Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force

South Bronx, 1971. Kevin Donovan is a young Black kid like so many others, and he's just climbed onto a rooftop in the New York projects. Fatherless, with a poster of Martin Luther King in his bedroom right above his mother's LP collection. Black music, mostly, but of every stripe: James Brown, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, B.B. King, George Clinton and so on, an essentially endless list. Daily bread for him, up to that point, just like the gang wars that kept flaring up all around the Big Apple. But Kevin now holds everything in his own hands. He's changed tactics, choosing alliance over fratricidal war. He's founded his own gang, the Savage Seven, which like many others has essentially replaced institutions and law enforcement in his home neighborhood. But he hasn't stopped there, and has had the nerve to cross boundaries, to walk with his head held high and turn winning over his rivals' consent into his real conquest. "Unity is strength": a truism for everyone, a blasphemy in the Bronx. For everyone, that is, except him: and there he is, Kevin, putting his stamp on a mini-revolution in the history of American political counterculture, essentially becoming the shadow mayor of the New York projects.

Meanwhile, all around him a new culture is being born day by day. At 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, DJ Kool Herc has already started teaching everyone what a break is. The black music Donovan grew up with is now being reworked in its instrumental parts, turning into Dionysian material to dance to and escape with. Before long, Grandmaster Flash begins writing the whole glossary of DJing: words like scratch and cutting become part of the Bronx's everyday slang. Entertainment starts to pass through the use of the voice too: the urge to "lead the dance", but also to tell stories about others and about oneself, as well as to escape and to entertain, starts taking hold of those moments. In that spoken-word delivery set to the beat, soon to be known as rhythm and poetry, some pour their own story into it and turn it into a brand new form of expression, inventing the role of master of ceremonies, the MC. Others prefer to depict it on decaying, moss-covered walls, turning them into pages of social chronicle: these are the writers. From a means of escape to a means of expression, hip-hop is about to cross the border and become the ultimate channel for a whole counterculture. Donovan is the leader of New York's biggest gang, and it's from within it that people like Herc and Coke La Roc emerge, right as the phenomenon is spreading well beyond the boundaries of the Big Apple: contact is inevitable.

But Kevin isn't a gangster like all the others, one of those who follow a script tied to the role. The Bronx shaped him, but his universe goes beyond the barriers of those walls, increasingly covered in graffiti. He soon becomes convinced that escapism isn't fertile ground but mere illusion, that rap must become a language of inner reckoning, a means of communicating a collective social unease that is nonetheless rooted in every single person. In 1972, watching the film "Zulu" and a trip to South Africa change the young man's life. Donovan learns about South Africa, apartheid, the global scale of racial discrimination. Everything that the all-consuming, unrelenting poverty of the Bronx had kept him in the dark about.

It's no longer a matter of gangs, neighborhoods, projects, suburbs, trafficking and counter-trafficking, autonomy and claims to turf. It becomes an existential matter, in some ways philosophical, deeply human, cutting across geographical borders and generations. Back home, he adopts a new name: Afrika, like the Earth that gave him his roots, defaced and reviled, whose history opened his eyes, and Bambaataa, like the first rebel against white rule in South Africa at the turn of the century.

1973. After months of reflection, Kevin comes out into the open and founds Zulu Nation: a kind of philosophical commune aiming to spread socio-political commitment through the lyrics of the emerging rap genre, condemning any form of belief or religion that undermines each individual's independence of judgment and reasoning, urging instead the exercise of reason and doubt. Within a few months, dozens of graffiti artists, MCs, DJs and B-Boys join Zulu Nation, drawn by the prospect of turning their art into a genuine vehicle of expression, a form of testimony. It's about taking to the streets, getting close to the asphalt, and staging one's own hardship through writing, music and dance: the very idea of the block party, which long predates the hip-hop phenomenon, is completely revolutionized. For the second time in less than three years, Kevin's shifts in perspective — from now on we'll call him Afrika — have redrawn the coordinates of an entire culture. Hip-hop as social protest, as an expression of the hardship of a neighborhood left to fend for itself, as "conscious" music, is born with him and with Zulu Nation. Within a handful of years, his idea of hip-hop becomes nothing less than the defining paradigm of the genre itself.

Düsseldorf, 1977. Kraftwerk release the album destined, more than any other, to change the very shape of the idea of electronic music: "Trans-Europe Express". From the motorway to the railway, from the car to the train, from the German prairies crossed by asphalt to an entire continent crossed by rail. Man hasn't yet become machine: he looks in the mirror, falls in love with his own image, becomes its slave, a "mannequin". Then a slave to his own act of creation, then to the product of that act, that magical vehicle that races along and closes distances once thought unfathomable. Finally, a slave to pure, inanimate matter: metal upon metal.

New York, 1977. In other words, hip-hop is spreading like wildfire through the projects of every US metropolis, with Paul Winley and Bobby Robinson lending a hand in establishing social commitment as a defining feature of the genre, the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" breaking into the Billboard Top 40, Grandmaster Flash already crowned a master by a lightning-fast new generation, Jocko Henderson putting Philadelphia on the other side of the scale, and Run DMC about to release the first hip-hop LP not long after. Amid all this, Afrika Bambaataa is still a hidden eminence, a shadowy figure directing things from behind the scenes. An idol to the few, right as the mass popularization of hip-hop is getting underway.

A few months before the key date, Afrika and a select group of "chosen ones" from the ranks of the Zulu Nation (Nation Cosmic Force) release, on Paul Winley's label, the musical manifesto of the commune, "Zulu Nation Throwdown", today a cult track of the entire old school and a masterful essay on the relationship between funk and hip hop. It's precisely during that experience that Bambaataa discovers an unusual and fertile artistic chemistry with some of his lieutenants, among them a rebellious twenty-year-old with rhythm in his blood (DJ Jazzy Jay), his four MCs from Soundview (Jazzy Five), and three of the earliest prophets of Zulu Nation philosophy (Mr. Biggs, The G.L.O.W.E and Pow Wow). With Afrika's official involvement, the collective also gets a name of its own: Soulsonic Force.

And so we finally arrive in New York, Intergalactic Studios, 1981. Here Afrika records, together with just Jazzy Jay, what will become his first proper single, "Jazzy Sensations", which already reveals the showmanship of Bambaataa the musician, his desire to keep his distance from that hip-hop gospel now spreading well beyond the States. The urge to swim against the current and an allergy to every kind of archetype would remain constant traits of his adventure as an artist, even more so than in his earlier role as ideologue behind the scenes.

While Kurtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash cultivate and spread the future old-school gospel, he slows things down and detonates a funk march, sampling the chorus of Gwen McCrae's "Funky Sensation" and playing over it with a Prophet 5 given to him by his mother and a drum machine that was essentially unknown at the time: Roland's TR-808. Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy, a longtime friend of Bambaataa, decides to release the single and sends it, among others, to Frankie Knuckles in Chicago. "Jazzy Sensation" becomes one of the most requested records at the Warehouse, as well as an enormously important piece (and a seminal anticipation) of the genesis of old-school house. The ex-gangster's first signature is already reaching beyond hip-hop in the strict sense.

Many miles further east, in Detroit, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May and Juan Atkins are shaping the ground for the other great revolution of the early Eighties, burning through those same records Afrika grew up on and with which Knuckles was inventing post-modern dance music. First-era techno is a matter of rupture, a Euro-Atlantic alliance between electronic languages, a rebellion against convention and a search for authenticity, physicality and the primordial. Among others, Detroit welcomes Kraftwerk, who had mythologized the machine by subordinating man to it while simultaneously identifying man with it, and who now extol the myth of the computer as the primary tool. Techno, however, is artistic substance more human than ever.

All these thoughts spin furiously through Bambaataa's mind, and in 1983, right in the middle of the hip-hop ferment, he gathers the Soulsonic Force and records "Planet Rock" at Intergalactic, with Arthur Baker producing and the future Washington Squares providing backing vocals almost by chance. Essentially repeating what he had done as a very young man with the Bronx gangs, he crosses boundaries and barriers, mashing up "Trans Europe Express", "Computer World", Morricone's "Per un pugno di dollari", George Clinton and the grooves of the TR-808. What emerges is a tech-rap mantra of fun, commitment and alienation that effectively marks the outer horizon (as such, an area never actually reached) of old-school hip-hop. Beyond techno before techno existed, beyond house before it was even defined, beyond clubbing yet exquisitely hip-hop, "Planet Rock" is the paradigm of an entire attitude, the fusion point, in a purely funk key, of hip-hop and electronics, the crossroads through which hip-hop itself becomes a musical hypothesis open to contamination and beatmakers become musicians in the strictest sense, the point of maximum contamination and openness of hip-hop as a culture, the model that anyone approaching the genre from '82 onward would have had to reckon with.

For it to spread globally, the world would have to wait until '86, the year of "Planet Rock: The Album", nothing more than a collection of the singles released under the name Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force over the previous three years, in other words a handful of crossroads for hip-hop and beyond. While the spotlight falls largely on the seminal title track, the tracks that follow are the direct continuation of an experience that, all things considered, is impossible to reduce to a logical sequence. 1983, on the other hand, is the year of "Looking For The Perfect Beat", a genuine technical manifesto of Bambaataa's idea of hip-hop and another timeless classic: it's the Soulsonic Force who narrate the genesis of the track itself over an entirely digital, scientifically engineered rhythmic skeleton, accompanied and punctuated by synth flourishes in an atmosphere hovering between sci-fi and techno. Black musical love is temporarily set aside here in favor of the rise of a hi-tech, futuristic, mechanical hip-hop, very far removed from the paths the genre had by then definitively taken during the same period.

While "Looking For The Perfect Beat" would later be reworked by Bomb The Bass for "Beat Dis", highlighting Bambaataa's position as a forerunner of clubbing, "Renegades Of Funk" is a hymn to origins, a return to the future. A genuinely funky track, as well as his consecration as a musical author, it is also the thematic high point of the period, containing what is perhaps the most gripping lyric of his career, in which he draws a parallel between the revolutions of the past and contemporary street art. Here hip-hop essentially becomes an alternative to itself, gathering into a single track all the teachings of Zulu Nation as well as the idea of "commitment" held by a young cultural revolutionary who gave up his own name for his ideals. Having already turned it into a genuine form of counterculture, Afrika Bambaataa transformed it into a musical form capable of speaking the most varied languages, of becoming "other than itself", precisely.

"Frantic Situations" is the single that marks, in 1984, the meeting point between the retro Bambaataa in love with funk and disco music, yet another anticipation of a trend (this time Chicago garage-house) but ultimately far less influential. The record does, however, include the "Frantic Mix" made together with Grandmaster Flash, a point of contact between Bambaataa's showmanship and eternal search for "otherness" and the heart of that hip-hop which had by then become a global trend, what we now call old-school and which he himself had helped forge. Rounding out the record, alongside this gem and the three contemporary pillars credited to Soulsonic Force, are three b-sides: the nostalgic "Why You Funkin' With?", the muscular statement of "They Made A Mistake" — perhaps the most traditionally hip-hop track of the bunch — and "Go-Go Pop", where Afrika hosts Trouble Funk, opening a window from his world onto go-go as well.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the story — and with it this long account — essentially ends here. What hip-hop would go on to become in the years that followed, with the progressive loss of its territorial and social dimension and its drift, first in imagery and in recent years in sound too, is well-known history. If hip-hop has had its own Arthur Rimbaud, that was Afrika Bambaataa. Whether because of the boundless, all-encompassing scope of the young gangster's wonders, or because of his perpetual habit of heading in the opposite direction, or because of the early exhaustion of his creative well. Talking about Afrika Bambaataa after '86 means talking about a path centered on spreading his own philosophy and on productions for countless young (and not-so-young) hip-hop artists, but musically lacking any particular peaks, largely forgotten and built mostly on recycling.

Curiously, this sudden and never-reversed decline has contributed decisively, together with the enormous number of remixes, covers and samples of his tracks by artists from the most disparate musical backgrounds, to building the hazy but enduring myth now associated with the figure of Bambaataa. The most elusive, ungraspable, flamboyant and influential of hip-hop's founding fathers.

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10/05/2015