Word: kool
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scariest moment of deja vu came during their version of Kool and the Gang's "Celebration." The opening dance moves seemed to be directly lifted from the repertoire of 'N SYNC's predecessors, Boston's own New Kids On The Block. I started having flashbacks to "The Right Stuff" and for a brief second wondered if they would parody their whole boy band phenomenon-frenzy by covering that song. Sadly, it was not to be, but it would have been a nice touch of irony from a band sometimes compared to that late 80s merchandising empire/band...
...room of a Bronx high-rise, was a success: Clive and Cindy charged 25[cents] for girls and 50[cents] for boys, and it went till 4 a.m. Pretty soon Clive was getting requests to do more parties, and in 1973 he gave his first block party. He was Kool Herc now--that was the graffito tag he used to write on subway cars--and he got respect. At 18 he was the first break-beat deejay, reciting rhymes over the "break," or instrumental, part of the records he was spinning. He had two turntables going and two copies...
Joseph Saddler loved music too. He thought Kool Herc was a god--but he thought he could do better. Saddler figured most songs had only about 10 seconds that were good, that really got the party going, so he wanted to stretch those 10 seconds out, create long nights of mixing and dancing. Holed up in his Bronx bedroom, he figured out a way to listen to one turntable on headphones while the other turntable was revving up the crowd. That way a deejay could keep two records spinning seamlessly, over and over again. Herc was doing it by feel...
Sitting in the conference room on the 24th floor of the Time & Life Building, Kool Herc thinks back to the start of rap with a mixture of fondness and sadness. He'd like to see rappers "recognize their power, in terms of politics and economics." Hip-hop has not made him powerful or rich. "I never looked at it like that," he says. "I was just having fun. It was like a hobby to me." But he would appreciate more recognition. When he calls local radio stations, looking for an extra ticket or two for a hip-hop show...
...Julia Scher came back with a spoken word piece about engineering for the environment. So to make a long story short, you can have Julia Scher from MIT sharing a space with someone from Wu-Tang Clan, or Mariko Mori, a conceptual artist singing a Buddhist mantra, skipping to Kool Keith talking about being a schizophrenic. This is the theater of voices. On another level, it's entirely virtual. None of these people interacted with one another; they interacted with these beats and fragments of sound I put together. So it's totally conceptual about presence and absence. So whether...