This course, part 2 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. This course covers the music of Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Carole King, Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Metallica, Run-DMC, and Nirvana, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Emerging out of the experimental and ambitious years of late-60s psychedelia, rock splintered into a variety of styles in the 1970s as the music business continued to expand. By the end of the decade, punk and disco had challenged the excesses of the hippie aesthetic, as rock became more commercially streamlined and radio friendly. The emergence and rise of MTV transformed pop music and propelled the careers of Michael jackson and Madonna, while heavy metal and hip hop dominated the late 1980s. Nirvana leads alt-rock's return to simplicity in the early 1990s.
CNN for Black People
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A História do Rock, Parte 2
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Heavy Metal, Rap, and Indie Rock (1980-89)
Developing out of underground scenes of the late 1970s, heavy metal and hip hop become important mainstream styles in the late 1980s, aided by exposure on MTV. The rock reaction against rap. [Read Chapter 12 and work through listening guides and dedicated video.]
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John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Chuck D of Public Enemy has famously said that rap music is "CNN for black people."
At least that's what he was saying at the end of the '80s and into the 1990s.
The idea there being that when we get to the end of
the decade into the 1980s as I said in the last video,
there are all kinds of good business reasons why you want to create a range
of different kind of rap music because as it
becomes a bigger and bigger sort of commercial entity,
you want to be able to offer all kinds of different types to
different kinds of people of different aesthetic preferences and that kind of thing.
And so there is generally a kind of a branching out of approaches.
And one of them is a kind of a realistic approach to what urban life really is.
The kinds of problems that African-American people have in their communities,
what they think the roots of those problems are,
who is still giving them trouble,
how racism still exists in the culture.
All these kinds of things.
And one way to broadcast these problems in a world
that doesn't really have a black news channel is to
do it through rap and so Chuc D's point there being that what you hear in rap
is black people telling other black people what's going on in their communities.
And so "CNN for black" people is a quote that has
stuck for some of this more socially conscious rap.
It also- the idea of- we've seen
many times in the history of rock already- the idea of the good guys and the bad guys.
Remember that back in the 1950s in the part one of this course,
we talked about Elvis Presley kind of being the bad guy,
the guy that the mothers didn't want their daughter to go out with.
And Pat Boone was the good guy.
Maybe in the 60s we think about the Beatles as being
the good guys and the Rolling Stones being the bad guys.
Well, now we get to the late 80s and it's possible for
some rappers to be you know fun but relatively
inoffensive and not so dangerous and others to be a little bit more dangerous,
a little bit more angry.
You've got your good guys and your bad guys.
And the bad guys during the late 80s where
definitely the LA crew around Gangsta Rap and that
was pioneered by Ice-T based as I say out of Los Angeles.
The song that most rap historians will point to is the song I'm
Your Pusher from 1988 was number 13 on the black charts,
it deals with urban themes but in a more graphic and kind of angry way.
It samples by the way Curtis Mayfield's Pusher Man from
the 70s and so the sampling of the Curtis Mayfield
is an interesting kind of musical commentary
on what's happening in the I'm Your Pusher song.
Anyway, another group responsible for the Gangsta Rap is
N.W.A who created a lot of anger and controversy.
The band featuring Easy -E and Dr. Dre,
who went on to become one of the almost highly regarded artists in the rap industry.
The anger- and controversy I'm talking about comes out of
an album from 1989 called Straight Outta Compton.
Compton being a neighborhood in Los Angeles that's you know,
a very troubled sort of urban neighborhood.
Number 9 on the black charts number 37 on the pop charts.
I'm not going to tell you the exact name of the song that caused all the trouble,
but I will paraphrase the title of the song as To Heck With The Police.
Of course, that's not really what it is. You can look that up.
This song was considered so angry and dangerous in some kind of ways that
the record label actually got a warning letter from the FBI.
So clearly these guys were shaking it up in ways that we're in your face,
that we're aggressive, that we're angry,
they used funk samples drawn from P-Funk and Kool & The Gang rather than
the more sort of rock oriented samples that run DMC and the Beastie Boys did.
When we think about N.W.A,
maybe their biggest album was an album
that I can't even really tell you the title of it not because it's vulgar
but because if you look it goes
E-F-I-L-4-Z-A-G-G-I-N and maybe we can project this behind me so you can see what it is.
But in order to read what it is you have to read it backwards.
Right. Anyway the album was from
1991 so a little bit outside of the time we know that we're talking
about was number one in the charts and number two in the R&B charts.
What's interesting is that- and we'll come back to this in
just a minute as we wrap up our discussion of rap.
As threatening as some people thought this kind of rap was
disturbing- his parents thought it was white suburban kids loved it. They just loved it.
They loved getting this window into neighborhoods that they would never be able to
go into and in many ways it was
almost voyeuristic and and exotic in a certain kind of way,
not unlike the way white kids in 1950s loved R&B.
It was an opportunity to go into a neighborhood musically,
culturally, that they couldn't go into
physically that they weren't allowed to be a part of.
So this music was quite popular.
We talked a bit about the social and political criticism.
Coming out of the South Bronx New York,
Boogie Down Productions were led by KRS One (K-R-S One) 1987,
their album Criminal Minded though wasn't a big commercial success,
is often thought of as being extremely influential for its sort of
New York based depictions of the harsh realities of urban life,
probably the group coming out of that part of the country that had the most effect was
Public Enemy and we've already talked about Chuck D
who was important in that group and along with Flavor Flav,
these guys come out of Long Island.
They're not too far from the Bronx.
In 1988 their album It Takes a Nation of
Millions to Hold Us Back is considered a real turning point
in many ways for rap in terms of raising of social consciousness and
awareness- number one on the black charts at number
42 on the pop charts and the big hit from that,
Don't Believe the Hype filled with all kinds of really interesting kind of sampling
and various kinds of textures that aren't
really- I mean these textures have stopped being like band textures anymore.
They're almost entirely constructed of electronic kinds of
sounds in interesting kinds of ways and processing.
Anyway, a Public Enemy follows up with Fear of a Black Planet in 1990,
number three on the black charts,
number 10 on the pop charts and the big big song there Fight the Power,
number 20 on the black singles charts was featured in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.
And so there with that movie exposure you get even more in even
sort of broader kind of exposure of the music of Public Enemy.
And finishing up our discussion of music here coming out of New York during this period,
we should turn to the music of Queen Latifah,
who comes out in Newark,
New Jersey and I know if you're from Long Island,
Newark or the Bronx,
you see a world of difference in those communities.
But for those of us in the rest of the world they seem pretty close to each other.
Queen Latifah's a big debut album All Hail the Queen,
number six in the black album charts in 1989 and the big song from that, Ladies First.
What's interesting about Queen Latifah is she raps about the pleasures of womanhood.
She's out to prove that women can rap.
And in a style of music that a lot of people would consider a massage.
Just you know the ways in which women are used in
rap music especially in the videos that played at R&B,
you know, lot of people say that women were objectified,
they were demeaned in certain kinds of ways,
called unflattering kinds of names,
and epithets kind of thing,
that to have a female rapper come along sort of stand
up for the cause of womanhood and all that is an important moment.
So Queen Latifah is that rapper from the end of the 1980s.
As I've said before this week in the lectures Yo!
MTV Raps debuts in 1988,
August of 1988 to be precise when it debuts,
it quickly becomes the most popular show on the MTV schedule.
A lot and lot of people are now really getting turned on to rap music.
And of course, it is now very effectively crossed over to
this wider sort of white middle class suburban market where suburban kids you
know are going off to their target or Kmart or Wal-Mart and they're buying up
these records that talk about worlds their parents
would never allow them to be a part of.
It's a kind of- I guess like I said before- exoticism, of voyeurism,
a way of looking into a community that you probably wouldn't be
allowed to participate in if your parents had their way.
There was a controversy over- a big controversy over rap and
we should take just a minute to talk about that.
A lot of rock musicians at the time really hated rap in
the same way that they really hated disco couple of years earlier.
Did they hate rap because it was so strongly associated with black culture?
Well, we'd like to believe that that isn't true.
And I'm sure there were certain people that it was true of,
I mean racism- we may be making important forward strides,
but it's not eradicated.
But probably the more important thing that rock musicians didn't
like about rap is that it wasn't really about the performing artist,
it was about the rapper, it was about the deejay that kind of thing,
but where were the guitar players?
Where were the bass players? Where were the drummers?
Where were the solos?
You know, heavy metal was all about the musicians and you know the big drum sets
and the posing on stage with the guitars and the virtuosic guitar solos,
that's what was happening in one part of popular music in the second half of the 1980s,
another part you've got music where there's everybody involved-
there maybe nobody involved even actually plays a musical instrument,
but somehow it's called music because they're taking
other people's music and recombining it putting it together.
Now, on the other hand on the positive side of rap- most of
those rock musicians didn't have a broad enough context to understand
that classical musicians and electronic music had been doing this
going really all the way back to the 1950s and into the 1960s.
That is, taking sounds were generated essentially by machines,
synthesizers or tape sounds.
Sounds that are processed through different kinds of filters
and various kinds of things to create sounds that you make-
you make it's like you can go out and record car brakes
squealing and then put it through a pretty kind
of circuit to turn that into something else.
These kinds of taped loops were used in Beatles songs during the 1960s right.
This kind of thing of taking sounds from the world around you and fashioning them
electronically is something that classical composers have been doing for a long time.
And it was certainly considered music within the classical world,
so to not consider this what rap musicians were doing during
this period music is probably unfair and maybe a little bit narrow minded.
But what we want, we don't really want to make a judge- you
make your own judgments on what you think about those arguments and all that.
What we really want to do is just identify that there's an issue here and
the issue is one that keeps seeming to come back.
This issue of white audiences,
white rockers sort of bristling or rejecting some element,
some musical style that comes out of black culture,
why that is there are different,
different explanations at different points in time.
But it certainly is something that we see recurring- going back to the 1950s and
certainly happening already are continuing to happen into the late 80s and the early 90s.
So far then we've talked about these two parallel scenes.
Heavy metal arising out of the late 1970s and the early 80s.
Having some success at the beginning of the 1980s but then really having
spectacular success at the end of
the 1980s with big albums and MTV exposure and all that kind of thing.
Really pretty much on the main stage.
At the same time, we see a parallel kind of thing going on with rap which develops out of
the New York scene in Bronx and all that in the 70's and then starts to sort of rise.
And by the mid 80s, the late 80s it becomes a very big kind of thing,
so many ways- and it's got an MTV show to go with it too.
So in many ways at the end of the 80s.
We're looking at not only all of the other groups that
we talked about last week that Michael Jacksons'
and Janet Jackson's and Prince and Madonna and all the rest of them that we talked about,
but also we're talking about the rise now at
the end of the decade of heavy metal and rap.
But while all that's happening,
there's other music bubbling along in the culture- and not all of it is on MTV,
not all of it is on major labels,
and not all of it is on regular FM commercial radio.
Some of that music is part of
regional communities where you can only hear the music if you go into clubs,
not unlike we talked about the punk scene in New York in the 1970s.
And some of it's happening in a place that really is off the mainstream radar
and that's FM radio stations on college campuses all across the country.
So for the last bit of our lectures,
the last couple of lectures for this week let's consider
this underground scene around indie music, hardcore punk,
and college radio because it's this scene who creates the context that allows us
next week to talk about the rise of
alternative music and alternative culture as we move into the 90s.
So we turn now to indie music in the 1980s.
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