Herc Your Enthusiasm (10)

By: Tim Carmody
August 9, 2013

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

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AFRIKA BAMBAATAA & THE JAZZY 5 | “JAZZY SENSATION (BRONX VERSION)” | 1981

Hip hop, like America its birthplace, and New York City its womb, is an e pluribus unum, many things that become one thing, a new thing which is all of them and none. Musically, hip hop comes from funk and jazz and soul and reggae as well as disco, rock, poetry, and pop. Thematically, hip hop is equal parts street violence, activist conscience, and block party. Genealogically, hip hop comes from that great satellite of Africa, the American South, and the Caribbean known as the South Bronx. And structurally, hip hop is the four new cultural forms identified by Afrika Bambaataa — emceeing, deejaying, breaking, and graffiti — plus the cultural soup and emerging self-consciousness that fosters and interconnects all four.

My favorite hip hop, especially before artists like Rakim and Nas figured out how to turn emcees into auteurs, pays tribute to this interplay between individual and group expression. “Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Version)” is my favorite example, and naturally, it’s not just because of Bambaataa. A dream team of three DJs are credited (and named) on the track: Bambaataa, DJ Red Alert (who went on to have an enormously important NYC radio show), and Jazzy Jay (instrumental in the formation of Def Jam records). The five emcees (Master Ice, Master Bee, Master Dee, AJ Les, and Mister Freeze), all of them from the Bronx’s Soundview housing projects (has there ever been a better name for the home of a hip hop group?) only recorded this one track together, but they fall in together flawlessly, harmonizing like a doo-wop group. It’s an embarrassment of riches in a genre driven by scarcity. There’s a reason why, when The Beastie Boys wanted to summarize and synthesize NYC hip hop in Paul’s Boutique, “Jazzy Sensation” (along with The Funky 4 + 1’s “That’s The Joint”) were their first stops.

The first call is unified, and directed to the crowd — the now utterly familiar ALL THE LADIES IN THE HOUSE, THE LADIES, THE LADIES — but before long the emcees are in the pocket together, moving from calling to the crowd to calling to each other like, well, jazz musicians. Most early hip hop singles lean heavily on end rhyme — think Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” — but “Jazzy Sensation” is packed with doubled and internal rhymes that give hints of what’s to come. Formally, it’s surprisingly sophisticated, with handoffs and choruses blending into call-and-response echoes. After seven or eight of these echoes, all five emcees lock in together in a sing-song, schoolyard melody:

We go by the names down in the Hall of Fame
No other guy or dame could ever play the game
We’re the flyest, the flyest, known to be the highest
’Cause we’re at the top and we can’t be stopped
We’re the sweetest, the neatest, the latest, the greatest
The best emcees to ever arrive

It’s silly and childish, but it’s also the apotheosis of the communal spirit of hip hop: you could call it utopian if it weren’t so human. The Jazzy 5 call themselves “the once divided, reunited,” and in that moment, you want to believe them. And at this time, in this place, it’s entirely appropriate that Afrika Bambaataa, the man who assembles the group and puts the party together, unifying the many into one, is the man with his name on the record.

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Herc Your Enthusiasm (10)

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