Emma O’Brien

ANTH 3890

26 February 2008

Hip Hop Pioneer Essay

 

Giving Them Something to Dance to

 

            Arabian Prince comes “straight outta Compton.” Though he does not appear on the NWA song of the same name, Mik Lezan was born in Compton in South Central Los Angeles on 17 June 1965 and still boasts a 310 area code. He is quick to point out that his birth year is often misquoted as 1964, claiming him to be one year older than he truly is. That is not to say he doesn’t know he’s old. When I ask if he considers himself a pioneer of hip hop, he laughs, “I consider myself old!” His age doesn’t show, considering all he’s been through. “We had more problems with the police than with anybody else… but I’m still here!” he admits.[1] And that he is, still up on stage before a dancing crowd, spinning the music that inspired the LA hip hop scene over 20 years ago. Arabian Prince has achieved the status of a hip hop pioneer for his roles as a contributor to the electrofunk DJ party scene and as a member of Niggaz With Attitude, the original gangsta rap crew. Both roles revolutionized the face of hip hop for future generations.

            Much like DJ Kool Herc whose career as a DJ developed with early access to his father’s sound system, Arabian Prince taught himself to DJ at the young age of 12 while hanging around the radio studio where his father broadcast a talk show.[2] “I’d be in the room with all the music,” Arabian Prince remembers. “I’d be playing with all the carts and learning how to mix and stuff, making little stupid mixtapes and I would go sell ‘em at school.”[3] The young entrepreneur was inspired by the music he heard on the radio at the time. “When you did shows or when you did DJ parties you were playing, you know, Cameo, Parliament, Prince, Michael Jackson, then you’d play Depeche Mode, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna… There really was no style to what we played, but that’s what we all listened to.”[4]

            For West Coast hip hop, it seems as if the mantra of “right place, right time” holds true more than anything. LA couldn’t have been further from New York City. As Arabian Prince says, “I never knew anybody from New York.”[5] And yet a parallel culture was rising up with the same elements as the Bronx, but in a completely different way. East Coast hip hop was born and raised in a 7-mile ghetto and evolved out of Jamaican dubs, taking the train, and a culture of youth abandoned by the city they lived in. The West Coast scene was born in the vast metropolis of Los Angeles, and developed from the electronic sounds of a new era, lowriders cruising the ‘hood, and the brutal racism of the LAPD.[6] It was an instant hit with inner city youth of all colors and white kids from the suburbs. The way Arabian Prince tells it, it was only natural that hip hop should have arisen from Compton in the early 80s just as it did. “They were doing their hip hop thing on the East Coast, and ours was a little different on the West Coast because… it derived more from electrofunk and then turned into this gangsta thing just happened to come about because we live in Compton.”[7]

 

             

             

            Well before the first West Coast rap album had been recorded, the elements of DJing and break dancing had hit Los Angeles. LA hip hop biographer Brian Cross argues that electropop, stemming from new technological elements like video games, was “a crucial element in defining the LA sound.” [8] “We had really started to get into Kraftwerk on the electrofunk side,” Arabian Prince says of the late 1970s and early 80s. “We took the electronic sound,” he explains, “…we mixed it with some heavy bass from funk records that we listened to.” Arabian Prince was an original founder of that sound, blending the sounds of Parliament Funkadelic and Cameo with the likes of Kraftwerk to create a unique sound that would influence the future music coming out of the West Coast, including NWA.

            LA had its own form of dancing well before the Rock Steady Crew first toured the West Coast in 1982. Locking, according to Brian Cross, was invented in 1972 by the LA group the Original Lockers. “Popping, on the other hand, is credited to Soul Train dancer Charlie Robot,” Cross reveals.[9] The combination of joint-locking and robotic movements of popping, blended with the New York breaking style, created a whole new form of dancing, a style heavily influenced by the electrofunk it was coupled with. Arabian Prince remembers b-boys dancing at early hip hop parties in LA. “Even Ice T was breakdancing back then.”[10]  

            Rap began to come about on the West Coast around 1981, evolving out of the unique blends of funk and electro that DJs were mixing. This new sound was the foundation for West Coast hip hop, and rappers soon began to put the words to the music. “We took the little, like, sexual aspect from Prince,” Arabian Prince says of the lyrics rappers were using. “From there, it moved from electrofunk into gangsta rap, which is what we brought as NWA to the table.”[11] Much like Grandmaster Flash and the Funky Five’s “The Message”, gangsta rap reflected life on the streets. But for Compton rappers, street life included the struggles with the police, the gangster lifestyle, and, as NWA member Eazy E has been quoted, “dick sucking.”[12] The difference came in the fact that, while New York rappers’ lyrics had more of a sociopolitical message, gangsta rap was more interested in the shock value, the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude.[13] “All we knew about was police, guns, drugs, and women,” says Arabian Prince, and that’s exactly what went into West Coast rhymes.[14] Though Melle Mel’s lyrics on “The Message” claimed that he was “close to the edge”, his vocal tone was not harsh. In contrast, most West Coast rap like NWA had a distinctly hard, angry tone to it, evident especially on Straight Outta Compton.

            While DJing, rapping, and breaking held a strong place in the hip hop scene of the West Coast even by the early 80s, the graffiti element was mysteriously lacking. Arabian Prince blames that absence on the difference in urban form between LA and New York. Films like Wild Style and Style Wars show New York as a decaying urban jungle with ample canvas space to paint, from the walls of hundreds of abandoned apartment complexes to the trains that crisscrossed the city. Los Angeles, however, was a product of the “Manifest Destiny” era of urban planning, when large quantities of “uninhabited” land were developed far less densely than East Coast cities. LA and its suburbs sprawled across freeways and low-lying residential and commercial landscapes. “There were not that many walls,” says Arabian Prince, “We didn’t have trains. I mean, there were no trains in LA.” With nowhere to paint, graffiti never developed like it had in New York. West Coast hip hop became more focused on the club scene—the breakers, the DJs, the rappers—and less on the physical manifestation of hip hop onto the streets themselves.[15]

            Though East Coast hip hop had some influence on the West Coast movement, it was limited by the extreme geographical distance between the two cities. In an era before MTV, the internet, and even radio airplay of rap music, the two coasts were, for the most part, isolated from each other. Brian Cross discusses the lack of access on the West Coast to the East Coast hip hop albums that were produced by independent labels with poor distribution plans.[16] “There was no way for us to really know even what the hell was going on on the East Coast unless we went there,” Arabian Prince explains. [17]  Los Angeles faced other geographical divides as well. Within the city itself there was less of a connection between scenes than on the East Coast. New York, though separated into boroughs, was still a compact place. For inner city youths who had no access to a car, one could still travel relatively easily from borough to borough by train. It didn’t take long in a city like New York for people to start coming together into a unified hip hop culture. LA, on the other hand, was “So vast, so big. It was just really really hard to get this thing happening.”[18] Going “all-city” was a much bigger proposition.

            Once things did start coming together though, it happened in a big way. Los Angeles had the advantage of a large population, and when hip hop DJs hosted parties they attracted a far larger crowd than would fit in an apartment or small community center. “It was really really big shows for small DJs,” says Arabian Prince about his early days DJing. “With Uncle Jam’s Army we’d do like the Convention Center, the Sports Arena, which could hold like 10,000 people.”[19] He stresses the fact that these shows did not feature any rappers early on, it was simply DJs spinning records for people to dance to and the crowds were still in the thousands. When rap crews started doing live shows they drew similarly large crowds. West Coast hip hop started as something to dance to, mimicking what funk had done for the previous generation, but with a new creative twist. The dance club scene continued until the influence of the gangs started getting in the way. “It became too crazy,” Arabian Prince says of the live shows which were shut down due to perceived or real gang violence.[20] It was at that point, he says, that rappers began focusing their energy on making records rather than performing live.             

            It seems as if Arabian Prince was simultaneously a pioneer and a sort of last-man-standing. As a DJ coming up in Compton, taking the funk, electro, and top 40 sounds and mixing it all together into something new and cool, Arabian Prince recorded 12-inch mixes and performed at parties. These were the sounds that would be West Coast hip hop. Even before NWA, he was working as a producer, rapper, and DJ with other electro/hip hop groups such as Bobby Jimmy & The Critters, World Class Wreckin’ Cru, and Egyptian Lover. “Me and (Dr.) Dre used to hang out cause he was in the Wreckin’ Cru at the time and we both were doing electro, that’s how we became buddies,” says Arabian Prince.[21] He goes on to explain NWA’s formation as arising out of the desire to make more money from the music he and Dre were producing.     

            At first, the money came in slowly. “We’d be doing swap meets out the trunk,” Arabian Prince recalls of the early days of selling NWA tapes and records on the Compton streets.[22] NWA seemed to bridge the racial divide, appealing to whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians alike. Arabian Prince attributes NWA’s wide audience base to the nature of their songs. “It just sort of captured everybody because it was a different thing… Anything bad, people want. And that’s what it was,” he explains.[23] Their diverse fan base allowed the group to do shows all across southern California. “We weren’t just doing shows in the hood, we’d be doing shows in like Pomona, San Bernardino, Riverside… there was not that big of a black influence in some of these places we were going, but we were still packing the house.”[24] As record stores began to stock copies of their albums and ship them out-of-state, NWA started gathering enough of a fan base to tour outside of California. It was a rough road of being screwed by record companies, leaving former crews behind, and police accusations that NWA were a gang. “Dude, we make records. We’re no gang,” Arabian Prince attests.[25] By 1987, NWA began to explode on the national and global scale.

            Arabian Prince’s membership in NWA was short-lived and his recorded contributions were limited to two songs, “Panic Zone” from NWA’s first album NWA and the Posse in 1987 and “Something 2 Dance 2” on Straight Outta Compton the following year. Upon listening it is not hard to discern that these songs are not like the others on their respective albums. The electro and funk influences are strong in these club anthems, with faster beats and danceable rhythms creating the perfect party soundtrack for popping and locking breakers. Indeed, as Arabian Prince raps in “Something 2 Dance 2” that the song’s sound was “not slow and low” like the rest of the songs on the album, but “the fast type.”[26] Jeff Chang does not overlook Arabian Prince’s role in NWA. He describes “Something 2 Dance 2” as being “more G-rated than G’ed down” and suggests that NWA closed out their second album with it as a way of guarding against their losses if the gangsta rap phenomenon didn’t work as they’d planned.[27] The song, featured as a B-side on the “Gangsta Gangsta” single, turned out to be a huge success in the urban club scene in 1988.[28] But the song’s success did not entice NWA enough to keep that sound. The group continued on sans Arabian Prince and his funky sounds, turning to hardcore rap and ushering in a new era of “we don’t dance we just pull up our pants” mentality.

            NWA’s influence on future hip hop was both good and bad, says Arabian Prince. He laughs, “I apologize for some of that stuff,” and then adds, “no I don’t!” He continues, “a lot of the sounds that are out now are the sounds that we helped create back in the day.”[29] That statement is true on several levels. NWA, as the founders of gangsta rap, set the bar for how future rap was supposed to sound, both lyrically and rhythmically. The cussing, the violence, the women-hating, the money-making—all the parts of hip hop that are frowned upon by society, were manifest in NWA lyrics. Certain phrases, especially “fuck tha police!” have achieved a legendary status of their own. Chang highlights the role NWA played in creating the street narrative, which was closely tied henceforth to the idea of authenticity in rap. “Now every ‘hood could be Compton, everyone had a story to tell,” Chang writes.[30] In addition to the lyrical legacy, their musical sound remains heavily sampled to this day.

            Arabian Prince equates legendary status with age. He acknowledges that he’s old school, understanding that everything he’s doing today, touring the US and Europe and performing at events like First Avenue’s Dre Day, is directly related to his revolutionary role in the earliest days of West Coast hip hop. His pioneer days were spent blending the electro elements that are so popular today and the gangsta rap themes now equally common place. Despite the fact that everyone from the average Minneapolis college students at Dre Day to Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys considers him a legend, Arabian Prince remains humble. “Dude! I’m just me! I’m just here to have fun and hopefully get people partying.”[31] It seems as if his goal has always been to simply give people something to dance to. And that he has.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

            Chang, Jeff. “The Culture Assassins.” Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. 299-329.

 

            Chang, Jeff. “Making a Name.” Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. 67-85.    

 

            Cross, Brian. “Eazy E.” It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1993. 200-203.

 

            Cross, Brian. “Ice Cube.” It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1993. 204-217.

 

            Cross, Brian. “L.A. Hiphop: a Brief History.” It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1993. 5-63.

 

            Interview with Arabian Prince. Conducted 22 February 2008 by Emma O’Brien at Graves 601 Hotel, Minneapolis, MN.