The Thing About Rap Lists: Critiquing Content and the Curation of Albums
(Part 2 of 2)
Whilst many celebrate hip hop’s 50th anniversary next month, the first true hip hop albums were not released until 1980, a year which saw the arrival of only two rap LPs – both self-titled – by Kurtis Blow and Sugarhill Gang respectively. The fact that these albums are self-titled is also interesting, and something which I will return to later. Chuck D has previously talked about the early days of manufacturing rap records, and the effective switch and total reconsideration of cultural production from performance to recorded output:
“Fuck, how you gon’ put hip hop onto a record? ’Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record?… Bam! They made ‘Rappers’ Delight’. And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I’m thinking, ‘man they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?’ It was a miracle” (Chuck D in Chang 2007: 130).
A huge proportion of the earliest hip hop 12”s were epically long, and following on from those early challenges of reframing and remaking music and raps to suit the 12” single format, the crafting of a hip hop album was a greater test. Still entrenched in the notion of performing hip hop live, it makes sense that for artists to manoeuvre their mindset from conceiving a live show to the conception of a full studio album would be a deep and lengthy creative process. Understandable then, that the formative hip hop albums contained approximately six to eight songs, a number which gradually increased from the mid-eighties until the overtaking of the compact disc in the nineties. This wasn’t a phenomenon unique to hip hop, throughout the seventies jazz, progressive rock and funk albums – and a large proportion of these ‘concept albums’ – were produced, some with as few as two or three songs in total, such as Grover Washington Jr’s Soul Box series (following the great albums of the previous decade, for example John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme). Albums such as these inherently influenced hip hop, not only in their sonics but in their product inception and construction.
If the arrival of the CD in rap music benefited vinyl at all, it was through formatting. By 1990, the number of songs appearing on albums was increasing greatly, but to the detriment of loudness and sound quality on vinyl. Perhaps the exemplar here is Jungle Brothers’ Done By The Forces Of Nature (and, indeed, my favourite hip hop album of all time), which includes sixteen songs squished onto two sides of wax. Something needed to shift. Hence, the arrival of the double album in the mid-nineties – not as a concept in its own right – but as a way to accommodate a longer curation of songs successfully (usually with three of four songs on each of the four sides) – provided a healthier agency for listeners, audiophiles, collectors and DJs. One of my favourite examples of this approach is the untouchable Uptown Saturday Night by Camp Lo.
But retuning to the embryonic years of rap albums, 1981 saw sophomore albums from Kurtis Blow and Sugarhill Gang, plus two other albums from the Sugar Hill stable – by The Sequence and West Street Mob. However, Bobby Demo (Bob Boyer and Demo Cates, the latter from funk band The Fabulous Counts) also entered the frame with Rap The Night Away, again following the disco rap vibe of the time and stretching to an almighty eight songs. Following the introduction of the electro sound to rap music (largely attributable to ‘Planet Rock’), 1982 witnessed more diverse arrangements and explorations in the sonics of hip hop. Man Parrish’s self-titled debut (although arguably not strictly hip hop) and the following year Whodini’s Whodini LP, Jonzun Crew’s Lost In Space, and B-Boy (Oh-La-Oh) by Bon Roc (curiously this received no US release) all brought that electro vibe to rap albums which opened up creative possibilities and a greater flexibility for representational narrative.