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BACK TO THE ESSENCE:
Hip Hop's Jamaican Soul
"No matter what the people say/
These songs leads the way/
It's the order of the day/
From your boss deejay"
-King Stitt "Fire Corner"
In this age of media overkill, sometimes we forget there is a deeper meaning to our hip hop culture. Having the longest headspins, the tightest crabs, or the most clever rhymes isn't what hip hop is all about. The truth is that 99% of hip hop artists unwittingly pay homage to those who struggled to pioneer this culture. People like Kool Herc, Afrika Bam, Grandmaster Flash. And King Stitt. And while most heads are familiar with hip hop's "Holy Trinity," you might be surprised to find this Trinity has important predecessors.
All of us face trials and tribulation of one sort or another. Yet few people experience the difficulties of those who are born with appearances that society deems ugly or strange. For King Stitt, being born with severe facial deformities should have doomed him to life as an outcast. But instead of letting his deformities keep him down, Stitt turned them to his advantage. Fashoining himself as "The Ugly One," after the Sergei Leone film "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly," Stitt brought attention to his talents as a lively dancer at Kingston music events in the mid 1960s. Stitt was literally invited off the dancefloor to become a deejay with Coxsonne Dodd's preeminent Downbeat crew. In Jamaican music the term "deejay" is not associated with the person spinning records, rather it denotes the person who chats, toasts, boasts, or raps over the music. The deejay is someone who brings the element of live performance to otherwise pre-recorded music. When given the opportunity, King Stitt took this fledgling artform to the next level by recording the first deejay hit, "Fire Corner."
Being a common destination for Jamaican immigrants, it was only a matter of time before the tradition of rapping over instrumental records would take root in the kindred ghetto neighborhoods of New York. And it should have been easy enough for Kool Herc to get the crowd moving with choice reggae selections. But his finicky Bronx compatriots simply weren't feeling it. There was something lost in the translation. Obviously, being a first generation Jamaican immigrant posed its share of obstacles. But Herc used his heritage to its full advantage. Herc sought out obscure American records, and gave them the Jamaican "sound system" treatment by playing them through a powerful Macintosh Amplifier and huge speakers dubbed "Herc's Herculoids." And of course, the bass was cranked waaaaay up. After all... this bass-heavy method had been working for years now in the sound systems and dancehalls of Kingston... and now it was working in parks and house parties of the South Bronx.
King Stitt may have been the first prominent reggae artist to turn a social stigma to his advantage. And Kool Herc may have changed the course of American music with his Jamaican musical knowledge. But around the same time that Herc pioneered hip hop, another story of redemption was taking place back in Jamaica. Born albino and raised as an orphan, Yellowman faced not one, but two obstacles in his rise to becoming reggae's biggest star of the early 1980s. In much the same way that King Stitt dubbed himself "The Ugly One," Yellowman fashioned himself in the unlikely persona of an albino sex symbol. And it worked. Yellowman's success is well known. And his dynamic, often freestyled, "slack" rhymes were much closer to contemporary hip hop than anything coming out of New York at the time.
Whether it be in response to a social stigma, poverty, corrupt politics, or adjusting to a new culture... behind every great hip hop artist is a struggle to overcome adversity. The message is clear: don't forget your roots... hip hop is music from the soul.
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