Urban Xchange

By Mike Kim

One of the least covered aspects of music is a subculture in which obscure old records are dug up, dusted off, and used to create the backdrop for one of the most powerful forms of musical and social expressions of the 20th century; Hip-Hop music.

Known as "digging in the crates," it is an important part of Hip-Hop, which even some of the most diehard Rap fans don't know about.

You may have heard about "sampling." Many Rap/Hip-Hop producers have used a handful of bands and artists from the '70s (James Brown, George Clinton, Sly and Family Stone and maybe a few others). Did you know that the dope beats on some of your best-loved jams might have come from records by The Monkees, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Three Dog Night, nightclub crooner Joe Williams, or even Jell-O pudding salesman Bill Cosby? Movies and Broadway shows like "Hair," "The Lost Man" and "Death Wish" have been utilized to create many hard-core Hip-Hop tracks as well. A brief overview: hunting down hard-to-find records with funky break-beats began in the earliest days of Hip-Hop. Pioneers like DJ Kool Herc and Africa Bambaataa would come up with unknown records that would rock crowds in the parks and keep the competition befuddled.

Anyone could pull out a funk song like The Commodores' "Brickhouse," but you had to be a dedicated beat-digger to stumble upon a jam like "Hihache" by The Lafayette Afro Rock Band (an African recording) or "Sing A Simple Song" by Please (a Bambaataa discovery from the Philippines).

With the advent of sampling in the late '80s, the art of beat finding encountered a big resurgence. Many of the classic records were long out of print and nearly impossible to find, causing record stores in many areas to raise their prices astronomically. Nevertheless, a new generation of kids began to get their fingers dusty, sifting through mom and pop's collection of assorted 45s and LPs, searching for samples and drum break-beats on Jazz, Soul, and Rock records.

So what do Jazz, Soul and Rock from the early 70s have anything to do with Hip-Hop music? In fact, Hip-Hop is so closely interrelated with these forms of music that it wouldn't exist without them.

If you've heard Quincy Jones's "You've Got it Bad Girl" (AandM, 1973), ex-Cream bass player Jack Bruce's album entitled Things We Like (Atco, 1971), or the Loading Zone's self-titled album (RCA 1968), one cannot avoid having respect for the artists who have supplied the tunes for some of the most well-known Hip-Hop songs.

Critics will often degrade sampling and it's contribution towards Hip-Hop beats, claiming it is simply stealing another artist's original composition. Of course, to a certain degree this is true. As long as there's Hip-Hop, however, "digging in the crates" will always play a major role in creating the backdrop for the constantly growing and socially accepted form of music of the millennium.