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In Victoria?
Yeah. Which was quite early on. It was just so different to anything you could go out and do, whether it be bands or clubs or anything else. It was just… from anther planet somehow. We take it for granted now, but the whole way of performing DJs was just really radical.
How important conceptually?
It was very important, really, and we take it for granted. Sampling became so much part of every pop music that nobody really thinks about it anymore. At that time, to make music from other people’s records in a creative way rather than a plagiaristic way, and to create new kinds of musical form was a breakthrough. Creating new kinds of musical form is something I’ve always been interested ever since I was 14 years old and listening to R&B records. Just looking for ways that were different to, you know, European classical music… Flash and Bambaataa and Kool Herc and all the other people who were around at that time, I don’t think they really thought too much about how different what they were doing was because it was quite a self-contained world. It was developing without any help from record labels, or promoters or commercial concerns. They were having to work in clubs and pay their way in clubs but that’s about as far as it went. It was something you can’t even imagine anymore.
In fact it’s something that’s quite rare in any part of the history of popular music for something to be allowed to develop for a few years outside of that, because it was like a bubble that they were inside I don’t think they really knew how remarkable it was what they were doing. They didn’t have many commentators writing about it. There were a few people writing for New York magazines, but there wasn’t a great weight of critical theory building up. That came much later. I think it even came after Rap Attack, really. Because Rap Attack wasn’t a theory book, it was a straightforward musical history book. And all the verbiage and theorising came later by which time it was all done and dusted really.
Do you think it’s quite weird that even though it was so close to one of the media centres of the world that it remained so apart from it?
It is weird, but then that’s something to do with American society and the structure of American cities, which is very different to the structure of European cities. And that separatism is so much part of what happened before the civil rights movement and what happened after the civil rights movement and the ghettoisation that took place in American cities. So from that point of view, it’s not so strange because I think there always has been this incredible division in American cities. America itself is often ignorant of what’s happening outside of itself to an extraordinary degree because it’s so powerful and it’s so self-contained…
And insular.
And so insular in many ways. So I think it’s a reflection of that, the Bronx falling so badly into decline. And Harlem as well; being like this world of politics and culture and hope at one point and not too many decades later turning into a complete ruin. That lack of mixing, people didn’t go to Harlem or the Bronx much. Or if they did, they went a targeted way. Maybe they’d go to the Apollo, or to the Bronx Zoo, and then they’d go back home again. That lack of fluidity. And the people who lived in the Bronx thinking that going downtown was like going into some alien zone. Also that sense of deprivation, just not feeling it’s possible to own these things or to even know that they exist and that’s part of hip hop history.
Economics contributed to the decline of big bands, Slave and all those huge bands with 15 members and eight conga players [laughs]. All those funk bands, they weren’t sustainable anymore in the same way that the swing bands of the ’40s eventually died out for economic reasons. There were bands that were part of the Harlem scene, that were part of the Bronx scene that disappeared, so musicianship was no longer associated with making music in a strange kind of way, in New York. I’m still not completely clear about that in my own mind. What happened and why hip hop, after it came on record, came to depend on just a few people, like Positive Force, the guys at Sugarhill and Pumpkin, just those few musicians. And why musicians weren’t part of the hip hop scene early on at all. Do you think that they were effectively like the MFP musicians?
I think that’s a bit unfair
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