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“Welcome to Seattle where the sun don’t shine”

Seattle, the Central District, and the Arrival of Hip Hop

SEATTLE, located in Martin Luther King County in Washington, was named after the Duwamish tribe leader Sealth, who made contact with the first white settlers that arrived in 1851. When Seattle was incorporated on Duwamish land by the Territorial Legislature in 1869, the city had two thousand inhabitants, with the primary industries being lumber, coal mining, and fishing. Following the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1883, Seattle gained an estimated one thousand new residents per month during the late 1880s, and by the early 1900s nearly 250,000 people called Seattle home. In the 1930s the Great Depression hit the Seattle area hard; however, the United States’ entry into World War II revitalized the local economy as such businesses as Todd Pacific Shipyards, the Pacific Car and Foundry in nearby Renton, and the Boeing Company flourished.

Cultural and racial diversity in Seattle came gradually as more white and nonwhite residents, attracted by increasing job opportunities, began moving to the area in the early 1900s. Scandinavians found work in fishing and lumbering, while Japanese immigrants operated truck gardens and hotels. Communities of Chinese, Filipino, Italian, and Jewish immigrants slowly took root and began to grow.¹ Early on, African Americans in Seattle primarily worked service jobs. Men were often employed as railroad porters and waiters or in construction, while women frequently worked as domestic servants or owned small boardinghouses or stores. Expanded professional opportunities gradually became more available in the relatively progressive social atmosphere of the Northwest.²

Seattle’s Early Black History

Seattle’s first Black resident, Manuel Lopes, arrived in 1858 and became the town’s first barber. Lopes was born in the Cape Verde Islands and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, before coming to Seattle. He was followed in 1861 by William Grose (Gross), who opened Our House, a restaurant and hotel located on the Seattle waterfront, and eventually added a barbershop. Grose’s hotel was destroyed in the Seattle Fire of 1889, but during the same period he settled on a piece of land in what was then Northeast Seattle near what is now Twenty-third Avenue and East Madison Street in the Central District. This became the neighborhood of settlement for the city’s earliest Black middle-class residents.³

African American settlers who first came to Seattle in the mid-nineteenth century were drawn by the region’s “free air,” meaning the absence of the most blatant policies and practices of racial discrimination that were a part of everyday life for Black people in the southern United States. African American men, for example, routinely participated in civic life in Seattle at a time when voting prohibitions and terrorist tactics drove post–Reconstruction era African Americans away from the polls in other regions of the country. Black men in Washington voted throughout the Territorial period, and the Washington Territorial Suffrage Act of 1883 briefly made it possible for Black women to cast ballots until that law was struck down by the Territorial Supreme Court in 1887. Although it would be incorrect to claim that racism and discrimination in the Pacific Northwest was never an issue, those dynamics certainly looked different in Seattle than they did in other parts of the United States.⁴

The development of early hip hop in Seattle took place primarily in the South End and the Central District, the longtime center of the city’s Black community. The turning point for Seattle’s African American population can be traced to 1940, when Black people made up about 1 percent of the city’s total population. The start of World War II meant that jobs were available in the defense industries at companies like Boeing, and between 1940 and 1950 the Black population grew from just under four thousand to nearly sixteen thousand, an increase of 413 percent. This trend continued over the next several decades, and by 1960 the numbers rose to almost twenty-seven thousand. In 1970 there were just under thirty-eight thousand, and by 1980 roughly forty-seven thousand African Americans called Seattle home.⁵

The US Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, helped consolidate the emerging push for civil rights around the United States. Galvanized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s only visit to Seattle in November 1961, the local civil rights establishment prepared to join the wave of change that swept the nation. Unlike in the Deep South, Black people in Washington State had been voters for almost a century and thus did not have to struggle for the ballot. However, Seattle’s Black community had traditionally faced three interrelated issues: job discrimination, housing discrimination, and de facto school segregation, which held back collective educational and economic progress.⁶

Two predominant civil rights organizations in Seattle were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded by Letitia Graves in 1913, and the National Urban League, founded by bacteriologist Lodie Biggs in 1930. As the civil rights movement gained momentum both nationally and locally, more groups and movements began to appear, such as the multiracial nonviolent Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1961 CORE began targeting supermarkets around Seattle known for engaging in racist employment practices. The Drive for Equal Employment in Downtown Seattle (DEEDS), organized by CORE, ran a four-month boycott of such downtown businesses as Seattle-based department store Nordstrom, J.C. Penney, and the Bon Marche (which later became Macy’s, now closed). These businesses faced protests and picket lines over discriminatory hiring practices. The direct action protests were credited with helping to create hundreds of job opportunities for African Americans in Seattle’s downtown retail core. As a result of this campaign, Nordstrom became the first major retailer in the nation to create a voluntary affirmative action program.⁷

While efforts to end employment discrimination met with some success, the fight against housing discrimination in Seattle continued. By the mid-1960s, eight of every ten Black residents in the city lived in the Central District. As more Blacks moved to Seattle, they faced individual discrimination; neighborhood associations, which maintained restrictive covenants; and “redlining” by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), which actively encouraged disinvestment in Black neighborhoods by discouraging loans in those areas by banks and other financial institutions.⁸ After years of demonstrations and civil disobedience, “open housing”—the right of individuals to live where they wished, regardless of their race—finally became law in Seattle on April 19, 1968. The legislation was sponsored by Sam Smith, the first African American member of the city council, and passed by the council two weeks after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis. In some ways, open housing helped set the stage for the eventual fragmentation of Seattle’s Black community. By the early 1970s, thanks in part to open housing legislation at both the local and national levels, African Americans began to reside in previously all-white communities. These newcomers to suburban cities of western Washington— such as Kent, Federal Way, and Auburn—included former inner-city residents as well as those who moved to Seattle from across the nation who had no prior ties to the traditional African American community.⁹

As Black people made important gains with respect to where they could work and live in Seattle, the issue of education for African Americans proved more difficult to reconcile. De facto school segregation (racial isolation despite the absence of formal segregation laws or public officials who openly supported racial separation) became among the most challenging issues facing the Black community in Seattle, lasting long after the tumultuous 1960s. In 1889, Washington had been one of the few states in the nation to enter the Union with a constitution that barred racial segregation in public schools. However, the overwhelming concentration of African Americans in the Central District from the World War II era and continuing through the 1950s ensured that Seattle schools would be racially segregated. In 1950 none of the city’s elementary and secondary schools were predominantly Black.

Seattle school district census information from 1962 indicated that Garfield High School had become the first predominantly Black high school in the state, with African American students making up 51.4 percent of the student body. Franklin High School, Garfield’s closest neighboring high school to the south, was second with 9.2 percent African American students. Meanwhile, six of Seattle’s remaining nine high schools had five or fewer Black students on campus. Seattle’s civil rights establishment, operating under the premise that quality education for Black children meant sending them outside the Central District, successfully pushed to have these students bused to mostly white schools in the northern part of the city. The Seattle School District officially ended its busing program in 1997, although issues such as the racial achievement gap and disproportionate discipline rates among African American students in the city’s schools remain to this day.¹⁰

Black Power in Seattle

Until the mid-1960s, Seattle’s middle-class civil rights establishment, including organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, operated as “the voice” of the Black community. The pushback against these groups emerged from what became known as the Black Power movement. The term was coined in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Almost overnight, the phrase shifted the discourse among African Americans all over the United States, primarily along generational lines.¹¹ Carmichael came to speak in Seattle on April 19, 1967, at the University of Washington and Garfield High School in front of an estimated four thousand people. His message resonated with younger African Americans as well as many white and Asian high school and college students. Bold and unapologetic, Carmichael attacked institutionalized racism, the white press, and integrationists while encouraging Seattle’s Black community to take control of their destiny.¹²

By the late 1960s a number of Black Power groups had formed in Seattle, including SNCC, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement (CAPI), and the United Black Front (UBF). However, none of these groups resonated with a small core of UW student activists—Aaron Dixon, Larry Gossett, and Carl Miller—who had led protests at Franklin High School. The Franklin incident began on March 29, 1968, when word spread that two Black female students had been sent home for wearing their hair in an “Afro” style. UW Black Student Union (BSU) members Gossett and Dixon, along with Seattle SNCC chairman Miller, arrived at Franklin with a list of demands, including the addition of a Black history curriculum, the hiring of a Black teacher and administrator, and the students’ right to wear hair as they pleased. The district superintendent agreed to the demands, but Gossett, Dixon, and Miller were later arrested and convicted on charges of unlawful assembly. Their six-month jail sentence, which was later dropped, prompted an uprising at Garfield High School, leading to six arrests following several hours of unrest.¹³

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. By 1967 the Panthers had emerged as the most recognized “Black militants” in the country after they walked into the California State Capitol in Sacramento with loaded shotguns. Dixon met with Seale during a March 1968 trip to the Western Black Youth Conference in San Francisco and invited the Panther leader to Seattle. Seale subsequently visited the Northwest and appointed nineteen-year-old Dixon as captain of the Seattle chapter of Black Panther Party, the first outside of Oakland.¹⁴

One of Dixon’s first acts was monitoring the Seattle police in the Central District—a move that won the Seattle Panthers support in a community that had long felt victimized by law enforcement. However, in doing so, they subsequently became the target for intense police surveillance and harassment. On July 29, 1968, the Seattle police raided the Panther’s Central District headquarters. Dixon and Panther co-captain Curtis Harris were arrested on suspicion of possession of stolen property: a typewriter. The raid triggered the first race riots in the Central District, resulting in sixty-nine arrests and injuries to seven police officers and two civilians, despite jailhouse pleas for calm by Dixon and Harris, who were later acquitted on charges related to the typewriter.¹⁵

Seattle’s young Panthers were not intimidated. In February 1969 armed Panthers, mirroring what happened in Sacramento in 1967, joined with members of CORE and the UBF to deliver a list of Central District demands at the State Capitol in Olympia to the Senate Ways and Means Committee.¹⁶ Confrontational actions marked the Panthers as thugs and terrorists in the eyes of many people, including a number of African Americans not only in Seattle but across the country. Far less attention was paid to the Black Panthers as they launched a free health-care service, which eventually evolved into the Central District’s Odessa Brown Clinic, initiated testing for sickle-cell anemia, set up prison visitation programs, and ran a free breakfast program for children in need.¹⁷ This legacy of local action by the Black Panthers and numerous others helped inform a new generation of activists, who would approach community service through a hip-hop lens.

Similar to numerous other African American neighborhoods in the United States, as the Central District moved into the 1970s, the community dynamics began to change. The end of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements intersected with gentrification and other social and economic factors that signaled changes in the Central District as the center of Black Seattle. Deteriorating buildings, crime, drugs, cyclical intergenerational poverty, and welfare dependency combined to generate growing levels of alienation, despair, and anger among Black residents of the CD. In addition, relatively low property values and the close proximity to downtown brought increasing numbers of upwardly mobile white people to the area. The resulting increase in housing prices and rents slowly pushed the Black population of the CD south to the Rainier Valley and even farther to the outlying southern suburbs of Renton, Kent, and Federal Way. By 1980 Black people in the Rainier Valley outnumbered those in the Central District, and only 38 percent of Seattle’s African American population lived in the CD.¹⁸ Meanwhile, Seattle overall had slowly shifted demographically, with a population that was 80 percent white, 9.4 percent Black, 7.8 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 2.5 percent Latino/ Chicano, and 1.4 percent Native American.¹⁹

Black Music in Seattle before Hip Hop

The city’s expanding multicultural environment was also reflected in local arts scene. Before the arrival of hip hop, Black music in the Seattle area had a long and rich tradition. By the 1930s, African Americans in the city had created a leisure culture centered on music and sports. Black musicians and performers, dating back to Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix and Zenora Moore, the grandparents of Jimi Hendrix, ushered in a music scene in the 1920s that included local acts like the Edythe Turnham Orchestra, Oscar Holden, and the Black and Tan Jazz Orchestra. These musicians played mostly on Jackson Street and at venues in the south end of downtown like the 908 Club and the Black and Tan nightclub. As one observer recalled: “You could see almost as many people at 12th and Jackson at midnight as you’d see on 3rd and Union [the center of Downtown Seattle] in midday.” Seattle’s mostly Black jazz musicians often played in Asian American–owned clubs, which in turn introduced them to a trans-Pacific jazz circuit that eventually included Shanghai and Manila.²⁰

World War II introduced Seattle jazz to an even wider audience, and in 1948 the scene attracted eighteen-year-old Ray Charles from Tampa, Florida. Charles, who began playing music at age three, lost his sight when he was seven to glaucoma. He learned to read and compose music in Braille and mastered several instruments, including the piano, clarinet, and saxophone. Charles made a name for himself in Seattle playing gigs for diverse audiences at the Black Elks Club on Jackson Street, the all-white Seattle Tennis Club, and after-hours establishments such as the Black and Tan Club and the Rocking Chair, where he was eventually discovered and offered a recording contract. Charles went on to record more than sixty albums, win twelve Grammy Awards, and earn induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts in 1993.²¹

Quincy Jones moved with his parents in 1943 from Chicago to the Seattle area, where he gained his first musical experiences doing gigs and writing arrangements while a student at Garfield High School. As a teenager, he played backup for some of the biggest names in music, including Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday, and Nat King Cole when they performed in Seattle during the postwar years. Jones’s big break came when he was asked to join jazz great Lionel Hampton’s band after moving to Boston. Jones accepted and over the next four decades received twenty-seven Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and an Emmy Award. He produced Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller, one of the highest selling studio albums of all time.²²

One of Black Seattle’s best known musical talents came into the world in 1942. Born in Seattle, Jimi Hendrix came of musical age in the city. At fifteen he was playing guitar in a local jazz combo, but he left Seattle in 1961 after enlisting in the United States Army. Upon receiving an honorable discharge, Hendrix moved to London, where his career took off. After scoring several hits in the United Kingdom, he reached number one in the United States with his 1968 album Electric Ladyland. Hendrix headlined the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in 1969, where he introduced his groundbreaking electric guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Already known among rock musicians and their fans, Hendrix was exposed to a worldwide audience as a result of his Woodstock performance. Widely recognized as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, he died in London of drug-related complications on September 17, 1970, at age twenty-seven. His body was flown back to Seattle, where the Hendrix family resided, and buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton.²³

Seattle’s Geographic and Cultural Distance from Hip Hop’s Urban Centers

In comparison to more established urban centers such as New York or Los Angeles, Seattle’s relatively young urban identity was still emerging during the 1980s. For many people in the United States the region was “a veritable hinterland known best for its mountains, rivers, and forests and as home of Boeing’s corporate manufacturing headquarters,” wrote author and scholar Murray Forman in his essay “Represent: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music.” Aside from Jimi Hendrix, “the city was otherwise not regarded as an important or influential center for musical production or innovation.” ²⁴ By the end of the 1980s hip hop had begun to develop in Seattle in ways that were both similar and different to the scenes in established urban areas. Where television shows and films gave New York and LA broad national exposure, cultural representations of Seattle had not yet become widespread. Seattle’s rap music, not weighed down as much by a deep history of existing imagery, thus presented a unique opportunity for innovative lyricists to reimagine and re-present the city.

Bruce Pavitt, cofounder of the alternative-oriented Sub Pop label, argued: “One advantage Seattle has is our geographical isolation. It gave a group of artists a chance to create their own sound, instead of feeling pressured to copy others.” ²⁵ This comparative independence was on display beyond music and lyrics. Seattle’s failure to imitate New York or Los Angeles in any significant manner sprung from the fact that in a post–civil rights urban cultural sense, Seattle was in many ways a work in progress. Geographic seclusion combined with the region’s still evolving multiethnic identity to create a fertile environment within which organic, community–based approaches to the various aspects of hip-hop culture eventually flourished.

Seattle’s regional isolation has another dimension—its sheer geographic and cultural reach. Aside from Portland, Oregon, the next biggest city south is San Francisco, eight hundred miles away. Minneapolis is the next major city due east, nearly 1,700 miles away. Although most of the areas in between are not known as population centers, nonetheless there are consumers of culture at every point along the way. In Bad Land: An American Romance, Seattle author Jonathan Raban documented his drive east through Washington into Idaho and Montana to determine where Seattle’s influence ends and Minneapolis’s begins.²⁶ While Raban never determined an exact point, using allegiance to professional baseball teams as a measurement, he found that Mariners fans outnumbered Twins fans as far east as North Dakota. The book showed that Seattle is actually the capital of a vast country, one that identifies with its professional sports teams and other aspects of its cultural life such as glass art, newspapers, alternative rock scenes, and urban styles—that is, Black urban entertainment such as R&B, rap music, hip-hop fashions, and so on.

Charles Mudede, longtime writer and editor for The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper, noted that the African and African American populations of Seattle and Tacoma combined to form the largest Black community north of San Francisco and west of Milwaukee. “Because small towns like Twin Falls, Idaho, have young people who are familiar with Black entertainment via national networks like BET,” Mudede argued, “they are ripe markets for entrepreneurs who produce events and music within Seattle’s black community.” ²⁷

Hip Hop’s Early Days in New York City

Culturally and geographically, a place like Twin Falls, Idaho, with a population under fifty thousand, could not have been further from hip hop’s origins. The foundations of hip hop were formed in the South Bronx during the 1970s. The four original elements of hip-hop culture included the musical aspect of DJing, the visual art component of graffiti, the kinetic dance portion of b-girling/b-boying (breaking), and the verbal action of MCing or rapping. Different fundamental aspects of these elements can be directly traced to longheld cultural traditions, primarily from Africa and the Caribbean.

A new style of DJ that rocked block parties and community centers around New York City in the 1970s initially evolved from Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, a native of Jamaica who immigrated to the United States in 1967. These gatherings inspired other aspiring local DJs, such as Grandmaster Flash, who began manipulating two turntables with copies of the same record and a mixer to prolong a favorite section of a favorite song for as long as he chose. The Grand Wizzard Theodore, another local DJ, was credited with inventing the practice of scratching records. Afrika Bambaataa exemplified the diverse nature of early hip hop by sampling a wide and eclectic variety of music, including Kraftwerk, James Brown, Captain Sky, and the score from the film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.²⁸ These pioneers and others provided a blueprint that tens of thousands of DJs all over the world still follow today.

Graffiti, the visual artistic portion of hip-hop culture, was one of the first elements of hip hop to make an impression on the general public. In 1971 the message “TAKI 183” began appearing on so many subway cars in New York City that the New York Times assigned a reporter to investigate. A July 21, 1971, story reported that TAKI was an unemployed seventeen-year-old Greek kid named Demetrios with nothing better to do than spray his name wherever he happened to be. TAKI was his nickname, and he lived on 183rd Street.²⁹ Graffiti writers or “bombers” began breaking into train yards at night and painting massive colorful grand design “burners” or “pieces” that would take up entire sides of subway cars. The message changed from TAKI simply saying “I was here” to “I am here, and I’m leaving this behind to show you that I have style; that I am a style master. . . . That I was the first ever to paint a cloud above my ‘piece’ [short for ‘masterpiece’]. . . . That I am king, and my style will influence all you ‘toys’ [shorthand for ‘novices’].” ³⁰ When trains pulled into a station, writers such as Kase 2 and Dez literally had “captive” commuter audiences all over New York City. Respect within the graffiti community was earned by those who “hit up” the most daring locations or created the most intricate and original designs.

If graffiti is the visual arts component of hip hop, b-girling/ b-boying (or breaking) is the dance component of hip hop. Borrowing elements of various dance styles such as jazz, tap, and lindy-hopping, breaking also sampled from disciplines like Eastern martial arts and capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that combines dance, acrobatics, and music. Early breaking was significantly influenced by Puerto Rican culture and traditions present in New York City during the 1970s.³¹ Popping and locking, a primarily upright style of hip-hop dance is more associated with the West Coast and also has roots in Latino dance traditions. Dance historian, writer, and critic Sally Banes theorized that breaking, like other forms of street culture, including graffiti, verbal dueling, and rapping, is a public display of virility, wit, and skill—in short, of style. Breaking serves as a way of using the body to inscribe one’s identity on streets and trains, in parks and high school gyms. Most of all, “breaking is a competitive display of physical and imaginative virtuosity, a codified dance-form-cum-warfare that cracks open to flaunt personal inventiveness.” ³² Mainstream media seized upon the early massive popularity of breaking as no fewer than three major studio films featuring break dancing—Beat Street, Breakin’, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo—were all released in 1984. Breakers were featured in commercials for McDonald’s and the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Although it eventually became the public face of hip hop, MCing or rapping, the verbal facet of hip-hop culture, initially did not receive significant attention. MCs were present at early block parties, but they generally got on the microphone only when the DJ gave permission. Even then the MCs job was to simply tell everyone how great the DJ was and announce any upcoming events.³³ However, the creativity and storytelling of MCs like Busy Bee and Lovebug Starski, who would rap while he was DJing, soon brought the vocalist to the forefront of hip-hop culture.

In the mix of hip hop’s birth in the South Bronx and subsequent migration to other boroughs around New York City came Sylvia Robinson. A former recording artist herself in the 1950s and 1960s, Robinson launched her own label, Sugar Hill Records, with her husband, Joe, in 1979. After hearing a DJ rap at a birthday party for a younger relative, Robinson displayed historic forethought by embracing this new music early on. Her visionary sample of the 1979 disco smash “Good Times” by the group Chic as the music behind “Rapper’s Delight” was widely credited as one of the keys that made this record so accessible to so many people. Def Jam Records cofounder Russell Simmons noted: “ ‘Good Times’ reflected the new aesthetic even if Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards didn’t know it when they made the track. It had simple melody, a memorable hook, and an incredible bass, guitar, and drum arrangement that b-boys could instantly relate to.” ³⁴

Robinson herself assembled Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master G, collectively known as the Sugarhill Gang. Hank began rapping while working as a bouncer at a local hip-hop club where Double Trouble, featured in the 1983 hip-hop movie Wild Style, and others performed. Robinson heard Hank reciting rhymes at his other job in a pizza shop in New Jersey and invited him to join the group on the spot. Wonder Mike, a friend of Robinson’s son, was already part of another group from New Jersey, as was Master G. Robinson was impressed enough after hearing both audition to offer them the opportunity to round out the Sugarhill Gang.

Until 1979 hip hop’s mobility was essentially limited generally to crude, low-quality cassette tapes. Certainly the people at Sugar Hill Records were not the first ones with the idea of putting hip hop on wax; they simply had the means. “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, released in the fall of 1979 on New Jersey–based Sugar Hill Records, is widely acknowledged as the song that introduced most of the world to rap music. However, it was not the first rap record. The Fatback Band released a single earlier in 1979 called “You’re My Candy Sweet” on Spring Records, with a B side that was a rap called “King Tim III (Personality Jock).” The single became a hit when record stores around New York began playing the rap in preference to the A side, and radio station WKTU followed up with airplay. Unlike “King Tim III,” “Rapper’s Delight” was a nationally distributed record, which allowed people all over the world to hear the result of what had been building up in New York City.³⁵

Once “Rapper’s Delight” started getting play, the reception from New York’s established hip-hop community was less than enthusiastic. Many felt that Robinson had simply taken their rhymes, attitude, and culture and made a record. “All of us—MCs, DJs, promoters—resented it,” Russell Simmons later said. “I personally was wrecked. I had so much animosity toward the Sugarhill Gang. They sure weren’t known where the real MCs hung out.” Some even thought that “Rapper’s Delight” would be hip hop’s one-and-only shot at serious exposure. “At first we thought that record had shut the door,” Simmons said, “when in reality that door was about to swing wide open.” ³⁶

Hip Hop Arrives in Seattle

For most people in the Pacific Northwest, hip-hop culture first arrived when KYAC, a Seattle-based rhythm and blues/soul music AM radio station that had been around since the early 1970s, began to play “Rapper’s Delight.” Robert L. Scott, KYAC program director and a veteran of local radio, took a bold step playing the song when no other station in town would. “Rapper’s Delight” quickly received increased radio play, and the twelve-inch vinyl single was sold at Seattle record shops such as Dirt Cheap Records and Music Menu. As early consumers of hip hop began to digest this first offering of rap to the mainstream, a couple of things stood out. First was a line delivered by Wonder Mike in the opening verse of the song:

You see I am Wonder Mike

and I’d like to say hello

to the black to the white

the red and the brown

the purple and yellow.³⁷

This purposeful shout-out to all the races was significant. The lyric sent the message that everyone was welcome, no matter your skin color. Second, this countered what would become the mainstream version of the hip-hop narrative. In the mind of the general public, hip hop started out as (and today is still) primarily a Black thing. Although hip hop was born out of the African American experience and culture, in practice it has always been as multicultural as the United States itself. Early examples of hip-hop media such as the independent film Wild Style and the documentary Style Wars, both released in 1983, illustrate this diversity of characters. Wild Style held immense power: it allowed many people for the first time to see what hip hop looked and sounded like from a grassroots perspective, instead of as an oddity in a news story. Also, it showed the interconnectedness of the four elements of hip hop for the first time.

Another significant aspect of the lyrical content from “Rapper’s Delight” is found in these lines delivered by Big Bank Hank:

So after school

I take a dip in the pool

which is really on the wall

I got a color TV so I can see

the Knicks play basketball.³⁸

This geographic reference to the New York Knicks, the city’s NBA team, was a subtle but important way for the MC to communicate specific allegiances to the listener. At its core, rap music has always been about telling who you are and what it’s like where you’re from. That type of discourse builds community, and in this way the genre has separated itself from nearly every other form of music. Pioneering Los Angeles rapper Ice-T addressed the practice of representing a city, a neighborhood, or even a street. “That’s what you do; as a rapper, you’re kinda like a cheerleader for a neighborhood,” he said. “That’s what a lot of people will ask, ‘Why do you always say the name of your [record] label or your street?’ Because that’s what the rapper does, it’s about shoutin’ out. You’re reppin’ a group.” ³⁹

As rap music began to travel, people from different locations figured out that in order to make their own attempts at rhyming relevant, they had to rap about themselves and their environment. Therefore most of those who rapped in the Northwest found themselves pulling from the regional cultural stockpile as it existed at that time. Because New York was the center of this exciting new culture, there were examples of performers who were Seattle natives suddenly claiming to have New York roots, hoping to gain credibility. This inferiority complex was not necessarily unique to Seattle, but remnants of it would continue to shape some local attitudes for decades to come.

By the early 1980s enough people in Seattle had become interested in hip hop that a local scene took root. As it had in New York, Seattle’s early hip-hop landscape grew out of three primary sources: nightclubs, community centers, and local events and activities. Some clubs in the area—Club Broadway, Skoochies (later Oz and then DV8), Spectrum, Omni, Encore, Castle Rock, and the Skate King locations in suburban cities such as Bellevue and Burien—simply incorporated the ever-increasing amounts of rap records released into the musical rotation played on Friday and Saturday nights. Other venues actively courted participants by advertising and holding specialized contests and competitions. One example of this was a club called Lateef’s, located near the intersection of Rainier Avenue and Rose Street in South Seattle. Lateef’s was one of the first local establishments to host regular open mic nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Aspiring rappers would come to show and prove their skill in front of crowds for a $100 first prize. The novelty of rap at this time combined with the relatively limited number of people who would actually get up and perform in front of an audience made these events stand out from the average nightclub scene.⁴⁰

Although older teens were able to get into some clubs like Lateef’s, younger teenagers did not have access to these venues. For this underserved demographic, hip hop could also be found within the community at all-age locations such as the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club off the northeast corner of Empire Way (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way) and Alaska Street. As an early hub for hip hop–related activities in Southeast Seattle, Rainier Vista had regular dance and rap contests and held dances on the weekends featuring local DJs, including a young Sir Mix-A-Lot. Prime all-age locations in the Central District included the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute on Seventeenth Avenue South and Yesler Way as well as the Rotary Boys & Girls Club located at the corner of East Spruce Street and Nineteenth Avenue. In addition, several community and city events showcased different aspects of hip hop. These included the Black Community Parade and Festival held at Judkins Park, the Funfest talent competition at Garfield High School, the annual Festival Sundiata, Folklife Festival, Bumbershoot, and 4H events all held downtown at the Seattle Center. Other gatherings at house parties, school dances, and in church basements also served as outlets for Seattle’s expanding hip-hop scene.

A variety of media delivery methods—including films, record stores, newspapers, and cable television—also contributed to the spread of hip-hop culture in Seattle. The producers of Wild Style, the first hip-hop movie, released in 1983, cast people who were actively involved in New York’s hip-hop movement instead of professional actors, like graffiti writers Lee Quinones, Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, and Sandra “Pink” Fabara as well as MC Busy Bee, which gave the film a documentary feel as it made its way around the country. Although Wild Style was received warmly by young people eager to take in anything hip hop related, the mainstream regarded it with uncertainty. “The film looks to be a partly improvised piece of fiction, about the cheeky, high-spirited art of the south Bronx, that is, subway graffiti, also known as ‘writing,’ and about rapping and breaking,” wrote critic Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “The slight narrative of Wild Style is about Raymond (Lee George Quinones), a skinny, outwardly mild-mannered Bronx teen-ager by day and, by night, the notorious ‘Zorro,’ a celebrated but unidentified spray-paint artist for whom every subway car is an empty canvas.” ⁴¹

While the movie underscored the utter desolation and urban decay that was the South Bronx in the early 1980s, it also captured the creative vibe and desire to innovate that characterized hip hop from the start. The film allowed the visual component of evolving hip-hop style to be seen and imitated by Seattle youth eager to match a look with the sound. This included iconic accessories like Puma and Adidas sneakers with fat shoelaces; sweatsuits, Kangol bucket hats, oversized belt buckles, and Cazal glasses; names emblazoned on T-shirts and sweatshirts with iron-on letters; giant, colorful graffiti “pieces” spray-painted around the city; and the practice of carrying around a piece of linoleum that would serve as a surface to breakdance on outdoors instead of simply spinning on concrete or dirt.⁴²

As key social and cultural community spaces, record stores played an important role in hip hop’s entry and spread throughout Seattle. Scattered around the city in various locations, these independently owned outlets filled a space in the still infant rap market that the larger chain stores such as Tower Records and Musicland did not. Dirt Cheap Records on the corner of Twenty-second Avenue and East Union Street was one of the first in town to carry “Rapper’s Delight” in the fall of 1979. Another early adopter was Music Menu, near the intersection of Rainier Avenue South and Twenty-third Avenue. It was operated by “Shockmaster” Glen Boyd, who would go on to write for The Rocket, the Seattle–based free monthly newspaper that covered arts, culture, and music, and cohost the program Rap Attack with “Nasty” Nes Rodriguez on radio station KCMU. Music Menu developed a reputation around the greater Seattle area for stocking the latest and hottest in rap music. Other independent outlets included Beverly’s Records & Tapes located at the corner of Twenty-third Avenue and Jackson Street, Little Record Mart on East Madison Street, and Rainier Records and Imports at the corner of Rainier Avenue South and South Holly Street.

Despite an active local print media landscape, initially there were a limited number of print outlets that devoted space to Seattle hip hop. In fact, essentially the only local publication that consistently covered hip hop in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s was The Rocket, published from 1979 through 2000. At its peak The Rocket’s circulation approached one hundred thousand between Seattle and Portland, and the paper had a staff of twenty. One of the first writers to cover hip hop for The Rocket was senior editor Robert Newman. The Rocket devoted column space to the likes of the dance/rap crew the Emerald Street Boys and became the rare local media outlet to deliver news of early Seattle hip hop to the entire city.⁴³

At the same time, the rise of cable television and the resulting need for programming also offered occasional opportunities for the public to experience hip hop. Although MTV was launched in 1981, the network initially ignored most African American artists not named Michael Jackson or Prince. However, by 1983 alternatives began to appear. One example was Night Tracks, a late-night weekend show introduced by Atlanta-based superstation WTBS that featured a number of the Black artists MTV would not play. In addition, the fledgling USA network carried a four-hour evening music video show called Night Flight, which had recurring episodes focusing on hip hop. A description of the program in the Seattle Times television guide at the time said: “Take Off to Street Music—The Phenomena of ‘Hip-Hop,’ ‘Rapping,’ and ‘Break Dancing’ are portrayed in videos featuring The Gap Band, The New Edition, Gladys Knight, Malcolm McClaren, Flashdance, and others.” ⁴⁴

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Nearly from the start, the Black experience that initially informed hip hop in Seattle was considerably different than in other areas of the United States. Local African Americans voted in the 1880s, and during the 1960s institutional issues such as housing and employment discrimination were for the most part effectively addressed amid the Civil Rights movement by organizations such as the Urban League, the NAACP, and CORE. Groups like the Black Panthers remained active addressing numerous other grassroots issues within the community. Racism and prejudice were present, just without the firehoses and lynchings that became symbolic in places like the Deep South. This relatively progressive atmosphere and a still developing urban identity was nurtured within the geographic isolation of the Pacific Northwest, and a new culture of innovation that spanned from business to the arts began to emerge.

As hip hop’s first generation became active in Seattle during the 1980s, DJs and MCs, like the Emerald Street Boys and the Emerald Street Girls, “Nasty” Nes Rodriguez, and Sir Mix-A-Lot emerged alongside such entities as the Boys & Girls Club in the Central District, Lateef’s, among the first nightclubs in Seattle to cater to hip hop, and radio station KKFX 1250 AM to lay a dynamic local foundation. Meanwhile, the activity of numerous breakers and graffiti writers in the area ensured that all four of the original elements of hip hop would be well represented in Seattle moving forward. That forward movement provided the necessary opening for the hip hop–based exportation of local culture. Within the decade Seattle hip hop would be heard not just nationally but internationally as well.