1988: Hiphop's Summer of Love

Little LML (age 2½) caught the chicken pox Friday, and in the resulting mania, I missed calling in to Billy Jam and his WFMU radio show Put the Needle on the Record to claim my righteous spot discussing hiphop’s own summer of love, the year 1988. Better late than never, I’ll wax rhapsodic anyways. As well, check out author Michael A. Gonzales on the subject over on his Blackadelic Pop blog, and Billy Jam on Amoeblog.

The importance of 1988, to me, deserves a 10,000-word New Yorker piece. Instead of that, I’ll just touch on why the year was personally important to me. Best to mention Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back up front right away. Bear in mind, I’m a pimply-faced 17-year-old at the time, finishing up his high school senior year up in The Bronx (not that successfully, judging from the summer school course that put a damper on my graduation) and about to start – on probation – as a Morris Brown College freshman in Atlanta. Did I mention working at McDonald’s and skimming from the register?

So my prom date Sharon (from the Valley, if you know anything about the northeast BX) surprised me with Nation of Millions as a gift on June 28 (on vinyl, of course), the day it came out, because I’d talked it to death by that point. Mr. Magic, Red Alert, Chuck Chillout and WHBI’s Awesome 2 were playing all the now-classic tracks on their weekend radio shows, and I couldn’t wait. I used to buy Billboard every Friday at a Times Square newstand that I swear would get them first, and already read Nelson George’s column calling PE the Black Panthers of rap, but I didn’t need his endorsement. I had already dubbed Yo! Bum Rush the Show (on cassette, of course) from my man Jay in 1987. I felt like a public enemy in Truman High School myself, walking through halls filled with Five Percenters, cats scrambling tré bags, and Dapper Dan-outfitted cats with dookie gold rope chains. My Prince fan ass was barely tolerated, and only because of my love for Private Stock and Ballentine 40 ounces of brew, plus Run-DMC, LL Cool J, UTFO… and eventually BDP, Rakim, PE, etc.

I got down to Morris Brown (immortalized by OutKast on the Idlewild single “Morris Brown” after its loss of accreditation), on probation, and got my first taste of hiphop from outside of the five boroughs. I hated it. Of course I’d heard the Fresh Prince and Schoolly D before, but it wasn’t until I tried kicking it to Stephanie – a divorcée from Vallejo – that I’d heard Eazy-E, his Eazy-Duz-It début looping endlessly in her ride. And cats from Cali on my floor in the Borders Tower dorm playing Too $hort’s Born to Mack and Life Is… Too Short even more nonstop, plus Ice-T and 2 Live Crew. Eazy in particular sounded inauthentic to me, too whiny, his rhymes too unbelievable. But also, I was 17 and wore New York City like a bulletproof identity vest down in Atlanta (you can’t imagine the dap New Yorker students get when they go away to college, especially in 1988 hiphop America), so there you go. But I can’t even put into words what it meant to have Nation of Millions as the soundtrack to one’s freshman year of college.

Spike Lee came out with School Daze that February; it was under his influence that I ended up at Morris Brown to begin with. Black colleges also got play on A Different World, which started getting popular that year, and I felt it was art imitating (my) life that made it a hit. African medallions swinging, flattop haircuts (I had both), teenage crack cowboys making ungodly loot slangin in the hood… I remember it well. And the Madison Square Garden shows: the only time I’ve seen Michael Jackson was at the head of that year touring for Bad, and my 18th birthday was spent in the very front row center (thanks uncle Shel) of a New Edition/Al B. Sure!/Bobby Brown bill with a hot shortie from my old high school. Yes, quietly Heart Break, In Effect Mode, Don’t Be Cruel and Keith Sweat were just as vital to the time as EPMD.

Started my CD collection too that year (Bad, Lovesexy, and the embarrassment, Bobby McFerrin’s Simple Pleasures), and remember Co-op City whiteboys holding out for when DATs would take over the world. I imagine they eventually caved in.

That’s all for now, shit. Gotta go pitch The New Yorker.