When rap came out 30 years ago I thought it was just a fad

No offence taken, Tom. Au contraire'---I appreciate your knowledge! That fact about Bloomfield is interesting, isn't it? I read an interview with Mike wherein he described arriving at the session intending to play guitar, but upon hearing Robertson, move to piano without being asked to. They both played in a similar blues style, and were two of the first white 60's guitarist to get good tone (though they played very different sounding guitars---Bloomfield a Gibson Les Paul, Robertson a Fender Telecaster), before most of the British players got hip, one exception being John Mayall's guitarists, Clapton and Peter Green. In '66 Jimmy Page, when taking over as lead guitarist (from Beck) in The Yardbirds, was still playing a Telecaster, and had horrid, thin tone. As did Keith Richards.

Musicians/singers/songwriters getting screwed financially is a very old, common occurrence. Chuck Berry was one of the few original Rock n' Rollers to possess business acumen, most others being very naïve and overly-trusting, even The Beatles (whose terrible songwriting publishing deal robbed them of many millions of dollars. Brain Epstein did NOT know what he was doing). In the early 2000's, Emitt Rhodes actually had to move into his studio (a huge converted garage located behind his house in Hawthorne California), and rent out the house to pay the mortgage.

bdp24, I wasn’t mad at you, like I said, I am still mad about how Jimi was treated and I have to vent from time to time. I believe Noel Redding was still suing for back royalties when he died, wasn’t he?

The music business certainly has more than its share of scumbags. Jimi also had trouble till the end of his life from a contract he signed while he was still an unknown with a small time studio owner here in the States. Everybody knows about Jimi’s Electric Ladyland studio in NY, but Jimi was just paying for it, Michael Jeffery was going to end up being the owner. Jimi was easy prey for these jackals.

The ability to spot real talent certainly does run in the Hammond family. Michael Bloomfield was definitely one of the greats. It’s hard to believe, but on John Hammond’s So Many Roads album Bloomfield is listed as playing piano (?) with Robbie Robertson on guitar. That has to be the only time that Bloomfield took a back seat to anyone.

Nobody knew how to dress like Jimi. He would dress so outlandishly, but always looked great. I’ll admit that the Brits generally had better fashion sense than the American bands.

I just wish that John Hammond Sr. had signed him to Columbia before he went to England. I think Hammond Sr. would have steered him to better management. We wouldn’t have the Experience albums but maybe something even better.

So, sorry if my posts were a little aggressive, you definitely better me on direct experience.  I never saw Jimi live.

Wow Tom, may I cry uncle?! You are obviously in possession of more knowledge about Jimi than I. I wasn't aware that Jimi was playing with Hammond, but John sure had good taste in guitarists, didn't he? He had engaged both Robbie Robertson (of The Hawks, of course. Bob Dylan stole Robbie and the rest of The Hawks away from John---they were his touring, uh, band) and Mike Bloomfield to play for him in '65 and '66, two of the best guitarists around. In my defense, let me point out that I didn't say Jimi was British (in fact, I specifically stated he wasn't), only that he was perceived as being part of the 1967 second wave of the British Invasion, perceived as such for the reasons mentioned above. He and The Experience also LOOKED British, didn't they? Contrast their ruffled shirts, crushed velvet trousers, and feather boas with the look of American Bands in the late 60's---dirty hippies! The only performers on the stage at Woodstock who looked like they considered themselves to be in "Show Business" were The Experience and maybe Janis Joplin. Everyone else looked like a farmer, except the members of The Band, who looked like they just came off the set of a western movie. 

I didn't see Hendrix live again after '68, but even then he seemed tired, or at least bored. Only the previous year he had been on absolute fire (no pun intended!---my High School Teen Combo performed his song "Fire" in '67-8). Contracts back then could be brutal, requiring at least an album a year. In the late 90's I worked with Emitt Rhodes, and he told us about being sued by Dunhill Records for breach of contract when he didn't deliver his second album on time. They withheld all future royalties in retaliation, and he never received another royalty check until after his song "Lullaby" was used in the film The Royal Tenenbaums, when an attorney/musician sued on his behalf. He signed his deal without legal representation, which was also common back then. 

bdp24, Chas Chandler took Jimi to England but Chas wanted to be a record producer not a manager, so he had Jimi sign a management contract with Michael Jeffery, the manager who had robbed The Animals blind. Chas bitched all the time about how Michael Jeffery had screwed them. I guess Jimi thought that Chas was his friend and wouldn’t stab him in the back. Poor trusting Jimi.

Michael Jeffery then proceeded to rob Jimi blind while working him mercilessly, and three years later Jimi was burned out, broke and dead. The worst thing that ever happened to Jimi was going to England.

Jimi was playing with John Hammond when Chas got his hooks into him. John Hammond Sr. probably would have taken note of Jimi’s talent before long and if he didn’t someone else probably would have. That’s just speculation, of course, but what happened to Jimi in Britain is fact. I love the Experience albums but I will never be able to forgive the people who used him for their own gain and who cared so little for him that he ended up dead so soon. So when I hear someone say that Jimi was a British act it’s hard for me to just let it go.

Kids are going to like what they like. I’m not sure that the people who enjoy rap now will still be listening to it when they are 60 though.

I think our culture in the US has been on a downward slide for some time and this is reflected in music, movies, tv and politicians. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of good people and a lot of good culture being created here, some of it in the rap/hip-hop genre, it’s just that the bad is growing at an alarming rate.

bdp24, Jimi Hendrix was entirely American. Born here, lived here and served in the US Army. A couple of Brits signed him to a lousy management contract and worked him too hard, and his British friends let him die instead of calling an ambulance, but that doesn’t make him British in any way.

Rap is NOT Music!

And stay off my lawn...

I like rap under the right circumstances. It really works in film like chase scenes, fights, etc. -very exciting.

I think a reason it prevails is that no one has created a replacement music form. Also, rap songs usually have a well defined message i.e., it is about something the listener cares about (whatever that may be).

Finally, watch the movie "Myra Breckenridge" from 1970 and see Mae West (related to kanye?)  doing the first known rap performance!

This makes rap 46 years old -not 30... (hey kids! Why are you listening to "old fashion" music? C'mon, invent something of your own!).

I don’t think most of it (rap) is even music. I feel the same about a lot of the modern classical compositions I was forced to study in college. Comparing either to real music is akin to comparing that orange-colored chemical crap they put in Pixy Stix to taking a bite of a slice of an actual orange.

Bring the Noise

Public Enemy’s political voice may have obscured the enduring brilliance of their work. It’s been 21 years since the release of "It Takes a Nation" and it’s hard to believe how fresh, innovative, and emotionally powerful that album still sounds. The raw energy of Chuck D’s booming voice, trading rhymes with Flavor Flav, is channeled through a layered mix of swirling scratches, quick beats, and funky James-Brown samplings. It’s only when you listen to the old masters like PE and Run-DMC that you realize how much the current generation (Kanye and the rest) are in their debt. And, who knows, perhaps gangsta rap will even prove to be a short-lived commercial aberration.

You may know Chuck D from his Air America radio show and perhaps less from his status as one of rap’s great MCs, along with 2Pac, Nas, Jay-Z, etc. The "noise" in the title is what the pop world thought of hip-hop in the early days. Chuck D welcomes the slur. Yes it is "noise," he is rapping, our kind of noise, and if you don’t like it, tough. As in much of black music, of course, there is an underground "elitism" there meant to shoo away the white establishment. The "noise" played the same gatekeeping function as the jarring harmonies, forbidding virtuosity, and asymmetric rhythm of bebop did 40 years earlier. It didn’t help matters that Seamus Heaney (a poet I admire enormously) praised the poetic power of hip-hop. Heaney was right, of course, but to declare hip-hop safe for the establishment was the last thing hip-hop needed. (Everyone was probably too busy listening to Britney to hear Heaney.)

Some quick historical perspective. In my view, one pop figure dominates, nah, towers over everyone else. Nothing the Brits did comes anywhere close. Same with Elvis. No one can claim his musical breadth, creativity, and influence. That person, of course, is James Brown. And yet there was always something missing. Brown was always so far ahead of everyone else he ended up talking to himself. And you can’t formalize a new language when you only talk to yourself. Hip-hop is Brown’s legacy as an autonomous musical genre, its culmination if you will. It’s a genre that never ceases to amaze me. It’s not musical in the traditional sense of the word. But there’s an emotional intensity to it, a rhythmic richness, and a verbal brilliance that have no equivalent in pop music. I love it."