Journey into Hip-Hop: Arrested Development (1/4)

This is Part 1 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

 

 

“If Jay-Z is Jehovah, I’m the Antichrist.” --Speech

The history of hip-hop music begins much earlier, but my history of hip-hop begins at Lollapalooza in the summer of 1993. When Arrested Development took the stage, a standard was set that I would find unmatched during the years of hip-hop’s ascendancy, leaving me to ask: What happened to hip-hop? And thus began my search for “real” hip-hop--hip-hop with a rare quality I couldn’t have defined at the time.

In 1993, I was a recent high school graduate who had been raised on Sixties rock, grown up watching New Wave on MTV, and developed a love of interesting rock, but I immediately loved Arrested Development. After seeing the party they brought to the stage with their boom, bap, scratching, African-inspired outfits, dancing, and arm-waving elder Baba Oje, I had to check out their only album at the time: 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of...(1992).

To this day, it is my gold standard in hip-hop.

 

 

The album begins with the sound of an old, scratchy record and proceeds with an intro that is a study in building momentum. Within two and a half minutes, you hear strings, horns, guitar, scratching, a wild beat on a trap set, tribal drums, various banging, a siren, music samples, a multitude of voices, and more. You can feel as the album warms up before taking off running. The rest of the tracks are as sonically diverse, plus rapping and singing about family, love, religion, integrity, social ills and African-American pride.

Always positive and bouncing along to some new surprise, it isn’t above controversy or harsh language, as in the hit song “People Everyday,” in which Speech, Arrested Development’s MC, spins a tale of falling out with some catcallers:

 

The next year, Arrested Development released Zingalamaduni, which is as inventive, effervescent and enlightening as its predecessor. However, it didn’t sell as well and Arrested Development, which continues to make music and tour, never returned to the spotlight in America in the way suggested by its stunning debut.

In part, this may be because by 1994, the newly christened “alternative” music genre was increasingly focused on rock, especially grunge. When hip-hop did begin to dominate MTV some years later, it was the antithesis of what Arrested Development represented and would spur me to set out in search of the ultimate sound in hip-hop.


Other posts in this series:
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)