Questlove offers a fascinating look at hip-hop’s past in his new book, Hip-Hop Is History

IN Questlove’s Fascinating New Book, Hip-Hop Is History,” rewrites hip-hop history to his own specifications. It’s exciting to read a really thoughtful book about hip-hop history written from the angle of an elite practitioner who can also be a superfan and historian. One of the primary ideas that jumped out at me is how Questlove sees hip-hop history: he sees 1982 as a turning point, but he also believes that each five years there’s a significant shift in the culture, enough to mark a new chapter in the genre. I desired to dig deeper and see what happened in those years of change, to know what Quest is saying.

The yr 1982 was a breakthrough yr attributable to the discharge of two groundbreaking singles – “Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Big Five and “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force. With these two tracks, hip-hop quickly became more serious as a political force and a force in dance music. These tracks also had a more epic scope than most of the tracks that got here before them. At this point, the culture began to grow from a small New York subculture into a New York subculture that almost all of the country took notice of.

In 1987, hip-hop was still a growing subculture, but it surely was a distinctly national one, and as a whole, it was way more complex than it had been five years earlier. It was the yr that saw the debut albums of Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, and Eric B. and Rakim. That group showed us how music had develop into way more political, with MCs acting as activists or advocates for the black community. Rakim also marked a new peak in the complexity of MCing. ’87 also gave us the debuts of Ice T and N.W.A. and the main label debut of Too Short. The growth of the West Coast, and specifically California from L.A. to the Bay Area. Now, hip-hop was not a New York thing.

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It was an era where it mattered where you got here from, because where you got here from shaped the sound of your music and the main points in your rhymes. It was easy to inform where an artist or group got here from by the sound of their music. It was a time when, as Chuck D famously said, rap is the CNN of black Americaa way for artists to speak on a national level in regards to the issues and culture of their neighborhoods, while giving the remainder of the world a glimpse into Compton or the Bronx or wherever they got here from.

By 1992, hip-hop was on the cusp of becoming the dominant musical culture in America, and in some ways the sound of ’92 was very different from the sound of ’87. In ’92, the largest hits of the yr were ““Jump” by Kris Kross““Jump Around” by House of PainAnd ““Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot. These were super-pop songs made for the club with no political intentions. At the identical time, ’92 gave us Dr. Dre’s monster album The Chronic, in addition to the debuts of Pharcyde, Gang Starr, Pete Rock and CL Smooth. It meant that MCing was getting more sophisticated and more refined. Where Chuck D, KRS and Ice T were practically shouting into the microphone, Snoop, Guru and CL gave us a style that was much closer to talking than shouting.

The yr 1997 was dominated by Puff Daddy (now Diddy) and the Bad Boy Records family of artists. Notorious B.I.G.Life after death” was the largest hip-hop album of the yr. Also in the highest six biggest hip-hop albums of the yr: Puff’s “With no exit” and Mase”Harlem World.” Bad Boy produced half of the six biggest hip-hop albums of the yr. And the largest songs of the yr were “Can’t anyone stop me?,” by Puff and Mase, “I will miss you“by Puff and Faith Evans, “Hypnotize,” by Big, “More money, more problems,” by Big, “I feel so good”by Mase and”All About Benjamins” which was written by Puff, but became unforgettable due to Big, the Lox and Lil Kim.

I used to be deep into the New York club scene in 1997, and it was normal to be at a club where the DJ was playing a series of Bad Boy records, jump in a cab where the radio was playing Bad Boy records, after which go to a different club where the DJ was already playing Bad Boy records. It was an era of epic party records for clubs that were built on easy samples. But it was also an era marked by post-battle sobriety: after the Pac vs. Big battle ended in their deaths, the culture was very sensitive to not letting that occur again.

2002 marked one other drastic change—it was the yr of Eminem and Nelly. It was the rise of the Midwest as a dominant force. The biggest songs of the yr were “Lose yourself“Without me“And”I clean my closet“and Nelly”Hot in Herre“And”Fix” by Nelly featuring Kelly Rowland. Eminem’s endless trolling was compelling and hysterical, but he’s also a standard-bearer for an increasingly traditional brand of hip-hop focused on rhythms and rhymes, as Nelly spearheaded the mash-hop and R&B movement into a more radio-friendly, crossover-friendly sound. Other giant records this year included Fat Joe’s collaboration with Ashanti “What is love“and an R&B hit by Cam’ron and Juelz Santana”Hi Mom.”

And so on. We see a significant difference in the sound of hip-hop every five years. Quest even notes that every era has a dominant drug that shapes it—he says hip-hop flourished in the disco era of cocaine. ’82-’87 was shaped by malt liquor, ’87-’92 by crack, ’92-’97 by marijuana, ’97-’02 by ecstasy, ’02-’07 by sizzurp, and so forth.

Of course, there are other necessary cultural markers that this framework doesn’t recognize, just like the rise of Run-DMC, the rise of the South, or the influence of gangsta rap, but I like the best way Quest sees hip-hop as something that’s continually changing, and overall, I like his book.