Brooklyn...Absent at functions? Not Hardly.

In the last chapter of the book, “From Rocking to B-Boying: History and Mystery”, I suggest that academic hip-hop scholars could learn a thing or two from the culture’s own historians, both factually and methodologically. By way of example, I discuss the ongoing argument concerning Brooklyn’s contributions to hip-hop’s early development, an issue that I’m also interested in for its own sake.

For the last few days, there’s been a great discussion developing on Freestylesessions.com about that issue, and it really exemplifies the dedication, meticulousness, passion, and even outright hostility that hip-hop historians bring to their inquiries.

The discussion begins, as it usually does, with some Brooklyn folks making claims about the borough’s contributions, which are then met with some counter-claims from uptown and Bronx folks. The back-and-forth continues for a while, until the question becomes more narrowly defined: everybody agrees that there were deejays playing records at block parties in Brooklyn in the seventies, but were they hip-hop deejays?

This, then, leads to an important tangent concerning what it actually means to say that someone was a hip-hop deejay in the seventies. It can’t be based on their having played hip-hop records, because hip-hop records didn’t exist yet. So how does one define “hip-hop deejaying” in that era? And, more to the point, why would a deejay playing funk and soul records in the Bronx be considered a hip-hop deejay more than any other deejay playing the same records anywhere else in the country? If it’s just because they were in the Bronx, then the logic is clearly circular: the Bronx invented hip-hop because hip-hop is from the Bronx.

An alternative line of reasoning soon emerges: the defining characteristic hip-hop deejays in that era wasn’t just that they were in the Bronx, but that they used two turntables to cut up and repeat the drum breaks of the songs they played, which sent the music off in a new direction and led to the emergence of hip-hop as we know it today. Which, in turn, raises three new questions: were Brooklyn deejays also cutting up breaks? And if so, did they develop the idea independently, or were they copying deejays from the Bronx? And, either way, can you prove it?

Which brings us to this amazing post made on Thursday by deejay and b-boy Forest Getem Gump (Breaklife/7GMS) about Grandmaster Flowers, one of the leading Brooklyn deejays of the sixties and seventies:

Cutting up Breaks. For whatever it is worth. I actually have some of Grandmaster Flowers records and I've had them in my collection for a number of years now. They were given to me from a reputable person who deals with records who had come into possession of some of his collection. I'm not taking a position here but I find it interesting in many areas. Most of the records that I have that were owned by Flowers are disco records. All of the records have breaks on them. I never heard him spin so I'm not sure if he was cutting up breaks or not at a particular point in his DJ career. All of the records I have from him have his name on them, the artist circled, and the word break. They aren't masked. All of it is written in Magic Marker. Then he had some weird lines which I guess were some of his cue points. Most of the records are from 1979 and none before that. They are all doubles. Some the breaks are killer and some of the breaks are uptempo. Some of them I would never consider cutting up or dancing to. Some of the records are a little to discoish for cutting up but it appears he might have been doing it anyway. What I have can't validate anything before 1979 but from the looks of it he was attempting to cut up breaks as far back as 1979 (again I can't say if he was doing it before then).

Wiggles and Fabel made a very interesting point about the heavy drums, cutting up the breaks, and the particular method to doing it. For me that's what it is about no matter what borough it came from. Aside from disco, the breaks come from all genres of music. Shout out to Rockin Rob one of the illest holding down the tradition.

At first, I thought he was talking about recordings made by Grandmaster Flowers. But no, he’s talking about the actual records that Flowers personally owned and deejayed with. Then, using the markings on the records and his own deejay knowledge, Gump is actually able to deduce information about the way Grandmaster Flowers deejayed, and when. Check it:

1. He hasGrandmaster Flowers’ records.
2. These records have breaks.
3. Flowers had two copies of each record and had marked them in such as way as to indicate that he was, in fact, cutting up the breaks.
4. If Grandmaster Flowers was cutting up breaks in 1979, then by definition Brooklyn deejays were cutting up breaks in 1979.
5. If cutting up breaks is the defining act of a hip-hop deejay, then Brooklyn had hip-hop deejays in 1979.

To his credit, Gump doesn’t draw any conclusions beyond that, and specifically states that he can’t make any claims one way or the other about what was going on before 1979, since he doesn’t have any records from that era.

You can draw your own conclusions about how this compares to the quality of the hip-hop scholarship being produced in the academic world.

I think you already know how I feel.

(Full disclosure: posters Fabel, PJAY, Tiny and Christie are all friends of mine, and all but Christie appear in Foundation).