Herc Your Enthusiasm (1)

By: Lucy Sante
July 29, 2013

First in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating old-school hip hop.

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SPOONIE GEE | “SPOONIN’ RAP” | 1979

Spoonie Gee’s “Spoonin’ Rap,” released in 1979, was the first solo rap recording. Its release was strictly local at first, but it was epochal. The label of the 12-inch single (Sound of New York, USA QC708A) has the plain look of early rap records, about midway between the crude rubber-stamp graphics of Jamaican releases and the slickness of disco 45s. Under the umbrella of its title, which applies to both sides, it has subtitles: “A Drive Down the Street”; “I Was Spanking and Freaking” (A side); “I Don’t Drink Smoke or Gamble Neither”; “I’m the Cold Crushing Lover” (B side). Half are episodes and half are claims, set out like signposts, like undercards on a boxing poster, like chapter titles in a Henry Fielding novel.

Its musical underpinning is the “Patty Duke” groove by Cloud One, a studio outfit headed by Peter Brown, who like the Jamaicans squeezed the most from a track, releasing “Patty Duke” as an instrumental as well as backing two other raps: Scoopy’s “Scoopie Rap” and Family’s “Family Rap.” (Note that this one was supposed to be “Spoonie Rap”; the misprint entered history.) Once the synthesizer accents are excised for talkover purposes, what is left is a sinuous bassline and a chattering, cymbal-driven drum loop. It is a walking rhythm, loose-jointed and relaxed, which opens itself up to receive and transmit what the talker has to say — with echo if necessary. In Spoonie’s case, that’s plenty.

His acknowledged coinages — “Yes yes ya’all”; “One for the money, two for the time” — immediately wove themselves into actual street talk, not to mention numerous other records; they entered the bloodstream. But since it was one of the very first hiphop records, who could tell even then which tags were his and which just floated in unmoored from the great hiphop folk-lyric river? “From the north, the south, from east or west” is totally schoolyard, but who made up “Like a lime to a lemon and a lemon to a lime”?

Gabriel Jackson’s name is Spoonie Gee and he wants to be known as “the metropolitician of the microphone.” He’s a man’s threat and a woman’s pet, “known as the mamselle’s joy” (which sounds as if it came from “Auprès de ma blonde”). He’s a smooth talker and a midnight stalker, and “the image of a man they call the J. D. Walker” (which comes from J.D.’s Revenge, directed by Arthur Marx, 1976). He permits himself to rhyme “He pulled out his gun, but did not shoot” with “Come on everybody, let’s Patty Duke.”

He goes on and on and on and on with his fronting, but no wonder: Spoonie is claiming territory, like the pioneer that he is, asserting his moral right to make an effigy of himself out of words that will occupy the space it occupies. He is Adam, putting on the primal naming ritual of hiphop. Henceforth everybody who passes by on Rhyme Street will have to pay tribute. He carved the first catchphrases out of raw vinyl.

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Herc Your Enthusiasm (1)

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