06 - Red Bull Music Academy Daily

DAILY NOTE
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2013
6 22
OF
I'LL HOUSE YOU
THE GOLDEN AGE: PART ONE
QUEENSBRIDGE / ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER / NYC RECORD STORES
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
Tired yet? It’s only just begun. We’re not even a
week into the madness that is Red Bull Music
Academy and we’re already freaking out about
everything that’s gone down. Since it’s likely that
you have a life and have been unable to attend each
and every show, here’s an Academy highlight or
two from the last few days: Schoolly D Charming the
crowd at Sunshine Cinema; Erykah Badu inviting a
nervous superfan onstage, only to then call the rest
of the adoring audience up for hugs and photo ops;
pianist Vijay Iyer snapping a quick selfie with Robert
Glasper at the end of his set at the Round Robin Duets
jazz show; Behold our weekend decree: go dance
to house legends Masters At Work tonight at Le
Bain, shop for records on Saturday at the Brooklyn
Flea Record Fair, get lost in a dark room with DJs
Andy Stott and Objekt at the Bunker late at night,
or spend some time with David Bowie’s genius at
the Classic Album Sundays listening sessions at the
New Museum. There’s much so to do, we know. We
recommend a disco nap.
Clockwise from top:
Andrew W.K. and Bernie
Worrell perform at
A Night of Improvised
Round Robin Duets;
Masters At Work lecture
at the Academy;
Ale Hop in an RBMA
bedroom studio;
Julia Holter outside
the Academy.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Adrienne Day
Michaelangelo Matos
Jess Rotter
Nick Sylvester
Dave Tompkins
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Cover Photo Kevin Cummins/Getty Images
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
Todd Terry, London, 1988
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
ABOUT RBMA
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make a
difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
2
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“When you get a publishing check and it’s from
somewhere you can’t pronounce, that’s the craziest
feeling. Man, my record got played there?”
— Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez of Masters At Work, May 2, 2013
TONIGHT
145 W 32ND ST
CITY
SLICKER
A very abridged history
of David Bowie—musician,
artist, New Yorker.
BRIAN
ENO: 77
MILLION
PAINTINGS
OPEN HAUS
In anticipation of the special David Bowie edition of Classic Album Sundays (May 5 at the New Museum) we’ve compiled some
of the Thin White Duke’s most memorable New York moments.
It would be impossible to cram in every worthwhile milestone,
but we tried to show just how many hats he’s worn since touching down in our city, and illustrate once again why Bowie is
everyone’s favorite pop chameleon.
Red Bull Music Academy
Meets Classic Album
Sundays: A David Bowie
Special
Sunday, May 5 at Sky
Room @ New Museum
235 Bowery
noon; 3 PM; 6PM
MASTERS
AT WORK
& SPECIAL
GUESTS
F
or more than two decades now, New York and house music have been intrinsically linked. Yet the impact of its
legacy extends well beyond the city’s borders, reshaping
dancefloors around the globe. Curious about the impact
of New York house on foreign shores, we asked Gerd Janson—a
key member of the Red Bull Music Academy team and one of Europe’s most respected DJs—to think back to when house first arrived in Germany and recount some of his initial impressions.
Before I ever heard about house, I knew about techno. In ’90
or ’91, I was a boy scout. Our group leader had a tape by Sven
Väth. He would play us the tape and always mentioned that he
went to a club called the Omen every Friday to hear house and
techno—and Sven Väth was definitely techno—but when I asked
him what house was, he couldn’t really explain it to me.
Luckily, I had another friend who also went to the Omen
every week, and he had a house tape. Listening to the music,
I began to figure out the difference. I thought, “Okay, this is a
bit slower. It’s not as aggressive. People sometimes sing. There
are melodies. So this is house music.” For us at the time, there
wasn’t really a distinction between New York house and any
other kind of house, because New York ruled the world. When
I was 13, Louie Vega played a club in Frankfurt and I was dying
to go, but I was sure that I wouldn’t get in. A few years later, my
friends and I regularly wound up driving for three or four hours
to go and see artists like Masters At Work.
1990
Exhibits two paintings
at New York Art Expo.
1997
Performs concert at
Madison Square Garden
celebrating his 50th
birthday with guests
Lou Reed, Sonic
Youth, Robert Smith,
Billy Corgan, and
Frank Black.
03
LE BAIN
A German boy scout discovers
New York House.
Stars as John Merrick in The
1980
Elephant Man on Broadway.
MAY
MAY
03
LE POISSON ROUGE
SIGNALS
IN THE
STORM
KNOX, QUIETDUST,
AUGUST ROSENBAUM,
JIMI NXIR
In our minds, the whole of New York was dancing to
house music. The whole thing felt very flamboyant and sophisticated. We even imagined that there was a certain way a
house DJ had to dress. A techno DJ might have on club wear
and a baseball cap, but a house DJ from New York? He had
to wear a white shirt tucked into his pants with a leather vest
and maybe some sort of strange cravat on top. It all seemed
so fashionable.
Back then, there wasn’t an Internet, so we grabbed every
music magazine we could find and pieced the puzzle together
as best we could.
-SHAWN REYNALDO
MAY
03
UPCOMING
EVENTS
SMORGASBURG
BROOKLYN
FLEA RECORD
FAIR
SPECIAL
MAY
04
THE BUNKER @ PUBLIC ASSEMBLY
1999 Buys two apartments
at 285 Lafayette Street in
WHITE
NIGHTS
Soho for $4 million.
2000
Second child,
Alexandria Zahra
Jones, born in
undisclosed NYC
hospital to
wife Iman.
2007
Curates High Line
4
Nuit Blanche New York is the
creative group behind the art
installations throughout the
Academy building as well as
the visual effects at several
of the shows. We spoke with
NBNY creative director Ken
Farmer to learn more about
their process and intent.
Appears on TV
On The Radio’s
Return to Cookie
Mountain. That
same year, he
admitted to New
York magazine
that he sometimes sneaks
into movies at the Angelika
Film Center.
2011-2012
Records The Next Day, his
first album in a decade, in
secret at the Magic Shop
studio on Crosby Street.
ILLUSTRATION REVENGE IS SWEET.
Festival, putting
friends and heavy
hitters like
Laurie Anderson
and Arcade Fire
alongside oddball
choices like Ken
Nordine. Bowie
sarcastically (and
wonderfully) told
The New York Times,
“I love that word
‘curate’... One of
the definitions
is someone who
oversees a zoo.”
2006
Who are you guys? We started in 2010
with the creation of Bring to Light, which
references a tradition that started in Paris
about a decade ago where museums and
other institutions stay open all night and
art takes over the city. We’ve been doing this
in Greenpoint and working to make it a citywide festival.
What are you doing with the Academy? We got involved in the Red Bull Music
Academy through a temporary venue that
we created in October of last year called
the Autumn Bowl, which was a month-long
performance series. Based on that, and
some of the other work we’ve been doing,
RBMA asked us to be the visual and installation
team for ten of the shows.
Can you tell us about the art that you’ve curated for the Academy building? The Academy building itself is a unique crossover space
with white walls and clean environments. But
you also have these very dramatic architectural features from [architect] Jeffrey Inaba that
promote a sort of meandering, labyrinthine
space, which I think has been an exciting thing
for the artists to react to. Given the nature of
the Academy—it’s really an artistic environment where people are constantly creating
and collaborating—the participants are kind
of living with and among the art.
Can you talk about the visual installations at
some of the RBMA shows? The Drone Activity
in Progress show at the Knockdown Center was
a particularly elaborate installation in a 110-yearold factory in Queens. We also did an Andy Warhol “Silver Cloud” installation, showing films
from Warhol, Kim Gordon, and Gast Bouschet/
Nadine Hilbert. E.S.P. TV did live sound-reactive
projections. For the Glasslands show [with Mykki
Blanco on May 7] we’re going to be working with
a group called Georgia, doing a projection that
wraps around the room, creating a kind of immersive sea-foam-illuminated haze. It’s bringing
the ocean and space together.
How do you incorporate music into
the installations that you’re organizing? It seems like every musician is also
an artist now, too. A territory we’re really
interested in is that convergence of sound
and image, whether the image takes the
form of projection, light-based installation, or something more sculptural.
There’s a lot of overlap between art and
music, grounded in this idea that there’s
such a yearning for the immersive experience. So we are thinking about how
sound and image come together to create
the concert experience that’s beyond just
the standard house lights—it seems like
everybody is longing for more than that.
ANDY STOTT
ATOM TM
OBJEKT
OCTO OCTA
MORE
MAY
04
NEW MUSEUM
CLASSIC ALBUM
SUNDAYS: A
DAVID BOWIE
SPECIAL
NILE RODGERS, TONY
VISCONTI, KEN SCOTT
MAY
05
TERMINAL 5
FLYING MAY
LOTUS
ULTRAÍSTA,
THUNDERCAT & BAND
05
THE GREAT HALL AT COOPER UNION
BRIAN
ENO: AN
ILLUSTRATED
TALK
MAY
06
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
-OLIVIA GRAHAM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
ONEOHTRIX
POINT NEVER
Daniel Lopatin talks about weird roommates, his label's
Greenpoint studio, and creative collaborations.
PHOTO GIANFRANCO TRIPODO
Why don’t we listen to one of the first things you did
as Oneohtrix Point Never, “Russian Mind”? Definitely not
one of the first things, but perhaps early. Depending on when
I die, I guess.
Do you remember recording this? Yes. Vividly, actually. I had
just moved to New York and it was my first apartment, one I
shared with a cat lady. I don’t know if they were feral cats or
what was going on, it was just fucking weird.
How did you get into an apartment with a cat lady? I just
needed a place. I was in this synth trio called Astronaut and
my bandmate Andy Plovnick knew of an opening in this basement apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Upstairs was a
totally happy scene and in the basement it was just fucking
terrible. Cats peeing on the couches, and the closet was divided. Occasionally in the morning we’d be opening the closet at
the same time. It was like something that would happen in a
romantic comedy but neither one of us would want to look at
each other and that would never change. So it was a brutal
thing. “Russian Mind” is something I did in the basement. It
was [all on] one track; it was just an Akai Headrush Delay, the
Juno, an arpeggiator in the latch mode, some delay setting,
and chord changes.
You said your recording process used to be more raw. How
has it changed? The last record I made, Replica, we made in
a studio in a more or less professional environment. We were
having a lot of fun. You’re in a studio, learning the technology
on the go. I’d become somewhat familiar with Pro Tools from
the Ford & Lopatin record Channel Pressure, so there was a level of comfort with it that was new to me. Even during that record, I wasn’t zipping around the tracks fixing stuff fast. I think
the true mark of whether you’re good at Pro Tools is how fast
you are at it. Then kind of understanding what Al [Carlson], our
mixing engineer, was doing, his choices and why he made them
and what he could bring.
Al seems pretty important to the sound. What does he
bring to it as a mixing engineer? Bass. We just listened to
“Returnal” and it’s very mid-band heavy; it was recorded in
GoldWave and Multiquence. I’ve actually used those two programs in conjunction with each other for many years. Al, being
super creative, he’s also a scientist. So he’s like, “Yeah, I want to
make your record and bring out the whole spectrum. I want it
not to be so mid-band heavy and to have low end and interesting top.” Basic stuff like that.
6
Have you learned a lot from him or are you just like, “Go
ahead, take care of it for me”? No, you can’t do that with an
engineer, I don’t care who he is. You have to mitigate it but at
the same time, there was a lot of jamming he was doing. We
would do a lot of one-take sampler performances with an SP555, and I would just play the pads. I had an idea of an arrangement in my head. While I was doing the arrangement and
a take in the hopes that it would work, he was on a Sherman
Filterbank and just shredding my 555 signal on another track.
So there was that interaction. It became a big sound on that
record, all the super-coarse sounds like audio being ripped, with
lots of super low end and fuzzy weirdness.
You put it out on your label, Software. Tell me about forming your own label and what that means. Are you going to
put out records by other people or just your own stuff? Yeah,
the idea was basically to have an imprint that was administered
by a label, so Mexican Summer administers the label and is teaching us how to be a label. We're also using their distribution arm
to get our records into shops and make it visible to people. It’s really cool. It came out of the idea of them having a studio in their
offices, which is a very rare thing. When I was talking to labels,
what was being offered was good but not musically inspiring. I
really don’t have the money. Even if I take a deal with a label that
on the surface is a good fit, I still to have spend tens of thousands
of dollars on studio time to have that luxury of being in a studio
without feeling pressured. So I really wanted to indulge in being
in the studio environment for as long as I needed.
How long did you need? I don’t know, it was an experiment. Channel Pressure took three-and-a-half months or something in the studio. So those three-and-a-half months cut down
on the time it took to do Replica because we had learned certain
things. It allowed me to have more ownership, to be closer to
and have access to this really beautiful studio that’s down the
street from where I live. And that’s something I valued and still
value very much. It’s been a good thing.
Why did you want to get in the studio so badly? As someone who does home recording, I would think you’d be
comfortable setting up in your bedroom. It seems very important to you that you got there. It’s okay, but I wanted to
make a record that sounds fuller. What I wanted was the analog
studio with the classic rock amenities, but to be making electronic music there. I thought that would make for something
very interesting-sounding. And it’s a very interesting space, kind
of psycho-geographically. You’re locked in this amazing dungeon
that’s dark and there’s a piano and a Neve console and a wet
room and comfortable couches. It puts you in the zone, a focus zone. When I’m doing stuff at home, I find that having to
switch things on and off and set stuff up and be the engineer
and the performer at the same time is distracting. We talk, like,
“Oh, music has changed so much. You can make these records at
home.” That’s true, but there’s something to be said for the oldschool approach, where you’re just there to perform, to make a
record, and you don’t fuss around with the guts of an operation.
For me anyway, it can totally kill the vibe.
You said it was a rock studio, but you created your own vibe.
You brought in lots of incense and curtains. Exactly. [Pink]
Floyd posters. We brought our synths in ’cause we had a lot—between the three of us we probably have 20 different synths. When
Al got in there he slowly brought his whole studio in and he’s
been working there steadily for the past year now. He’s working
with other bands; Peaking Lights and Yeasayer recorded their records there. So Al’s been there and made it his home.
The other collaboration we should talk about is Antony
[Hegarty] singing another version of “Returnal.” How did
that come about? He’s a really polite guy and he emailed Carlos [Giffoni] and asked permission. “Can I email Dan?” That’s
the nature of Antony, his character; he’s an incredible person.
He had seen some of my videos, my Sunset Corp YouTube account stuff, and thought it was cool.
And what do you make of what he did with it? It was amazing. The cool anecdote I can say about that is he tricked me.
He said, “I’m gonna do this cover.” I said, “Okay, cool. Are you
gonna do all the parts?” Then he said, “Hey, I’m doing it at the
studio in Manhattan now, you should come down.” I was like,
“Cool, I’m gonna get to watch this incredible musician play one
of my songs and hang out.” So I get in there and he’s like, “Piano, you!” And I’m like, “Fuck!” I didn’t even know how to play
the fucking song. I had no idea. But I figured it out and he was
really supportive and amazing. What’s funny is how sweet to me
he was, but how aggressive and intense he was with his vocal
takes. He’s extremely efficient and he can basically just jump in
at any point. He has an amazing memory, and the speed and
the language he uses… The man is seasoned. Seeing that was
incredible. I was just like, “Phew, I’m too slow and stoney.”
Interviewed by Todd Burns at Red Bull Music
Academy Madrid 2011. For the full Q&A, head to
redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
7
FEATURE
Kierin Kirby (Lady
Miss Kier) of
Deee-Lite, 2001.
Photo by Ebet
Roberts/Redferns
Part 1
STRICTLY
RHYTHM
The genesis of New York house music.
WORDS MICHAELANGELO MATOS
chicago gave birth to house music and London brought
it to the world, but New York City gave it its dimension. House
music was NYC’s ubiquitous after-dark soundtrack throughout
the ’90s, and there was a shade for every taste: rough-and-ready
hip-hop-infused rhythms from Todd Terry; the thick, funky tribal of Danny Tenaglia; the soulful earthiness of the Body & Soul
camp. This conglomerate of styles took shape in a city where
creative change is a constant—and formed the soundtrack for
Manhattan’s last great era of nightclubbing.
The Aztec Lounge, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a
punk and goth club in the mid-’80s—not the first place you’d
look for the future of dance music. So imagine Bruce Tantum’s
surprise when he found it there. Tantum, now clubs editor for
Time Out New York, was at the Aztec when the DJ dropped a
strange, arresting 12-inch from Chicago which was obviously
created on cheap electronic equipment by amateurs. “It was
weird shit—real primitive, raw stuff,” says Tantum, who asked
the DJ, “What is this disco-from-outer-space shit?”
This was house music, and though it didn’t sound like anything else, it was also not entirely unfamiliar. “A lot of their
grooves [came] from the old disco records,” says ‘Little’ Louie
Vega, then a freestyle producer who played records in the Bronx
at a club called the Devil’s Nest. “‘Jack Your Body’ by Steve ‘Silk’
Hurley—that bassline is by First Choice [from ‘Let No Man Put
Asunder’]. But they would play them over again. What Chicago
did was to begin with drum machines and synthesizers.”
Vega was playing first-generation Chicago house artists Virgo, Mr. Fingers, and Marshall Jefferson alongside Latin freestyle, hip-hop, and rock; so did Bruce Forest, who played four
nights a week at Better Days on West 49th Street in Manhattan. In 1985, Forest gave David Morales, who handled Thursday
nights, his extra 12-inches by Chicagoans J.M. Silk and Chip E.,
and Morales began playing house, too. Vega joined on the island
in 1986 when he landed at Heartthrob on West 26th Street—
formerly the FunHouse, the mid-’80s home of John ‘Jellybean’
Benitez, the New York DJ best known for producing Madonna’s
“Holiday.”
8
“Between ’85 and ’87, if you didn’t have no Trax records, you
weren’t the man,” said house producer Benji Candelario in 1995.
Candelario had spun hip-hop in the pre-“Rapper’s Delight”
Bronx, and in 1986 he teamed up with electro producer Aldo
Marin as Nitro Deluxe for the aptly titled “Let’s Get Brutal” on
Marin’s label Cutting.
But New York didn’t fully occupy house music until Todd
Terry. Born and raised in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, Terry was equally inspired by Larry Levan’s DJ tapes from the Paradise Garage and the hip-hop of the era. He began making beats
for his friends to rhyme over, but couldn’t find a label that was
interested. Then he decided to fool around with the house music sound that had been sneaking into the clubs: “It had a more
traveling type of deepness to it. It had the 909 [drum machine],
so that gave it a stride—a lot of riffing over deep basslines.” Terry decided to stitch some current, popular house records together for a laugh: “I was doing it just to show my friends, ‘I can do
this shit. What’s the big deal? The rap stuff is a lot harder to do
than this.’”
House music wasn’t just easier to make, it was easier to sell.
Terry shopped the demo, titled “Party People” and credited to
Royal House, to the small Brooklyn label Idlers. “I got a deal
for that the next day,” he says. Terry responded in kind, turning out tracks in a hurry—he even named his Black Riot single
from 1988 “A Day in the Life” because that’s how long it took to
make. “I woke up in the morning, made the beat, did the music,
and I was finished later that night.” (In 1992, he made an entire
album—The Todd Terry Project on Champion—in a single day.)
Terry’s biggest pop hit, the 1995 remix of Everything but the
Girl’s “Missing,” was done in a day and a half. “It was a pretty
easy record to do because the song was there,” he says. “Go in
there, do it, felt good about it, handed it in.”
Unlike the Chicago producers, who were using samplers
mostly to stutter their own voices, Terry layered and reconfigured his samples like a hip-hop producer. (Vega, who was transitioning out of freestyle, mixed many of Terry’s tracks.) The link
wasn’t lost on his fellow New Yorkers. “Only Todd’s stuff was
9
FEATURE
10
an equally revered club in Newark, New Jersey, to play alongside Tony Humphries, who had a Saturday-night mix show on
KISS-FM, at the time one of New York’s premier hip-hop stations. Morales’ manager, Judy Weinstein, took on Knuckles as
well, the three of them incorporating as Def Mix Productions
(named for Morales’ mix of the 1987 song “Do It Properly,”
which was credited to “2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman, and a Dominican”—in billed order, Morales, Robert Clivillés, David Cole,
and Chep Nuñez).
Def Mix Productions changed the face of remixing. “Before
us, when you did a remix, you worked with what was available
to you,” Knuckles said at his 2011 Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Madrid. “By the time we got started, we were bringing in
musicians and completely overdubbing everyone’s songs, reworking the music and the tracks, everything.” Eventually, the artists
themselves got in on the act, as when Mariah Carey re-recorded
her vocals from 1993’s “Dreamlover” for Morales’ remix.
Eric Kupper, a keyboardist and programmer who has
worked extensively with the Def Mix crew—he also produced
the first RuPaul album in 1993—remembers the “Dreamlover”
remix. “The arrangement was done all on the desk using an automated console. ‘Dreamlover’ was nothing but two to four bars
with keyboards, and we just opened up this and that,” Kupper
says. “That’s how you worked in those days. There would be a
lot of things that repeated a lot and we would play the desk.”
By 1995, Morales was netting $80,000 to rework tracks like Michael Jackson’s “Scream.”
Morales’ early collaborators Clivillés and Cole opted to make
their own hits as C+C Music Factory, tapping steely voiced
studio engineer Freedom Williams to bust basic rhymes over
their crisp hooks. Their 1990 debut, “Gonna Make You Sweat
(Everybody Dance Now),” sold five million copies, with the title
track going to number one on the pop chart. It launched them
as producers for established acts—they made Carey’s “Make It
Happen” and Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman,” among
others—before Cole’s death from spinal meningitis in 1995 at
age 32.
Clivillés and Cole weren’t the only New York house act making pop hits in 1990. In the early ’80s, Dmitry Brill, a Ukrainian
émigré working as a maître d’ at a Caribbean restaurant and
DJing at night, met the brassy, new agey Kierin Kirby in Washington Square Park. Eventually known as Supa DJ Dmitri and
Lady Miss Kier, the two began to hang out at Area (where
Kirby briefly worked) and the Pyramid, where drag stars like
Hapi Phace and Lady Bunny held court. In 1986, they formed
Deee-Lite, soon adding Towa Tei, a Japanese DJ who had befriended the couple; one of their early gigs was at Wigstock,
Lady Bunny’s drag and arts festival.
“They were the ones that gave people hope that they could
make a lot of money doing dance music,” Tantum says. “Deee-Lite went from nothing to ‘Groove Is in the Heart.’ Nobody knew
about them until then. The interesting thing is, a lot of people
didn’t like ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ because they thought it was
a poppy, watered-down version of house music, but everybody
liked Deee-Lite because they were part of the scene and they
were all funny people.”
No one had anything bad to say about the B-side, though.
“‘What Is Love?’ was much more accepted among hardcore
clubbers,” said Tantum. “Everybody has heard ‘Groove Is in the
Heart’ so many billions of times that no one wants to hear it
anymore. [But] there are still songs coming out with the vocals
from ‘What Is Love?’”
Above:
Top row: Lem
Springsteen,
Kenny ‘Dope’
Gonzalez,
Erick Morillo,
Pablo Todo,
Todd Terry.
Second row:
unidentified
woman, Gladys
Pizarro,
Michael Weiss,
Julie Jewels,
Roger Sanchez.
Bottom:
‘Little’
Louie Vega.
Photo courtesy
of Michael
Weiss
Left: House
music pioneer
Frankie
Knuckles
and MTV VJ
Downtown Julie
Brown attend
an event at the
Tribeca Grill.
New York 1988.
Photo By Al
Pereira/
Michael Ochs
Archives/Getty
Images
FLYERS COURTESY OF DEEPHOUSEPAGE.COM
really making the kids go manic,” says Larry Tee, a resident DJ
at the Tunnel, who said of his playlist circa 1989, “If it sounded
like Todd Terry, we played it.”
Rap fans initially resisted house music. When Frank Owen,
an English music writer who’d moved to New York the day the
stock market crashed in October 1987, began throwing parties
that mixed acid house in with hip-hop at the multistoried Alphabet City spot the World, he had to do a quick rethink. “Some
homeboy stuck a gun in the DJ’s face and told him if he played
that crap again he’d shoot him,” Owen recalls.
The World kept aggressively pushing rap and house as kin to
its crowd, a mix of artists, b-boys, and fashionistas. “It was like
Obi-Wan Kenobi: ‘You will like hip-hop… You will like house
music,’” World cofounder Steve Lewis wrote in 2010. Terry
helped seal the gap. When “Can You Party” started hitting in
hip-hop clubs as well as house ones, Terry put Idlers-signed rappers the Jungle Brothers on top of it; their version was called
“I’ll House You” (1988), which, inevitably, helped sire hip-house
as a genre. But Terry was also audible in subsequent producers’ work whose dance tracks appealed to the hip-hop crowd,
such as Soho’s “Hot Music” (1990), produced by Joseph Longo,
aka Pal Joey. “That was a time when hip-hoppers didn’t want to
dance,” says Longo. “That song made you dance or fight—it was
one or the other.”
The World further proved its commitment to house music
by going to the source. Frankie Knuckles was the South Bronx
native who’d left New York in 1977 to man the decks at Chicago’s
Warehouse—the place that inspired the term “house music.” After leaving his second Chicago club, the Power Plant, Knuckles
began producing more. But he was getting restless—Chicago
could only get you so far if you wanted to keep growing. A decade after leaving New York, Knuckles came back home as the
World’s new resident.
Joining him was David Morales. Born and raised in Prospect
Heights, Brooklyn, Morales had been a resident DJ at the Ozone
Layer in Brooklyn when he began to fill in for Larry Levan at
the legendary Paradise Garage. Morales then went to Zanzibar,
FEATURE
I
t never became a hit like “Groove Is in the Heart,” but
one of the early-’90s New York house records Tony Humphries championed on the radio was Photon, Inc. featuring Paula Brion’s “Generate Power” (1991)—the first
track by Nathaniel Pierre Jones for a recent startup label called Strictly Rhythm. Jones was better known as
DJ Pierre—and even better known as part of Phuture, whose
“Acid Tracks” (1986) had set off a tidal wave of acid records
that tweaked the bass-synth lines of a Roland TB-303 till they
zapped like the RKO antenna.
Pierre was a Chicago native who, like many others, had
grown weary of the bad deals the Windy City’s labels were
handing out. “I’d seen that the scene [in Chicago] was folding,”
he says. Pierre trekked east in 1990. “I was visiting New York
and I realized that this is the place to be—the scene is new here,
the labels are fresh. I was getting, in a funny way, in [on] the
ground floor of the New York scene.”
On “Generate Power,” Pierre switched out the 303 squeal for
an unhinged-sounding but thoroughly controlled mélange of
samples—curling sax here, Rhodes strings there, Brion’s shouts
of “Power! Power!” riding it like a bronco. The standout on the
12-inch was Pierre’s own “Wild Pitch Mix” of the track—named
for a party founded by Bobby Konders and David Camacho, at
which Pierre began playing regularly after relocating to NYC.
“In essence, that’s a New York sound,” says Pierre. “It’s not
like acid—it has no connection to Chicago. [What] makes something ‘wild pitch’ is the way it’s layered and built. I start from
building the foundation—the drums, the beat—and have stuff
11
FEATURE
Kenny ‘Dope’
Gonzalez and
‘Little’ Louie
Vega of Masters
At Work. New York
2000. Photo by
Naki/Redferns
“IT WAS A VERY MIXED
CROWD: STRAIGHT, GAY,
BLACK, WHITE, MALE,
FEMALE. JUST EVERYBODY.”
-ERIC KUPPER
coming in slowly but surely, and have it building up, like euphoria, where it releases a big sound until you get hooked in. It just
builds and builds and then I strip it back down. True ‘wild pitch’
sounds the best when you are mixing it in slowly, over 32 or 64
bars. You don’t just come in at 16 bars—you ride that bad boy.”
“Generate Power” was as important for who released it as for
what it sounded like. Though plenty of New York indie labels
issued house records, Strictly Rhythm almost immediately became identifiable as a house label, a distinction it wore proudly,
issuing a passel of classics: Aly-Us’s “Follow Me” (1992), a house
record that found favor with hip-hop DJs such as Red Alert and
Funkmaster Flex; CLS’ “Can You Feel It (In House Dub)” (1991),
one of Todd Terry’s peak moments; and the return of Phuture
on “Rise From Your Grave” (1992).
Founded by Gladys Pizarro and Mark Finkelstein in 1989,
Strictly quickly became top dog in a crowded pack that soon included Nervous and Nu Groove. According to DJ Pierre, Strictly’s bigger producers were warned not to work with Nervous.
“[Strictly] felt like they were the big fish. If they wanted to say
not to work with the smaller fish, they felt like they had a right
to say that.” Nervous founder Michael Weiss says that the labels
were “competitive and very friendly”—not to mention they were
part of a tight circle. “Gladys Pizarro actually worked very briefly at Nervous for a couple months,” Weiss says.
During her brief stint at Nervous, Pizarro introduced Weiss
to Vega and his new producing partner, Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez.
Gonzalez, like Terry, was a hip-hop producer who’d found quicker acceptance doing sample-based club tracks. One of them, 2
Dope’s “A Touch of Salsa” (1990)—which sampled both salsa
queen Celia Cruz and disco giant Sylvester— caught Vega’s ear.
Vega asked Terry, “Who is this guy? I want to meet him, maybe
do a remix of him.”
In 1990, Vega had gotten an album deal with Warner Bros.
He invited Gonzalez to “come lay down some beats,” and the
two began working together in earnest—first on the debut
album by Marc Anthony, a family friend of Vega’s who wrote
songs for freestyle acts and coached their vocalists, then on
their own. They asked for and got Terry’s permission to use one
of his discarded aliases, Masters At Work.
“We complemented one another so well,” says Vega. “I would
play keyboards, he would make the beat; or I would come up
with a groove first and he would make a beat to that groove. It
was like clockwork. I was still getting a lot of remix requests from
Atlantic and Warner Bros. We said, ‘Let’s use the remixes as an
outlet. We’ll get ourselves out to people through the remixes.’”
Rather than fashioning something sumptuous around an
extant song à la Def Mix, a Masters At Work dub would strip
it back, often leaving only ghost traces of the vocals. “We’ll do
something with your original song, but we’d take your vocals,
do something hooky, put that hook on the B-side, but the music
wouldn’t necessarily be yours,” says Vega. “We’d still have a bit
of the artist in there, but create a brand-new hook.” Soon New
York’s top club DJs were buying Debbie Gibson 12-inches for
12
the B-side MAW dubs. “Even Madonna wanted one,” he says.
“Everybody wanted one.”
It set the table perfectly. Cutting Records issued Masters
At Work’s key early 12-inch: on the A-side was “Blood Vibes,” a
head-turning dancehall reggae/hip-hop mesh. For the B, Gonzalez brought in a sample he’d taken from the Eddie Murphy
comedy Trading Places. “Bippity-bippity-bippity-HA!” it went.
“The Ha Dance” became a foundational track for the voguing
scene in New York. “I didn’t realize how big it was until some of
our friends [told] me,” said Vega. One was Willi Ninja, the godfather of voguing, who died in 2006 of AIDS-related illness. “He
was like, ‘That is our anthem. We use it all the time to battle.’
A couple years ago I YouTubed a lot of voguing battles, ’cause I
wanted to see them. I didn’t realize that, even now, that record
is used so much. Like breakdancers had ‘Apache,’ the voguers
had ‘The Ha Dance.’”
Ninja was the doorman during Vega’s mid-’90s stint at the
Sound Factory Bar, working at an industry showcase night
called the Underground Network. “That was my favorite party ever, probably,” says Kupper. “It was a very mixed crowd:
straight, gay, black, white, male, female. Just everybody.” Tantum adds, “It was a great crowd, great energy. It was a packed
room. Everybody was dancing. Even people seated around the
edges were dancing.”
Initially known as Private Eyes, the Sound Factory Bar became the new home of Frankie Knuckles, who’d played the actual Sound Factory after Junior Vasquez, the tempestuous regular
there, walked out one night. “When you have a room that size
and you have a sound system that enormous and that pristine,
my first thought was, going in to play on the first night, ‘You’re
only gonna get one chance to do this right,’” Knuckles has said;
he wound up staying six months. After Vasquez returned, the
club’s management presented Knuckles with a smaller room
better calibrated to his slower tempos.
“It started off like a dress-down party, a casual party,” says
Barbara Tucker, the Underground Network’s cofounder (with DJ
Don Welch) and host. “The first year, we alternated DJs—every
week, someone different.” With Vega in place, the night exploded. A peak moment came on March 9, 1994, at a birthday party
for vocalist (and Vega’s then-wife) India, when salsa legend Tito
Puente stopped by to jam after a Blue Note gig. “They went
mad,” Vega said in 1995. “I’ve never seen… I mean… the hairs
stood. If you would have seen the reaction of that audience, the
way they screamed—you had to be there, it was a once-in-alifetime thing.”
“You could go into Vinyl Mania on a Friday afternoon, look
around, and see five different people you could make tracks
with,” says Michael Weiss. “Wednesday night at Sound Factory
Bar, Louie Vega would play all the independent labels’ records,
and they would blow up if they were any good. And they would
all blow up.”
Stay tuned for Part Two.
13
BAKH YAYE
African
241 W. 116th Street
New York, NY 10026
(212) 531-0274
LA MALIENNE
MAMA DE MOMY
West African (Mali, Senegal)
230 W. 116th Street
New York, NY 10026
(212) 316-2651
RECORD MART INC
Latin & Jazz
7 Times Square
New York, NY 10036
(212) 840-0580
ROCK AND SOUL
DJ EQUIPMENT &
RECORDS
Hip-Hop & House
462 7th Avenue
New York, NY 10018
(212) 695-3953
rockandsoul.com
JAZZ RECORD CENTER
Rare Jazz
236 W. 26th Street #804
New York, NY 10001
(212) 675-4480
jazzrecordcenter.com
ACADEMY
RECORDS & CDS
Classical
12 W. 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
(212) 242-3000
academy-records.com
A-1 RECORDS
Beats (New, Used)
439 E. 6th Street
New York, NY 10009
(212)473-2870
OTHER MUSIC
Indie
15 E. 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
(212) 477-8150
othermusic.com
PUNJABI
GROCERY & DELI
Indian Folk
114 E. 1st Street #3
New York, NY 10009
(212) 533-3356
NY MUSIC
Asian
151 Canal Street
New York, NY 10002
(646) 613-1754
BOLLYWOOD & MUSIC
DEADLY DRAGON
SOUND SYSTEM
MOODIES RECORD AND TAPE
Crate-digging (Used)
48-9 Bell Boulevard
Bayside, NY 11364
(718) 279-0040
breakdownrecordsnyc.com
BREAKDOWN RECORDS
Hip-Hop & Reggae
3976 White Plains Road
Bronx, NY 10466
(718) 654-8368
CO-OP 87 RECORDS
Small Labels (Curated, Used)
87 Guernsey Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(347) 294-4629
BROOKLYN FLEA RECORD FAIR
Williamsburg Waterfront
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, May 4, 11 AM - 5 PM
(Thanks to DJ Rekha)
Contrary to popular belief, record stores are
still alive and are actually thriving. Here are
some that stock a wide world of music.
RECORD
TIME
House & Techno
57 Pearl Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(718) 260-9299
halcyonline.com
HALCYON
Avant-Garde, Classical, Jazz
13 Monroe Street
New York, NY 10002
(212) 473-0043
dtmgallery.com
DOWNTOWN MUSIC GALLERY
Reggae
102 Forsyth Street
New York, NY 10002
(646) 613-0139
deadlydragonsound.com
Crate-digging (Used)
1001 Manhattan Avenue
Brookyln, NY 11222
(718) 349-8234
THE THING
Bollywood & South Asian
3711 74th Street #74C
Flushing, NY 11372
(718) 429-8800
CENTERFOLD
HARMONY
RECORDS
Hip-Hop
352 Lenox Avenue
New York, NY 10027
(212) 369-5323
blackstarvideo.com
BLACK STAR
MUSIC & VIDEO
Hip-Hop, Funk, Soul
1625 Unionport Road
Bronx, NY 10462
(718) 792-4070
KORYO BOOKS
K-Pop
35 W. 32nd Street
New York, NY 10001
(212) 564-1844
nykoryobooks.com
MAJORS RECORDS
& VIDEO
Generalist
1351 Forest Avenue
Staten Island, NY 10302
(718) 442-3462
FEATURE
Tower of Sound by
Sound Liberation Front,
2013.
718
BASS
High-quality sound arrives in Brooklyn.
PHOTOGRAPHY ANTHONY BLASKO
people say that sound -system culture
has never been a major part of New York music—and
they may have a point. Sure, there’s long been classic
sound design in the city’s clubs (think the Loft, Paradise
Garage, Twilo, and Plant Bar) and parks (where Kool
Herc and Grandmaster Flash’s homemade stacks
changed the world forever), but top-shelf sound has
always been an audiophile’s game. Even as the last few
years have seen an explosion of DJ parties around the
five boroughs, new big-room delivery systems have
been sadly lacking—until recently. With the January
opening of Output in Williamsburg, featuring a one-ofa-kind Funktion One system designed specifically for
the club, and the 2012 rollout of Dub-Stuy, a gorgeous
wood-framed monster of the low end, Brooklyn just
might be on the verge of a new halcyon age for sound.
So please, let’s put away those awful earbuds and
computer speakers, and drown our ears in bass.
16
17
Floor bass bin at Output
by Funktion One,
2013.
18
19
COLUMNS
COLUMNS
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
LO G O S
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
Fania art director Izzy Sanabria is better
known for his exuberant album covers
and his larger-than-life stage presence
as the Fania All-Stars’ MC than he is for
designing its logo. For someone dedicated
to “improving the image of Latin artists”
while bringing salsa music to the world, a
logo seems minor; yet for nearly 50 years
the Fania mark has held tremendous weight
as a symbol of great Latin music.
The label was started in 1964 by
bandleader Johnny Pacheco and his lawyer
Jerry Masucci. They enlisted Sanabria,
who’d previously designed the cover of
Pacheco’s smash 1960 album, Pacheco y Su
Charanga, on Alegre Records. “That became
the biggest-selling Latin album at the time,”
says Sanabria, whose woodcut rendering of
a flutist on that cover became iconic as well.
For his first Fania commission, Pacheco at
the NY World’s Fair, Sanabria revived that
woodcut style, only this time with an image
of a percussionist and bold lettering that he
razor-cut from black paper. If the beveledtype Fania logo in the upper right corner
looks generic, that’s because it was. “The first
20
one was done at the printers,” says Sanabria.
“[Around 1968] Jerry wanted a new
logo, so we went through some typefaces
until we found something that he liked,
and from that I deviated,” he says. With
its angled block letters leaning inward (to
form the shape of a mesa) and a bubbly
dot over the “I,” Sanabria’s hand-drawn
logotype wasn’t so much precise as it was
full of character. That design endured for
26 years, branding such infamous Sanabria
covers as Ray Barretto’s Power (inspired
by the story of Samson’s hair) and Willie
Colón’s The Big Break (spoofing an FBI’s
Most Wanted flyer).
Today’s logo is from a pastel artwork by
fashion illustrator Joe Eula for the Fania AllStars’ 30th anniversary album cover, with
the letters F-A-N-I-A stretched tall, rising up
high behind the musicians. “Eventually we
decided to use that as the basis for a logo,”
says Sanabria, who standardized the colors
and redrew the letters with straighter lines.
The spirit of the previous logo is there in
Eula’s rendition, which Sanabria describes
as “like a piece of fine art.”
-SUE APFELBAUM
there is no such thing as vocals without effects. Just by singing into a microphone, you
are processing your vocals through a series of
electronics that color and contort the waveform. The apparent sound of “dry vocals without effects” is, more often than not, the result
of a chain of specific mics, preamps, compressors, and EQs that bring the vocals closer to
your ear. The irony: truly dry vocals, with no
effects, often sound unnatural.
The advent of affordable vocal processing
has changed the sound of music around New
York. Short of bringing your own, you never
know what kind of live engineer you’re going
to get at smaller venues. Indie bands and singer/songwriters now bring along a pedal with
a reverb treatment they know will make their
vocals sit more “naturally.” Some experimental
musicians, meanwhile, have built their entire
sounds around extreme vocal treatments. It’s
a technological development up there with the
availability of cheap synthesizers in the ’80s.
We spoke with Dan Winner, a senior DSP
[digital signal processor] engineer at TC-Helicon, to learn more about the kind of thought
that goes into his company’s popular line of
vocal pedals.
RBMA: What are the kinds of challenges that
make designing vocal processors different from
designing non-vocal-specific processors?
Dan Winner: Vocal products generally run a
lot more algorithms simultaneously on the same
processor. The challenge is fitting it all in, keeping the delay (latency) as low as possible, and not
compromising too much on computational complexity such that sound quality suffers.
RBMA: Auto-Tune/HardTune was a pretty significant trend in vocal processing. What do you
see as the next big thing in vocals?
DW: I do think the use of more vocal effects
overall in music is a trend in itself. People are
beginning to discover more and more what vocal harmony is, for example, and how to use a
looper for building layers.
RBMA: What would you say are the biggest
developments in technology that have allowed
extreme vocal processing?
DW: CPUs and DSPs are obviously advancing
and getting faster, so that always helps run
more “stuff” in the box. The smartphone revolution has certainly brought out some amazing
processors and there are more to come.
RBMA: What about software?
DW: The biggest development is the “intelligent” algorithms that do a lot of the work for
the user, like “tone” (a TC-Helicon feature)
that just automatically gets you a better vocal
sound. Analyzing your guitar chords in order
to drive the harmonies is a huge step forward
from the days of having to manually program
in key and chord/scale steps within a song.
QUEENSBRIDGE
HOUSES
In the 1980s Vernon Boulevard was a vital cultural corridor connecting the Astoria and Queensbridge Housing Projects. Astoria Houses is a mile and change to the northeast of
Queensbridge, and in those days—if you dared—you could
walk from one to another along Vernon. On the way, you’d
pass an assortment of power plants and housing-project
parks that daisy chain up the East River to Astoria and beyond, with some fine vistas of the river and its various bridges (Queensboro, Triboro, Hell Gate Bridge).
This terrain is now legendary for having spawned some
of the biggest names in hip-hop, with Queensbridge at the
center: the Juice Crew’s Marley Marl and Roxanne Shante
in the ’80s; Mobb Deep, Nas, Capone-N-Noreaga in the ’90s,
among many others. Ego trip writer/editor Sacha Jenkins
grew up directly across the street from the Astoria Projects, and remembers watching park jams from his bedroom
window. “Queensbridge had a popping park-jam scene in
the ’70s and ’80s, and Astoria had a similar scene,” he says.
“There were rivalries between the two projects, but it was
really thrilling and exciting to make your way from one to
the other.” Out of these jams came some of the most famous
records of the early hip-hop era. MC Shan’s “The Bridge,” initially recorded for a park jam in 1984, unwittingly touched
off one of hip-hop’s first well-known feuds (the Bridge Wars),
with South Bronx’s KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions’
retaliation, “The Bridge Is Over,” now considered a classic
diss song of the era.
Relatively close quarters led to indelible connections between Astoria and Queensbridge, forged by blood or money:
blood, if you had family in the other projects (as many did);
money, if you could find a way to make records—an expensive proposition, one which crack dealers often bankrolled.
“The drug economy and rap were synonymous at that point,”
says Jenkins. “I’m not saying that everyone who was involved
with rap was involved with selling drugs, but it was a very
tumultuous time.”
Today, Queensbridge, still the largest housing development in North America, seems almost quiescent, though in
front of one building a candle-strewn altar announces the recent departure of Clarence Shawn ‘Du’ Williams (“In Loving
Memory”). In the park across from the complex, where the
Bridge Wars first began, a game of lacrosse unfolds across the
grass. And stretching high above it all, connecting Queens
with Manhattan and the rest of the world, is the bridge with
the indelible name.
-ADRIENNE DAY
TOP
5…
LOCAL INDIE
RADIO STATIONS
PRESENTED BY
NPR Music takes a lot of different
approaches to music coverage—album
previews, long-form criticism, live
concerts—but at our core, we’re a
radio operation. We wanted to take
this opportunity to give props to five
New York radio channels that anyone
attending the Red Bull Music Academy
should know about. Log on and lock in.
LANDMARKS
THE BRONX
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
PAST FEATURED LANDMARKS
1
2
3
4
5
MAX NEUHAUS’ “TIMES SQUARE”
THE THING SECONDHAND STORE
THE LOFT
MARCY HOTEL
ANDY WARHOL’S FACTORY
1
5
QUEENS
5
2
5
3
MANHATTAN
4
WHAT: QUEENSBRIDGE
HOUSES
WHERE: LONG ISLAND
CITY, QUEENS
WHY: MARLEY MARL,
NAS, CAPONE-NNOREAGA, MOBB DEEP
WHEN: 1983–PRESENT
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
WFMU
(91.1 FM, wfmu.org)
East Village Radio
(eastvillageradio.com)
WNYU
(89.1 FM, wnyu.org)
Bacchanal Radio
(bacchanalradio.com)
Q2
(Q2music.org)
It’s almost silly
to call this a New
York station at this
point, such is WFMU’s
worldwide dominance
of the freeform
format (plus, it’s
technically in New
Jersey). But hey,
it’s the best station
in the world and has
had a profound effect
on music freaks for
more than 40 years.
Fans of RBMA will dig
Duane Harriott’s show
on Wednesdays from
noon-3pm ET.
Broadcasting from
a storefront near
First Avenue and 1st
Street, the Internet
radio station has a
sick roster of dance
DJs. The Saturday
lineup is insane:
Mystic Sound’s reggae
vibes, Universopolis’ pan-global dance
tracks, Mark Ronson’s Authentic Sh*t,
and Academy Records’
b2b2b2b.
In spite of the blogosphere’s best efforts, college radio
is still alive and
kicking. WNYU features one of New York
City’s best dance
DJs, Tim Sweeney from
Beats in Space (Tuesdays, 10:30pm-1am)
and a weekly education in boogie called
A Downtown Affair
(Fridays, same time).
Plus, the iconic New
Afternoon Show runs
each weekday from
4-7:30pm.
While its servers may
reside in Trinidad
and Tobago, the excellently titled Bacchanal Radio features
several NYC-based
DJs and caters to the
city’s West Indian
population. You won’t
hear its mix of soca
(Trinidad’s signature
sound) and chutney
(a Caribbean take on
traditional Indian
music) anywhere else.
If Brian Eno was releasing Ambient 1:
Music For Airports
today, Q2 would be
streaming it a week
before it came out.
The “contemporary
composers” arm of New
York Public Radio is
fiercely dedicated to
the avant-garde, and
while most of its programming eschews drum
machines, it does a
great job of connecting the dots between
electronic-music pioneers (Morton Subotnick) and the unclassifiable figures of
today (Julia Holter,
Laurel Halo).
-NICK SYLVESTER
21
NEW YORK STORY
NEW YORK STORY
YOU’RE A
CUSTOMER
A tale of magical realism from an
unusual Manhattan record store.
WORDS DAVE TOMPKINS
ILLUSTRATION JESS ROTTER
i once walked into a used record store troubled by a dream:
Bushwick Bill had transformed into the mandrake-root creature from the film Pan’s Labyrinth. It was an odd hybrid. Bill
is the abbreviated rapper from the Geto Boys, a man who slept
with one eye open after a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The
squirmy nightshade root lived under a little girl’s bed and/or
in her imagination during the Spanish Civil War. Magic realism vs. “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me.” Both possessed hallucinogenic properties.
I tried explaining the dream to Jared Race Boxx, proprietor
of Big City Records, a tiny shop in the East Village. He paused
from wiping down a Beatnuts 12-inch and assured me that
the actual dream content was probably far more substantial
than its waking memory: “You only awoke with the shadow
of that dream.” Mr. Boxx seemed not at all surprised to learn
that Bushwick Bill had turned into a giant animatronic plant.
Great production values, good night.
Since Bill was often predisposed to irreality (e.g., “Chuckwick,” a song where he merges with a homicidal-doll franchise), I felt pressed to review some truths.
1. Bushwick Bill taught Snoop Dogg how to roll a blunt.
2. Bushwick Bill once saw a deer dancing in the snow in a
forest outside Duluth.
3. Bushwick Bill lost a breakdance battle to a girl in Union
Square.
4. Bushwick Bill threatened my friend with a dinner fork.
5. Bushwick Bill is from Bushwick.
Jared was accustomed to this sort of conversation, having
shared an apartment with me for five years. When I played
him my favorite New York electro record from 1983—the dub
version of Fantasy Three’s “Biters in the City”—he described it
as “a vacuum cleaner on the tarmac.” This naturally evolved
into “Chewbaccuum Cleaner.” I knew then we’d get on just
fine. We were often on different schedules, so the best way to
catch up was at his shop on East 12th Street, between First
Avenue and Avenue A. Though Jared often brought the store
home with him, the records themselves—no matter how
great—were never a substitute for being there.
The best record stores are conversations, serving the
story and the legend as well as the customer. At Big City, I
didn’t want to spend too much time under headphones at
the listening stations, preferring to eavesdrop on random exchanges from behind the counter. “I saw Super Lover Cee and
Casanova Rud do a show at Ashford & Simpson’s club Saturday night.” Robert Mitchum’s informant blues in Friends of
Eddie Coyle. A quote from Jack Johnson: “We eat cold eels,
and think distant thoughts.”
One day at the shop, Jared played an old clip taken from
102 Jams, a radio station out of Greensboro, North Carolina.
Apparently their Jam Machine—an apparatus that played the
intro of Guy’s new jack swing hit “Teddy’s Jam” for station
22
IDs—had gone on the fritz. For 48 hours
straight, listeners were barraged with “Oh
jam! Oh jam!” The phones blinked in confusion. One caller suggested shooting the
Jam Machine. Anyone who walked into Big
City that week was treated to this malfunction of bygone hype technology. It became
the sound of the day.
Big City didn’t seem too bothered with
present trends, unaware of its moment in a
town that constantly had to be up on itself.
Jared was more concerned with keeping
up with his clientele—which was a microcosm of why we live in New York. On
any given Friday you might bump into the
guy who specialized in restoring ancient
Egyptian wooden sarcophagi, or a used
car dealer from Long Island who favored
Herc from The Wire. A Japanese man from
Pittsburgh with a pet ferret named after a
Korean cracker stick covered with chocolate.
A flea market icon (named Stinky Steve) who
made frighteningly authentic bat calls while
dancing to James Brown in ninja slippers. Q-Tip.
To my knowledge, Big City was the only place in
New York where you could get your favorite member
of A Tribe Called Quest to write your wedding proposal.
My friend Allen—who once made a beat from the Family
Ties theme—had Tip inscribe a copy of Low End Theory to
his girlfriend, customizing a line from her favorite Tribe song:
“What is Allen without Nicole!” (She said yes.) There are certain things that could only occur in New York, but this could
only happen in Big City.
This space—the width of a single grocery aisle—was more
rarefied than the records on its walls. As is often the case in
New York, dimensions can be misleading, an entire world in
a block. Appropriately, Big City’s bins were once organized
according to the artist’s home borough, keeping it as local
as all get out.
Many times, the legend became the everyday. Producers
and DJs who made records showcased on the wall were often customers, a transfer of analog format. Vinyl to flesh.
The Texas transplant who produced all those Gang Starr
albums would get that same giddy feeling as we did when
entering the door. The four-eyed genius rifling through the
cheap bins with weird gloves once made beats for Eric B &
Rakim. I remember Lord Finesse appearing in the doorway
after responding to a tip from Jared, utterly winded, as if
he’d sprinted down from the Bronx. All perfectly normal—
perfectly New York—finding your ’90s rap heroes in a retail
circumstance, trying to buy more time for their holdbags,
their Sharpied names expanded by plastic stretch marks. You
kind of never wanted to get over it.
Special thanks to Jon Kirby for “Plight of
the Jam Machine.”
Dave Tompkins is the Brooklyn-based
author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The
Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop.
He is currently working on a book about
I once brought director John Hughes to Big City so he
could buy his favorite Jonzun Crew single, “Pack Jam,” an
electro-funk classic he played on the set of Sixteen Candles
while shooting a deleted high school dance scene. A newly
found film buff, Jared didn’t realize who it was until the next
day. (“Hey, wasn’t that…”) You didn’t have to leave with that
expensive True Desire 45 that sounded like budget Nate Dogg.
Sometimes it was just enough to see Danny Dan the Beatman
toweling off his bald head in front of the cheap Latin bins.
On Big City’s final day of business, over Labor Day weekend
2012, these apparitions were all in there sweating, paying tribute
to a place that once blasted the most sub-frigid air conditioning in Manhattan. The counter was all donuts and beer and the
walls were decorated with Jared’s personal records. Lord Finesse
roamed the aisle, eyes saucered. Behind him, people grabbed
dividers bearing Jared’s impeccable serial-killer penmanship.
Feigning a normal Friday, I found myself in a conversation about a late-’80s rapper named Lawnmower Def. We
marveled at the name. Lawnmower Def. What was he thinking? What were we thinking, thinking what he was thinking?
Outside, a graffiti-tagged register was passed around to sign.
I misspelled vacuum twice. The attorney who proposed to his
fiance via Q-Tip proceeded to tell me his clients included one
of Chubb Rock’s dancers.
Back inside, Jared started gifting us pieces from his collection. As much as I like touting that it was never really about
the records, I was reminded of a condition known as the “gripsweats,” an exudation of nerves caused by wanting a record
you can’t have. Jared then passed me a 45 of a soul-crushing
ballad by Reuben Bell (“It’s Not That Easy”) and an orange
Mantronix beer hugger. “Grip it on that other level,” as Bushwick Bill might say.
I walked out and sat on the bench outside the store, next
to a tree that trilled with invisible birds in the summer. Across
the street was Jubb’s Longevity, a health store that specialized
in colon cleansers and witchy tinctures. I wondered if Jubb’s
sold mandrake roots.
At 10:30pm, the shop remained packed, as if everyone figured that Jared couldn’t close as long as they stood in there
cheering. All day, I’d been anticipating how it would all end.
Would it simply go down with the gate? Launch into space?
Maybe Lord Finesse would just saunter off with Big City itself
folded up in his holdbag.
I finally gave up and decided to leave things open-ended,
framed in that shoebox of orange light. I knew I wouldn’t return to that block, not out of maudlin loyalty, but in that way
how certain parts of our New York past, actual streets, vanish
from neglect. As with Big City, as with the block. So it goes.
Miami. Crosstalk and mixes can be found at
howtowreckanicebeach.com
23
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