Jonathan Abrams - The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop

Every hip-hop music fan has an origin storywhen the music ignited those first sparks, grabbing us, shaking us, initiating a lifelong relationship.

Growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles during the late 1980s, I was too young to appreciate the rebellious explosion of N.W.A, a group that opened millions to the possibilities of the genre. The groups lyrics did not lend themselves to frequent radio play, and my parents didnt openly invite that hoppity hip into our home. I was plugged in enough to applaud Dr. Dre when The Chronic landed, but could not yet truly appreciate the full evolution of his sonic mastery. Doggystyle, Snoop Doggy Doggs debut album, painted the scenes of an elaborate party that my adolescent mind could only partly imagine.

Instead, for me, the artist who truly stoked those early embers was Tupac Amaru Shakur. As he did for so many people my age, Pac ignited in me a full devotion to hip-hop music.

This was back in the days when the music found you. Long before Spotify and iTunes, I would toggle the radio dial between 92.3 The Beat and Power 106 and record Shakurs songs onto a cassette tape so I could play them back on demand. I got my hands on Me Against the World, Shakurs third album, when a teenage employee at Circuit City took pity on my pleading eleven-year-old self. My mom unearthed the cassette, took one look at the Parental Advisory sticker, and marched me back to return it. I discreetly purchased another one, vowing to find a better hiding place. Such was the power and pull of Pac on my young mind.

Pac gifted me a song or lyric for every emotion and feeling. He had a way of making it seem as though he was speaking directly to me, crystallizing thoughts and ideas that were only starting to percolate and form. Brendas Got a Baby illuminated the structural inequities in the world that I sensed people like me faced, but were not being taught in school. Dear Mama existed for when I reflected over my mom and witnessed her trudge through setbacks. I reserved Hit Em Up for those rare and insular moments I wanted to give the world double birds.

Tupacs killing in late 1996 shattered my world. I mourned the death of an artist and poet who transcended his still-young musical genre. I had come to view hip-hop music as a foundational block in my own life and wondered if it would continue evolving, emerging, and influencing after the loss of one of its brightest stars.

The deaths of Shakur and other talented artists gunned down in their prime, like the Notorious B.I.G., were colossal losses. But hip-hop music, above almost anything else, is resilient. The genres original bricklayers in the Bronx of the 1970s heeded their own flickers of imagination to ignite a musical genre out of decay and neglect. The genre persevered, overcoming every obstacle imaginablefrom an older generation who rejected it, to radio stations that did not want to play it, to politicians speaking out against it.

I never found another Pac. But, in the genre, I found a constant ally. I turned to hip-hop music when I needed inspiration or motivation, to zone out or home in, during times of celebration and mourning, for education and enlightenment.

Hip-hop music has now existed for almost half a centuryand its origins and evolution are finally beginning to be studied and excavated with the rigor they deserve. But the voices of those who created, innovated, and persevered to propel a musical genre that would one day become the most popular in the United States are still seldom heard fromand some of their stories are at risk of being forever lost. That realization, which I had in 2017, became the catalyst for this project. After publishing my oral history of the groundbreaking TV show The Wire, I aimed my next oral history project at a far more ambitious subject: hip-hops rise and the creative sparks behind its first transcendent moments.

Lyricism, after all, is a form of oral tradition.

This oral history weaves together the sweeping origin, spread, and impact of hip-hop music across generation after generation as it made its dominant march across the country. It starts with the inventiveness of neglected kids amid the Bronx ruins before stretching to New Yorks other boroughs like the veins on a subway map. It encompasses hip-hops path from parks onto vinyl, its travels to the West Coast through the rise of gangster rap and G-funk, the Southern surge in cities like Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans, and many places and moments beyond and in between. The chapters focus on the artistry, creativeness, and courage of those who made significant impacts, and seek to illuminate the roots of careers that influenced generations of others.

I began this project in the summer of 2018, and over the next four years I would conduct over three hundred interviews. The stories captured on these pages were provided by DJs, artists, producers, label executives, and journalists who lent their time and memories to deliver firsthand accounts. There are people whom I had hoped to talk to for this book and couldnt get to; I hope that these pages still manage to capture their contributions to the music. I also know that there are bricklayers whose influence is not documented in this bookbut any omissions here are not a judgment on their inroads. Those legacies are eternal. A book dedicated just to listing the names of those who have made positive impacts on hip-hop music could never contain enough space.

People, like hip-hop music, move along on their own schedules, which sometimes didnt align with my reporting timeline. One individual replied to a direct message for an interview more than two years after I first sent the request. Some people whose thoughts I hoped to include in these pages declined requests, preferring to allow a lifetime of work to speak for itself. But many others, including some who have rarely granted interviews, were willing to sit down with me. These conversationslike the late Edward Duke Bootee Fletcher describing the origins of The Message, DMC passionately detailing his groundbreaking efforts, Kool Moe Dee elaborating on his Grammys boycott, and executives like Ann Carli and Monica Lynch detailing their pioneering movesresulted in a manuscript that, in its initial form, was nearly three times longer than the one you are reading.