A Hip-Hop History Bus Tour

February 12, 2006
Music
A Rolling Shout-Out to Hip-Hop History
By JODY ROSEN

JUST before noon on a raw, wet Saturday a few weeks ago, two dozen tourists piled off of a bus at Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 155th Street in Harlem and made their way into Rucker Park. The park is a Harlem landmark, the site of the annual Entertainer's Basketball Classic, a summer tournament that pits local legends against professional players. But the tour group was there for a different kind of performance.

In the otherwise empty park, they were greeted by Wonder Rock and Mouse, two break dancers from Brooklyn, who hooked up an MP3 player to a Pignose portable amplifier, blasted a James Brown breakbeat, and were soon moving across the rain-slickened asphalt, demonstrating moves like the toprock, the coffee grinder and the windmill. When the show was over, the audience was invited to clamber down from the bleachers for a quick tutorial. A paunchy, 40-ish white guy from Dallas announced that he had been in a break dance crew a couple of decades earlier, and was soon down on the ground, executing a better-than-passable windmill.

That elicited whoops from the tour guide, a burly 45-year-old named Curtis Fisher, better known as Grandmaster Caz. Caz is a renowned figure in early hip-hop, a member of the venerated Bronx rap crew the Cold Crush Brothers and the ghostwriter of some famous verses of "Rapper's Delight," the 1979 Sugarhill Gang song that became rap's breakthrough single.

Today, he has gone from making history to teaching it. Caz is one of several hip-hop pioneers — including Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh and D.J. Red Alert — who work for Hush Tours (www.hushtours.com), a Manhattan company that since June 2002 has run hip-hop-centric sightseeing tours of Harlem and the Bronx.

The success of Hush Tours is a sign that hip-hop has become part of New York's official cultural heritage — for younger visitors especially, a tourist magnet right up there with the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.

But Hush Tours offers something more than just sightseeing: an argument about authenticity, an opportunity, in the words of its promotional literature, to "see, hear and feel the true meaning of the elements of hip-hop." In so doing, the tour reflects debates about history, memory and "the real hip-hop" that have become more pronounced and contentious as the years have passed, and hip-hop culture has developed a self-consciousness about its past.

As Hush Tours takes pains to point out, hip-hop history stretches back to the early-1970's, years before the first rap records were even recorded. "This is the 32nd year of the culture of hip-hop," said Caz, as the bus rolled north on Madison Avenue, adding, with an M.C.'s flair for self-mythology, "This is my 33rd year in the game."

HUSH Tours is the brainchild of a 38-year-old Bronx native, Debra Harris. Several years ago, Ms. Harris, a legal secretary, began taking members of her family on impromptu driving tours to places like the former site of Harlem World Entertainment Complex on 116th Street, where rival rap crews had faced off in rhyme battles a quarter-century ago. Ms. Harris was motivated, she said, by a desire to pass along knowledge of hip-hop's roots to her children. She soon realized that she had stumbled on an untapped tourist market.

"When you go to Nashville, you know that's the home of country music," Ms. Harris said. "New York needed to step up to the plate, to say officially that this is the birthplace of hip-hop. The city was sleeping on it. I discovered that younger visitors who loved rap music were eager for more knowledge, for a different kind of tourist experience that would get them out of Times Square."

Today, for the price of $70, the Hush Tours bus whisks visitors to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, making stops at, among other places, the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue, a schoolyard featuring enormous murals by some of the city's top graffiti artists, and Bobby's Happy House, a record store owned by Bobby Robinson, the onetime proprietor of Enjoy Records, which released some of the earliest hip-hop singles.

At the Graffiti Hall of Fame, there is a Disneyish touch: Caz distributes Kangol hats and fake gold chains with dangling dollar-sign pendants to the tourists, who cross their arms and strike B-boy stances for snapshots in front of the spray-painted walls. Harlem residents have seen a lot over the years, but a gaggle of white tourists dressed like LL Cool J circa 1985 is something new.

The real action, though, takes place on the bus, where the tour guides play music, reminisce, instruct and proselytize. "This is an opportunity to pass on the truth," said the rapper Kurtis Blow, who is also host of "Backspin," a Sirius Satellite Radio program devoted to old-school hip-hop. "Hip-hop history has been lied about, distorted and in some cases outright destroyed."

Leading bus tours is not exactly the standard afterlife for onetime stars like Mr. Blow, whose 1980 single "The Breaks" was the first rap record to go gold. But the hip-hop pioneers regard the tours as a way to ensure their legacies.

Red Alert, a longtime fixture on the New York airwaves, said: "It's great because we didn't have a platform to pass on our knowledge. The tour has given us a platform to explain the history that we experienced, the history that we set in motion."

On that chilly Saturday a few weeks back, Caz was a jovial, blunt tour guide. "Today you're going to learn what hip-hop is and what it's not," he announced at the tour's outset. "It's not just rap music, and it's definitely not just the 10 records you hear over and over again on the radio."

He peppered his talk with oft-told hip-hop tales and intriguing nuggets of cultural history. He told hip-hop's creation story, of the famous 1973 party in the Bronx, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in Morris Heights, whose host was the legendary Jamaican immigrant disc jockey, D.J. Kool Herc. He described how the looting of hi-fi stores during the 1977 New York City blackout propelled D.J. culture. ("It was like Christmas for black people" he said. "The next day there were a thousand new D.J.'s.")

He played charmingly primitive early rap records, like the Fatback Band's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" (widely regarded as the genre's first single) and songs by the Sequence, one of the earliest all-female rap ensembles. He waxed rhapsodic over hip-hop's humble beginnings, when the biggest rap shows in New York were announced on hand-lettered Xeroxed fliers (Caz distributed several vintage examples), and D.J.'s powered their sound systems for outdoor block parties by tapping into the wiring of street lamps.

"The rappers today who can drive around in Bentleys, with their jewelry and million-dollar homes," Caz told the tour group. "They're able to live like that because cats like me and Bambaataa" — the famous rapper and D.J. Afrika Bambaataa — "were in the trenches back in the day, laying the groundwork and getting chased off the block by the police."

That sense of grievance is common among old-school rappers and D.J.'s. "All of the pioneers that I know feel overlooked and dissed," said Ms. Harris, whose tour guides have also included Rahiem of the Furious Five and Reggie Reg of the Crash Crew. Of course, long-term memories are rare in popular music, and hip-hop M.C.'s and producers are particularly unsentimental about the musical past. For good reason: it is precisely that ruthless fixation on novelty — new sounds, fresh styles, the next big thing — that has kept the genre vital for so long.

"We have a real thing in hip-hop about out with the old, in with the new," Ms. Harris said. "I'm shocked about how little awareness of history there is, especially since so many people are making so much money in the rap industry. There's much more awareness of hip-hop history in other countries."

Artists like Grandmaster Flash tour regularly overseas, where they draw far bigger audiences, and Ms. Harris estimated that 80 percent of Hush Tours' patrons are "international visitors." Sure enough, a recent tour included just four Americans, along with tourists from England, France, Germany, Australia and Kenya. In this respect, old-school rappers and D.J.'s have in recent years become similar to jazz musicians, who have long experienced rapturous receptions in Europe and Japan while struggling at home to find respect and decent-paying gigs.

Still, hip-hop culture does not lack a sense of history. Rappers have long been shouting-out their elders and dropping allusions to past raps into their rhymes. Sampling is, among other things, an art of historical preservation, resurrecting the sonic past to serve the present. And as hip-hop has entered its fourth decade, the process of historical investigation and canon-making has swung into high gear.

Recent years have seen the publication of important books on hip-hop's origins (including "Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade" (Da Capo Press) and "Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" (St. Martin's Press) by Jeff Chang) and the arrival of VH1's annual "Hip-Hop Honors" telecast, a counterpoint to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which has thus far ignored rap artists.

Meanwhile, a cult of the good old days is much in evidence among normally nostalgia-averse rappers. The "back in the day" pastorale has become a hip-hop cliché: seemingly every third rap album includes a soft-focus ode to such old-school symbols as Cazal eyeglasses, fat sneaker laces and Eric B. & Rakim. (On the tour bus, Caz played one of the more famous examples, Tupac's "Old School," which opens with the lyric, "I remember Mr. Magic, Flash, Grandmaster Caz.") This nostalgia is especially entrenched among underground or "backpacker" rappers, who position themselves as the true heirs to the old school, carrying the spirit and politics of hip-hop's "golden era" into a debased age of bling and chart-topping gangstas.

From ragtime revivalists to 1950's folkies to roots rockers, there have always been purists who mourn the fall from pre-commercial "authenticity" to mainstream popularity. But that reverence for the past can cause some fuzzy historical thinking. It's worth noting, for example, that the current gangsta-bling era now spans far more years than any of hip-hop's purported golden ages. At this point, who is to say that that gangsta rap isn't the real hip-hop? Does anyone really believe that Spoonie Gee and Whodini were better rappers than, say, Snoop Dogg or Ludacris?

The cult of the old school also smacks of basic New York chauvinism. Now that the hip-hop diaspora has spread worldwide — and current-day rap history is largely being narrated in a Southern twang — it is silly to argue that New York has some kind of monopoly on hip-hop authenticity.

Ms. Harris is adamant that Hush Tours has no axe to grind. "We're certainly not hating on today's rap music," she said. "We're just trying to make sure that people know where it all came from. If we stay in business, 20 years from now we'll be giving guided tours to today's hip-hop."

As for Grandmaster Caz, he has some scores to settle, which he does, of course, by rapping. As the tour wound down and the bus headed south from Harlem down Fifth Avenue, Caz stood up at the front and regaled the crowd with rhymes extolling the old school. The tour de force is a rap called "Before," in which Caz makes a grand metaphysical boast in behalf of hip-hop itself: "Before Reganomics/ Before rappers got shot in their stomachs/ Before Britney, Mariah and Janet/ Before Soul Sonic Force rocked the planet/ In its lyrical form and in the essence of time, by no means get it twisted/ My name is hip-hop, and I have always existed."

It's one of the more basic hip-hop lessons, as valid now as it was back in the day: polemics go down easier when delivered in rhymed couplets, over a beat.