By the time I found a seat on the floor of the SAP Center in San Jose, California, for what was billed as a celebration of how hip-hop had transformed the Bay Area, the arena was thick with the familiar smell of marijuana. “You just can’t make the songs he made and then make that.” For what it’s worth, Ice …
The genesis of the most pivotal year in hip-hop began in the summer of 1987. By then, Rakim had already rewritten the rules of emceeing, eschewing rap’s slower, linear B-boy rhymes for faster, more complex patterns and deeper lyricism: “I start to think and then I sink into the paper like I was ink / When I’m writing, I’m trapped …
Before De La Soul, says Hank Shocklee, “‘beautiful’ and ‘rap’ weren’t two words that went together.” Shocklee would know: As a founding member of Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, he’s as responsible as anyone for shaping the blaring, dissonant, pugnacious sound of hip-hop in the mid- to late-1980s, when the music “was almost like a football game — …
