![]() Dance jam “What U Waitin’ 4” throttles forward from moment one and only lets up its ferocity when intentionally adding more tension to its distinct groove. ![]() One of the first groups outside of Chicago to innovate within the house/hip-hop crossover space, NYC’s Jungle Brothers mixed funky samples and clever lyrics into the mix, resulting in a sound that was both genre-defining and distinctly house influenced. It’s maybe the purest distillation of what hip house really is, – JTįrom Done By The Forces of Nature (1989 Warner Bros.) With its roots in Chicago house, the track incorporates that signature sound’s funky beats and hypnotic piano loops, while emcee Kool Rock Steady offers up some fairly silly but definitely perfect for the track verses (He uses the phrase “awesome, super duper trooper,” which Treble is having printed on buttons right now-pre-order yours today!). Tyree Cooper’s 1989 single “Turn Up the Bass” incited a little bit of controversy upon its release when it was marketed as the “first hip house track on vinyl.” UK outfit The Beatmasters had a bone to pick with that distinction (and there’s at least a couple on our calendar that predate it), but “Turn Up the Bass,” regardless of how early it was in the shuffle, was certainly one of the first truly exceptional hip house tracks to hit the clubs. With its inclusion on The KLF’s mainstream LP The White Room, it scored a victory for so-called stadium house on both sides of the Atlantic. – AB Before disappearing in a fog of infrequent remixes, occasional new cuts and a deleted KLF back catalog, they saturated the market in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with a few different versions of their dramatic acid track “What Time is Love?” The middle child in this set of siblings built upon the spare skeleton of the original most notably with a megaphone rap from Isaac “Bello B” Bello of British rap group Outlaw Posse. UK musical gadflies Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond made a living using society to tweak their electro, and using their electro to tweak society. There were certainly mixing contemporaries with larger legacies like Grandmaster Flash and Steinski there were equally definitive songs like Paul Hardcastle’s depressing “19.” Yet few moments in recorded history managed to mean so much to a particular label (this was 4AD’s best-selling single forever), champion new performance styles (including sampledelica), and herald the rise of multiple genres and subgenres (including turntablism). – AB & Rakim, funk from James Brown and Jimmy Castor, oddities from Islamic chants and German pop and classic bad films. On top of it they laid a pastiche of scratches and found sounds: lyrics from Public Enemy and Eric B. Kane didn’t just embrace the flat drums and piano stabs of the burgeoning house scene. This offshoot of 4AD acts Colourbox and A.R. How do you make a hip house record with no discernible rap? Focus on the wheels of steel, that’s how. That last bit of boogie would itself time-warp into legend, sampled by Nightmares on Wax for “I’m for Real” at the dawn of both trip-hop and the history of Warp Records. And man, “Jam on It” was on some sci-fi shit, from the crew (“ I’m Cozmo D from outer space/I came to rock the human race”) to the story (Newcleus in a soundsystem battle with Superman himself) to the deliberate bassline and staccato keyboard riff. It wasn’t until this family affair out of Brooklyn started releasing tracks with vocals sped up, chipmunk-like, that rap with an electro groove managed to tell stories in the same vein as Slick Rick and Run DMC. But for all of his sonic innovation, the raps he led were still largely nascent, feeling their way through primitive dancefloor exhortations and crypto-religious philosophy. Dude legitimized the use of synthesizers and vocoders to futurize rap, no question. Yes, we know, Afrika Bambaataa, blah blah blah. As the genre moves forward into the next generation, we’re honoring its best moments with a list of 10 essential hip house tracks, with a playlist for your listening enjoyment. Yet hip house has seen a resurgence, if not an outright renaissance thanks to an upswing in house-laden hip-hop singles in the past half-decade, from the likes of Azealia Banks, Shamir, Vic Mensa and Le1f. In the early days, artists were only beginning to scratch the surface of how to blend house with hip-hop, reaching a peak in the late ’80s when artists such as Tyree and The KLF refined and essentially perfected the recipe. But, maybe unsurprisingly, it works remarkably well. Hip house is basically as simple a mixture of styles as you can get-it’s literally rapping over house beats (or scratching and sampling over house beats as the case may be). House music has been healthier and more profile of late than it had been for a while, but so has its hybrid offshoot, hip house.
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