The BeatTips Manual

The Art of Beatmaking, The Hip Hop/Rap Music Tradition, and The Common Composer

Amir Said

• Publisher: Superchamp, Inc.
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780989398633
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

'The BeatTips Manual' (Amir Said) is the definitive study of the art of beatmaking (hip hop production). Brilliantly divided into five major parts - a riveting History part, an extensive Instruction (how-to) part, an insightful Interviews part, which features exclusive interviews with DJ Premier, DJ Toomp, Marley Marl, 9th Wonder and more, an explosive Music Theory part, and a Business part - 'The BeatTips Manual' is robust, detailed, and comprehensive. Containing a sharp analysis of the origins of beatmaking, as well as its key aesthetics, principles, priorities, and predilections, 'The BeatTips Manual' is an incisive look at the art of beatmaking - and an intense read. Not only the most complete examination of the hip hop/rap music process, it's also among the leading studies of hip hop culture itself. Destined to expand and transform traditional ideas about musicians, musicianship, and musical processes, 'The BeatTips Manual' is one of the most important and innovative music studies ever published.

Part 1

HISTORY

Many of those new to beatmaking either haven't made enough effort to learn the art form comprehensively, or they lack the resources to do so. Therefore, they are unfamiliar with the root structure and nuance of beatmaking and hip hop culture in general. This is why a study of the history of beatmaking and hip hop culture is critical. For it is through the unraveling of this history that we are all taken towards a truer understanding of hip hop's and beatmaking's essence and significance, both then and now. Also, this part covering the history of hip hop culture, hip hop/rap music, and beatmaking is especially crucial because the best way to preserve the culture and art form is by learning about its origins and its earliest developments; which makes learning from the earliest available resources and/or devoted practitioners of the art form essential. The key to the history and initial intentions of the art form can be found in the actions of its principle architects. Regardless of other opinions, theories, or assumptions, the principle architects remain the highest authorities.

I should further add that despite what some contemporaries may have you believe, the newest thing, trend, or development is always, essentially, a throwback or a homage to an earlier time within a given tradition. Hence, with the knowledge of the historical context in which hip hop/rap music was created, as well as with a historical account of the developments that occurred in the beatmaking tradition, you will be more comfortable in your moves towards innovation. Finally, as with any art form, it is necessary for beatmakers, being the auteurs that we are, to have a solid foundation (i.e. a healthy knowledge base and accurate historical understanding) in order to more effectively make beats.

Here, I should point out what kind of history exists in this part of the book. First, while this book is fundamentally about the beatmaking tradition as it exists within the hip hop/rap music tradition, no musical tradition can be properly understood outside of the context from which it was born. Therefore, the history part of this book is primarily concerned with the formative years of hip hop culture, hip hop/rap music, and, of course, the beatmaking tradition. Second, my aim is to present an accurate, objective audit of hip hop, one that is based on the historical evidence as it truly was, regardless of how favorable that historical evidence may have been or is to one group or the other. Point is, frank discussions based on the factual conditions that led to the formation (or formulation) of hip hop are critical to any real understanding of hip hop culture, hip hop/rap music, or beatmaking. Finally, it is not my purpose to romanticize the early history of hip hop. I'm certainly not concerned with sanitizing hip hop's story, or presenting a neat and clean "version" of hip hop's earliest beginnings in an effort to make some readers more comfortable. If the details of the historical backdrop of hip hop and its formation cause a level of discomfort for some readers, particularly with regards to the South Bronx Disaster, then I consider the history part of this study a success.

Chapter 1

Backdrop to Hip Hop:
The Story of the
South Bronx Disaster

The South Bronx...was the death trap. The most ugliest place on the face of the earth was the South Bronx. –Benjy Melendez, founder of the Ghetto Brothers

The Bronx, where I grew up, has even become an international code word for our epoch's accumulated urban nightmares: drugs, gangs, arson, murder, terror, thousands of buildings abandoned, neighborhoods transformed into garbage- and brick-strewn wilderness. –Marshall Berman, ca. 1978

Patterns of Paragraphs Based on Ruin –Rakim

Like any culture, hip hop persuades its participants to adopt its style and attitude in every aspect from language to fashion to dance to even how one walks. Upon entering hip hop culture (or dare I say the hip hop way of life), those not born into the culture and traditions of hip hop learn early on that they must draft any number of unwritten rules. From street dress codes, to physical posturings, to the adaptation of a uniquely enunciated vocabulary, and, of course, an aggressive and competitive world view, hip hop culture is, in some ways, a way of life. It has often (correctly) been said that hip hop started in the South Bronx. Although this statement is true on the face of it, it's incomplete. A more accurate statement is that hip hop started in the streets of the South Bronx. It is that very detail — "the streets" — that gives us the most appropriate insight into the origins of hip hop and, subsequently, the longevity of it. However, for most, the story of how the ubiquitous South Bronx "streets" were created is unknown. In fact, the narrative of poverty, crime, and violence in the South Bronx is often either taken for granted or worse, over simplified. Still, the cause and reality of the backdrop to hip hop is far more sinister than one might imagine.

The principles, ideas, approaches, and traditions of hip hop culture are not manufactured components of a conglomerate enterprise or the trickle down characteristics of an elite society. The hip hop ethos has its own backdrop, a backdrop that is the result of a combination of many fascinating, inhumane, and tragic factors. The backdrop of hip hop has been described before in different texts by various scolars and historians. However, I should point out that much of what this backdrop is comprised of has yet to really reach the consciousness of those who are squarely outside of the upper echelon of academia. Therefore, in this chapter, I illuminate the backdrop, and the little-known backstory, of hip hop, not only for those who might not otherwise be privy to it, but also for those who may not be aware of the fundamental mitigating circumstances behind hip hop's origins. Also, I believe that in order for one to more accurately understand the "soul" and fundamental life force of hip hop culture and rap (its chief musical expression), it's important to first grasp some understanding of the backdrop of hip hop.

Spectacular Ruin

At the end of the 1973 blaxploitation movie classic Black Caesar, Tommy Gibbs, the film's protagonist, limps out of the subway into the post-industrial South Bronx. The Harlem gangster, who having just escaped an assassination attempt, sees the place of his youth as perhaps a temporary hideaway and safe haven. But when he returns to the Bronx he finds that it has been burnt out and abandoned. As he struggles to draw meaning from the hill of rubble and stones that lie where the entrance to his boyhood home used to be, he is met by a small gang of teens, who swarm on him like a pack of vultures. They beat him and take his belongings, then leave him for dead. At this point, the camera pulls back to reveal a neighborhood of ruins...and the movie ends.

If you lived in the South Bronx in the 1970s, this scene from Black Caesar would not have shocked you, you would have recognized it all too well. The abandoned, post-war-like world that was so accurately depicted in the movie would have been eerily familiar to you. But to the average resident of the South Bronx (then and now) and the average hip hop/rap fan, the causes of the dreadful South Bronx Disaster are little known. To truly understand the conditions of the South Bronx in the 1970s, and to really have a complete grasp of the origins of hip hop culture and rap music, you must first look at how the South Bronx of "ill repute" was actually created.

Robert Moses's People Removal

In the late 1930s and 1940s, cities across the United States enacted "urban renewal policies" and began to create redevelopment programs. These early projects, which were said to be for the "greater good" of the community, were generally focused on slum clearance and were implemented by local public housing authorities, which were responsible for both clearing slums and building new affordable housing. In some ways, urban renewal programs can be seen as an outgrowth of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the massive legislative agenda which sought to help the United States recover from the Great Depression that had began with the stock market crash of 1929. The most notable and prominent example of urban renewal (that was ostensibly for the greater good) took place in New York City between the 1930s and 1970s, under the direction of one man, Robert Moses.

Robert Moses, who was not an elected official but an unelected bureaucrat with immense political power and connections, gained his power through his reputation for getting large construction projects done. In fact, he had gained so much power over the years that the many elected officials whom he was supposedly accountable to instead became dependent on him. But if his power made him one of the largest political figures in New York City, then his take on modernism and urban renewal certainly made him one of the most controversial figures as well.

Robert Moses harbored an astonishingly insensitive modernist view of public structures and the public itself. Many of his most impressive and notable public projects strongly suggest that he consistently favored automobile traffic over human and community needs. Moreover, Moses was obsessed with building new projects, "I'm just going to keep on building. You do the best you can to stop it," he quipped when pressed in the 1950s about his brand and pace of building in and around New York City. Throughout the latter part of his career, Moses's public works were so immense and rampant that they displaced hundreds of thousands of New York City residents, and destroyed thousands of traditional neighborhoods along the way.

Robert Moses's controversial career in public life stretched from the early 1920s to the late 1960s. But if it could be said that Moses's earlier public works (prior to 1950) were distinguished by design and beauty, then it must be said that his projects of the 1950s and 60s were distinguished by brutality and insensitivity. To be fair, in the late 1930s and 1940s, other cities across the United States enacted urban renewal policies and began to create redevelopment programs. However, the concept, objective, and directive of Moses's Urban Renewal was not entirely in line with that of the rest of the country at that time. Through the programs of his "special agency," the Committee on Slum Clearance, Moses masterminded innumerable construction projects that consistently displaced families, disorganized communities, and, ultimately, devastated the lives of many New Yorkers. For this chapter's purpose, it's Moses's New York City projects of the 1950s and 1960s that are of major importance. It was some of these projects — specifically, the Cross Bronx Expressway — that collectively shattered the South Bronx, and set in motion the disastrous conditions from which hip hop emerged.

For more than 30 years, beginning in the 1930s and ending in the late 1960s, Robert Moses oversaw a magnitude of immensely complex building projects that were seemingly designed to make Manhattan Island an easy commute for rich and upper middle-class whites, who had begun moving to New York suburbs and upstate during the late 1940s. There was the West Side Highway, an ambitious project (as were all of Moses's projects) that saw expressway miles stretch from the lower West Side of Manhattan all the way upstate into Westchester. There was the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, which ran from the edge of Long Island and connected to Manhattan via the Battery Tunnel, another one of Moses's creations. There was the Tri Boro Bridge project, a true triumph of modernism that connected the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan through a complex web of highways, parkways, and bridges. There were innumerable parks and housing developments, and then there was the Cross Bronx Expressway, a colossal expressway which carved a hole right through the center of the Bronx. Each one of the aforementioned projects did their part in displacing millions of New York City residents, and disrupting neighborhoods and communities throughout Manhattan and the outerboroughs. But of all Moses's famed construction projects, none played a bigger role in the devastation and destruction of the South Bronx than the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Construction on the Cross Bronx Expressway began in 1953. To make room for the immense and unprecedented expressway, more than a dozen solid, settled, and densely populated neighborhoods were literally blasted and bulldozed, forcing an estimated 60,000 working- and lower middle-class people — mostly Jews, but many Italians, blacks, and Irish as well — out of their homes, effectively destroying solid and settled neighborhoods that had stood for 30 years. Construction for the Cross Bronx Expressway ended in the early 1960s. But this ending was only the very beginning of the ruin and devastation that the Bronx would be forced to endure.

As more than one hundred thousand whites abruptly fled the Bronx during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in what is commonly known as the "white flight from the Bronx," the apartments they left behind (some literally overnight) were crammed with impoverished blacks and Latinos, who had been relocated under the auspices of urban renewal and the Welfare Department. This wholesale move-in spread panic among many whites who had stayed in the Bronx, and it accelerated their flight to the suburbs of Long Island and upstate New York. It's further worth noting that tens of thousands of blacks and Latinos had already been displaced before by Robert Moses's "slum clearance" programs — programs that were really nothing more than public cover for some of Moses's immense and overawing construction projects. In fact, nearly all of Moses's construction projects hurt poor non-whites the most. I note this not to imply that Moses was a racist or that he did not like black or Latino people; on the contrary, evidence suggests that Moses's wasn't particularly fond of people in general, particularly those he deemed as being "in the way" of his building. Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that nearly all of Moses's immense (often over reaching) construction projects inevitably hurt and devastated poor non-whites disproportionately more than any other group in New York.

Robert Moses's slum clearance programs ended in 1965, but again, by then, the South Bronx had literally been gutted and blasted by the Cross Bronx Expressway. And as the apartments that previously housed those whites (who took flight) were emptied out, they were reloaded with poor blacks and Latinos (most of which who were evicted and displaced from long settled neighborhoods in Greenwich Village and the West Side of Manhattan, again due to a number of Moses's vast projects), this white flight accelerated. And the landlords wasted no time in raising the rents on their new "problem" tenants.

Housing Disruption

By the time Robert Moses's slum clearance programs had ended, and after his power and influence had waned completely in 1970, housing overcrowding and social disruption had just begun its path to epidemic proportions. Between 1970 and 1980, more than 1.3 million white people had left New York.¹ But there were a total of two million people who were uprooted, with more than 600,000 poor blacks and Latinos being shuttled into the South Bronx, which by then was an area large enough to perhaps house little less than half that number.

Before...