Between speaking at recent Columbia Journalism School conference on hip hop journalism and the publication of Tricia Romano’s ‘The Freaks Came Out to Write,’ an oral history of the Village Voice, I’ve spent a lot of time recently revisiting my youth as music journalist in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Much of my writing from that period has been collected over the years — Buppies, BBoys, Baps & Bohos was published in 1992, and The Nelson George Mixtape Volume 1 and 2 are now available via www.pacificpacific.pub.
However, another piece of writing from that era had largely slipped my mind. An email from a younger writer asking me a question about it jogged my memory and has me looking through my storage for ‘Fresh, Hip Hop Don’t Stop.’ Packaged by agent Sarah Lazin, publihsed under her imprint, and released by Random House in 1985, ‘Fresh’ was one of the first serious looks at the emerging culture released by a major house. Previously ‘How to break dance’ and ‘How to Rap’ books had been published to capitalize on what was viewed as a short lived fad.
Kurtis Blow wrote the forward (which I believe was ghosted by his producer and my former roommate Robert ‘Rocky’ Ford), while I provided the introduction and a chapter on rapping. Sally Banes, who’d already written a early look at street dance for the Village Voice, contributed a chapter on breakin’, while Susan Flinker and Patti Romanowski combined to look at the movement’s impact on fashion and art. The book is laced with over 100 black & white photos that capture, not the desolation of uptown streets, but the energy of a business just being born. It may be hard for younger fans to understand, but it was the dance and fashion aspects of hip hop that was the most commercially viable in the mid-80s.
When the book was released in ‘85, the records and the artists were still fighting for a foothold on radio and, except for Kurtis Blow, none had major label deals. The “golden age” of MCs, with politcial commentary, violent narratives, and complex rhyme schemes, were still a year or so away. Crack hadn’t yet overwhelmed neighborhoods. There were a lot of day glo outfits, new wave flavor, and Rick James leather impacting what people wore and the sound of the music. Sampling hadn’t yet changed its sonics.
In the middle of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Me Decade,’ hip hop hadn’t yet separated itself dance music as a whole and solidified itself as a new genre, much les as the new mainstream. Slang like “da joint,” “fresh” and “def” were current useage and there was a kind of innocence to scene that was soon to disappear. So ‘Fresh’ is situated at an inflection point in the rise of hip hop, a phrase itself that was only a couple of years old as an umbrella title for all the music, dance, art, and dress coming out of New York.
At the time of this book’s publication I’d been writing about hip hop since 1978. That was seven years in ‘85 and, back then, I was having arguments with editors about why it deserved coverage. It trips me out that, decades later, a lot of that work is of some historical importance. I haven’t found a copy yet of ‘Fresh,’ but I better keep looking.
BTW Romano’s critically acclaimed book is a must read for a number of reasons, but if you’re a fan of pop music writing (which I assume you are if you subscribe here, Tricia’s chronicle of Village Voice music section is essential and often funny.)