Rap Attack 2

Rap Attack #2

by David Toop

Book by Toop, David

Genres: Music, Hip Hop, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

David Toop is a musician, writer, and Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is the author of Ocean of Sound, Sinister Resonance, Into the Maelstrom, and other books.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm exaggerating but not much when I say that up until recently my hip hop knowledge started with Raising Hell and ended with Three Feet High and Rising, with "Rapper's Delight" as a poorly-understood prologue. This book is a great introduction to the early years, especially the "old school" era through about 1984, when the hip hop scene was just starting to break out beyond its New York City origins. Toop covers the personalities, cultural influences, business angles, and especially the techniques and technologies that came together in what could be seen as an East Coast parallel to what was happening contemporaneously in Silicon Valley: a revolution in musical hardware and software that would have global implications.

As quickly as it spread, the new sound continued to mutate:

The reason why rap changed its sound so dramatically in the latter half of the '80s was due to the development of relatively low priced digital samplers with enough memory to hold and loop a few bars of music. By the '90s, these samplers could run multiple loops of long or short sections of music simultaneously, along with drum sound samples and other noises, all of which could then be saved onto floppy disc to be kept as the producer's personal library of 'signatures'. This was a massive progression from Grandmaster Flash cutting up 'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel' in the studio, or Jam Master Jay running one section of Bob James' 'Mardi Gras' under a drum machine beat.

When this edition was published in 1991 (surely one of the most depressing years ever for popular music), the charts were dominated by the lamentable likes of M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice: "Ten years earlier, hip hop had fused African roots and video game imagery as an act of surreal imagination. Now it fused those same elements in the service of marketing." Still, Toop concludes on a hopeful note, recognizing that what hip hop had unleashed would carry forward:

While one sector of America was struggling to reassert the values of 1950s America, fighting to maintain the illusory cohesion of a single unified culture, battling to limit the spread of information, the erosion of the old truths, rap was attacking and remoulding the fragments of the electronic age with a speed that was breathtaking. Knee deep in an intangible world of past, present and future. Saturated in bass vibrations, drumming out voices in the head, speaking in tongues, swinging and locating. Pass the plugs, pass the plugs.

Includes a wealth of B&W photos and discography of 200 essential hip hop singles.