David Toop (Part 1)
What does Grandmaster Flash mean to you?
Well, Flash was like a… flash. You know, there are a few records that came out in the early history of recorded hip hop that were like moments of real revelation. One was ‘Planet Rock’ and the other was ‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel’, because both of them were so different to anything that had gone before, that it was just like an epiphany. ‘Planet Rock’, I didn’t even like when I first heard it. It’s a classic situation of you hear something, you hate it and next time you hear it, it’s your favourite record ever. Rick Rubin said that to me once; it’s a sign that you’re really gonna love something if you hate it immediately and then suddenly you get a religious conversion to it. It’s because it throws everything out of whack in the way you feel about records and how they should be made.
‘Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel’ was one of those records. For me, as a personal thing, it plugged into a lot of other ideas, other histories that I’d been involved in, which was the experimental avant-garde area of music history, which was a parallel music history for me, and black music of various kinds. And it connected very strongly with that, but it also clearly was the way hip hop should be. You’d read all these things about hip hop jams and the records were like R&B disco records which translated what had gone on, but ‘Wheels of Steel’ was
actually what had gone on. And the fact that the record company allowed him to do that and that it was successful record both artistically and commercially was incredibly exciting, I think.
Did you know what was going on with hip hop when you heard records like that? When did you first hear about it?
I did know a bit, because… I’d heard records like ‘Rappers’ Delight’ when it first came out and it didn’t make that much of an impression despite the fact that I’d always collected records by people like Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all the R&B records, like Doctor Horse. I had all those records and I knew all those records but, for some reason, when I heard ‘Rappers’ Delight’ it didn’t connect in my mind immediately. Perhaps because it seemed to be just a gimmicky pop record. In fact, I went to New York in ’79 but I wasn’t really aware of hip hop then. I was sort of plugged into the whole John Zorn scene and I went out there to play, in fact. But I was going out with Sue Steward at that time, and she went to New York in ’81 and came back with quite a few records on Sugarhill and Enjoy and I thought they were fantastic. And we were working together on a magazine called
Collusion and we published some articles on hip hop including articles on hip hop DJing in ’82. And that was about using six decks, three DJs working at the same time, and cutting out records and collaging; all those different techniques that were part of the early history. There was a writer called Steven Harvey who wrote the piece on the disco underground…
Actually, I interviewed him recently and he said if I saw you to remember him to you.
Well, Steven wrote some really good pieces for
Collusion. He wrote that piece on the disco underground, which is probably like a key piece.
Totally. And I edited that thing, because it was huge. It was like about 20,000 words long.
You don’t happen to have the unedited version, do you? He’s going to try and track down the Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan transcripts for me. I may have, in the loft. We’re having a loft conversion, so I’ll have a look. So… Anyway, I knew a bit, and I started writing about hip hop myself for a few places and then I heard those records, so there was a kind of an understanding. Not a full understanding, I don’t think I got that until I went to New York to do all the interviews for
Rap Attack in ’84. But to come back to your question, Flash was a real pioneer and he was obviously one of the three most crucial people to the growth of hip hop. Very articulate, and a great spokesman. Plus, with the Furious Five he had hits that were very important as well. Lot of different reasons why he was important.
What do you think his role is in the history of music?
I think that he is the most significant person in bringing a certain approach to collaging music, through DJ methods into a popular sphere. Those techniques have been done before by composers like John Cage and they’ve been used in electronic music. And they’ve been used in fringe, marginal areas of rock music and what have you. They’d appeared in a diluted form, I guess, in music like disco. But they never really been done quite so openly in party music. And hip hop was party music. Never mind all the other stuff that we now know about, like the sociology, the politics and so on. But it was party music, primarily. It was remarkable that it was a party music that was so avant garde. Plus he was a pioneer in hip hop and hip hop has been a hugely important form of music in the 20th century up until now.
I think also he was an organiser. People tend to downplay that or they don’t realise its importance, but you always need organisers on a scene who’ll go and do things and set things up and do them properly and not make a complete fuck up of it and he was obviously very good at that. He was like a figurehead. I remember going to see the group that toured in this country as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five after they’d split and Melle Mel introduced this DJ – I can’t remember who it was – and said, ‘Grandmaster Flash!’ and it wasn’t. It was kind of tragic in a way. And ridiculous as well. What happened was a classic music business story and a real tragedy because, you know, he was a smart person. Intelligent man. I must say, I saw him DJ at this club called Broadway International in Harlem and he was just DJing. Terrible club. And it was absolutely extraordinary.
In what way?
The fluidity and the invention. For me, as a personal thing, not being there at those early hip hop jams, unlike people like Tommy Silverman who were. Virtually every white person who went to one of those early hip hop jams was so completely blown away that they became important in some way in communicating about the music, or starting a record label because it was so radical. So for me the only exposure I’d had of that was seeing Flash play at Broadway International in ’84. And then seeing Afrika Bambaataa play at the Venue.