Being Hip at the Hop

November Is Hip-Hop History Month

I woke up Saturday morning expecting to hear the programs I like on the radio and instead I heard what was described as the “hip-hop take over of the station” and then I was listening to a 61-year-old rapper from South Africa talking about some rapper who just died, both rappers I never heard of, not that I 've heard of that many rappers, but on the other hand, I happened to have heard a lot of rappers, for 30 years now. Still, I’m totally out of the hip-hop game, man, and have to admit, as a musician I don't consider it music, though I appreciate many aspects of it, especially the beats.

I’ve been around New York City since rap began here and I was early acquainted distantly yes but not so distantly really with one of its “beginners,” a kid I knew of, had seen but paid no attention to, though my girlfriend was close friends with his mother, and I’ve actually been in his house and watched his mother iron clothes—this was way back in the blue ages when I hung out in Mount Vernon, New York.

This South African dude mumbled something about this dead rapper, his protégé, I assumed, a South African rapper he’s calling and respecting as Mister Devious. This old South African and a young American street babe (she called herself that not me) are discussing Mister Devious as if he was a saint now. The old rapper said Mister Devious was great because he used hip-hop to survive among murderers, rapists, gangsters, dopers—I supposed he was talking about livin’ in Soweto maybe—and then he just continued mumbling along—it was very hard to understand him because it was as though he was talking over a phone line, and maybe he was, it was Pacifica Radio. It ended by the old dude saying hip-hop was a global music that had started simultaneously in the black ghettos of the world and that hip-hop had started in those mean streets, blah, blah, blah. He seemed fascinated by the fact that Mister Devious had suffered stabbings, gunshot wounds, a life of rapping about surviving in those styles of streets helping his peers gain strength to fight those coalitions of evil that exist in such streets.

I’d never heard that hip-hop had started simultaneously in the streets of the ghettos of the world, but I sure knew it had started in the streets—and schoolyards and hallways—of the United Mess of America—all great American music started in America's streets. The blues certainly started in the streets—with street musicians—singers, guitar players, harmonica players, jug blowers—on the streets of all the black neighborhoods of the cities all across the South for sure, then immigrating up the Mississippi to Memphis, St. Louis, then on to Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Indiana.

Jazz came from the streets, from the black marching bands of New Orleans—or even before that, from the drum and dance and singing sessions the New Orleans blacks celebrated every Sunday in Congo Square in the heart of old New Orleans since way before the Civil War—wow, what an experience that must have been. When I lived in New Orleans, I used to walk over to where Congo Square used to be and listen to the air to see if I could perhaps hear the echoes of those sessions—the aboriginal drumming—you still hear it in really early jazz—and you certainly hear it in all the many Latin musics there are depending on aboriginal drum rhythms for their life-stirring syncopations that lead to dancing, that lead to singing, that lead to abandonment of cares and a flinging of rules and morals and mores to the winds—life lived at it most pleasureable—with thirst quenched and hungry held at bay, then was the time for dance and song and all night celebration on one’s day off—free day—that’s what all this street music leads to, that FREE DAY when we all just celebrate the freedom of our collective solar plexus urges. Of course, sex is the reward for being a great party-er—a great dancer, a leading singer, a king-kong drummer—reward for those traits is sex.

Jesus, I feel totally strange…I mean, I’m confused. When I came to NYC hip-hop hadn't reared its full body yet, only the top of its head. The street musicians had found fame in Philly, New York, L.A., and Detroit as the Impressions or the Blue Notes or the Supremes or the Stylistics, and in Washington, D.C., as Gil Scott Heron.

I got to NYC in 1969, a turning-point year in this phony country’s history.

But, we can zoom on up to 1973, the year before I went through a Haitian divorce from my executive wife who had my wolf-boy self living in the high cotton of the Upper East Side of NYC, on the corner of East 56^th and exclusively rich white Sutton Place, and you couldn’t, in those days, get any better than that—if you were a white couple like my wife and I. We'd been half-Commies in Santa Fe after becoming Civil Rights activists in New Orleans--my wife was a member of CORE and we both were members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reading regularly the Louisiana Weekly and I got to reading Paul Sweezy and Dissent and certainly we believed in a unified country where all of us could form a truly free and fair society based on socially conscious policies that elevated diplomacy over military actions, talking rather than fighting. That was the key to our thinking--the talking--talking things out--having discussions--having RAP sessions, consciousness raisings, interactions--and in the early seventies New York City was so wonderfully socially active, with peace rallies, with riots even, with the Weather Underground stirring up thoughts, a wonderful time to be free in New York City, screw the conformists--and everything started flourishing, especially music and dance, with all of us feeling an end coming to the Viet Nam War, feeling an end coming to racial discrimination, feeling an end coming to police brutality and Christian right-wing bullshit--an end coming to God even.

Talking blues became rapping lyrics rather than singing them.

And one day my gorgeous young creature wife threw my wolf ass out of that Sutton Place apartment, she was tired of my broke ass--I was trying to write novels, but like Hemingway said, it's hard as hell to be a writer in New York City. Out in the street, I ended up in a refrigerator-box apartment on East 57^th, between Second and Third avenues, a narrow, tiny, dinky, dull, dundreary apartment, my only window overlooking another high-rise building and all its windows with a grade-school playground down below us, between us, the grade school low below us, too, over to my left on Second Avenue. One day I had been living in the lap of luxury—I mean, listen to this, how free the early seventies were, my wife (may she RIP) used to bring home her protégés to stay with us, and one time one of those proteges was a simply wonderfully prime, blossoming, young genius flower, a Middlebury College grad-student—and I, like James Joyce in Giacomo Joyce when Joyce is teaching in Trieste and falls head over heels for one of his hauntingly beautiful students, fell head over heels for this one, with my wife’s approval, I thought, though that proved to be a lie and she was really major jealous of me making it with this alluring girl--jealous of me because she loved her, too—and though it ended up a pleasurable and valuable life experience for both my wife and me, it eventually sent my ass on a trip to Haiti to get divorced quick and then to return to NYC and into the lap of the commercial jungle in which my new digs were located--only a few blocks from Sutton Place in terms of distance but like being in another world in terms of social registry. My apartment was right around the corner from Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s, diametrically opposed department stores in terms of location and contents—Bloomingdale’s of course the renown store of the bourgeoisie and Alexander’s, just the opposite, a notorious store of the working class bourgeoisie wannabes. Everything you bought at Alexander’s looked good in the store, had great labels, but when you got it home you were lucky if you got to wear it or use it a full day without noticing a flaw, a defect, like in a cashmere sweater you’d find a hole in the armpit, or the beginning of a serious tear along an edge, or the threads in a seam coming loose. You could take stuff back easily—Alexander’s was always expecting it.

It was in that neighborhood, while walking around there one day, that I, a lonely dude, just divorced, still young, healthy, good looking, and looking hard, saw a sign—you know, one of those cheap tin signs like the fortunetellers put out on the sidewalks in front of their sultry dens—the dens of absolutely guaranteed thieves. That’s something amazing to me about New York City; how the fortunetellers, gypsies or old hippy women, are doubted but respected, because some neurotic actress or some neurotic department store buyer happened to go in one of those one day and she was told this and that and sure enough it came to pass so there must be something to fortunetelling, which is in the Christian Yahoo Bible, where I assume it comes from the Torah, is one of the worst sins you can commit—meaning, you’re supposed to put your trust in a legal god and not the babblings of a person considered by the godhead a savage trick-ass devil. I wouldn’t go in a fortuneteller’s den—looking in them gives me the willies, except there used to be one of Third Avenue not that many years ago where up in the living quarters above the den’s macabre parlor a beautiful young fortuneteller daughter used to stand naked in that window but only at a certain time of day, beautifully enticing customers into that room beneath her that contained the table holding the crystal ball and the Tarot decks—such bullshit; why not just go to a Catholic church and put your trust in those cheap plaster images of those bullshit divinities; their silence gives you more honest fortunetelling than you’ll ever get in a gypsy’s or pseudogypsy’s den of coincidental rip off. Neurotics and the paranoias are so easy to fool, to trick, to bluff, to buffalo—is there such a word? “To buffalo”? Doesn’t that mean to kinda “herd along” or am I full of bison shit?

Wow, Robin has a huge barn, doesn’t he? or is Robin a she? he could well be a she.

This tin sign read: “Come on up and RAP. Nice room; soft drinks; live chat.” It led you up a flight of stairs to what was signed “Roxanne’s Chat Central.” You entered into a tiny space with a desk and a chick behind the desk. “Hi. I'm Johnnie Lee, are you here to chat? We’re starting a new session in about 5 minutes. That’ll be two dollars for a 30 minute session or three dollars for an hour. Thank you, now, just go through that curtain…if you want a soft drink, Miss Fox will take your order inside.”

You went through this curtain and into a tiny livingroom set up, with a couch, a coffee table, and two end chairs with a throw rug and a big framed anti-war poster on one wall and a raised fist, a la Che Guevara, on the other wall. Che had become a symbol of the anti-war movement, the Peace Movement, which in ’69 was still going on but was beginning to fade back into history by 1973.

To Be Continued

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Again thegrowlingwolf Has Left Us in the Lurch

With nothing to do here in the beautiful ashen-falsetto office yowling high above a blue-screened shot of Lima, Peru, at night in the outskirts of Intercourse, P.A. Or did the fine city of Intercourse change its name? We remember Ralph Ginsberg, that filthy scumbag NYC Jewish rights clown--like Al Goldstein and rancidly rank Pleasure, a pure funky rag that was overexplicitly sexual in the Al "Piss in Your Pants" Goldstein way--Al was a sleazebag Jewish guy with a huge belly, a true Brooklyn-type-a sex maniac; We're sorry to have to say that as of a year ago, Al was stone broke, sleeping on a bench in Central Park, and begging old friends to let him shower and sleep every now and then in their apartments then borrow money from them and go back to his park bench; no word of Al around the office since then.

Ralph Ginsberg was the publisher of Eros magazine--a lightweight sex-oriented magazine that was printed as though it was a coffee table book--it did feature some fairly professional looking photographs in 3-color reproduction, though Ralph may have run the photos without paying for them. Ralph used saturation advertising to sell his rather expensive magazine--each issue sold for $7.00, so a year's subscription was pretty healthy. Ralph used Intercourse, P.A. as his return address on his mailers when he shipped you your Eros. He also used Blueball, P.A., too, though my friend from Philly says I'm lyin' about that because she says the town of Bluebell, P.A., has always been Bluebell and was never Blueball or Blueballs, as we used to quip about it back in those days--the late sixties. Ralph went to prison over using Intercourse and Blueball as return addresses, plus on the some explicit content of Eros--the most famous issue featured a naked big black man wrapped intercoursingly all around the naked snow white body of a young white girl. That was the final straw in Ralph's fifteen minutes of fame. When he got out of prison, Ralph went right back to work with a newspaper-type magazine he called Fact.
We have no idea what happened to Ralph, except that he may should have committed suicide. He fades back into NYC history along with Crazy Eddie, Uncle Steve, Mesugganah Dave, What's the Story Jerry, Joe Franklin, Carleton Fredericks, and the woman on WEVD who used to preach Christian sermons in German while in the background you could hear obviously canaries chirping away, what sounded like droves of them--which brings to mind the famous Virginia Belmont and her all bird choir--Virginia still had a birdshop in Rockefeller Center when I started working there in 1972. Going, going, gone.

We sent The Daily Growler mad poet, Houston Highchair II, out onto the Internet looking for the poetry of William Cowper and here's what he came back with having found it on a site called poetry.com. He said he found 30 poets named Cowper; none of them William Cowper. He picked the first sample attracted to her name--most of them were women, he said--Beka A. Cowper--let's take a look at Beka's diddy:

Society

space consumption,mind presumption
gages set to three
perfect sorrow, belay tomorrow
nice touch to those eyebrows
painful substance ,lacking sustenance
vitamin c shall redeem us all
strange ideals,no one feels
untidy chaos rampant
clinging vanity , childish humanity
broken little gingersnap
changing spaces, leaving traces
nutshell cracked years ago
pensive anguish, enemy vanquish
black army for black soul
emotional conquest, feverish protest
peircing darkness bites
bane of amelia, strike pedophelia
lifetime creases in your face
sheltered worry, oblique fury
oranges rot in your mind.

Beka A Cowper

Beka, doll, we ain't mentioning many of your misspelled words except we like "pedophelia." Sounds like a girl's name; or certainly a nice name for a cat. "oranges rot in your mind" did give us a thrill. We sat for an hour trying to imagine how an orange rots in your mind. Evidently, Beka has a mind full of rotten oranges, though we did where she's comin' from.

The Mr. Highchair II decided to pick a Cowper poem by interesting title; let's see what he came up with.

Raining Words/Lost Ideas

Slow fall at first
A-drip, a-drop
A-gentle tapping
at the glass of conscious.

Slow ride at first
Nudged, then rushing
Wishing well
All following
the slide to Knowhere.

Tidal wave roaring
Over the edge into
Startling Free Fall
Before...
Impact

Hit the ground crying
So afraid of trying
Soaked into vanishment
A wavering creation
Feared by the Fate they Free the most:
(Fading)....

Don Cowper, Jr.

"The slide to Knowhere" got us. Sorry, Don, Beka A's shit is better than yours, though yours certainly stinks worse than hers.

Damn, we're cruel.

We found some poems by William Cowper, but hell, they were as corny as Don's and Beka's stuff, so F him. Beka, you the winner tonight--let's say, you're The Daily Growler Good-Bad Poet of the Day.