Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and Welcome to the Bay. Local News to Keep You Rooted. Today marks 50 years of hip hop. This anniversary traces back to August 11th, 1973, when a teenage deejay Kool Herc, mixed records at a back to school party in the Bronx. But before that, long before hip hop even had a name, the Bay Area was laying the foundations of hip hop culture. Even if the region doesn’t get the credit.
Eric Arnold: When I started digging into this, I noticed that there were all these things, all these really kind of foundational elements of hip hop that were not only identified with the Bay Area but originated with the Bay Area.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So today we’re talking about KQED’s That’s My Word series, a yearlong exploration of the Bay Area’s contributions to hip hop culture. We’ll talk about how the Bay has shaped some of the most important elements of the genre and how the Bay Area was hip hop before there even was hip hop. Stay with us.
Nastia Voynovskaya: Bay Area hip hop is so diverse. We’re really talking about it in a geographic sense.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This is Nastia Voynovskaya, associate editor of KQED Arts and Culture. She co-edited KQED’s That’s My Word series, exploring the Bay’s contributions to hip hop with veteran hip hop journalist Eric Arnold.
Nastia Voynovskaya: We’re talking about five decades of evolution and this region that has so many distinct cities with their own scenes. You know, we have Oakland. Vallejo. Richmond. San Francisco. San Jose is Palo Alto, Pittsburgh. Fairfield. All different corners of the bay. And the artists from those scenes cross-pollinate and collaborate and influence one another. Even when you go back to the eighties, when the Bay Area scene really started taking off. In Oakland alone, you have two short making mob music and rapping about the underworld of the streets.
MUSIC: Just like we had to work for my eight years on the mark and I’m not joking. So to start coming straight from Oakland.
Nastia Voynovskaya: You have Digital Underground making fun, funky, silly and expressive music that tells people it’s okay to be different and weird. My name is.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: And you have M.C.Hammer making pop rap and dancing and entertaining.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: And in San Francisco, there is Paris, who is known as the Black Panther of hip hop’s wisdom.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: So all of these elements, the street, the revolutionary, experimental and commercial aspects are mixing together and influencing each other, and they continue to do so. So there’s not one sound or one style of Bay Area hip hop, and it’s all of these things.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Eric Arnold, you’ve covered hip hop in the Bay Area for many years. Have you felt that Bay Area hip hop has been overlooked.
Eric Arnold: Almost every single day? I mean, it has it’s almost a defining characteristic of the bay, you know, And it it’s sort of the underground underdog mentality, the chip on the shoulder type thing, though we’re different where, you know, we’re not L.A., we’re not New York. But we made hella contributions to hip hop’s culture at its esthetic over the decades. You know, of course, we’ve created all these phrases like pushes that have gone on to become part of rap’s lexicon.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You wrote a piece for that’s My Word, titled The Bay Area was hip hop before there was hip hop. So I want to stick with you for a little bit. First of all, why go back to before hip hop was even a word?
Eric Arnold: Hip hop was created or invented in 1973, but it wasn’t even named until 1981. So that means that that it was a culture of flops. And in development that entire time, it was still evolving. It was still emerging. So when I started digging into this, I noticed that there were all of these things, all these really kind of foundational elements of hip hop that were not only identified with the Bay Area, but originated with the Bay Area prior to 1973 or, you know, concurrent with, you know, 1973 to 1981. Whatever time period, you you know, you want to put on that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: In one of Eric’s pieces for that’s my word. He lays out three key ways that the Bay Area shaped hip hop that you can still see and hear today. The first is Boogaloo, a street dance movement pioneered by black youth in East Oakland. The second is Bay Area Funk. And third, the political movements that influenced a social consciousness in Bay Funk that we would later find in hip hop. Well, let me dig into Boogaloo with you. You describe it as sort of the ancestor of pop locking years before hip hop had a name and that it’s really this like whole culture with its own rituals and esthetic to it also, right?
Eric Arnold: It is. Back in like 1964. It was youth driven. It came from the inner city. It was this inventive dance that kind of started with James Brown. But then people in East Oakland just started adding moves and developing this dance vocabulary and having competitive battles. As you do that, you actually create a cultural esthetic. So it becomes like this whole movement that spreads from East Oakland to West Oakland to North Oakland to Berkeley, to Emeryville, to Richmond, to San Francisco. When it gets to San Francisco, it’s called strutting. When it gets to Richmond, it’s called robotic. So it was very, very foundational and it occupied a place in sort of like the cultural milieu of the times that hip hop occupies now.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And then it eventually reaches L.A., Right. How does it sort of transform into some of the dances that we now associate with hip hop.
Eric Arnold: With Boogaloo? There were certain techniques or groups that became foundational to that, get it taking where you kind of move your hand like a clock, like the like the second hand of a clock on double tripping, which is like kind of like a side to side motion where you’re kind of you’re going forward, but moving kind of side to side, kind of sideways, getting down. And the opening hit, which is like, you’re dancing, then all of a sudden you stop on the beat, we’re gonna die. Well, that got integrated into what L.A. was doing, which was locking The Oakland hit became the pop. So that added the pop to the lot. And then you get pop locking. And then when breakdancing becomes integrated with pop locking in L.A. in the early eighties, the Oakland hit or the pop becomes part of that esthetic.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I know. Aside from Boogaloo, another foundational element that you talk about in your piece is Bay Area Funk. How is Bay Area Funk in particular important to hip hop’s early sound and also esthetic and ideology?
Eric Arnold: So you had funk invented by James Brown, and James Brown was an established artist. Right. So he already had a sound. But when Sly Stone came up, he has, like, this entirely different approach. He was this musical prodigy raised in the church in Vallejo. He had produced psychedelic records. And he starts to emphasize the interplay between the bass and the drum a little bit more and also creates space in the music.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: And his bass player, Larry Graham, created the slap bass sound of the Pet Express, which then becomes the ubiquitous sound of Bach. Every fan group picks up that sound.
MUSIC: And all that stuff.
Eric Arnold: But Sly Stone also crosses over to this mainstream multiethnic audience, and he’s able to do that while retaining a black identity so that every single black artist starts trying to get that sly Stone sound and do the same thing. And if you look at hip hop, hip hop has sort of embodied all of those characteristics.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And another, I think, characteristic of Bay Funk and in particular Sly Stone’s sort of version of Funk, is this sort of social consciousness that he brings to the music. Right? And I know you also sort of point to this social consciousness as really central to Bay Area hip hop. As we, of course, know, this region has this really long legacy of progressive politics and multicultural social justice movements. So how do these social movements in the Bay Area in particular also become foundational to hip hop everywhere?
Eric Arnold: So Bay Area, fuck it. You know, you mentioned that it was very progressive. I mean, it also censured women such as Sugar, Pride, as Tanto, the Pointer Sisters, and the Bride of Frankenstein.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: And there was a time when all of a sudden, like Funk said, Well, we need to be relevant to these times. And people are talking about liberation movements. And that all started with the Bay Area.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: And that that sort of because that’s a foundational element it sort of gets transposed into hip hop.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: So the Black Panthers were happening at the same time that the funk movement was happening and the boogaloo movement was happening. But they went national very early on in like the late sixties. They had more than 30 national chapters at one point. And the Black Panthers actually had a punk band called the Lumpen that addressed political topics back in the day. They also had a newsletter that had a circulation of between 350 to 400000. So when you think about Chuck D’s quote, that rap is at CNN of Black America for the Panther newsletter was a CNN of Black America before there was CNN or even before there was rap.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: In 1968, the Black Panthers opened up a field office in Bronx River. Now, Bronx River is the birthplace of hip hop. And at that field office, they did outreach to the exact same. You became the first generation of New York hip hop. So literally, the Black Panther ideology is embedded in hip hop’s DNA, afros, the leather jackets, the sort of militant radical self-expression that they had. That’s all part of the esthetic.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: Then you think about people like Tupac, whose parents were Panthers. He was a Panther cub. And Tupac sort of embodies this idea of the next generation and their expression. You know, not being Foxx, but being hip hop.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Nastia, I want to bring you in here and kind of come back to the present day as well. What are some of the ways that you see some of this history that Eric is talking about in hip hop today?
Nastia Voynovskaya: Yeah, I mean, Eric mentioned the nineties generation being Panther cubs. Now you have and the millennial and Gen Z generations, Panther, Grand Cub’s.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: League, one of the more popular Bay Area rappers out. You know Rex Fries has his dad kind of grew up around the Black Panthers and he infuses his music with that political consciousness even though he’s not a purely political artist. We are about.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: He and other rappers that are gaining prominence right now, like Le Russell and Samba, also talk about community healing and their own personal healing, which is I feel like that’s the way that our generation’s kind of evolving that conversation with more consciousness around mental health and things like that.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: And then, you know, the other elements of Bay Area hip hop we’ve been talking about. And those conversation are still present and evolving in different ways.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: And Larry June, who has a hit record out right now he’s kind of carrying over that funky sound but in a more modernized where he kind of has that old school player element that’s been foundational to Bay Area hip hop since the two short days.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: You’re out. Also have artists like PUA sweetie drawing from behavior move man making that sort of uptempo party music but in a current way and you know their music is gaining mainstream traction.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, I feel like something that I’ve also noticed about Bay Area Music is this almost sort of DIY, entrepreneurial, independent spirit that I think Eric was describing earlier is very sort of underdog. How is that sort of a characteristic of Bay Area hip hop? And and does that also to you have roots in some of the history that we were talking about?
Eric Arnold: I mean, when you go back to. You know, artists selling tapes on consignment and selling out the trunk and outselling national artists. So the Bay Area was doing equal or better independently without radio play, without distribution. So I think that kind of typifies the independent mentality, having this mentality where you don’t feel like you have to conform to commercialism. But I also think that that connects to Afrofuturism and Afrofuturism as part of the Black Arts movement, which is also rooted in the Bay and rooted in Sun Ra and his type of expression. And then we see that in, you know, Bay Area rappers like Dell and Black Alicia’s and the Mystic Journeymen and how they’ve just come completely from left field and said, Okay. We’ve got this piano player stuff on one hand, but then we’ve got the super abstract backpack, stuff like that, and it’s all hip hop.
Nastia Voynovskaya: He talks about artists like to for any 40 selling tapes out the trunk. You know that continued with CD is one those became available and then Bay area artists also really ran with the early social media like the pack and Little B really exploded on MySpace. So so did the hyphy movement, actually. And then, you know, artists like really embraced YouTube in its early days and people say that Mag Dres trill tbh predated blogging because he made these crazy DIY. A party documentary is about just all of his after hours escapades and kind of showing off like the sideshow culture and party culture of the bay. So Bay Area artists have always found a way, even if we don’t have the infrastructure of the mainstream music industry behind us. And I think, yeah, that underdog mentality still really defines the Bay.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: Pilo on his song put me on some says last year they even like the bay You know that’s something that people sing along to Any time that plays in the club and just wear it as a badge of pride.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I want to look ahead here with the two of you. Nazia We’re celebrating 50 years of hip hop, but how are you thinking about where hip hop is heading, particularly here in the Bay Area?
Nastia Voynovskaya: Well, one really exciting thing we’ve been able to do with this project is include a lot of women’s voices and also kind of critically examine Bay Area hip hop with love and as fans and practitioners of the culture. The Bay Area hip hop scene is revolutionary and progressive in all these ways, but we’ve really seen misogyny get a huge pass because of that underdog mentality in the Bay Area. People have been hesitant to, you know, also criticize some aspects of the culture. But the scene is also evolving to include a lot more women’s voices. So now you have artists like Kinky Will Kill a stony alien marketeer.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Nastia Voynovskaya: Now I’m really excited to see how those conversations continue to develop, especially around women and queer and trans folks. These are all artists who are just super bold, expressive and captivating on stage, and I’m so excited to see how they’re going to evolve.
MUSIC: [MUSIC]
Eric Arnold: Well, I see it as a progression and I see it as a continuum and I see it as evolution. All of those things have continued to happen with hip hop in terms of it being a space where multiculturalism can flourish and come together. And we saw that with Sly Stone in, you know, everyday people, but we also saw it with to shore added lipids to shore it and you know, all the great Bay Area anthems, right? All of these things that brought people together and were really continuations of these social movements, these cultural movements, these political movements, these pushes for economic equity that began decades ago. And so history really is cyclical. When you look at the 16th Street train station in Oakland, it’s such a historic location. And knowing that it has all this history with with the Pullman porters. And then it was the place where they choreographed the turf dancers and tell me when to go really makes it seem like, you know, all that history is connected. Just one just one housekeeping thing. So we did mention Mac Dre R.I.P., but we also have to say R.I.P. to Dream. Gift of Gab. Zombie shot. Gee, all of our OG’s that we’ve lost along with Oscar Grant, all of our OGs that we’ve lost along the way who are still with us and we carry their memory to this day.
Nastia Voynovskaya: Yeah, The Jacka, too.
Eric Arnold: The Jacka.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Traxamillion.
Eric Arnold: Traxamillion. Mr. C from RBL. I mean, the list goes on.
Nastia Voynovskaya: Yeah, but that’s a big reason for why we really want to thoroughly document and preserve this history, because unfortunately, we’re losing some of our hip hop legends.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Eric and Nastia, I feel like I could talk to you all for so much longer than this. But thank you so much for coming on the show.
Nastia Voynovskaya: Thanks so much for having us.
Eric Arnold: Yeah, thank you. I can’t I can’t wait for this to come out.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Nastia Voynovskaya, associate editor of arts and culture for KQED, and Eric Arnold, a veteran hip hop journalist and co contributing editor of KQED’s That’s My Word. Nastia, Eric and the whole team are going to continue their coverage of Bay Area hip hop throughout the year. The series is also led by KQED’s Pendarvis Harshaw and Gabe Meline. Check out all the amazing work that they’re doing on this project at Bay Area Hip hop dot com. We’ve also got a bunch of other links in our show notes, including where to celebrate 50 years of hip hop right here in the Bay.
MUSIC: [MUSIC].
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This conversation was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca. It was produced and scored by me. Alan Montecillo is our senior editor. The rest of our team here at KQED includes Jen Chien, the director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger, our podcast operations manager. We also get audience engagement support from César Saldaña. Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening. Peace
