The new school of hip-hop was a mid-1980s movement in hip-hop music, led by artists such as Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys. Predominantly from Queens and Brooklyn, it was characterized by drum machine-led minimalism, often tinged with elements of rock; rapped taunts, boasts, and socio-political commentary; and aggressive, self-assertive delivery. In song and image, its artists projected a tough, cool, street B-boy attitude. These elements contrasted sharply with Funk and Disco, novelty hits, live bands, synthesizers, and party rhymes of artists prevalent in the early 1980s. Compared to previous artists, new-school artists crafted more cohesive LPs and shorter songs more amenable to airplay. By 1986–87, their releases began to establish hip-hop in the mainstream. This, along with further innovations by artists like Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions, led into the golden age of hip-hop.*Caramanica, Jon. "Hip-Hop's Raiders of the Lost Archives" , New York Times, June 26, 2005. Retrieved on July 2, 2008. Coker, Cheo H. "Slick Rick: Behind Bars", Rolling Stone, March 9, 1995.
Coker, Cheo H."Slick Rick: Behind Bars", Rolling Stone, March 9, 1995. Drever, Andrew. "Jungle Brothers still untamed" , The Age [Australia], October 24, 2003. Retrieved on July 2, 2008.Per Coker, Hodgkinson, Drever, Thill, O'Neal, Parker and Sariq. Additionally: Coker, Cheo H. "KRS-One: Krs-One", Rolling Stone, November 16, 1995. Pettie, Andrew. "'Where rap went wrong'", Daily Telegraph, August 11, 2005. Reeves, Mosi. "Easy-Chair Rap" , Village Voice, January 29th 2002. Kot, Greg. "Hip-Hop Below the Mainstream", Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2001. Coker, Cheo Hodari. "'It's a Beautiful Feeling'", Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1996. Mervis, Scott. "From Kool Herc to 50 Cent, the story of rap – so far" , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 15, 2004. Retrieved on July 2, 2008.*Sariq, Roni. "Crazy Wisdom Masters" , City Pages, April 16, 1997. Thill, Scott. "Whiteness Visible" AlterNet, May 6, 2005. Hodgkinson, Will. "Adventures on the wheels of steel", The Guardian, September 19, 2003. Retrieved on July 2, 2008.*Scholtes, Peter S. "True MCs" , City Pages, January 7, 1998. Retrieved on July 2, 2008. DJ Shadow in conversation with William E. Ketchum III, "DJ Shadow Knockin' Doorz Down" , XXL, August 24, 2006. Retrieved on July 2, 2008. Downes, Maurice. "Talking Philosophy with DJ Nu-Mark", The Free Williamsburg issue 53, August 2004.
The terms "old school" and "new school" fell into the vernacular as synonyms for "old" and "new" in hip-hop, to the confusion and occasional exasperation of writers who use the terms historically."A few weeks ago I was DJing a party and a young twentysomething came up to me to request 'some old-school.' I asked for clarification – after all, Run DMC and LL Cool J are considered old-school, but technically, they invented the new school. The response: 'I don't know, some Tribe Called Quest or something.' After gently picking my jaw from off the floor, I turned back to my crates and wondered to myself, 'If Tribe is old-school, what does that make Kurtis Blow? In utero?'"—Oliver Wang, "Book report", San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 6, 2003."I always get frustrated when I see a link to this site on some hipster's blog with a tagline like 'taking it back to the old school', when I very rarely post anything recorded before 1989. I mean, I guess a lot of what I post here is old, but that don't make it old school, yaoming? Like how you gonna call Leaders of the New School old school?"—Noz, "Lady Don't Tek No Beat", Cocaine Blunts and Hip Hop Tapes, January 10, 2005. The phrase "Leader of the New School", coined in hip-hop by Chuck D in 1988, and given further currency by the eponymous group Leaders of the New School (who were named by Chuck D before signing with Elektra in 1989), remains popular. It has been applied to artists ranging from Jay-Z to Lupe Fiasco.*Dinco D, in conversation with Derek Phifer, "Leader of The New School: Dinco D." , HHNLive, October 15, 2007. Retrieved on July 4, 2008. Callahan-Bever, Noah. "Lupe Fiasco – Grindin'" , Vibe, January 18, 2006. Retrieved on July 2, 2008.
Background
Elements of new school had existed in some form in the popular culture since hip-hop's birth. The first MC's rapped over DJs swapping back and forth between two copies of the same record playing the same drum break, or playing instrumental portions or versions of a broad range of records.Toop, p. 14Toop, p. 17 This part of the culture was initiated by DJ Kool Herc in 1973Hermes, Will. "All Rise for the National Anthem of Hip-Hop" , New York Times, October 29, 2006. Retrieved on September 9, 2008. using breaks from James Brown, the Incredible Bongo Band and English rock group Babe Ruth in his block parties.Upshall, David (writer, director, producer). The Hip Hop Years, Part 1, Channel 4, 1999. Brown's music—"extensive vamps" in which his voice was "a percussive instrument with frequent rhythmic grunts", and "with rhythm-section patterns ... [resembling] West African polyrhythms"—was a keynote of hip-hop's early days.Collins, Willie. , St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, January 29, 2002. Retrieved on July 17, 2008. By 1975, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa had taken up Kool Herc's breakbeat style of DJing, each with their own accompanying rappers. Flash was especially associated with an important break known as "The Bells"—a cut-up of the intro to Bob James's jazz cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me To The Mardi Gras"—while Bambaataa delighted in springing occasional rock music breaks from records like "Mary, Mary", "Honky Tonk Women", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Grand Funk Railroad's "Inside Looking Out" on unsuspecting b-boys.Toop, p. 66
The earliest hip-hop records replaced the DJ with a live band playing funk and disco influenced tunes, or "interpolating" the tunes themselves, as in "Rapper's Delight" (Sugar Hill, 1979) and "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" (Spring, 1979). It was the soft, futuristic funk closely tied to disco that ruled hip-hop's early days on record, to the exclusion of the hard James Brown beats so beloved of the first b-boys.Ross, Andrew. "Old master flash.", Artforum, March 1, 1995. Figures such as Flash and Bambaataa were involved in some early instances of moving the sound away from that of a live band, as in Flash's DJ track "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (Sugar Hill, 1981), and even innovating popular new sounds and subgenres, as in the synthesizer-laden electro of Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (Tommy Boy, 1982). Often though the rawer elements present in live shows did not make it past the recording studio.
Bambaataa's first records, for instance, two versions of "Zulu Nation Throwdown" (Winley, 1980), were recorded with just drums and rhymes. When Bambaataa heard the released records, a complete live band had been added.Hager, Steven. "Afrika Bambaataa's Hip-Hop", Village Voice, September 21, 1982. Reprinted in Cepeda, p. 23 Something closer to his intentions can be heard on a portion of Death Mix, a low-quality bootleg of a Zulu Nation night at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, released without his permission on Winley Records in 1983.Shapiro, p. 4 Likewise on the bootleg Live Convention '82 (Disco Wax, 1982), Grand Wizard Theodore cuts the first six bars of Rufus Thomas's "Do the Funky Penguin" together for five and a half minutes while an MC raps over the top.Toop, p. 67–69 Grandmaster Flash's "Superrappin'" (Enjoy, 1979) had a pumping syncopated rhythm and The Furious Five emulating his spinbacks and needle drops and chanting that "that Flash is on the beatbox going ..."Toop, p. 90 The beatbox itself however, a drum machine which Flash had added to his turntable set-up some time earlier, was absent on the record, the drums being produced by a live drummer.Toop, p. 126
Kool Moe Dee's verbal personal attacks on Busy Bee Starski live at Harlem World in 1982 caused a popular sensation in hip-hop circles. In the same way, groups like the Cold Crush Brothers and The Force MCs were known for their routines, competitive attitude, and battle rhymes. Tapes of battles like these circulated widely, even without them becoming viable recordings.Wilder, Chris. "Mutual Respect", The Source, November 1993.Woodson, AJ. "Whatever Happened to Battles???", On The Go, 1997. Apart from some social commentary like Melle Mel's one verse on "Superrappin'", Kurtis Blow's ruefully comedic "The Breaks" (Mercury, 1980) and a spurt of records following the success of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (Sugar Hill, 1982), the old school specialized lyrically in party rhymes.Shapiro, p.327
Notable artists
David Toop writes of 1984 that "pundits were writing obituaries for hip-hop, a passing fad" which "Hollywood had mutated into an all-singing, all-dancing romance" in movies like Flashdance and Breakin'. Against this, Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, and the label Def Jam were "consciously hardcore", "a reaction against the populist trend in hip-hop at the time", and "an explosive emergence of an underground alternative".Toop, p. xi For Peter Shapiro, Run-DMC's 1983 two-song release "It's Like That"/"Sucker M.C.'s" "completely changed hip-hop" "rendering everything that preceded it distinctly old school with one fell swoop."Shapiro, p.327Shapiro, p. 401 In a 47-point timeline of hip-hop and its antecedents spanning 64 years, Shapiro lists this release as his 43rd point. Reviewing Toop's book in the LA Weekly, Oliver Wang of Soul Sides concurs, hailing Run-DMC as inaugurating the new school of rap.Wang, Oliver. , LA Weekly, March 8, 2000. Retrieved on July 2, 2008.
Run-DMC
Run-DMC rapped over the most sparse of musical backing tracks. In the case of "Sucker M.C.'s", there was a loud, Oberheim DMX drum machine, a few scratches and nothing else, while the rhymes harangued weak rappers and contrasted them to the group's success. "It's Like That" was an aggressively delivered message rap whose social commentary has been defined variously as "objective fatalism",Christgau, Robert. Consumer Guide , Village Voice, 1984. Retrieved on July 2, 2008. "frustrated and renunciatory",Rose, Tricia. "'Fear of a Black Planet': Rap Music and Black Cultural Politics in the 1990s", The Journal of Negro Education, Summer 1991. and just plain "reportage".Breihan, Tom. "Run-DMC / King of Rock / Raising Hell / Tougher Than Leather" , Pitchfork, September 23, 2005. Retrieved on July 2, 2008. Run-DMC wore street clothes, tracksuits, sneakers, one even wore glasses. Their only possible concession to an image extraneous to that of kids on the street was the stylistic flourish of black fedoras atop their heads. This stood in sharp contrast to the popular artists of the time, who had variously bedecked themselves with feathers, suede boots, jerri curls, and red or even pink leather suits.Dennis, Reginald C. "Born Again", The Source, February 1993.