Hip Hop Family Tree

Ed Piskor’s “Hip Hop Family Tree” makes innovative use of the comics medium to tell the story of Hip Hop. It’s basically a documentary, but instead of aged talking heads reminiscing over old footage, Piskor narrates the story, with the images showing the main characters and action. This technique takes you back and effectively immerses you into the sights and fashions of the periods covered.

The story starts in the Bronx in the 70s and for a while doesn’t travel very far outside; it’s remarkable how much of the early innovation in Hip Hop happened in such a small, concentrated area. Despite this, the number of characters quickly multiplies, and Piskor has his work cut out managing all the competing crews, DJs, club owners and MCs.  Piskor has cited Chris Claremont’s 70s/80s work on the Uncanny X-Men as inspiration for handling an extensive list of characters and it’s there to see in techniques such as introducing characters well before they take centre stage (graphic design student Carlton Ridenhouer is seen listening to early Hip Hop at college, and in a nice touch we see young comics fan Darryl McDaniels reading a copy of the X Men).

Going so far back in time enables Piskor to explain the cultural roots of the genre. The battles between the sound systems at the block parties and the roots in gang culture explain the seam of adversarial braggadocio that still runs through the music. 

The comics are well-researched (with endnotes pointing you to further reading and YouTube clips), but the tone isn’t dry, and though the genre is given the respect it merits, there’s a spiky playful tone throughout. This is evident in how Piskor portrays some of the characters: Rick Rubin is shown as a spoilt, slumming rich kid, while Russell Simmon’s lisp (or as the comic would put it “Ruthell Thimmon’th lithp”) is turned up to 11.

If you’re a Hip Hop fan, you’ll find more than enough detail and verisimilitude here to wallow in. If like me, you’re largely a sympathetic observer, you can enjoy the storytelling chops and artwork, plus find a few things to explore beyond those Public Enemy, Wu Tang Clan and Common albums.

The Broons in 2016

About twenty years ago someone wrote to the letters page of The Guardian with a set of three questions that could be used to determine whether someone was really Scottish or not. I forget the other two, but one of them was “Who lives at 10 Glebe Street?”. The answer, as anyone who has grown up in Scotland over the last 80 years or so will know is: The Broons. I received a copy of the latest book as a Christmas present (it must be a classic gift for exiled Scots) and it was the first one I’d seen for quite a few years.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Broons, it is a long-running comic strip published weekly in the Scottish Sunday Post newspaper with a book collecting the strips being published every two years or so (And it really is long-running, first appearing in 1936, it’s characters are older than Batman and Superman). The original writer/artist died in the late 60s and since then a series or writers and artists have continued the strip in exactly the same style (there have been no Frank Miller-type Dark Knight re-imaginings of the Broons, though it’s an intriguing thought).

There are four standard Broons storylines:

1. “The Bairn overhears something”. Simple but versatile, the bairn overhears someone talking about one of the family, gets the wrong end of the stick, mobilises panic-stricken family members until it all sorts itself out. Memorably used in Viz’s McBroons strip. Key phrase: “Ha ha! My wee lamb!”

2. “Pa is mean”: Pa Broon tries to save money in a ridiculous way while lecturing the rest of the family on their spendthrift ways. He always comes a cropper and ends up spending more to get less. Key phrase: “Auld Skinflint”

3. “The But and Ben”: All 9 Broons decamp for a holiday in a two-room house in the Scottish countryside. Key phrase: “Look at that teuchter!

4. “The Broons vs Modern Life”: A member of the family will enthuse about a new trend or technology, such as electric shavers or computer games, only for the Broons to put their own stamp on it. In this year’s book, Grandpa Broon comes up with a mince & tatties smoothie, the idea of which is making me feel a bit queasy as I type. Key phrase: “Now that’s what I call a –insert technology name-!”

 

Why is The Broons still going? It was old-fashioned even when I first read it in the 70s; it can look ridiculously so today. In one of the strips in this year’s book we see Pa Broon at work in what seems to be a shipyard while his son buys a second hand zoot suit for a date. It’s not even that well-written: the bairn these days talks like Jar Jar Binks’s Scottish cousin: “Me disnae think Paw kens how”.

I think one reason it still exists is that it benefits from the powerful Celtic Nostalgia that Scots tend to be subject to (think of Billy Connolly’s line about Scots singing about being far away from Scotland while they’re still there). But I also think it’s linked to the fact that The Broons are one of the first things that a Scot will read by themselves; there are generations who remember having Broons and Oor Wullie books in their childhood libraries. The Broons is a reminder of childhood independence. And because it’s so strongly linked to our childhoods we’re happy to ignore the fact that Pa Broon dresses like something from Peaky Blinders.

Scents of the Seventies

 

Taking a wrong turn in Singapore’s sprawling Mustafa Centre a few months back, I ended up in 1978. There, facing me from the shelves was a line-up of fragrances that I hadn’t seen in the same place for years: Denim, Old Spice, Tabac and Brut: the fab four of Seventies fragrances. Sure, the livery had changed on a few of them (though I don’t think the Tabac Brand Artwork team has been that busy in the last 40 years) but they were still easily recognizable. Cheap, too. So what does an Afterworder do when he finds himself in a shop with cheap stuff that other folk haven’t been interested in since the 70s? He buys them of course, and here are my reviews.

Denim: For me, the most disappointing of the four: very, very light scent, as if a bottle of Smirnoff had been left open in a flower shop for a couple of hours. This used to be for the man who didn’t have to try too hard. What happened?

Old Spice: Probably the brand that’s had the highest profile over the last 40 years and it had a bit of swagger (it was actually on another shelf by itself and I had to move the can there for the photograph). Reminded you of a well-preserved/botoxed lead singer being reunited with his former band mates. I liked it, but I didn’t hear Carmina Burana.

Brut: Like Denim, it’s changed a bit, with a lighter scent than Henry Cooper would remember. Perhaps it was trying to evoke the ocean, or perhaps it was just cost saving. Better than the Denim, though.

Tabac: Now this was an experience, a fragrance that seems to be entirely composed of long lasting base notes. You could put it on on Monday, and still be all Tabaccy on Friday, even if you have a shower on, say, Wednesday. Perhaps the most Proustian of the four, a couple of dabs of it and the world went a bit Kodachrome. Also, you can’t see it in the picture, but the bottle was exactly the same as the one that sat cold and shivering for years next to the Matey bottle in our bathroom. You can’t buy these memories with 180g reissued vinyl.

1986

 So how was 1986 for you then?

Given that 2016 brings us as far away from that year as Heartbreak Hotel and the Suez crisis were, perhaps it’s time for reflection. It didn’t feel to me like a vintage year for the music at the time, and time hasn’t changed that opinion much, so why is that?

It seems like a year of transition, the decade’s summer holidays. The early 80s pop boom was winding down: Duran Duran, Frankie, Spandau and Culture Club had all seen their best days, but hip hop, house music and hair metal had yet to really make their breakthrough (although they were knocking at the door: Livin’ on a Prayer and Walk this Way both were hits this year).

It also seems to have been a year that a lot of acts that were in their prime at the time sat out. The list of bands who made albums in 1985 and 87 but not 86 is striking: U2, Simply Red, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, all were touring/resting/drying out. The charts abhor a vacuum of course, and you wonder if bands like The Mission would have been as successful in 1986 had some of the acts on that list made records. Still, this was the year of Parade and The Queen is Dead.

Perhaps the year did have some influence though. For one, this seems to have been the year that bands realised, thanks to live Aid, that they could play stadia instead or arenas. Wham! played Wembley and Queen played Wembley Stadium and Knebworth, where two years previously they had played Wembley Arena and the NEC. Touring would change for good.

Then there was C86. While it can be difficult to name many of the bands that were on the cassette, it does seem to have laid down the basic template for Indie bands that is still used today. Before C86, Indie could have meant Throbbing Gristle or Orange Juice. After, it meant a four piece of floppy-haired students trying to sound like The Smiths. It still does, really.

Elsewhere, while we were able to watch the world’s greatest footballer win the World Cup, we were unaware that a big dreadlocked guy was becoming the first truly modern footballer over at PSV. There was a lot less football on the TV those days.

Wedding Songs

What music did you play at your wedding?

As someone who has recently left behind his bachelor days, I'm curious. When my wife-to-be and I were shortlisting the songs we wanted to be played at the march-ins, it had seemed to be a pretty simple task. We knew that they would be 70s Soul songs, as that's the genre where our musical tastes overlap the most. Outside of that, she likes Air Supply, while I like Black Sabbath. She says Tomato, I say Rat Salad.

So it should have been pretty easy to find a couple of nice slices of Philadelphia or some Stax tracks, right? But once we started shortlisting, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than we thought, as favourites started tumbling at early hurdles and sent off to the UHU factory. "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)?" by the Delfonics was an early frontrunner. We both love the song, and that beautiful introduction sets the stage for a soppy old love song, right? Wrong; he's leaving her, and the title is his kiss-off (and it's a surprisingly mean-spirited one at that. This is a Thom Bell song, remember).

Next up were Earth, Wind & Fire. "Reasons" doesn't quite have the romantic lyrics you might expect from its lovely arrangement, while for "After the Love Has Gone" we didn't even need to look at the lyrics.

Luckily, in the end we had Stevie Wonder and The Stylistics to step up and deliver the goods. "You are the Sunshine of My Life" may not be the most original choice, but I'm damned if I care: it's a beautiful song and performance, and I think that the fact that it's written by a blind man provides the lyrics with a melancholic coating that strengthens the song. And Thom Bell came good in the end with "Betcha By Golly Wow", though to be honest we could have taken just about anything from that first "Best of The Stylistics" album.