Eric B. & Rakim

The artistic lives of New Yorkers Eric Barrier and William “Rakim” Griffin intersect, and intersect with the history of hip-hop, through circumstances that at times border on sheer fate. It's just the start of the second half of the '80s when Barrier feels the urge to transform a career that had, up to that point, stayed passively behind the scenes. The time is right to start creating, to put on record those sounds that Eric, then simply a disc jockey, was experimenting with at parties and on local radio. What's needed, though, is a vocalist who can add value, revitalize and spark a reaction from his beats.

His first choice falls on Jamie “Freddie Foxxx” Campbell, at the time a member of the Supreme Force crew and already a fairly popular performer on the hip-hop circuits of the day. But Campbell fails to show up to the arranged meeting, and Barrier's eagerness to cut at least one single is too strong to wait. So a second name emerges, a rapper already less visible than Campbell but just as stubborn: William Griffin, formerly Kid Wizard and by then converted to Islam as Rakim.

What is born there is the perfect union of a DJ and an MC, destined to go down in the genre's annals not merely as memorabilia but as a blueprint for the evolutions - stylistic, but also, why not, in terms of poses and iconography - of generations to come.

The decision to record together is firm, and just as free of second thoughts is the recording session (little more than a week). The basslines of the debut single, “Eric B. Is President” (1986), immediately carve out their brand of funk-electro with a stealthy stride. Rakim goes free-flowing in a psalm-like chant with pronounced echo, while Eric scratches and lays out his breakbeats in a measured stream of loose sounds, which eventually take over, breaking his partner's flow. It's a track-as-metaphor that stands for the whole record.

The charleston-hi-hat bass of “Move The Crowd” underpins a guitar-and-keyboard pattern: it's party soul remixed and ultimately turned into a powerful studio piece, with Rakim's rap slotting in perfectly between kick and snare. The title track, another great soul cut on the album accompanied by an iconic whistle, tells of the deeds and struggles of the contemporary African-American, from the ghetto to the megalopolis; Eric's scratches, in any case, never fall silent: toward the end of the track they sound almost cosmic, yet detached, off to the side, then monstrously deform a choir.

“I Ain't No Joke” is an elegant, tightly measured, martial rap assault, with a warped sax hook. Eric fuses with his own instrument. From here we move to the soundscape of “As The Rhyme Goes On”, a wandering duet between Eric's blasts and a darkened rap, barely brushed by a slender harpsichord counterpoint and distant swells.

The concert of samples and reverberated words - crackling to the point of stereo distortion - in “My Melody”, all hinging on urban alienation, unfolds over a wandering music-box line and closes in a grand finale of turntable dissonance and industrial beats.

There are two tracks that belong to Eric alone, two moments where he carves out his own glory and stamps his personal seal on the record. “Eric B. Is On The Cut” is built entirely on robotic cacophonies, generated by a vocal-instrumental sample over a snappy uptempo beat. Even better is “Chinese Arithmetic”, which takes the most stereotypical Chinatown jingle and shatters it into liquid samples, tearing it apart over a relentless beat - a genuine display of virtuoso sampler-and-turntable fantasy that ends up sounding like a surreal urban ballet, a showcase from one of the beat's greatest nerds, a machine of dissonance.

As Rakim recalls, it's an album that should have left more room for individual personalities, letting flow the blood that Rakim instead holds back, rather than being weighed down by Eric's sole, relentless inspiration. But it's precisely that vital drive that makes it one of the greatest hip-hop albums of the golden age. His multi-syllabic flow has a malleable, fluent, melismatic, syncopated style, as rigidly locked to the beat as it is loose and free: it doesn't have the politicized shockwave of a Chuck D (Public Enemy), it doesn't have the party exuberance of Run DMC, or the fatalistic snarl of LL Cool J. But it has a bit of everything, freeze-dries it and beams it back out for hip-hop's second wave.

A flat, almost pre-planned album, perfectly designed to exclude any filler (yet so short that they decided to include an “Extended Beat”, the instrumental base of “Move The Crowd”). This is also confirmed by the co-involvement of mad scientist Marley Marl, the producer who was the first to introduce the study of stereophonic techniques and the radical use of the sampler into hip-hop albums, going on to coin one of its cornerstones, the breakbeat.

Already paid tribute to at the time: the collective M.A.R.R.S. sampled Rakim's emblematic command, that “Pump Up The Volume!” taken from “I Know You Got Soul”, for the same year's hit that would bring them worldwide fame. Followed by the equally strong “Follow The Leader” (1988) but also by the lesser “Let The Rhythm Hit 'Em” (1990) and “Don't Sweat The Technique” (1992), the album of an embittered breakup.

Barrier has just one self-produced album to his name before his decline (“Eric B.”, 1995), while Rakim only launched a solo career in search of stardom in '97. No official reunion; a reissue with unreleased tracks was announced for the 25th anniversary but never materialized. Among the samples turns up a James Brown that would land Barrier some legal trouble, and an unlikely Fausto Papetti on “As The Rhyme Goes On”.

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01/02/2015