(Tommy Boy)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
For someone with a nearly religious belief in the transformative power and artful directness of rock & roll, it can be tempting to drop everything under the rockist umbrella. But that gives short shrift to hip hop, the sole major innovation in western pop music since the '60s. Punk might have crafted its own subculture, but at bottom it was a resurrection of the speedy '50s anthems once wrongly thought of as primitive. Rap music is its own art form, with its own rich history, but it is friendly to the rock mythologist because of its narrative parallels. When you think of the 1977-86 period as the '50s, it all becomes quite clear. The '50s were the decade of excitement, the '60s of ambition and sometimes wildly successful innovation. So it goes here. You still get a fresh rush out of the earliest Grandmaster Flash and Treacherous Three records, relentlessly thrilling in their uncluttered starkness and rampant flamboyance of pure creativity, the starry-eyed discovery of unlimited possibility in a new artform. And nobody's early records -- not in rap, not in rock, not anywhere -- were so explosively exciting as those offered up by Afrika Bambaataa, the brilliant, conscientious South Bronx DJ who laid a groundwork and lit a fuse that remains alight three decades after.
We think of the golden age extending well into the '90s, but the truth is that well before pretentious boneheads like Dr. Dre began to appear on the landscape, even heroes like Bambaataa were succumbing to the temptation to cop to "progressive" ideals, busying up their records with appeals to outside importance beyond their countercultural audience. As so often, the counterculture had it right -- it is in those early good-hearted, joyful, emotionally straightforward, at times bitterly angry hip hop records that the true potential of the genre was realized. Before those recording it even realized they were crafting art. Not to say that the well dried since then, or that there haven't been plenty of enormously vital and gifted performers in the field since then, but all of those who've laid down masterpieces, The Score to The College Dropout, owe their strongest debt to the conscious but body-driven arm-wave of hip hop's tirelessly lively roots.
On a personal note, I would give a lot to be able to craft a description of how Bambaataa's output in the first half of the '80s, exemplified by the first seven tracks on this fine collection, makes me feel. It is like nothing else in the pop music annals. More than just an admiration of Bambaataa's filthily efficient skills as a producer and an event-maker, more than the infectious enthusiasm that was always a feature of his work, and more than the indisputable positivity of his outlook (a heart in the right place rather than the supposed Right Words than an inexcusably bland Arrested Development or PM Dawn might put across), there's an almost spiritual rightness and beauty to "Jazzy Sensation" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat" that make them some of the most infectious and provocative music ever laid down. I've written before in this space of the way that great music refuses to accept being placed in the background by losing its shape when attention isn't being paid to it. Bambaataa's '81-'85 sides refuse to even allow that to happen. When they're on, it's impossible not to give them all of your focus -- and all of your body.
This set opens with the sole significant cut released under the Cosmic Force rubric, 1981's "Zulu Nation Throwdown," and it's one of the most impressive early rap records -- issued before I was born, it still sounds futuristic to me, a textured and wildly varied merry-go-round of disco-funk and space-hop with a genuine party atmosphere. Its funky flatness provides a backdrop for goofy, funny traded barbs leading up to a staggering verse by some force of nature named Lisa Lee. She make the ants crawl in your pants, put you in a music trance, and she is the climax of these seven minutes. There's another "Zulu Nation Throwdown" here, a totally different song credited to Soul Sonic Force, and it's comparatively quaint and sweet, dropping no bombs like Lisa Lee did.
But the disc only gains momentum after that. "Jazzy Sensation," "Planet Rock," and "Looking for the Perfect Beat" all lay claim to being Bambaataa's masterpiece, and the latter could quite easily be the single greatest hip hop record ever made. "Jazzy Sensation" outsteps in one regard, though, possessing the craziest and most relentless bassline ever; this pounding monster of a 12" flies through percussive vocal ideas ("the boys the boys") too fast to bother with much of a refrain, a relentless cascade of warmly funny and twisting, winding rhymes. It's a dance music thrill that doesn't deserve to be overshadowed by its two brethren, but they both make it nearly inevitable.
"Planet Rock," Bambaataa's most famous record, deserves credit for many innovations, not least of them being the virtual creation (out of nowhere) of the electro-funk subgenre by the simple but audacious act of using Kraftwerk as the basis for a hip hop cut. There's more to it than that, though; Afrika and the Soul Sonic Force don't just use "Trans-Europe Express," they appropriate its mildly off-kilter kitsch and emotional desperation as their own. In contrast to its usual jam-hailing boasts and enthusiastic mating calls, the track is almost horrifyingly stark, thereby crafting (courtesy of producers Arthur Baker and John Robie) a unique sensation of bearing muffled witness to something far more ominous than a mere party. There's a sense in which it's a pity that Bambaataa would achieve his lengthiest brush with mainstream fame (outside of New York City, where he regularly played venues like the Mudd Club) with a song so conceptually at odds with his typical righteous pushing of fun, love, and productivity. But the song is too brilliant, too assured and too unique, for that to matter for long.
Besides, "Looking for the Perfect Beat" marries that impressive sonic boom with a stargazing nightlife serenade so wide open it seems to lift the room. Clearly this track takes the dance floor potential of hip hop to its fullest, with an all-out enthusiasm, an embracing of the boogie night, that no one's ever duplicated. It also recasts the space funk of "Planet Rock" as something over the top and robotic, then undercuts it with a Wall of Sound hugeness. Rife with unconventional, cunning beats and palpable, busy excitement, it plants us in the middle of one of Afrika's famous block parties but also points us squarely into some scarcely imaginable, assuredly remarkable future. Not only is the music thrilling, it's gloriously optimistic; true to form, "Beat" still sounds astonishingly current, like something we still have to catch up with.
Those three juggernauts plus the Cosmic Force 12" can, when heard in sequence, make "Renegades of Funk" and "Frantic Situation" seem marginal, but don't be fooled. "Renegades" says a lot about Bambaataa's character, framing his work in context with a historical breadth that seems assured but never cocky -- and musically, in the context of the rockist sympathies of the time (even propagated by such supposed on-our-side forward thinkers as the Replacements), a heroic refusal to accept synthetics as a hindrance or a limitation. And "Frantic," while less catchy, gives long overdue attention to the sounds of Africa that must have permeated the artist's ears on his life-altering trip there in the late '70s. It has the most organic feel of anything he had laid down since dropping his live band.
With the broader context we now have, we might rightfully be wary of the purity of Bambaataa's message. Peace and love are, after all, the tantamount concerns of the Jurassic 5, the Black Eyed Peas, and Santana as well. But you have to consider how much Africa made this man, and how much the feelings that were stirred up by his journey there are audible in his music. "Zulu" isn't a buzzword for Bambaataa; it is a lifestyle of brotherhood and empathy, the virtues he witnessed laid against unspeakable strife. When the former gangland warlord began to speak out against violence and organize block parties to celebrate hip hop as a way out of such dead ends, his influence and intelligence allowed him to change the course of the music, and more importantly of generations worth of the disenfranchised. His story alone spits in the eye of any notion that hip hop (and rock & roll, because why not) isn't important. He represents, in the most real and inarguable way, the literally life-saving potential of the music.
But he also is an intelligent and ambitious guy, and he wanted the Zulu Nation on the pop charts. The pop charts tend to require sacrifice. On streamlined, evened-out later works from 1985 onward, such as "Unity Part 1" (the famous James Brown collaboration) and the rather silly "Funk You!" Bambaataa doesn't sound like the same man who laid the revolutionary foundation for the areas of early rap culture that remain most relevant even today. But one must accept that he was valiantly attempting to spread that same message farther. Still, when trading lines with Brown or John Lydon (on the enjoyable but equally silly "World Destruction," not included here), the scrappy punk-rock joy of Cosmic Force seems leagues away. The demands to be taken seriously, amidst ironically generic queries such as "Who Do You Think You're Funkin' With?" and, well, "What Time Is It?" seem surprisingly out of character -- free of character, even.
These pop and progressive persuasions (he would later, into the new millennium, branch off into abstract club music, trance even) didn't really fuck up Bambaataa's career, and his legacy was safe before even "Planet Rock" was released, frankly before he ever released any of his music commercially. His imprint and fortitude, his brilliance as a performer and a recognizer of talent, will echo in the streets of New York and in every beat of great hip hop that's released long after he's gone. And a big part of that legacy comes from his leadership and selflessness -- most simply, his determination to help others discover a better life through art; but also, at bottom, his willingness to give the floor to others. There was Mellie Mel on "Frantic Situation," James Brown serving up the hook on "Unity," and of course the unforgettable, ghostly Lisa Lee making those proclamations that seem almost like battle cries writing history in their fiery prescience, freshness, and razor-sharp rebellion.
This ain't a Broadway play or a high school plot
It's the real deal that makes you feel
Like, like you got sex appeal
Now party people in the place you feel the bass
Can you check out the highs, check out the grace
So wallflowers in the house, this is your chance
To show everybody that you can dance
Punk rock to the left, and Patty Duke to the right
Move your body now, you can do it all night.
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