Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 64: Excerpt #2 "The Two Sides to Hip Hop" lyrics

Dan Charnas: One of the things I wanted to do was redeem DJ Hollywood because he gets left out of a lot of major narratives on hip hop. The fact is that hip hop is not just one thing -- because we've named it hip hop, that's why Kool Herc gets the credit for being the "father of hip hop". But the fact is there were always two strains of this phenomenon. There was the stuff in the Bronx that was break based and people rhyming over breaks and the, you know, break pantheon expanded with Afrika Bambaataa and Flash added that virtuosity. That became what was named hip hop. The other thing that worked right along side it, which was the more adult thing, which was the club rap. Club rap, for lack of a better term. They wouldn't call it hip hop, they would call it rap. It was guys like DJ Hollywood and Cheeba and Starski who catered to a more adult crowd, who wen to clubs and rhymed over disco records. Not breaks, not the rock records and stuff like that. Not James Brown. And that was just as valued. As a matter of fact, a lot of guys in the hip hop scene wanted to be - would be giving their eye teeth, to give that cliche - a Hollywood or Cheeba, because those were the guys that made a lot of money. And one of the points of the book was to say hey, we have these two strains of hip hop: you had the Harlem-based, club, older thing and then the kid stuff in the Bronx, the hip hop stuff. They've always been this sort of polar force in our music and that in the mid 90's you could still see that with Wu Tang, on the one hand, sort of that Bronx break lineage, and Uptown SameOldShawn: Who literally sampled a lot of the disco hits Dan Charnas: Sure, and it makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of crossover between those two, and there always was. I guess the orthodoxy just bugs the sh** out of me. So to say that one is more valid than the other is kinda silly and revisionist