Six Degrees of Hip Hop Separation: No Idea's Original

                            "No ideas original/there's nothing new under the sun
                                    it's not what you do/but how its done"
                                                       ---Nas (2002)

                                                                       

A video surfaced on Facebook featuring hoop god LeBron James at a party rapping word to word to Atlanta rapper Doe Boy's Walk Down. The ominous synth sounds, Eazy E/Dr. Dre name checks and lyrical cadence are clearly NWA nods. Everything goes in cycles. What's old is new again. As usual, today's current rap drip is squeezed from the juice of yesterday's hip hop bountiful crop.

                                                                       

                                                                           

Walk Down's bass heavy track is an interpolation of  Knowledge Me, by Original Concept---Rapper G, T-Money, Easy G and Dr. Dre---the other  Dre and future co-host of Yo! MTV Raps. The Long Island rap crew ran in the same circles of a pre-Def Jam Public Enemy and were part of the label's mid-Eighties' run of classic trunk-rattling albums and 12 inch singles that flew off the shelves on the strength of Def Jam's legendary logo.
                                                           

                                                 

                                                                     

Dre and Def Jam's Rick Rubin produced Knowledge Me, inserting a sample from the drum heavy Dragon Attack by UK arena rock gods Queen taken from their 1980 The Game---recorded as three seminal black records hit the streets: Chic's Good Times, The Sugar Hill Gang's Rapper's Delight and Kurtis Blow's Christmas Rappin'.

Original Concept's Straight From The Basement of Kooley High may have never sold the numbers of LL Cool J's Radio and  the Beastie Boys' License to Ill, but immortal songs like Pump That Bass, Can You Feel It 88 and Knowledge Me were feasted on by producers as premium sample fare for decades.


As disco was elbowing rock music off the charts and the radio, the Rolling Stones (Miss You), Chicago (Street Player) and Rod Stewart (Do Ya Think I'm Sexy), Queen experimented with the R&B dance music sounds. Another One Bites the Dust was next in line sessions. It was just supposed to be an album cut but after a co-sign from Michael Jackson---a fan of their theatrical shows, Dust was released in August 1980. 

Currently on fire with his Off the Wall album featuring the anthemic Don't Stop Til You Get Enough, MJ knew his way around a funky bassline. Dust was a breakout smash and the group's biggest hit behind Bohemian Rhapsody five years earlier. Funky enough for black radio, it landed squarely in Billboard Magazine's Soul Top Ten behind heavy hitters like Stevie Wonder, Teddy Pendergrass, Kool and The Gang, The Jacksons, Zapp and Cameo.

                                                                     

                                                                     

                                                                       
                                                                       

 



Lyrically inspired by Chicago's bootlegging beefs of the gin-drenched Roaring Twenties, Dust's pumping bassline clearly was a jack of Good Times and Christmas Rappin'. Critics accused Chic and Blow of lifting the bassline when in fact it was the other way around. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers claims credit. He revealed that Queen's bassist and Dust's songwriter---John Deacon was in the studio with him when he composed Good Times.

In 2018, Blow told the Indianapolis Star that Queen's mega-hit lifted its hook from his record played by the late bassist/ seminal rap producer Larry Smith (who concurred with Blow). Blow revealed "they never got paid for it" but concedes that the idea "flowed from Chic to Blow to Queen." Chic bassist Bernard Edwards---always outspoken---didn't mince words: "Well that Queen record happened...because the bass player was spending time with us in the studio. That's OK. What isn't OK is the press...started saying that we ripped them off. Can you believe that? Good Times came out more than a year before. It's inconceivable to these people that black musicians could possibly be innovative like that. It's just these dumb disco guys ripping off a rock-n-roll song."

                                                             

                                                                         

One thing that can't be disputed is that Walk Down's musical model was built from the rap chassis of one Jesse Weaver, Jr---West Philadelphia's own Schooly D. He put out his first single Gangster Boogie in '84 independently on his own when other acts were tethered to record labels. Grinding away in a neighborhood shoe store ("two years of stinky feet in my face"), Schooly scraped together money for a future project that was the antithesis of the Melle Melle-Grandmaster Caz-Moe Dee verbal tree future rap flows were rooted in.
                           

   
               

PSK What Does It Mean, and Gucci Time were heroin-hotshot lethal. Schooly's playful cadences were cloaked in sinister lyrics set to rigid pounding 909 drumbeats stiff as a cadaver. Heavy as final footsteps steps to the gas chamber. Schooly was a big fan of the proto-boom bap Run-D.M.C jams with beats so "nervous" that nose-candy aficionados partying up in the Bronx at the Disco Fever spilled their blow on the floor mid-sniff when the beat for Jam Master Jay dropped (they demanded ample warning next time).

In his pre-Wire Baltimore corner-boy narrative In Cold Blood (Spin Magazine, May 1986), writer Barry Michael Cooper called Schooly's music "gunshot funk." Indeed, it was. PSK penetrated the wall of New York-centric rap, ringing out across the country like a shot from an assassin's bullet. In time, a galaxy of future rap stars would lean on School’s rhyme style like Bill Withers.


                                                                                                                                                   

Eons before Law and Order and New Jack City, twenty-seven year Tracy Marrow was one of many up-and-coming Cali microphone fiends putting in work in rap contests rhyming under the moniker Ice-T. When he heard PSK booming though the speaker in a Santa Monica club, Ice was blown away by Schooly's "dusted" sound and his chilling narratives about the streets of West Philly's Parkside Avenue. Ice cast aside his "LL style" rhymes and come up with his own version: 6 in the Mornin'.

 In his 2011 memoir Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption---from South Central to Hollywood, Ice T revealed how he settled into his signature reality-based storytelling technique that launched a whole coast of emcees. "I adopted a delivery similar to Schooly D's but rapped about the shit I knew first hand. I wrote the lyrics in my apartment in Hollywood with an 808 drum machine. People often say I created the gangsta rap genre with that record, but let me give proper credit. It was Schooly D who inspired me to write the rhyme."

                                                                 
                                                                     

 At Long Island's Adelphi University, Carlton "Chuckie D" Ridenhour had PSK and Gucci Time in heavy rotation on his college radio show. Chuck loved the banter between Schoolly and his DJ Code Money on the intros. Ever the musicologist, it reminded him of the interplay between James Brown and Bobby Byrd on records like Sex Machine. Ducking Rick Rubin's phone messages offering him a solo deal, Chuck finally relented and signed on with Def Jam (he called it "the great surrender").  Pulling in Flavor Flav, he modeled their vocal one-two punch after PSK, Gucci Time and his beloved JB records. Schoolly's cadence and pouty-mouth storytelling were in full effect as Chuck dressed down a superficial gold-digger on Public Enemy's finger-wagging Sophisticated Bitch. In 1997's Fight the Power: Rap, Race and Reality, Chuck credited Schooly "as a big influence on my vocal application, rhyme style and delivery."


                                                                         

                                                                   

                                                                             

The Beastie Boys worshipped at the Schooly D altar too. They dropped his name in songs, sampled Gucci Time on Hold It  Now, Hit It. They kicked Schooly's style throughout their debut  landmark License To Ill (see: Paul Revere). Strains of his tough talk and street corner commentary are in the DNA of Boogie Down Productions' Remix for P is Free and 9mm Goes Bang or NWA's Boyz in the Hood and Dopeman.

In '87, twenty-two-year-old KRS-One toppled rap giant Melle Melle with a battle rap challenging rap's inclusive pecking order of first-generation emcees. A year later, Kris resurrected the lines, inserting them into My Philosophy, his rap Reformation nailed to the door of hip hop's anointed canon. Positioning himself was rap's Martin Luther, Kris aimed his sights squarely at those stuck in the old ways: "You know what you need to learn/old school artists/don't always burn/you're just another rapper whose had his turn/no it's my turn.”

As usual, everything goes in cycles. One moment Rap's New Generation ushered in a new golden era, bum-rushing the show (business) faster than Rakim's flow on Follow the Leader, traveling at magnificent speeds through hip hop's universe---hot as a flaming comet at first, cold as Pluto the next. 


To the current hip hop flock: the new Youngest in Charge beaming down high-wattage millennial rap lit like the Fourth of July---Take heed. Careers last a season. Classic records last a lifetime. Walk Down may be part of hip hop's current main event, but never sleep on the power of the PSK undercard. Beneath those pumping 909s beats the heart of a champion, one by one, still knocking them out.