It begins with a Tony-sounding English gentleman reciting the opening lines of Clement Clark Moore's "Twas the Night Before Christmas," which the Englishman accurately repeats before being rudely interrupted. 10 words entered the holiday criteria. 40 years ago this month, 20-year-old African-American rapper Kurtis Brower made his wax debut,
"Hold on! Don't move, it's over!" blowing on a tree branch cry. The rapper then turned to his band, instructing them to "Hit it!" And, as the beat hit him like a punch in the stomach, the young Mr. Brower revealed the source of his impatience:
Don't give me everything you wrote during your lifetime
Because this is not 1823
Not even 1970
Now I It's that guy named Kurtis Brower
Christmas is one I know
so every year around this time
I use Rhyme to celebrate.
, and then spent the next three and a half minutes telling everyone the story of Santa Claus stopping to deliver gifts in Harlem, and then deciding to fight with the gang of young people he met there. People go out and have some fun. Tradition? It's a new day. The talented and ambitious Harlem-born Curtis Walker (circa 1979) said his role model was actor, singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. He said: "Robson is so versatile that I planned my life to be like this. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Although Blue's "Christmas Rapper" is the earliest-ever One of those rap records that saw the light of day, but in retrospect, the cocky confidence is so typical of hip-hop and, as is the case with hip-hop more generally, that chutzpah ultimately proves to be entirely justified, 40 years after the song was released. The story behind its enduring success is one worth telling.
It was the spring of 1979, and a wannabe record producer named Robert Ford, known to his friends as Rocky. , got his girlfriend pregnant. When he was nearly 30, Ford was working as a reporter and commentator for Billboard magazine, a job he loved that paid him about $300 a week, which was enough to keep him going. The nose stayed above water, but barely enough to support a child. As a respectable young man, Ford knew he had to do something right. "I promised my father that I would take care of whoever I brought into the world. kid," he recalled. So, he thought, how can he conjure up the necessary dough?" Just when lightning struck, Ford decided to make a Christmas rap record. What if no one had ever made a rap record before? So what if the mainstream music industry doesn’t care about rap? So what if the earth-shattering success of the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rap" was still a few months away
It just so happened that Ford was working with an old guy named Mickey Eddy, who was working for Perry in 1951 Perry Como wrote a Christmas record and he swore you could always make money on a Christmas song because the song was played every year, year after year, no matter what, "Christmas Rap" , photographed by Denzil Miller, featuring J. B. Moore, Kurtis Walker, Larry Smith, and Robert Ford (above: 7-inch American version in the collection of the National Museum of American History) Sales exceeded 350,000 copies, 10 times Mercury's original goal.
(NMAH) "The Christmas Rapper" has been sampled 181 times, including by The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, North America, Cypress Hill, J.Dilla, UGK, Raekwon, Onyx, Lil Kim, Redman, Busta Rymes, House of Pain, Slick Rick , Schooly D, Mobb Deep, EPMD, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Nature and MC 900 Ft.Jesus. "That was my inspiration," Ford said.
Ford shared the dream with his music-loving colleague at Billboard, J.B. Moore (not directly related to the author of "The Night Before Christmas"). "Robert was a black man from downtown Hollis, Queens, and I was a white man from the North Shore of Long Island, and we had a record collection," Moore recalled in a 2001 interview:
Moore loved making Christmas rap records, So much so that he wrote some rhymes without thinking, and Ford discovered Moore's efforts after coming home from work one night and played Moore's message on his answering machine, reciting some of the verses he'd written for "The Christmas Rapper."
I heard it and said, “That’s it! He recalled,
After Ford accepted his lyrics, Moore volunteered to pay for the record's production. For the past five years, the 37-year-old Vietnam War veteran has been saving money every week to build his nest. His dream is to leave Billboard so he can devote himself full time to writing a novel about his time in Vietnam. Now, with about $10,000 saved, Moore decided to spend it all on "Christmas rap." Photos and some of Brower's stage gear, including this jacket worn on his 1981 album "Deuce," are in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (NMAAHC, gift of Kurtis Walker PKA Kurtis Blow)
The lyrics are written, the money is on hand, and the question remains: Which of today's hottest emcees can rap? Ford's first choice was a Hollywood DJ. Like Kool DJ Hulk, Hollywood is one of the founders of hip-hop. In fact, he started doing it in 1972, and Hulk joined the sport a year later. Ford's second choice was Eddie Cheeba. As a student of Hollywood, Cheeba was popular in hip-hop venues like Bronx DiscoHot and more upscale venues like Harlem's Charles Gallery.
Ford was still trying to make a choice one day while riding a bus on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. His eyes happened to fall on a young man posting flyers at a rap show. Joey Simmons' name told Ford that his brother Russell produced the show. Ford called the promoter,
Russell Simmons' body proved to be a hip-hop whirlwind of a man. The 21-year-old native of Hollis, Queens, the same neighborhood where Ford grew up in Simmons, is nominally a sociology major at City College of New York. But much of his time was spent producing and promoting hip-hop parties, a budding entrepreneurial spirit in which he was a larger-than-life presence. Christmas rappers Robert Ford (right) and J.B. Moore (center), teaming up with musician and screenwriter Larry Smith (left) in 1999, 20 years before they got together at Green Street Recording Studios in lower Manhattan. (Courtesy of Linda Medley)
The energy Simmons emanates, including his incessant talking, has long earned him the nickname "Rush." His work, produced under the Rush Productions banner, was a three-person collaboration. In addition to Rush, the team also includes an old friend named Rudy Toppin, a 19-year-old rapper and a college student from the same city named Kurtis Blue.
Born Kurtis Walker, a talented and ambitious young Harlem native, his first role model was actor, singer, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson.
He said: "Robson is versatile, so I planned my life to be like this. This young man discovered the many cultural types of hip-hop when he was a teenager, and his ambitions became even stronger. A few years later, as a city A communications major at the college, Brower decided to focus on rap, although he and Simmons continued to promote parties together. Then, in the late summer of 1979, Ford revealed to Simmons. plan to make a rap record. Simmons soon came up with a plan of his own: show off his chops to the Times Square Hotel Diplomat. That night, August 31, 1979, Ford was at home, finally. Agreed that the hit was the right fit. He said the decision was the best of both worlds: Russell Simmons went with Kurt Burrow. "Russell has a lot of energy and he's got more energy than I've ever seen. "Anyone who knows how to get paid better," Ford said.
The team's energy now turned to him making the record. The question was: How to replicate on record a sound that had never been recorded before? Music? In a pre-production meeting with Ford, J.B. Moore and musicians/arrangers Denzil Miller and Larry Smith, Brower suggested combining James Brown's heavy funk with funky genre-hopping disco Up may have been a successful idea for the New York-based crew, whose "Good Times" was not only the most popular radio show in New York City at the time, but was also popular in hip-hop circles where John Stein was cast. Ze (pictured above with Kurtis Brauer in 1980) received a cassette tape sent to him from New York by J.B. Moore. He said: "I listened to it and thought, yeah, it's pretty good. ”. They convened “KDSP” at Greene Street Recording, a small recording studio in a changing part of Lower Manhattan that a few years ago people had started calling “Soho.” The musicians were J.B. A mixture of Moore's friends (drummer Jimmy Bullaro) and Ford (Smith and Miller) were also present. Adam White, a young Englishman who had worked with Ford and Moore on Billboard, was recruited. Reciting the opening lines of "The Night Before Christmas," this is when Kurtis Brower walked in the door, waiting for his crew, and Moore handed him a printout of the lyrics from the rapper's previous song. Never seen anything like it. Forty years later, Brower still savors their strangeness:
He's Raleigh, he's Paulie, and I say, "Holy moly!"
You must have a lot of beard on your chin.
He allowed himself to be proud of the little people
who had hair on his chin where the skin should be.
"It was completely different from the way we were banging," Blow said. "But it's so witty and I'm glad I got the chance to do it." He wrote the lyrics himself for the second half of the record: "About Santa Claus at a party, there's a big crowd and everyone's having a good time . ”
The record was completed in one night. Blow remembers cutting the entire eight-minute song as if it were being played live in a club; he tapped it a few times, the band played along, the tape rolled up, and then it was done.
, but even so, the finished product struck some people at the time as odd, being a mix of mismatched body parts. Music critic Nelson George said: "The challenge is how to reconcile those two worlds, between making a record and making a rap record, what does that mean?
It's really the hardest to find a label willing to release a record part. Ford recalled being turned down by nearly 20 companies before Mercury Records settled the pay scandal. The problem was, almost no one at the major labels wanted anything to do with rap, though by 1979. In October, the world was rocked by the success of "Rapper***," one of the first rap records ever released, in which George said, "Nobody gave a f**k in the city center." ".
"And not a single black man in the city center actually gave a f**k."
How to explain this industry-wide disgust? In a 2001 interview, Ford said that few black professionals at the time liked rap music "because it reminded them of their lives in the ghettos." This at least partially explains why "The Christmas Rapper" was signed by a white British man to Mercury Records.
John Stanzer was working in the Gramophone Company's London offices when he had the opportunity to do the same job in the company's Los Angeles offices, where he had signed "Dire Straits." A lover of American R&B, Jamaican reggae and Christmas novelty records, Stenzer jumped on the bandwagon. It was there that he received a cassette tape sent to him from New York by J.B. Moore. "I listened to it and thought, yeah, that's good," he said, and he immediately made a rather sustained move to sign the record. Colleagues in his office wanted nothing to do with it, and Mercury's national director of R&D initially wanted nothing to do with it either. But Stanzerp