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". . . oh there was this young reporter I did adore/So I rocked the vicious rhymes like I never had before/She said damn, 'Fly guy, I'm in love with you'/That Casanova legend must be true . . ."
("Rapper's Delight," as recorded by Sugarhill Gang, 1979)
On a public basketball court in the Bronx in the late Seventies,
local DJ Casanova -- a.k.a. "Grandmaster Caz" -- penned these
rhymes in a smooth but familiar neighborhood style that rolled
effortlessly in and out of a stitched-together string of musical
breaks. With a "hip, hop, hip to the hippyhippy, hiphiphop and ya
don't stop," Caz and his five rhyming and spinning associates, the
Cold Crush Brothers, used their own words to revamp classic funky
jams that had not yet lost their soul to the tame sound of club
disco. But while Caz chased local acclaim in the concrete and
barbed wire "studios" of public parks, project lots and playgrounds
across New York, his virgin words were stolen by his promoter,
resurfacing in a song that would garner more attention than Caz
ever enjoyed. The song was "Rapper's Delight," by the newly formed
Sugarhill Gang, and it became the first rap single to reach No. 1
on the charts.
Twenty-one years later, the legends of the Sugarhill pop stars and
the unremunerated Grandmaster Caz enjoy disparate limelights in
Harlem. The trademark rainbow letters and baby blue background of
the "Rapper's Delight" twelve-inch now adorn the five-disc
Sugarhill Records Story box set, selling at the new Harlem
HMV for $50. Across 125th St. at the legendary Apollo Theater, Caz
and fellow hip-hop forerunner Kurtis Blow (of "The Breaks" fame)
deejay and narrate a well-meaning, but lackluster production called
Echo Park: The Hip-Hop Musical. Intended as the first
theatrical look at the tough times and motivations that gave birth
to the rap and hip-hop industry, Echo Park boasts
bounce-splitting dive-rolls by New York's b-boy elite but falls
flat as a cultural history lesson.
Playwrights Kelly D. Scott and Sean Couch's freshman production
attempts to portray the truth about the budding hip-hop scene by
focusing on the motivations of unknown DJs and MCs between 1979 and
1981. Their story is built around seventeen-year-old Scott Jenkins'
(Bronx MC Derrik "Nine" Keyes) come-uppance as a
funk-and-soul-loving DJ in the Harlem projects, where his skills
playing "just the parts people really want to hear" off his
mother's James Brown records make him a star at neighborhood park
parties. As floor-grabbing and gravity-skipping dance numbers bump
the story through miles of awkward filler, Scott's mixing skills
lead him to battle for king of the hill at the famous Bronx DJ
battle spot, "Echo Park." His life mirrors history when his "Cold
Crush Brother" buddy "Doc," played by Robert Beaty (a one-time
backup rapper for Biz Markie), steals his lyrics and makes it big
as an MC.
Yet for some reason, the play refuses to make the comparison to the
Sugarhill swindle explicit, even though co-narrator Caz openly
refers to Scott's life in light of his own. Scott's family life,
the role of the Cold Crush Brothers and the bad-guy promoter, and
even the transformed cheeseball musical hit and "sell-out" to
mainstream music are all part of the script. While these
similarities are recognizable to some audiences, why use details
like the names of the good-guys in a story if the "bad-guys" and
subject of controversy are fictionalized?
Such apparent copouts would be less glaring if the rest of the
story didn't seem so tired. The cliched dramatic sequences
involving Scott's alcoholic, would-be singer mom, his pimped-out,
DJ Red Alert lookalike father figure (accompanied by hammy
Seventies Blaxpoitation soundtrack music every time he slides
onstage), and his competitive battle breaking are paced as clumsily
as a high school play. The dialogue is even worse. "Your mom be
buggin!" Doc tells a deflated Scott after his mom tells him he
can't take his turntables out of the apartment; the line is
repeated as a running would-be punch line throughout the rest of
the play.
Meanwhile, star narrators DJ Caz and Kurtis Blow alternately spin,
scratch and speak in between scene changes, sometimes relating to
the characters onstage, other times simply rattling off lists of
important Old Schoolers with no clear relevance to the dramatic
action. Blow ceaselessly delivers over-used, overly dramatized
catch phrases like "The DJ is the man, and he gets the party
started right, but I am the MC and I've got to rock the mic,"
without elaborating on their meaning. It is also disappointing that
this headliner, whose rap single "Christmas Rappin'" actually made
it onto the pop charts even before the Sugarhill Gang emerged, only
performs one song ("The Breaks") at the end of the show.
Writing and acting flaws aside, Echo Park does boast some
of the best street dancing since Breakin'. The pro
ensemble of b-boys and fly girls cut up dance moves, then turn them
literally on their heads, spinning out upside down to land in
arms-crossed lay-backs with the same self-assuredness and "betcha
can't do this"-attitude that DJs employ mixing and matching beats.
As the dancers spin impossible upside down rhythmic moves and flip
their whole bodies in the air to honor a sound they understood,
Echo Park reminds the audience that Old School began as an
in-your-face reinventing of what little these pioneers had. Taking
grim surroundings, sounds that weren't quite right, even a
mainstream America that did not support them, they mixed, patched,
and scratched through the rough spots until they could flip
everything over and finally come out on top.
Echo Park is intended as the first installment in a
projected trilogy on the full history of hip-hop. If it retains its
funding, one can only hope that the writers and actors will
eventually hit their stride and catch up with the dancers. But
until then, would-be students of hip-hop history are best directed
to the record store.
JENNIFER ODELL
(June 15, 2000)