A hip hop exegesis; a glossy tennis magazine; spooning with Prince and Donna Summer
I’m All Lost In
The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#54
L-R, Mr. Mudede, DJ Vitamin D, Dr. Daudi Abe
1) “Rapper’s Delight” Annotated @ Clock-Out Lounge, 10/18/24
No revisionist history. I was not into hip hop when I was young, or rap, as we used to call it. However, nor did I actively dislike it. Mostly, I was just hyper aware of its existence after “Rapper’s Delight” came out in 1979, a year otherwise nudged by the sudden sounds of new wave, both the power-pop-punk-guitar-driven new wave and also, fascinated with the retro future, the robots-in-mascara-playing-synthesizers new wave. Hip hop evolved on a parallel track and my teen head ceded it to Black teens.
Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,“ hip hop’s opening spin, was released about three weeks after my 13th birthday (and less than 2 weeks after my bar mitzvah) in September ‘79. It was a massive hit and an even bigger curiosity. Its lyrics about gross-food-at-your-friend’s-house were instantly relatable and entertaining. That was my main association with the song. That, and I connected it to disco, thinking of it as “Black” music; I literally thought, listening to “Rapper’s Delight,” that I was peeking into Black kid’s bedroom.
I first heard “Rappers’ Delight” shortly after it was released at my friend George Miller’s apartment (he was not Black) while we played Atari Pong on his TV. I liked 1960s rock and increasingly, new wave; I bought my first new wave record, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, that year. (Blondie’s NYC allegiance to hip hop was unknown to me at that time.)
While I subsequently defined myself throughout high school with post-punk music (which was primarily performed by white artists), it’s true that Black music, mostly pop R & B and bubble gum funk—those bass lines!—was a cultural force (along with break dancing) for my classmates. My suburban Maryland high school was 95% white, but Black pop music was ubiquitous on the D.C. radio stations.
By spring of senior year, well before they teamed up with Aerosmith, I did recognize how great Run-DMC was. And despite my snobbish affinity for underground white music (“alternative” and “indie” were not terms yet), I spent some of my $3.35 minimum-wage paycheck on their first record. And later, in college, on Public Enemy’s. I still felt separate from rap, though, and mostly bought these records with the impulse of a completist going for a record collection that reflected my times.
I still don’t like rap much, but I have come to deify the through-line that puts Rap’s progenitor, Afro-Caribbean music—starting with Jamaica’s 1950s sound system scene—at the center of contemporary music history. This is the Kingston-based DJ Coxsone Dodd-to-Bronx-based DJ Kool Herc narrative that has come to define the artistic strains of today’s popular music: A blend of hip hop, R & B, electronica, jazz, Afro beat, and outré white music (Steve Reich, Eno, and DEVO have everything to do with all this). I call this layered concoction Abstract R & B.
This self-conscious intro is all to say: My wonderful old friend Charles Mudede—who agrees with me that the one-part disco/one-part electronica Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder track, 1977’s “I Feel Love”, is the greatest song of all time—gave a free-flowing talk about “Rapper’s Delight” on stage at Beacon Hill’s Clock-Out Lounge last Saturday night with Seattle Central College Prof. Dr. Daudi Abe, and Seattle hip hop DJ Vitamin D. It was a delight.
Charles is the closest thing Seattle has to a public intellectual, a charming, contrarian, and playful bibliophile. (He giggles with, well, delight, that hip hop’s founding document, “Rapper’s Delight,” was recorded by second-rate musicians in a cheap Englewood, New Jersey studio as opposed to in NYC.)
I don’t know Dr. Abe nor Vitamin D., but with Dr. Abe, who wrote Emerald Street: A History of Hip-Hop in Seattle, playing facilitator, and Vitamin D. bringing the populist wisdom and beats, Charles was glowing with knowing (thank you for mentioning Blondie’s “Rapture”) as the trio expanded on a recent article Charles and Dr. Abe wrote for the Stranger, a literal annotation of the 3-minute radio rendition of “Rapper’s Delight.”
Vitamin D. played samples from “Rapper’s Delight” and other relevant tracks, such as “Jam-Master Jay” by Run DMC.
My iPhone video from Clock-Out Lounge, 5/18/24
Appropriately, Vitamin D DJ’d a dance party after their talk too.
I had my quibbles with some points from the talk. Vitamin D.’s insistence on the priority that rap places on “originality” seemed like a banal claim, one that every macho advocate makes about their chosen art form. And unfortunately, in this instance, the emphasis undermines one of hip hop’s main revolutionary aesthetics: Sampling other people’s music (an elaboration on Caribbean music’s tradition of dubbing.) Heck, 1970’s disco group Chic sued the Sugar Hill Gang over “Rapper’s Delight” itself because, it turns out, the founding hip hop jam lifted its defining bass line from Chic’s earlier 1979 Disco hit “Good Times.”
Vitamin D also claimed that hip hop—as opposed to disco—is the genre that lives on.
Absurd! While hip hop culture (sampling in particular) is a central intellectual force in contemporary music, the incessant dance pulse of EDM and electronic pop is clearly descended from disco; check out my 1970s disco playlist “LaBelle’s Boots.”
I don’t mean to pick on DJ Vitamin D. He held his own with our insanely well-read Marxist Charles, reminiscing about cassette culture and explaining how the words to “Rapper’s Delight” were the DNA of his school playground’s lingua franca before he’d ever heard the song.
This was an A+ lecture that should be sampled far and wide, particularly Charles’ deconstruction of the line
“A-skiddlee bebop, we rock a scooby-doo/
And guess what, America, we love you,”
putting the focus on the Sugar Hill Gang’s framing overture: “Guess what…”
Tennis legend Andre Agassi on the cover of the latest Racquet magazine.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read a magazine cover to cover.
To my surprise, this 120-page bound and glossy coffee-table magazine is not glossy; it’s printed on stock paper instead of slick pages, and, more surprising, it’s light on ads and heavy on actual articles.
The latest issue (Racquet debuted in 2016), Issue No. 25, includes features on Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, and Dominic Thiem (my tennis obsession is new, so reading recaps on these important veterans was fruitful). Also in this issue: a poetically sappy series of recurring short essays throughout titled “The Greatest Thing I’ve Ever Seen on a Tennis Court;” a negative review of the U.S. Open’s signature “Honey Deuce” (by longtime Esquire cocktail columnist, David Wondrich, who suggests an alternative, the gin-based “Flushing Meadow," with a recipe of his own); a precocious history of modern tennis, dating back to the “remarkably unremarkable” 2002 Wimbledon final, written by a curiously profound 13-year-old; some fast-paced interviews with WTA players Danielle Collins (World No. 11) and doubles star Taylor Townsend; a smart aleck guide to improving your game, written by two bratty pro coaches; and, prompted by the overrated tennis movie Challengers, (panned by me here last summer), a flirtatious essay on the standard tennis-as-sex metaphor.
To be honest, this is not a super well-reported magazine. The chatty, and oddly addicting articles, which make no pretense of interviewing their subjects, read as if they were written from a hotel room by cocky, high-paid freelancers on assignment, reliving their student days jamming out English papers the night before. And the Atlantic Monthly-aspirations—like the Agassi article’s clunky thesis on the Sisyphean nature of returning life’s infinite incoming tennis balls—add to the magazine’s glorious sophomoric embellishment.
Me and my Honey Deuce at the this year’s U.S. Open, 9/5/24
Aside from the wise 13-year-old historian’s well-argued article (his inflection-point point being there wasn’t a single serve & volley during the entire Wimbledon 2002 final), the issue’s best article is a touching piece of memoir called “Goth Tennis.” This 17-page, page-turner (lots of goth-doodle illustrations) about the writer’s doomed late-1990s stint as a high school tennis star while living a pasty, pimple-plagued, stoner teen’s life, dressed perpetually in black, plays to the magazine’s dubious and delightful strength: Reveling in first-person, quasi philosophical musings about tennis.
Racquet, which I picked up from the elaborate magazine shelf at Elliott Bay Books, has been in the news lately: A) the magazine’s original co-founders had a dramatic split over editorial direction which led one of them—who accused Racquet of becoming a lifestyle brand rather than a tennis magazine—to start his own competitor after getting unceremonioiusly ousted, and B) after going deep on the Alexander Zverev sexual assault story, good job!, Racquet subsequently bailed on the freelance reporter’s legal fees. (Here’s the reporter’s account of getting ghosted by the magazine.)
The new competitor, the confusingly branded The Second Serve/Open Tennis, actually seems far more fixated on lifestyle.
I’m planning to read a copy of that next!
Cal Anderson Park
In other tennis news: On Saturday morning, I lost 4-6 to my new tennis rival, Ian; we played at the graffiti-happy Cal Anderson Park tennis court. I mounted a comeback from 2-5 down, but, in the end, I didn’t pull it off.
And then there’s this: My favorite player, Daffy Saby (my household’s nickname for the often-befuddled Aryna Sabalenka), ascended to the World No. 1 spot this week, replacing officious Iga Swiatek at the top of the class; the once-invincible Swiatek has otherwise held the spot all year. Saby, who had actually slipped to No. 3 mid year, falling behind Coco Gauff, has definitely been playing convincing tennis lately; I noticed her turnaround in the run-up to the U.S. Open. So, credit where credit’s due to the hilarious and mighty Sabalenka.
But Swiatek’s fall, technically on account of losing points for not meeting the tour rule of playing six 500-level matches per year (the math is confusing), seems indicative of a larger weirdness with Swiatek:
Up through France’s Roland Garros grand slam, which she won for the third year in a row this past June (right after she also won the 1000-level Spanish and Italian Opens back to back in April and May, beating Sabalenka in both finals), Swiatek had seemed god-level to all her competitors’ mere hero-level play.
But then came an improbable string of losses over the summer: Losing in the early rounds (to No. 29, Yulia Putintseva) at Wimbledon; losing to No. 7 Qinwen Zheng in the summer Olympic semifinals; losing to Daffy Saby in the WTA 1000-level Cincinnati semifinals; and then losing to No. 4 Jessica Pegula in the U.S. Open quarterfinal. (Saby herself would go on to beat Pegula in the U.S. Open final.)
I first noticed it during Swiatek’s loss to Zheng:
Swiatek’s been reminding me of the Franny character in J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey novella. Franny, of course, in a fit of Bohemian Zen Buddhism, chants herself into a catatonic nervous breakdown. It’s been hard to miss Swiatek’s lengthy, on-court conversations with herself prior to each point. There’s a spooky liturgical rhythm to them as she davens on the baseline like an ancient rabbi.
C-to-C octave
3) Piano Octaves: “I Feel Love,” “Kiss,” “Little Darlin’”
Speaking of “I Feel Love,” it’s one of three jams I’ve been savoring playing on piano this week. The other two are “Kiss” by Prince, and the 1950s doo-wop air “Little Darlin’” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, née Gladiolas.
What do these three bangers have in common? Octaves. Or more specifically, splayed chords, built on octaves.
The verse to Prince’s “Kiss” (1986) rides an A-to-A octave chord, A-E-A in the left hand (the song is in the key of A Major, so that’s the tonic 1 note at the root of the octave with the key’s dominant 5 note, E, locking it in.) During the mid-verse turnaround—”you don’t need experience”— Prince drops to the key’s subdominant 4th, swapping the E out for a D, two Ds actually—played as an octave while keeping the tonic, the A, in the mix as the middle note this time. This sets up the traditional 1-4-5 sweep to the chorus:
“You don’t have to be rich…” jumps to the Dominant 5, with an E-to-E octave chord, an E-B-E. Then, in response, there’s some palindrome 5… 4… 1 blues tension along the way back down to the verse: The second and fourth lines of the chorus feature a D-A-D octave chord on “you don’t have to be cool to rule my world” and again on “your extra time and your…
“Kiss!” …
back to the 1 as the root with the A-E-A octave guiding the vibrating verse again.
Maurice Williams’ 1957 “Little Darlin’” (which I was obsessing over back in late August too) strolls through the well-known “50s” chord progression, 1-6-2-5 (more commonly played as 1-6-4-5, but the propulsive 2 works just as well, if not better. Williams chose the forlorn minor instead of an upbeat major).
It’s the stately octaves that give the song its unabashed groove. I’m playing it in B flat, so the octave chords, with the 5 tone to each chord’s root-1 filling out the middle position, are: B flat-F-B flat; G-D-G; C-G-C; F-C-F.
I like playing these chords as up-and-back-down-again arpeggios, which lets the middle note create see-saw momentum. I never want to get off this ride.
“I Feel Love” (1977), the Summer/Moroder early sci-fi pop masterpiece that I’ve certainly obsessed about before, is the biggest octave-fest of all.
Its avalanche of octaves comes in the dynamite chorus, which cycles through 4 separate octave-based chords. And, as opposed to the octave-based three-tone chords in “Kiss” and “Little Darlin’,” these chords are stocking-stuffed with 4 tones a piece.
The song is in F Major, so the immediately ascendant chorus blasts off by starting with the Dominant 5—a C-to-C octave: C-E-G-C. We’re off. The 4 is next. A B flat-to-B flat octave: B flat-E flat-G-B flat. Then to the 3, an A-to-A octave: A-C-F-A. And then, oddly, the cascade ends with a chord rooted in the key’s sharped 4, a B-to-B octave: B-D-G-B.
These four-finger chords are tricky to play; I found the secret is in letting your ring finger, which is responsible for playing the third tone in each of these bold stretch chords, lead your brain on the changes, instead of setting out with your pointer finger, which is responsible for striking the root note of each chord.
The verse to “I Feel Love” foreshadows the chorus’ orgy of octaves; as you take a momentary break from the energetic right-hand melody line—”heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows, heaven knows"— you fill out the rushing, staccato left hand bass part by leaning on a C-to-C octave chord in the right hand with an F in the middle. And similarly, just before the chorus, you play a G-to-G octave with a B flat (and then slyly, that sharped 4 B again) as the middle note.
Spooning with Donna Summer
What makes playing these octave-rich jams such a pleasing experience?
Certainly, there’s something physically satisfying afoot as the two notes swaddle the overall group of three or four tones in perfectly matched bedding.
An octave is defined by two pitches where the higher pitch vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower pitch, so when you play the two pitches together they spoon.
I’ve been spooning with Prince, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and Maurice Williams all week.
————
Lastly,
this week’s recommended reading: the NYT on a topic I’ve been obsessing over for a decade, getting rid of parking minimums!
(Here I am 8-and-half-years ago: My Guerrilla Shared Parking Pilot Project.)
Currently, and thankfully, Seattle doesn’t have parking minimums for housing near transit, but it does still require constructing parking everywhere else, and sadly, in the new comp plan, which, per state law requires fourplexes in traditional single family zones, it tacked on a .5 stalls per unit rule, which will surely stall (heh) new housing development.
This week’s recommended listening: I’m liking the juxtaposition of sing-song ‘60s girl group vocals and sophisticated Afro-centric sounds of SAULT.