NB. Yeah the first one is pretty obvious I admit, and I know A Bit Patchy and We Run This came out aaages ago, but this track has been sliced and diced and re-energised so many times - in fact that is the whole bloody point of the importance of this song - that it's clearly only a matter of time before its turn comes again.
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Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band. OK, wait a second...before I start...what a fucking NAME!! Seriously. That name tells you two things that make you piss your pants out of excitement right off the bat. One...they're a fucking BONGO BAND. Two...they're fucking INCREDIBLE!
Anyway, basically just a motley assortment of anonymous LA session boys and a record mogul, the group made like the bongo-fiddling, funk-worshipping Mantovanis they were and put out two albums of percussion-heavy cover version fluff. Needless to say, both records bombed and it wasn't until hip hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc got his mits on their Bongo Rock debut that things got interesting. At a time when a DJ was only as good as the breaks in his box, Bongo Rock and its take on Shadows-staple Apache contained a beat so devastating that all Herc needed to run rap in the Bronx was two copies that he could spin back to back, on and on and on, for the B-boys on the floor in front. Five minutes of rolling deep funk, the IBB's Apache was special in that it took a tune already so deeply embedded in some mythical Great Rock 'n' Roll Songbook - a song that had become absolutely synonymous with the guitar itself - and regrounded it in an alternative, "blacker" tradition where the rhythm was the song - a tradition to which rock 'n' roll owed its existence in the first place, yet one which it had summarily come to reject over the intervening years as the music, in its popular incarnations at least, came to be seen as an inherently "white" and melodic form. Maybe this is why it meant so much to hip hop from the genre's formative years right up to its arguably troubled present; in its formative years of breaking and battle rapping, where Apache was used primarily as a DJ tool for live performance and competition, through the anything-goes sample culture of the late 80s, where it first found new life within songs other than itself, through to the post-Biz era of "licensed interpolations". Hip hop, unlike rock 'n' roll, began as a black expression and has continued to be seen as one. But it is also traditionally an African-American one. Songs like the IBB's Apache are what connected the dots - the short memory and white-centricity of American popular music and something from its associated canon taken head on, then reused and reinvented by a black culture - an inversion of traditional currents vital in its assertion of hip hop as a truly valid, consciously-black but equally-American art form.
(NB. yes, I know The Shadows were British, but any Rock 'n' Roll Songbook will always be American too)
Download: Incredible Bongo Band - Apache [Mr. Bongo, 2006 reissue]
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