pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

More Run-DMC context: The Sugarhill sound that Spoonie Gee and The Treacherous Three were now tethered to in '83 was dying fast. "Planet Rock" and, to a lesser extent, Sugarhill's own "The Message" had already radically altered the sound of rap music before "Sucker MCs" dealt it the death blow. "White Lines", released six months after "It's Like That"/"Sucker MCs" was basically its last hurrah.

Also the raw street rap of "Sucker MCs" was more radical in '83 than the clubbier sound of "It's Like That", because by the time it dropped, hiphop was becoming rife with dance records from Bambaataa acolytes (it would even take a couple years for the Run-DMC sound to eclipse Bam's as the dominant sound of hiphop), while no one had really been releasing anything as tough and street as "Sucker MCs" since the early days of Enjoy Records. Hiphop as a recorded medium was pretty much immediately taken over by Harlem record biz vets who wouldn't know the sound of the street if it mugged them. Thank god for Bobby Robinson's (insistence on using live musicians aside) hands-off production style! Sugarhill's Sylvia Robinson was too perfectionist and too driven by commercial imperatives to let her acts (many of them - Spoonie, T3, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Funky 4+1 - pilfered from Enjoy's roster) fuck off in the studio with just a rhythm section, let alone a drum machine as company. She was trying to compete with Cameo and the Gap Band as much as with other rap labels. Meanwhile at Tommy Boy, Tom Silverman was giving Bambaataa/Baker/Robie free reign to blast off into space. Maybe Kurtis Blow's "Tough" (produced by Larry Smith, even) is the closest thing to a precedent in the immediate pre-"Sucker MCs" era? It has the slow drum machine beat, probably Larry's same Oberheim DMX later used on the Run-DMC tracks, but still has a disco-funk bassline and Melle Mel-style rap that place it firmly in 1982.

It's funny I almost typed "Run-DMX" earlier, but Run-DMC DMXed the game and brought it back to the streets when Earl Simmons was just some kid who beatboxed. Their fresh street dude fashion (really Jam Master Jay's - Darryl McDaniels and Joe Simmons were middle-class kids) was also a huge part of this. At that time Flash and the Five dressed like rock stars and Bambaataa's crew might as well have stepped off of Sun Ra's ark.

(clicks back onto thread, reads last few hours of posts, backs away slowly and quietly)

martorialist best rap songs of the 80s http://themartorialist.blogspot.ca/2015/08/i-was-on-roads-when-madonna-made-crazy_26.html

Spoonie Gee - Love Rap (1980)
Treacherous Three - The Body Rock (1980)
Blondie - Rapture (1980)
Melle Mel & Duke Bootee - The Message (1982)
Trouble Funk - Pump Me Up (1982)
The Fearless Four - Rockin' It (1982)
Jimmy Spicer - Money (Dollar Bill Y'all) (1983)
Davy DMX - One For The Treble (1983)
Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde - Gettin' Money (1983)
Jonzun Crew - Space Is The Place (1983)
Newcleus - Jam On It (1984)
Herbie Hancock ft. Grand Mixer D.ST - Rockit (1984)
World's Famous Supreme Team - Hey D.J (1984)
Cold Crush Brothers - Fresh, Fly, Wild, And Bold (1984)
Schoolly D - Saturday Night (1986)
Egyptian Lover - Freak-A-Holic (1986)
Roxanne Shanté ft. Biz Markie - The Def Fresh Crew (1986)
Salt-N-Pepa - Push It (1986)
Just Ice - Cold Gettin' Dumb (1987)
Eazy-E - The Boyz-N-The Hood (1987)
Cool C - Juice Crew Dis (1987)
LL Cool J - Go Cut Creator Go (1987)
Slick Rick - Children's Story (1988)
Too $hort - City Of Dope (1988)
Eric B. & Rakim - Follow The Leader (1988)
Ice-T - High Rollers (1988)
M.C La Kim aka Lakim Shabazz - We Got The Funk (1988)
EPMD - You Gots To Chill (1988)
N.W.A - Straight Outta Compton (1988)
Public Enemy - Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos (1988)
Tone Loc - Wild Thing (1989)
Nice & Smooth - Early To Rise (1989)
Kool G Rap & DJ Polo - Road To The Riches (1989)
De La Soul ft. Native Tongues - Buddy (1989)
Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies (1989)

Rev droppin science

hey rev you didn't really touch on it, but am i right in thinking "walk this way" WAS ahead of the game in terms of using a familiar pop chorus AS the chorus? Obv a million tracks were sampled, referenced, alluded to, etc. But I mean having your chorus be "I got the big beat/ I got the sound" rather than using the loop.

― da croupier, Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could easily be forgetting stuff but most sung choruses i can think of were original (i.e. kurtis blow "if i ruled the world" - at least I think that's original).

― da croupier, Wednesday, August 26, 2015 12:12 PM Bookmark

I think this may be a point in favor of "Walk This Way"? It's certainly not the first popular rap song to use a sung hook. "If I Ruled The World" was out a few months earlier and following up the early-'85 success of Blow's "Basketball" (his comeback single after a relatively fallow period post-"The Breaks") and "AJ Scratch", both also with sung hooks. There's also The Sequence's "Funk You Up", "The Fat Boys Are Back", "Roxanne, Roxanne", a bunch of Whodini stuff, and Captain Rapp's "Bad Times" (although the latter is West Coast-specific) that had melodic vocal hooks. I'm trying to think of other precedents, but all of those were original hooks, not swiped from existing records.

Yeah i cant think of a prior rap song w a chorus copped from somewhere else

woohoo! affirmation! honestly for a sec i was like "should i read in sucker mc tea leaves that rev straight up dngaf about who had the first pandering chorus lift"

Oh I guess both "White Lines" and, even earlier, Bambaataa's "Jazzy Sensation" jacked sung vocal hooks before "Walk This Way", but both were from underground club hits (I guess the Gwen McCrae was probably getting black radio play), rather than mainstream hits beloved by Middle America.

Rev, I'm glad you cited "The Fat Boys are Back" cuz when every kid on the playground was singing the chorus in fall '85 the song felt kinda novel.

Wait what where is the white lines chorus from?

Tim, read my posts at least! I promise there's good stuff in between croup and Moka arguing semantics.

"Cavern", same place as the beat.

so i guess the follow-up would be if the fat boys' "the twist" is the first rap hit to JUST take the sung chorus from a big pop song- though there is the beastie boys' "low rider" which at least centers around the most obv hook from the song

must cop to not knowing any fat boys stuff aside from the two top 40s and the song about raiding sbarros from krush groove

Ha totally forgot about the "something like a phenomenon" part in cavern, i always think of liquid liquid as an instrumental band

Spoonie Gee - Love Rap (1980)
Treacherous Three - The Body Rock (1980)
Blondie - Rapture (1980)
Melle Mel & Duke Bootee - The Message (1982)
Trouble Funk - Pump Me Up (1982)
The Fearless Four - Rockin' It (1982)
Jimmy Spicer - Money (Dollar Bill Y'all) (1983)
Davy DMX - One For The Treble (1983)
Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde - Gettin' Money (1983)
Jonzun Crew - Space Is The Place (1983)
Newcleus - Jam On It (1984)
Herbie Hancock ft. Grand Mixer D.ST - Rockit (1984)
World's Famous Supreme Team - Hey D.J (1984)
Cold Crush Brothers - Fresh, Fly, Wild, And Bold (1984)
Schoolly D - Saturday Night (1986)
Egyptian Lover - Freak-A-Holic (1986)
Roxanne Shanté ft. Biz Markie - The Def Fresh Crew (1986)
Salt-N-Pepa - Push It (1986)
Just Ice - Cold Gettin' Dumb (1987)
Eazy-E - The Boyz-N-The Hood (1987)
Cool C - Juice Crew Dis (1987)
LL Cool J - Go Cut Creator Go (1987)
Slick Rick - Children's Story (1988)
Too $hort - City Of Dope (1988)
Eric B. & Rakim - Follow The Leader (1988)
Ice-T - High Rollers (1988)
M.C La Kim aka Lakim Shabazz - We Got The Funk (1988)
EPMD - You Gots To Chill (1988)
N.W.A - Straight Outta Compton (1988)
Public Enemy - Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos (1988)
Tone Loc - Wild Thing (1989)
Nice & Smooth - Early To Rise (1989)
Kool G Rap & DJ Polo - Road To The Riches (1989)
De La Soul ft. Native Tongues - Buddy (1989)
Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies (1989)

― flopson

What!? No Whodini, no Grandmaster Flash, no Run DMC, no Big Daddy Kane, no Afrika Bambaataa

and yet Blondie's cheesy Rapture is in there.

wait I see there's The Message in there under Melle Mel & Duke Bootee.

"Slip in and out of phenomena" in the Liquid Liquid record. Even the "white liiiiiiiiiines" melody comes from "Cavern" tho. xxxp

I was surprised at "Rapture"'s absence from the P4k list! Also I never noticed how weird the lyrics to the rap are until recently. I always just remembered the "Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly" parts, not the "Man from Mars eating cars" parts.

that martorialist list is actually listed as "favourite" rather than "best" on the original post

saw rapture done at karaoke and those lyrics really are a trip

Back to back, sacroiliac
Spineless movement and a wild attack
Face to face, sightless solitude
And it's finger-popping
Twenty-four hour shopping in rapture

Rapture reads to me as a song about over-blown consumerism. At least it's the only way I can interpret those lyrics.

the "Man from Mars eating cars" parts

That's the only part I remember! It always reminds me of the Saturday Night Live "Rap Street" sketch.

Maybe the discrepancy for me is because of "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"?

Lol everybody trolling themselves talking to Moka

I'd take "Square Biz" over "Rapture" as far as '81-white girl rap goes.

Lol is true but they clearly have nothing better to do

A couple other early-80s rap tracks with original sung hooks, although in both of these they're secondary hooks: "Jam On It"; MC Fosty & Lovin' C - "Radioactive Rapp" (another one that probably didn't influence beyond the West Coast, at least until Snoop jacked its opening wholesale for "2 of Amerika'z Most Wanted", although my contraristan favorite flip of it is Mac Dre/Mac Mall/E-40's "Dredio")

nah they picked the right H&O

― brimstead, Monday, August 24, 2015 10:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

song is played

― mods = chickenshit idiots (D-40), Monday, August 24, 2015 10:02 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh no it's played... whatever that means?

Great song obv but it's been the Pitchfork-approved H&O song for years -- the same way "In the Air Tonight" and its spare electronics fits with P's ethos.

which Hall and Oates song did they pick?

Guess!

No can do

aw, thought it might have been Method of Modern Love

"billie jean" generates from "i can't go for that" so imo it was the appropriate pick. also that song will never be played for me, still sounds so effortless and packed with tiny melodic ideas

geeta wrote about the apple thing too the other day:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/aug/24/rolling-stones-greatest-songwriters-list-corporate-sponsorship-apple-music

― scott seward, Wednesday, August 26, 2015 9:13 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone who helped organize and write the songwriter list from its very beginnings, I can tell you that there was absolutely no editorial input from apple whatsoever, and any connection that geeta/guardian have intuited is based on absolutely nothing

curious what one would do apple music linkwise for the beatles, songwriting allowed for lennon and mccartney to be represented separately

ah, see that in the case of prince it goes to the itunes store instead of apple music, guess they could just do that

are their any artists that would plausibly make a pfork/stone canonical list with zero apple presence (music or itunes?) even seger's got some live shit available for apple

though i think the concern that apple-branding could hypothetically lead to artists being ignored is valid, considering its breadth of product i also believe in most cases the issue simply wouldn't cone up

come up

oddly with prince there's simply no link to apple music on the pfork list but there is a "listen on apple music" link for kate bush's "running up that hill" - which leads to a "not available in us"

First off, Moka is an idiot and no one cares about corny ass "walk this way." It's not even the best song on the album ("Peter piper")

She's not, be nice.

Also, where's the secondly?

First off, deej is an idiot and the best song on the album is "My Adidas"

I couldn't follow the Run-DMC argument upthread, but just wanna say that they are the best and Pitchfork's constant campaign to erase them from history will not stand on any internet that I also use

v chill dude calling women idiots on message boards

(right about "Peter Piper" tho)

who would've imagined this discussion of 80's music on the internet would disintegrate into ad hominem and narcissism of small differences; that we would live to see the day, what will we tell the children, etc