society and they all came to mean something. Certain people with big ideas came along, like Bambaataa, and saw links between what was happening socially, what people were doing with dance, graffiti, the kind of records that were being played, the way people behaved. He had a kind of distance from it. He could look at what was going on and analyse it. He could say, this is what I would like to do with this movement. Then, of course, people started to write it up and as soon as a history comes into being it creates a kind of shape and logic. It’s one history. It’s not the history, the sole history. Unfortunately, with old school hip hop not many people wrote about it. It’s quite hard now, because people have died and disappeared

[HaydenAsche]

Originally Posted by Saturnine

they really are not abraisive at all. they are too cute to be abraisive.

It is called sarcasm, honey.


Anyways, I have no idea. I hope so. I hope they make better music than noise because other than Yellow Swans the majority of shit they put out these days is boring atonal walls of shit.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

Read it first,then form your own opinion about it.There are enough people without a stable and concise sense of judgement on this board already.I'd say 'An Ocean of sound' is even better.

I've read both, and Haunted Weather. In fairness, he is very comprehensive, and he really, really knows his onions. I find his writing style a bit to 'nicely nicely' for my liking, but he is an authority on a great deal more music than I am ever likely to be. Sour grapes, perhaps, but he lacks the visceral excitement... but then I can't stand Reynolds or most music writers. Hmm. Perhaps I don't have an opinion at all.

[drrrtyboots]

Originally Posted by HaydenAsche

It is called sarcasm, honey.


Anyways, I have no idea. I hope so. I hope they make better music than noise because other than Yellow Swans the majority of shit they put out these days is boring atonal walls of shit.

yellow swans are the shit

[Toilet & Bowels]

having just read through all that stuff you posted (much to my chagrin, and purely so i could make this answer) toop talks primarily himself, the music and facts are secondary; what the hell does an english person living in the UK have in terms of first hand knowledge of hiphop in the early 80s anyway? a bit of record shopping and a couple of gigs? fuck off! and secondly he presents me with nothing i didn't know about hiphop already, there's no genuine insight. much like his live music, it's the work of someone arrogant enough to believe that whatever they spew forth is worth people's time and money.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Originally Posted by Sheriff Rhys Chatham

I mean whats the next level? As far as audio goes (not the live aspect) theres not much more that can be done. Until people start recording murder & rape to beethoven. Where will it go?

I've honestly been thinking about this myself. What will be the new way of musically challenging people?

There are some musical concepts that have occured to me. Concepts that haven't really been acted out. But none have occured to me that would really break barriers and challenge its listeners.

[m^a(t)h]

there is no way im reading that dave toop shit, waste of my fuckin time...

[kingcoffee]

I think that noise is pretty much as bad ass as it gets. I mean even the name "noise" conveys that it's abrassive and rough. How can you get anymore Noise than Noise? None. None more noise.

[porkmarras]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

having just read through all that stuff you posted (much to my chagrin, and purely so i could make this answer) toop talks primarily himself, the music and facts are secondary; what the hell does an english person living in the UK have in terms of first hand knowledge of hiphop in the early 80s anyway? a bit of record shopping and a couple of gigs? fuck off! and secondly he presents me with nothing i didn't know about hiphop already, there's no genuine insight. much like his live music, it's the work of someone arrogant enough to believe that whatever they spew forth is worth people's time and money.

1)If any writer could be described as arrogant it certainly wouldn't be David Toop
2)I do wonder how many of his records you do own and how many times you have seen him playing live as well as HOW MUCH of his writing you HAVE read.
3)In the book,he states quite clearly that he spent time in New York at the time Hip Hop was finding a more pronounced voice.
4)You don't have to agree with everything someone writes but dismissing them as a whole smacks of snobbery.