New-school hip hop

The new school of hip hop was a second wave of recorded hip hop music starting 1983–84 with the early records of Run-DMC and LL Cool J. Like the hip hop preceding it, it came predominately from New York City. The new school was characterized in form by drum machine led minimalism, often tinged with elements of rock. It was notable for taunts and boasts about rapping, and socio-political commentary, both delivered in an aggressive, self-assertive style. In image as in song its artists projected a tough, cool, street b-boy attitude. These elements contrasted sharply with the P-funk- and disco-influenced outfits, novelty hits, live bands, synthesizers and party rhymes of artists prevalent in 1984, and would render them old school. New school artists made shorter songs that could more easily gain radio play, and more cohesive LPs than their old school counterparts. By 1986 their releases would establish the hip hop album as a fixture of the mainstream.

The innovations of Run-DMC, LL, and new school producer Rick Rubin of Def Jam were quickly advanced on by producer Marley Marl and his Juice Crew MCs, and acts like Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim. The production became denser, the rhymes and beats faster, the music admitting more possibilities as the drum machine was augmented with the sampler. Rakim took rapping about rapping to new heights, while the MCs of the former two groups, KRS-One and Chuck D, pushed "message rap" towards black activism and beyond. The last popular hurrah of this New York new school continuum in the face of factors like the rise of a new, West Coast underground—gangsta rap—was that of Native Tongues artists whose inclusive, sample-crowded music accompanied their positivity, Afrocentricity and playful energy. The late eighties new school period is sometimes referenced as "middle school" or "mid-school", and sometimes as hip hop's "golden age".

In the nineties and after, hip hop artists who offered an alternative to gangsta rap or to mainstream hip hop in general were sometimes dubbed a "new school", either because they were seen as starting a new direction in the way of early Run-DMC etc., or because their music was seen as harkening back to the content or form of this earlier period. This same tendency was sometimes therefore dubbed "old school", with the new school synonymous with current mainstream hip hop. This more conversational usage has continued with fans and journalists calling contemporary hip hop "new school" and older hip hop and its values "old school", to the confusion and occasional exasperation of writers who use the terms historically.

Prehistory

The first MCs rapped over DJs swapping back and forth between two copies of the same record playing the same drum break, or playing instrumental portions or versions of a broad range of records. Kool DJ Herc initiated this part of the culture in 1972 using breaks from Babe Ruth, The Incredible Bongo Band and James Brown in his block parties. Soon after, Afrika Bambaataa would delight in springing rock music breaks from records like "Mary, Mary", "Honky Tonk Women", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Grand Funk Railroad's "Inside Looking Out" on unsuspecting b-boys.

The earliest hip hop records replaced the DJ with a live band playing funk and disco influenced tunes, or "interpolating" the tunes themselves, as in "Rapper's Delight" (Sugar Hill, 1979) and "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" (Spring, 1979). It was the soft, futuristic funk closely tied to disco that ruled hip hop's early days on record, to the exclusion of the James Brown productions so beloved of the first b-boys. Figures such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were involved in some early instances of moving the sound away from that of a live band, and even innovating popular new sounds and sub-genres, as in the synthesizer-laden electro of Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (Tommy Boy,1982). Often though the rawer elements present in live shows didn't make it past the recording studio.

Bambaataa's first two records for Winley Records, for instance, "Zulu Nation Throwdown" (1980) and its sequel, were recorded with just drums and rhymes. When Bambaataa heard the released records, a complete live band had been added. Something closer to his intentions can be heard on a portion of Death Mix, a low-quality bootleg of a Zulu Nation night at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, probably around 1980, eventually released without his permission on Winley Records in 1983. Likewise on the bootleg Live Convention '82 (Disco Wax, 1982), Grand Wizard Theodore cuts the first six bars of Rufus Thomas's "Do the Funky Penguin" together for five and a half minutes while an MC raps over the top. Grandmaster Flash's "Superrappin" (Enjoy, 1980) had a pumping syncopated rhythm and The Furious Five emulating his spinbacks and needle drops as they sang "that Flash was on the beatbox going..." The beatbox itself however, a drum machine which Flash had added to his turntable set-up some time earlier, was absent on the record, the drums being produced by a live drummer.

Kool Moe Dee's infamous verbal personal attacks on Busy Bee Starski live at Harlem World in 1982 caused a popular sensation in hip hop circles. In the same way, groups like the Cold Crush Brothers and The Force MCs were known for their routines, attitude and battle rhymes. Tapes of battles like these circulated widely, without making it to record. Apart from some social commentary like Melle Melle's one verse on "Superrappin'", Kurtis Blow's ruefully comedic "The Breaks" (Mercury,1980) and a spurt of records following the success of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (Sugar Hill, 1982), the old school specialized lyrically in party rhymes.

Advent

One time, in probably 1983, I was in the park in Brooklyn. I was getting beat up by about eight kids, I don't even remember why. But as it was happening, this dude was walkin' by with one of those big boom boxes. And as he's walking by, we hear [imitates the unmistakable intro drum pattern from Run-DMC's 'Sucker MCs', loudly]. They all stopped beating me, and we all just stood there, listening to this phenomenon. I could have run, but I didn't, I was just so entranced by what I heard. Then the dude with the box passed by and the kids continued to beat me up. But it didn't matter. I felt good. I knew right then that I had to get into this hip hop shit."

— Pras of the Fugees, 2003, as told to Brian Coleman, Check the Technique 2nd. ed., New York: Villard, 2007

David Toop writes of 1984 that "pundits were writing obituaries for hip hop, a passing fad" which "Hollywood had mutated into an all-singing, all-dancing romance" in movies like Flashdance and Breakin'. Against this, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys and the label Def Jam were "consciously hardcore", "a reaction against the populist trend in hip hop at the time" , and "an explosive emergence of an underground alternative". For Peter Shapiro, Run DMC's 1983 two-song release "It's like That"/"Sucker MCs" "completely changed hip-hop" "rendering everything that preceded it distinctly old school with one fell swoop." In a 47 point timeline of hip hop and its antecedents spanning 64 years, Shapiro lists this release as his 43th point. Reviewing Toop's book in the LA Weekly, Oliver Wang of Soul Sides makes the same point, hailing Run-DMC as inaugurating the new school of rap.

Street style: Run-DMC on the cover of their debut LP, 1985

Flash and the Furious Five record cover, 1985

Run-DMC rapped over the most sparse of musical backing tracks. In the case of "Sucker MCs", there was a loud, brutal drum machine, a few scratches and nothing else, while the rhymes harangued weak rappers and contrasted them to the group's success. "It's like That" was a message rap whose social commentary has been defined variously as "objective fatalism", "frustrated and renunciatory", and just plain "reportage". Run-DMC wore street clothes, tracksuits, sneakers, one even wore glasses. Their only possible concession to an image extraneous to that of kids on the street was the stylistic flourish of black fedoras atop their heads. This stood in sharp contrast to the popular artists of the time, who had variously bedecked themselves with feathers, suede boots, jerri curls, and red or even pink leather suits.

The group's early singles are collected on their eponymous debut (Profile, 1984), introducing rock references in "Rock Box" and widely recognized then and now as the best album of hip hop's early years. The next year, they appeared at Live Aid and released King of Rock (Profile, 1985), on which they asserted that they were "never ever old school". Raising Hell (Profile, 1986) was a landmark, containing quintessentially hip hop tracks like "Peter Piper", "Perfection" and "It's Tricky", and going platinum in the year of its release on the back of the huge crossover hit "Walk This Way". The group had rapped over the beat from the 1975 original in their early days, without so much as knowing the name of the band. When Raising Hell's producer Rick Rubin heard them playing around with it in the studio, he suggested using the Aerosmith lyrics, and the collaboration between the two groups came about. The album's last track was "Proud To Be Black", written under the influence of Chuck D of the as-yet unrecorded Public Enemy. On "My Adidas" the band rapped that they "took the beat from the street and put it on TV". Comments from Darryl McDaniels, AKA DMC of Run-DMC, make this connection to the underground explicit: "[T]hat's exactly what we did. We didn't really think it was pioneering, we just did what rappers did before us was doing on tapes. When a lot of the old guys, like Kool Moe Dee, The Treacherous Three , and Grandmaster Flash, got in the studio, they never put their greatness on records. Me and Run and Jay would listen ... and we'd say, 'They didn't do that shit last night in the Bronx!' ... So we said that we weren't going to be fake. We ain't gonna wear no costumes. We're gonna keep it real."

The other production credit on Raising Hell went to Run's brother, Russell Simmons. He ran Rush Artist Management, now Rush Communications, which as well as handling Run-DMC, managed the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Whodini and Public Enemy. Simmons also co-owned Def Jam Recordings, the important new school label, with Rubin. Simmons would rise with Def Jam to become one of the biggest moguls in rap, while Rubin would claim credit for introducing radio-friendly brevity and song structure to hip hop. Def Jam's first 12-inch release was the minimalist drum machine breakdown "I Need A Beat" by LL Cool J (1984). This was followed by "I Can't Live Without My Radio" (Def Jam, 1985), a loud, defiant declaration of public loyalty to his boom box which the New York Times in 1987 called "quintessential rap in its directness, immediacy and assertion of self". Both were on his debut album for Def Jam, 1985's Radio ("Reduced by Rick Rubin", read the liner notes), which contained another minimalist b-boy classic with shards of rock guitar, "Rock the Bells". Perhaps rock fan Rubin's natural proteges were the Beastie Boys, sampling AC/DC on their Rock Hard EP on Def Jam in 1984, and recording a Run-DMC outtake and a heavy metal parody on their hugely commercially successful debut album Licensed To Ill (Def Jam, 1986). In 1987, Raising Hell surpassed three million units sold, and Licensed to Ill five million. Faced with figures like these, major labels finally began buying into independent New York hip hop imprints.

Further development

See also: Golden age hip hop

Marley Marl's first production was an "answer record" to "Sucker MCs" in 1983 entitled "Sucker DJs" by Dimples D. Soon after came 14-year-old Roxanne Shanté's answer to UTFO's "Roxanne Roxanne", "Roxanne's Revenge" (1985), sparking off the wave of records known as the Roxanne Wars. More disses (insults intended to show disrespect) from Shanté followed: "Bite This" (1985), "Queen of Lox" (1985), introducing Biz Markie on "Def Fresh Crew" (1986), "Payback" (1987), and perhaps her greatest record, "Have a Nice Day" (1987). MCs from Marley's Juice Crew like Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap and Masta Ace would come to define the "fast rap" style characteristic of the late eighties, and the producer introduced to recorded hip hop a breakbeat that would become ubiquitous in this period, James Brown's "Funky Drummer" break, on Kool G Rap & DJ Polo's "It's a Demo" (Cold Chillin', 1986).

BDP's By All Means Necessary, 1987

Shante's "Have a Nice Day" had aimed some barbs at the principal two members of a new group from the Bronx called Boogie Down Productions: "Now KRS-ONE you should go on vacation with that name soundin' like a wack radio station, and as for Scott La Rock, you should be ashamed, when T La Rock said "It's Yours", he didn't mean his name". Boogie Down Productions had manufactured a disagreement with the Juice Crew's MC Shan, releasing "South Bronx" and "The Bridge is Over" in reply to his "The Bridge" and "Kill That Noise" respectively.

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Malcolm X posing for Time in response to death threats

KRS-One considered Run-DMC the epitome of rap music at this time and had picked up the mic following their lead. But he has also said that B.D.P.'s approach reflected a feeling that the early innovators like Run-DMC and LL Cool J were now tainted by commercial success and out of touch with the streets. Boogie Down's first album Criminal Minded (B-Boy, 1987) admitted a reggae influence and had KRS-One singing to the tune of the Beatles on the title track. It also contained two tales of grim street life played for callous laughs, "The P Is Free", in which KRS throws out of his car a girl who wants crack cocaine in exchange for sex, and "9mm Goes Bang", in which he shoots a drug dealer then cheerfully sings "la la la la la la". Songs like these presaged the rise of an underground that matched violent lyrics to the hardcore drum machine tracks of the new school, such as was being pioneered by Philadelphia's Schoolly D. The cover of Criminal Minded was a further reflection of a move towards this sort of radical image, depicting the group in half-light holding artillery. The next album By All Means Necessary (B-Boy, 1988) left that element behind for political radicalism, with the title and cover alluding to Malcolm X. KRS-One would launch his Stop the Violence Movement at this time. Boogie Down Productions, along with Run-DMC and Public Enemy, would associate the new school with rap music with a strong message.

Eric B. & Rakim appeared with the Marley Marl produced "Eric B. Is President" and "My Melody" on Zakia Records in 1986. Both tracks would appear on Paid in Full (4th & Broadway, 1987). Just as B.D.P. had, the pair reflected changes in street life on their debut's cover, which depicted the two wearing huge gold chains and surrounded by money. The album cemented James Brown's status as a hip hop source, while Rakim's allusions showed the growing influence of mystic Islam-offshoot The Nation of Gods and Earths among hip hoppers. The music was minimalist, austerely so, with many writers noting that coupled with Rakim's precise, logical style, the effect was almost one of scientific rigour. They followed Paid in Full with Follow The Leader (Uni, 1988) (on which they were open-eared enough to sample The Eagles), Let The Rhythm Hit 'Em (MCA, 1990) and Don't Sweat The Technique (MCA, 1992). Rakim is generally regarded as the most cutting-edge of the MCs of this new school. Jess Harvell in Pitchfork in 2005 wrote that "Rakim's innovation was applying a patina of intellectual detachment to rap's most sacred cause: talking shit about how you're a better rapper than everyone else." Christgau in the Village Voice in 1990 wrote of Rakim's style as "calm, confident, clear. On their third album, as on their phase-shifting 1986 debut," he continues, "Eric B.'s samples truly are beats, designed to accentuate the natural music of an idealized black man's voice." Looking back at the late eighties in Rolling Stone in 1997, Ed Moralez describes Rakim as "the new-school MC of the moment, using a smooth baritone to become the jazz soloist of mystic Afrocentric rap."

Public Enemy, having been reluctantly convinced to sign to a record label, released Yo! Bumrush the Show on Def Jam in 1987. It debuted the Public Enemy logo, a hatted b-boy in a sniper's gunsights, and contained both battle rhymes ("Miuzi Weighs a Ton", "Public Enemy #1") and social-political fare ("Righstarter (Message to a Black Man)" and the anti-crack "Megablast"). It was influenced by the energy of early Run-DMC and LL Cool J, and the booming Roland TR-909 drums of Schoolly D, and was a critical and commercial success, particularly in Europe, unusually so for a hip hop album at that time. Bumrush the Show had been recorded on the heels of Run-DMC's Raising Hell, but was held back by Def Jam in order for them to concentrate on releasing and promoting the Beatie Boys' License to Ill.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back: cover shot by Glen E. Friedman at the city jail on Thirty-second Street, New York

Chuck D of Public Enemy felt that by the time it came out, BDP and Rakim had already changed the landscape for how an MC could rap. Public Enemy were already recording their second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam, 1988) when Bumrush hit stores. It Takes a Nation of Millions... contained criticism of the media on "She Watches Channel Zero?!" (looping Slayer's "Angel of Death") and "Don't Believe the Hype" (in which Chuck D declared himself "leader of the new school" rapping from "the book of the new school rap game"), dealt again with crack on "Night of the Living Baseheads", rapped from the perspective of a black conscientious objector breaking out of prison on "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos". Chuck D accused the FBI of tapping his phone in "Louder Than a Bomb", declared himself a "Rebel Without a Pause" and flipped the title of a Beastie Boys hit to rhyme about the Black Panthers in "Party For Your Right to Fight". All this was to the dense, fast-paced squalls of noise created by Public Enemy's production team, The Bomb Squad. The landmark album was followed by more of the same on 1990's Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam), whose "Fight the Power" described Elvis Presley and John Wayne as racist and declared "most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps".

An underground that was to become gangsta rap had existed almost as soon as Run-DMC had inaugurated the new school of hip hop. Philadelphia's Schoolly D self-released "Gangsta Boogie" in 1984, and "P.S.K. What Does It Mean?"/"Gucci Time" in 1985, leading to Saturday Night (Schoolly D, 1986, Jive, 1987). The West Coast, which would become the home of gangsta rap, had Ice-T's "Six in the Morning" and Toddy Tee's influential Batterram mixtape, before N.W.A. would explode on the scene with Straight Outta Compton in 1988. Pop-rap crossovers from the West Coast would also see great success in this time, with Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" on the Californian independent Delicious Vinyl, and MC Hammer's smash hits "U Can't Touch This" and "Pray". Developments in the New York new school continuum in this climate were represented by the Native Tongues groups—The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Monie Love and Leaders of the New School—along with Islamic fellow travellers like KMD and Brand Nubian. They moved away from aggressive, macho posturing, towards ambiguity, fun and Afrocentricity. Their music was sample-crowded, more open and accessible than their new school predecessors. De La Soul's debut sampled everyone from The Turtles to Steely Dan, while A Tribe Called Quest matched tough beats to mellow jazz samples and playful, thoughtful raps. In the nineties, West Coast gangsta rap evolved into the slow, P-funk influenced keyboard sounds of G-funk; the East Coast responded with a new breed of hardcore by the likes of Black Moon and Onyx, and tales of New York street life in the debut records of Nas and the Notorious B.I.G.

The "golden age" of hip hop is a phrase usually framing the late 1980s to early 1990s in mainstream hip hop, said to be characterized by its diversity, quality, innovation and influence, and associated with Public Enemy, KRS-One and his Boogie Down Productions, Eric B. & Rakim, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers due to their themes of Afrocentricity and political militancy, their experimental music, and their eclectic sampling. This same period is sometimes referred to as "mid-school" or a "middle school" in hip hop, the phrase covering acts like Gang Starr, The UMC's, Main Source, Lord Finesse, EPMD, Just Ice, Stetsasonic, True Mathematics, and Mantronix.

The term in the Nineties and beyond

A few weeks ago I was DJing a party and a young twentysomething came up to me to request "some old-school." I asked for clarification – after all, Run DMC and LL Cool J are considered old-school, but technically, they invented the new school. The response: "I don't know, some Tribe Called Quest or something." After gently picking my jaw from off the floor, I turned back to my crates and wondered to myself, "If Tribe is old-school, what does that make Kurtis Blow? In utero?

— Oliver Wang, "Book report", San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 6, 2003.

I always get frustrated when I see a link to this site on some hipster’s blog with a tagline like “taking it back to the old school”, when I very rarely post anything recorded before 1989. I mean, I guess a lot of what I post here is old, but that don’t make it old school, yaoming? Like how you gonna call Leaders of the New School old school?

— Andrew Nosnitsky ("Noz" of XXL), "Lady Don’t Tek No Beat", Cocaine Blunts and Hip Hop Tapes, January 10, 2005.

References to new school hip hop in journalism in the nineties and after often either equate "new school" with contemporary, or are to do with acts offering an alternative to the prevailing ethos. Mos Def and Talib Kweli are a "new school" of rappers whose "conscious" lyrics link them to earlier Native Tongues groups, for instance, or West Coast acts The Pharcyde, Hieroglyphics, Dilated Peoples or Jurassic 5 make up a "new school" in a time dominated by gangsta rap. The phrase becomes less a historical one and more a conversational one, as in Gil Griffen's 1991 Washington Post article, "Early Rappers Aim To Update Images", in which he asks, "But can these "new" old-school style rappers make it in hip-hop's new-school '90s?" Now Blackalicious can be "members of the new school of smart, bling-free hip-hop" in the John Hopkins News-letter at the same time that journalist and author Dalton Higgins writes for Amazon that they "expand mainstream rap's limited new-school paradigms". The phrase "leader of the new school", coined by Chuck D in 1988, and presumably given further currency by Leaders of the New School (named by Chuck D prior to signing with Elektra in 1989), remains popular, and has been applied to artists ranging from Jay-Z to Lupe Fiasco.