As bleak as its lyrics are, it was a minor hit. Though the gangsta rappers who emerged later in the decade would take the flak for promoting illegal activity in their music, Melle Mel and his Sugar Hill cohort Duke Bootee speak bluntly here about the criminality, poverty, and sheer desperation of being Black in the city in the 1980s. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “New York New York” (1983) Smith’s work, including with Run-D.M.C., is underappreciated for its ability to take the synthetic sounds of ’80s pop and reconfigure them to rattle your bones. If Larry Smith’s instrumental for “Friends” had come out today, it would still sound like it was beamed in from the future.
A timeless single that came to embody hip-hop’s golden age. Over a brilliant Roger Troutman flip that highlights Sermon’s considerable production talent, the dynamic duo get down. Real heads know.Įrick and Parrish take the laid-back cool of Rakim and make it sound even icier on this cooler-than-thou classic. The spirit of New York hip-hop springs eternal.
#80S HIP HOP ALBUM SONGS PROFESSIONAL#
It manifested itself through aspiring musicians boosting sound systems during the 1977 blackout, then turning into professional DJs seemingly overnight through Run-DMC securing the first rap endorsement deal after repping shell-toe Adidas so hard in their music through a 14-year-old Roxanne Shanté flaming UTFO in “Roxanne’s Revenge” through Raekwon’s mob epics and Ghostface’s psychedelic crime stories through Cam’ron getting shot three times and driving himself to the hospital in a Lamborghini, dripping in diamonds through Jadakiss’s devilish signature laugh and Azealia Banks’s withering snark through Bobby Shmurda’s gravity-defying hat and Pop Smoke’s guttural snarl. The enduring spirit of New York hip-hop is unbridled confidence, limitless audacity. It’s the noisy, flashy style Harlem folks pick up across 125th Street and the gruff, no-nonsense speech of Brooklynites, the insular slang of the Queensbridge projects and the versatile blend of cultures you see in a trip through the Bronx. Old heads will tell you that New York rap is a distinct sound rooted in the thunder-and-lightning interplay between kick and snare drums in an East Coast boom-bap track, but really, it’s an attitude, a way to be. To decide the “best” of New York rap would only tell half the story - an uneven one - so instead, we invited a team of writers to rank a new type of local canon: 100 songs that capture a bigger picture of the sound of the city. As regionalism in rap began to ebb and artists from the East, South, West, Midwest, and overseas began trying out one another’s wares, stars like 50 Cent - and later Nicki Minaj - dominated via annexation, picking and choosing bits of popular sounds and fashions to graft onto their formidable arsenals of tricks. Drum-machine fanatics took after forward-thinking auteurs like Prince and Miles Davis, assembling clattering, inhuman percussion parts that would lead to epochal early-’80s gems like Run-DMC’s “Sucker M.C.’s (Krush-Groove 1).” A happy studio accident in the late ’80s inspired Queens native and Cold Chillin’ crew member Marley Marl to invent the art of sampling, setting the stage for the plush jazz-rap stylings of acts like A Tribe Called Quest and the abrasive kung fu rap of the Wu-Tang Clan in the ’90s as well as the triumphant sounds of the Diplomats’ “Dipset Anthem” and Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement” in the next decade.
#80S HIP HOP ALBUM SONGS HOW TO#
When kids in the Bronx needed party music to distract from the violent tumult of the rocky ’70s, DJ Kool Herc figured out how to extend the climaxes of funk records, making long and euphoric vamps out of sweet seconds of ecstasy. But the spark that inspired the early bombers, breakers, DJs, and rappers to revolutionize art, dance, fashion, music, and language endures in New York City, changing alongside the advancing generations. Hip-hop started out in the parks and traveled around the globe and back, picking up new accents and flavors in every region and time zone, rubbing elbows with other genres and cultures, and adapting to new climates and temperaments.
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