(The Roots "Act Too (The Love Of My Life)" plays)
♪ Check it out, yeah, what, and it sounds so nice. ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life. ♪
♪ I'm 'bout to take you to the top what? ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, Hip-Hop, to the top, to the top. ♪
(The Cold Crush Brothers, "Fresh, Wild, Fly & Bold" plays)
- Peace. I'm Rich Medina.
I am #KenCenHipHop, and this is my Life in Five.
The Cold Crush Brothers, "Fresh, Wild, Fly & Bold."
That record came out. I was in high school.
I want to say it came out in '86.
I could be off but that record just represented
the disposition of the culture at the time
in such a strong way.
The Cold Crush Brothers were everybody's idol,
anybody that was parts of the culture.
And when I say that, I mean, growing up in the seventies
and the eighties, not really romantically looking at Hip-Hop
as rap music. I mean the culture as a whole.
The Cold Crush Brothers represented
a chamber of the culture that really laid the pathway
for what we know as MC-ing today
and "Fresh, Wild, Fly & Bold."
It was an introduction to new vocabulary.
I'm from Jersey, close enough to New York,
40 minute ride down the highway.
But yeah, "Fresh, Wild, Fly & Bold." really opened me up
to looking at MCs as
a real influence on the way I view things.
Jungle Brothers "Straight Out the Jungle"
black medallions, no gold. You know what I'm saying?
It was a whole different earthy organic presentation
of B-boy culture that hadn't really
hit the public in that way.
It was always there and present in the street,
but when those records went commercial, I know dudes
that had a lot of jewelry that
all of a sudden stopped rocking it
because The Jungle Brothers represented a disposition
that was a little bit more humble,
with the whole, the camo outfits and the hiking vests,
and Tim's and the bucket hats and all of that.
It was like a breath of fresh air.
It was putting the battery in the back
of a lot of young black men and said
you don't have to do it like everybody else does it.
You could be unique and still be respectable
and represent the culture in your own life.
(Ultramagnetic MC's music plays)
After the JBs, my number three,
I would have to make that a whole album.
Ultramagnetic MC's "Critical Beatdown" album.
Man, Ced Gee's production.
That was kind of like a dinosaur
of the bomb squad production.
Really busy and heavy, layered production.
And Kool Keith just off on a spaceship somewhere
saying all types of craziness.
It's so funny, but still pertinent, you know?
It still spoke to issues, but there was
a little bit of whimsical-ness,
a little bit of whimsy in it.
And yeah, Kool Keith, to this day, man,
still one of my favorite MCs because
he's just so funny and so bugged out.
(Big Daddy Kane "Set It Off" plays)
Big Daddy Kane "Set It Off".
It changed the whole dynamic of presentation for MC-ing,
because for the first time
you're watching the lead rapper
dancing with his dancers and his cane.
He's a ladies man.
He always had the fly flat top, three parts.
They had the parts in his eyebrow,
everybody was like, "Eww yo, he got that off."
You know what I mean?
So he already had this real unique look
and as a kid, there's so only so many guys
we gravitated to, right?
You gravitate to the hustlers,
to the athletes, and to the B-boys,
and the dudes that got all the girls
and Kane represented kind of that whole
all of those dynamics in one box.
And the tempo of the record
rhymin' that complicated over such an uptempo track.
I think that track's like 110, 115 beats per minute
which is almost house music tempo,
but to still get the point across
and still come off so suave and so mellow
and setting it off became a notion
of getting busy across the culture.
Whether you're a DJ, an MC, B-boy, B-girl, graffiti writer,
if you're setting it off, it means your game is poppin' off.
(Tribe Called Quest "Footprints" plays)
Tribe Called Quest, "Footprints."
That whole introduction of jazz loops,
long running eight to sixteen bar jazz loops
that were filtered and layered
with these other components from other songs
that were either in the same key or filtered
into the same key to create these really lush beds.
Q-tip as a producer, what can you say about that guy, man?
innovative MC, innovative producer, still innovating,
but "Footprints" really opened the door
to philosophy and a broader lens on MC-ing
using different influences
beyond a lot of the influences that we were getting
from records that have made a commercial splash.
Between the JBs, the Tribe, and everybody else
in the native tongue movement,
even though the music was quote unquote "underground",
that record was getting spins on a major radio at the time.
This is still before 1996.
This was before The Telecommunications Act
changed FM radio forever.
And man, we used to cane that record.
I'm Rich Medina, and that is my Life in Five.
(The Roots "Act Too (The Love Of My Life)" plays)
♪ Check it out, yeah, what, and it sounds so nice. ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life. ♪
♪ I'm 'bout to take you to the top what? ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, Hip-Hop, to the top, to the top. ♪