Scarriet

Marc Edmonds, aka, Walter J. Negro  We called him Ebbets.

Is it just bad poetry?

Is it just foul-mouthed ravings over samplings of 70′s funk?

We’ll never know what something is unless we know why it exists—its rationale.

Rap exists to sublimate aggression.

Rap is a means for males to fight with rhymes instead of fists.

Rap is Alexander Pope, making rhymes to amuse, to sermonize, and to insult.

By the 1960s, a tremendous amount of urban ‘free energy’ was let loose in the American inner city, especially in ethnic urban settings, as young people experienced both new opportunities on one hand, and the shame of still being mired in unemployment/under-employment on the other; the post-war era jumped and swirled as traditions and families loosened and love, sex, violence, and creativity blossomed.

To grow up with blacks and whites in 1960s New York City where rap was born.  Playful insult to relieve tense situations was common among us.  One of our friends, Mark, part black, part Cherokee, would grow up to be one of the first rappers, a.k.a., Walter J. Negro and invent the words you now see on t-shirts: Zoo York.  Marc was extremely shy as a 9 year old; he was small for his age; he wouldn’t participate in gym.  He was watching, though, and gradually he came out of his shell, and by the time he was 13, he was flamboyant in manner, growing an afro and developing ‘a mouth.’  He laughed at Bob Dylan: he “sounded like some guy singing in the shower.”  Maybe his opinion changed, later; he was only 12, at the time, but he was always very opinionated.  His favorite word was “cackle.”  He’d tease Tommy, a black kid in our group, who had a silent laugh, by saying “I’m going to make you cackle!”  Mark had many voices and expressions: whispery, shouting, rhyming, singing, apologetic, thoughtful, lispy, tongue-tipped, tongue-tied, head-scratching,  hesitant, chuckling. Marc was stumbling out of his long shyness. Our group’s bully was a white guy; the pecking order was whites on top, blacks on bottom, even though we were a friendly, racially mixed group. We were not a “gang,” just a group of school chums.  P.S.145.  105th street and Amsterdam Ave, near Broadway, on the West Side.  Some of us lived on Riverside Drive, the nice neighborhood, near Riverside park, and the river.  Actually, there was a fat white kid at the bottom of the pecking order.  Marc was in the middle.  He called Tommy, a black kid, Larry’s younger brother, ’egghead,’ and did somthing strange to the clean-shaven black kids who he wasn’t afraid of: he’d grab their heads and took an exaggerated pleasure in doing so.  He called it ‘grab-a-head.’  Marc had an afro and he loved to grab the heads of little conservative black kids with fuzz on their heads.  If there was a haircut and a brand new bald head presented itself, Marc would pretend to be in heaven.  Of course, we all knew Marc was just kidding, but what did it all mean?  Tommy and his brothers couldn’t stop laughing, though, when some bigger black kids called Marc “cunt” over and over again, beating on his shoulder pads with a stick, in the park, on the way home from a football game.  He must have been 14.  A year later, I moved away.  When I knew him, Marc liked Sly and the Family Stone, the Fifth Dimension, and most all, Muhammad Ali.  Marc used to rhyme like Ali; Marc would sing aloud in the street, and he’d also rap, extended rhyming jams, half-way between talking and singing.  He had a lot of energy, he loved music, he was extroverted, he was insecure, he was shy, he wanted to be liked, he wanted to dominate, he wanted stardom.  I remember the day of Marc’s transformation from the shy kid who was afraid of gym—Riverside park.  He still hated sports at that point but I remember he had shoulder pads on for some reason and he ran across the field and made a tackle and our band of sandlot athletes all went wow, and that was it, a new Marc Edmonds, a new Ebbets, and he was so proud and happy.  A stupid tackle in the park.  He was always shy.  When we played Strat-O-Matic baseball as kids, he took the St. Louis Cardinals.  Why the St. Louis Cardinals?  Because all the home teams were taken, and I had the Giants, and Willie Mays.  He was jealous, but he grew into Curt Flood and Bob Gibson. He was a follower in our little gang, not the leader.  He was inventive; he could make anything he had seem wonderful.  We all doodled and made comics with our own super heroes.  Larry had Steel Storm (a copy of Iron Man). Later, I heard about the grafitti accident when he and Lenny (Futura 2000) were undeground uptown and paint cans exploded on a rail they thought was dead and Marc got nasty burns. 

Nothing could compare with being a youth in NYC in the 60s. Everything felt new, but everything also felt rough n’ tumble. ”Psych your mind!” was a childhood taunt, or just “psyyych!!” for short, when you made someone look foolish, verbally, or physically, but usually verbally.

Rap grew out of those verbal turf wars, the male comraderie of insult, the ubiquitous rhyming of 60s pop music (and the boxer Ali’s rhymes before battle); the energy and culture then was the same as it is now—now it’s more dispersed in the media.  Today feels no different than the 60s—no progress has really been made at all.

Rap, like any other art form, is a human response, one could almost say a fearful, childish response, to aggression.  We don’t think of rap music as geeky, but I was there at the beginning, when it was.