In retrospect, the Puma Suede (AKA Puma Clyde, AKA Puma State) and hip-hop were made for each other, so it’s no wonder the Suede was THE shoe to rock back in the day. Both are designed to move right while looking tight.

B-boys and graffiti artists needed a shoe that was tough and grippy but that looked clean and sharp everywhere you took it. Fat laces or none at all, perfectly color matched to your clothes or even in mismatched pairs (a la MC Shan), the Suede had you covered.

As Walt “Clyde” Frazier said of his namesake version of the Suede:

It wasn’t just a basketball shoe…you could style in this shoe. Off the court, I used to wear my mink coat and my big hat and I’d have my Clydes on. No one said anything about that. If you wore Clydes man…you were cool. You knew what was happening.

Out-hustling and out-muscling. Driving and mesmerizing. Swooping and hooping and looking cool doing it. Now that’s hip-hop.

Published on Apr 23, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Folks will argue back and forth all day about where hip-hop was born (see The Bridge Wars, KRS-One vs. MC Shan circa 1987). But you could do worse than say it all got started in the rec room of 1520 Sedgewick Avenue, an exceptionally ugly high-rise apartment building in the Bronx* where on August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, a young Jamaican immigrant, threw a party to help his sister buy school clothes. For 50 cents (or 25 cents for girls), you could have seen Clive (or DJ Kool Herc, as he’s now known) playing two turntables at once and his friend Coke La Rock shouting over a microphone before anyone else had.

*And for the criminally scientific-minded among you, both Bronx and Brooklyn are corruptions of names left over from the 1600’s when New York was still Nieuw-Nederland.

Published on Apr 23, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Three years ago, Nas proclaimed “Hip-Hop is dead”. Not everyone agreed, but enough did that the title alone caused controversy and a wave of answer songs. Which tells you something.

In the past 30 years, hip-hop went from nothing to arguably the dominant form of popular music in the world. And you could say that its success is what has led to all the lyrical hand wringing. Any time an art form gets big, there will be a counter-current of purists who want to go back to some imagined pure origin when definitions and distinctions were clear and everyone knew who the “real” players were. Look at jazz, for example.

What people forget is that no popular art form is born from nothing. They’re all bastards, hybrids, combinations of this and that. That’s where their life comes from and why they continue to grow. The natural lifecycle of a successful form like hip-hop is that it spreads out and drops its seeds into new hybrid forms. The real power of hip-hop is its appeal to young people around the world who see themselves as voiceless. The tools of hip-hop are readily available to them in a way that the tools of, say, classical music, are not.

So until the world changes in some very fundamental ways, hip-hop is not dead. It’s just gestating.

Published on Apr 14, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Classic tools of the hip-hop trade:

Technics 1200SL turntables
Roland TR-808 drum machine
Akai MPC-series sampler
E-mu SP-1200 sampler

Of course, you can also just use a microphone and a tape recorder.
Now go make a record.

Published on Mar 30, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Back in the days, there was a certain style of dress. One of the major pieces we used to always rock was Puma. There were other sneakers but the focus was the Suede, and if you didn’t have that look you weren’t representing.

Back then it was about looking good. When the Electric Boogie guys used to break, I was in Beat Street at the time, so when I seem ‘em dancing and my boy Wade was dancing he had on the Pumas, you know what I’m saying? It was intense. Puma was one of the best sneakers to dance in too. It felt right for the foot. I remember the way you had to lace them…it was crazy. You could wear ‘em when you were going out or you could wear them just to play ball.

The Puma was always a fly sneaker, man. You had to have a pair of Pumas. If you didn’t, you better not come around here. Brooklyn loved the Puma. Harlem and The Bronx loved the Puma. The Puma was running things.
- Doug E Fresh

Published on Mar 30, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

For me the Suede represents when sneakers got fly. Suddenly they went from canvas to the leather and suede and they really made you stand out from the crowd…Puma made sneakers that were more than athletic wear, they made them shoes style icons.
- Fab 5 Freddie

Published on Mar 15, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Even at the time, it seemed a bit old school. The plot was cliché. The acting was amateurish. But hey, they were amateurs. The actors in 1983’s Wild Style were for the most part the real b-boys, taggers, DJ’s and MC’s who were then inventing the multimedia street art that would become hip-hop. And for that reason, the movie has been rightly recognized as a seminal cultural document that captured a scene and inspired a worldwide movement. (Though, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t actually a documentary.)

Prior to 1983, director Charlie Ahearn’s resumé consisted of the grindhouse martial arts flick, The Deadly Art of Survival. It was while showing this film that he met Fred Braithwaite (AKA Fab 5 Freddie) and within two minutes, they decided to do a film together capturing what was then an extremely local phenomenon.

After bluffing their way to some start-up money from a couple of European tv stations, they gathered together a proto-superstar cast, from lead actor and legendary grafitti artist Lee Quiñones to Rock Steady Crew, Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee, Grand Mixer DXT, Rammellzee and a number of locals including a guy named Pookie who, when handed a starter pistol to use in a robbery scene, bluntly refused and calmly reached into his car to pull out his (real) sawed-off shotgun instead.

Today, Wild Style is namechecked by everyone from Nas to the Beastie Boys and revered from Berlin to Tokyo as the spark that spread the fire. And watching the spontaneous, infectious energy of the final amphitheatre concert scene, it’s easy to see how this very local culture came to take over the world.

Published on Mar 15, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Impression of the Instore concert @ Seventyfive, Amsterdam. If you can’t see this movie, click here.

Published on Mar 03, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Interview Dret & Krulle op raptalent.nl.

Published on Feb 26, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

Dret & Krulle Finale Grote Prijs 12 December ‘09 Paradiso, Amsterdam. Check out Samen Sterk Records and GPvNL for more info. If you can’t see the video, check out here.

Published on Feb 25, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop

About 25 square meters. A narrow street with a dozen of people. A booming soundsystem. Free beers and the Best Hip Hop act around. This Saturday @ Seventyfive, Nieuwe Hoogstraat 24, Amsterdam. Don’t miss it!

Published on Feb 25, 2010 Filed under: Hip Hop