Afrika Bambaataa - Godfather of Hip Hop

00:00:00 Episode preview

[London Real promo removed]

00:01:06 Brian Rose introduces Afrika Bambaataa from Buckingham Palace

Brian Rose: In over three years at London Real I’ve never shot my pre-roll from this place, and if you can’t tell from behind me, I am at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen lives. Her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, is right here, sitting up there presiding over this fabulous empire that she built. This is a special place when you’re in London, and what always surprises me about Buckingham Palace is that it’s not very ornate. There’s not a lot of bling here. It’s a pretty plain-looking building, and I don’t know if that was by design, in order not to upset the common folk. I should probably look that up and get back to you. This is where the Changing of the Guard is, and all the famous stuff the tourists love, especially you Yanks. It just reminds me that I live in such a wonderful city. There are so many aspects of London and so many nooks and crannies that you can just keep going, like an onion, I guess you could say.

Brian Rose: But I’m not here to talk about royalty as we know it from the House of Windsor. I am here to talk about hip-hop royalty, most specifically the Godfather of hip hop, and that is Mr Afrika Bambaataa, who is my guest this week. A very special edition. I was quite honoured to have him in my studio. He is 57 years old and he is the creator of the Universal Zulu Nation, a movement he founded after he was lucky enough to win a writing contest and go to Africa when he was young. He saw so many things over there, and when he came back he adopted the name of one of the Zulu warriors, Bambaataa, and he created this whole movement and this whole music style that was known for sampling electronic music and using ideas from the band Kraftwerk out of Germany, around 1983, when people weren’t doing this. Afrika really broke the mould on so many aspects of what was going on in DJing at the time, and he’s looked up to by so many artists.

Brian Rose: I first heard of him on one of Ice-T’s tracks on Original Gangster, called MVPs, where he shouts out all the big players. Ice-T is known to be such a selfless guy who always gives respect to the people who came before him, and Afrika is mentioned in about the first 15 seconds of that song. That was the first time I was familiar with his work, and like I said, it was a real honour to sit down with him. He is no joke. He recorded music with James Brown in 1984, so he’s got so much to talk about, even the minutiae of DJing that I could probably never get into. I couldn’t get him to take off his purple wraparound sunglasses. I did try. I had the same problem with Immortal Technique. But if I was Afrika Bambaataa, I wouldn’t take my sunglasses off either. It’s still a fabulous interview with a lot of great information. If you ever want to find out what the big fuss is, just check out Planet Rock on YouTube. It’s a song I remember playing when I was maybe 12 years old in San Diego. So it’s a big honour to have him on, and I hope you enjoy what he said and some of the knowledge he drops on us. As I stroll around here getting a little closer to the palace, you’ll see the guards behind me with the big bearskin hats, some of that fine imperial pomp that still exists in this country.

[London Real promo removed]

Brian Rose: If you like this episode, share it on Facebook, like it and subscribe to our channel on YouTube, and send us some love and we’ll send it back at you. As we say, it’s about the journey, and now I leave you with the legend himself, Mr Afrika Bambaataa.

00:07:12 Welcome to London Real

Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Afrika Bambaataa, an American DJ from the South Bronx in New York, respectfully known as the Godfather and Amen Ra of hip-hop culture. You are one of the originators of breakbeat DJing, releasing a series of genre-defining electro tracks in the 1980s, such as the iconic Planet Rock, that influenced the development of hip-hop culture. This year you’re celebrating the 41st anniversary of the Universal Zulu Nation and the 40th anniversary of hip-hop culture, a term you helped coin and then spread throughout the world. Afrika Bambaataa, peace and blessings to you, and welcome to London Real.

Afrika Bambaataa: Thank you, and peace and bliss to you.

Brian Rose: Thank you very much. It’s an honour having you here.

00:08:12 London, Europe and taking hip hop abroad

Brian Rose: You embraced European music from the very beginning. It’s really part of your signature. You were inspired by the German band Kraftwerk, you then inspired the French rapper MC Solaar, and you collaborated with Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When you’re flying in from New York to London, what do you think of when you think of music and London?

Afrika Bambaataa: I think of London as having many different styles of music. Back in the early days we used to go to different clubs at night in London, so one minute we could be hearing hip hop, another we could hear techno or electro, another time we could hear jazz and dub music and the different styles that were happening at the time. There was always some different style of music going on in London, and you had great record stores like HMV and all the little mom-and-pop stores.

Brian Rose: Do you remember your first visit here? About what year was that?

Afrika Bambaataa: I think it was 1982, if I’m not mistaken. It might have been 1981, but 1982 I think is when a radio station in France brought a big army of us over to do a big introduction of what is called hip-hop culture today.

Brian Rose: Why was Europe always on your radar screen? That was really revolutionary at the time. You were looking east to this continent when a lot of people probably weren’t. Was there something that really caught your eye?

Afrika Bambaataa: Definitely, because you also heard the stories of many people who broke big here in Europe, whether it was Josephine Baker, or Lena Horne and other artists who became very well known here in Europe and became stars in their own right over here. So it was the same when we brought this hip-hop culture movement over here, starting in France and then coming to London. The Zulu Nation in France is very big. It’s got a huge following.

Brian Rose: So as you used the music from Europe, Europe embraced you right back. Did that surprise you?

Afrika Bambaataa: It wasn’t overnight. It took a lot of work, coming back and forth, playing from cafes to gymnasiums to stadiums and back to little small places, going from town to town, city to city, country to country, meeting people and getting people to understand what we were doing. At first, especially in France, they didn’t understand what this was that we were doing: scratching the records, Double Dutch girls doing jump rope, b-boys and b-girls, MCs, DJs. It was something new to them. So it took a lot of work going to all these places, getting the people to feel it, grabbing them, dancing with them, bringing them on stage and letting them be part of the show. London was easier, because it was an English-speaking country, so they opened up more quickly. And when I released my breaks, and with Blues and Soul magazine, then it was over. The rest is history with the music and the breakbeats over here in London and the rest of the UK.

00:11:45 Rapping in your own language

Brian Rose: You were always encouraging people to use their own language when they made their own music and their own hip hop. You were encouraging French people to rap in French, that kind of thing. Why were you such a proponent of people using their own language?

Afrika Bambaataa: Because many were trying to rap American style, using the English language, and when they tried to do it, it sounded a little funny, the way they were trying to get the dialogue. So I told them to rap in their own language and speak about their own issues, whether they wanted to speak about the past, the present or the future. If they wanted to put some English in it, go ahead and add it in, but it would come out better. Many of them used to say, we sound funny trying to do it in the German language or in French. I said, keep working at it. And look at it today: many of them became stars in their own right in their respective countries on the planet.

Brian Rose: I had Ashley Walters in here, who was a member of So Solid Crew, which was big in the UK about 12 or 13 years ago. He was talking about how in the late 1990s everyone was trying to rap in an American accent and use those terms, and it was only around 2000 that Britain really started getting its own voice, rapping with an English accent about local issues. Before that it felt to them like a copy of America.

Afrika Bambaataa: To me, there were many who were starting out doing it in the English language over here. You had groups like the Cookie Crew, and Monie Love, and the London Posse. Many of them started it over here, and they were doing it in their own language. So many were doing it in the 1980s, way before the year 2000.

00:13:20 The name, and the roots of hip hop

Brian Rose: I was wondering if you could walk us through the journey. On our show our tagline is “it’s about the journey”. Could you tell me about the journey from Kevin Donovan to Afrika Bambaataa, from a young man who was a warlord of the gang the Black Spades to the creation of the Universal Zulu Nation? Can you talk about the path you took to get here?

Afrika Bambaataa: First of all, I don’t know who Kevin Donovan is. That’s one of the biggest lies ever put on the internet. It’s a lot of journalists who keep copying the same journalist, or going to Wikipedia, where anybody can put in and write whatever they want. I travel around and somebody might call me Kevin, and I don’t even know what they’re talking about, so I keep walking. My name is Afrika Bambaataa. All those other names that people are making up are on them.

Afrika Bambaataa: But it was a great path. The term was coined through the terminology of Keith Cowboy and Lovebug Starski, who were the first to use the word hip hop. And when it came to asking me what we call this, we could have said it was the go-off, we could have said it was the boogie. We could have taken it back to the bebop of the 1940s. But we said this is something that’s hip, and something to hop to, to get up and move, to get to the groove. So it’s hip hop. And we give November as Hip Hop History Month. The reason I say November is because many of us started playing outside in the parks in the summertime, and then moved inside from November to about June, playing indoors in the gymnasiums of the high schools and junior high schools, and the community centres in our area.

00:15:20 The world that produced hip hop

Afrika Bambaataa: This was a time coming out of the 1960s, when you had all your civil rights and human rights, all your Black Power and white power movements, your flower power movement like Woodstock. This was a time when many bands would come into your neighbourhood and do remakes of the songs that were being played on the radio, before the DJs got popular. This was a time when you had drugs in your community and gang violence, and hardworking people trying to live day by day. This was the time of soul music, R&B, salsa, reggae and calypso or soca music. This was a time when you had radio stations like WWRL, AM stations, WABC with Cousin Brucie, and Frankie Crocker. You had Gary Byrd, who had the GB Experience and was doing the rapping at that time, from the early 1960s. Then came FM radio in the 1970s, when people started getting a better sound than the AM stations. Then you had WBLS, and you had WHBI, one of the first stations that started putting hip hop on the air, with Mr Magic, Jazzy Jay and Afrika Islam, with the Zulu Beat that was happening at that time.

Afrika Bambaataa: This was a time when you had political groups like the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen, who were blowing up stuff all over the place trying to get their politics pushed in the government. You had the Young Lords Party and the Black Panther Party with Huey P Newton. These were times when you could get a Coca-Cola or Pepsi for 50 cents, or go to the movies for 50 cents and see movies three times a day: karate flicks, or the blaxploitation flicks, like Truck Turner with Isaac Hayes, and the football star Jim Brown, who was making a lot of movies. So you had all these different things happening that led up to what we were doing, called hip hop.

00:18:26 The DJs and crews who built the culture

Afrika Bambaataa: Then it came to the DJs. It started with a lot of the soul, R&B and disco DJs, like Grandmaster Flowers, Maboya, Plumber, the Disco Twins and Pete DJ Jones. Then you had the father, Kool Herc, coming out of the West Bronx. On our side, the south-east Bronx, you had my brother Disco King Mario, myself, DJ Tex, DJ Hollywood, Kenny Ken, who were all part of the Black Spades movement in the Bronx River Houses, Soundview, Castle Hill and that area. So you had all of this happening at the time that brought about the whole cultural movement of hip hop. In the North Bronx you had DJ Breakout and the Funky Four, and you had Grand Mixer DST. Then it was spreading into Harlem with the Crash Crew and the Treacherous Three with Spoonie Gee. All of this played a big role, all the branches of the tree, back to the roots of what we call hip-hop culture.

Brian Rose: And that was all happening around the late 1970s, when it was all coming together?

Afrika Bambaataa: Well before we decided to call it hip hop, it started in the early 1970s. As we progressed and started giving a name to this whole movement, you could say from 1973 and 1974 on.

Brian Rose: You mentioned the Nation of Islam, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan, Malcolm X. You’ve said before that there was a lot of really serious political movement in the 1960s, and then in the 1970s it calmed down. I’ve heard you quoted as saying it was like The Jeffersons, moving on up, and people relaxed. Did that change again in the late 1970s? Was it important to get another message out there, and was that part of what you were doing?

Afrika Bambaataa: Definitely. Some of the movement spread over from the 1960s into the 1970s, with the civil rights and human rights movements, and people were still going through the struggles. But then you had the Jeffersons syndrome, when people thought they’d made it, and things got a little calmer. You still had political strife that could happen here and there, but the 1980s were when it was in full swing, and music was always playing a part throughout everybody’s life. You could have all the different terminologies of life going on, but there was always a song or a beat or a groove that reminds somebody of a certain era. The same went on in the 1980s, when hip hop was becoming strong, coming from the 1970s and moving a lot with the punk rockers in the punk rock scene, who were also changing their style of music. Both were coming up at the same time.

00:21:30 Punk, downtown clubs and the Roxy

Afrika Bambaataa: Then we started crossing over in the 1980s, when we started playing clubs downtown, like Negril, being invited by Kool Lady Blue and Michael Holman. That was my first opening, playing among a lot of white people downtown. Then I broke into that scene and became one of the first members of the Rock Pool promotion. They wanted to know who this black guy was, playing all this other type of music to a large black and Latino audience. It was me, playing Gary Numan in the 1970s, playing Blondie, playing Adam Ant, so many groups that were happening at that time, all the punk groups moving on the scene, the B-52s and all that. Going into the 1980s and keeping the hip hop and the punk happening at the same time is what made me start dressing the way I did, when I went from Planet Rock to the wild costumes, taking things from history and from the punk look, with Looking for the Perfect Beat. That grabbed a whole large punk audience to start following me from many places, and that was the birth of all the downtown clubs that started playing hip hop: Negril, Danceteria, all the way to the famous Roxy.

Brian Rose: Most people don’t see punk and hip hop mixing together. What was it about punk that made you want to embrace it?

Afrika Bambaataa: It was the funk side of the punk rockers who were making funky punk music that made me grab it: hearing certain sounds that Blondie might have been making, and some of the funk-influenced bands from back then. I can’t think of the whole list, because I played so much different music, like the B-52s’ Mesopotamia, which was so funky. When I used to throw that on at the Roxy, the whole place used to go crazy. And when many of the groups started coming to the Bronx, much of the media said there was going to be a racial fight between so-called blacks and whites. But the music made everybody just party. People who were into hip hop were looking at the punk rockers like, what are they doing, that dance, the stomp and step? And the punk rockers were looking at the hip-hop people, trying to learn the dances they were doing. Once we got into the Roxy, it was all, like Uncle George Clinton said, One Nation Under a Groove.

Brian Rose: In my generation I saw that continue when I saw Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses with a Public Enemy shirt on stage, and then I saw Ice-T start Body Count. It now seems normal to have these two genres hand in hand.

Afrika Bambaataa: Well, we did a lot of work in the early days: me and John Lydon doing the first rap-rock record with World Destruction.

00:24:30 Crossing genres under many names

Afrika Bambaataa: I worked with so many different artists, from John Lydon to Cheb Khaled and Manu Dibango, to many hip-hop groups and go-go groups like Trouble Funk. My thing was not to tell a hip-hop artist that he should only do hip hop, and that’s why I worked with so many different groups, to cross those barriers. I was following what George Clinton was doing with Parliament-Funkadelic, being on many different labels under different names, and James Brown’s family of soul. So I said, why not in hip hop? So I became Time Zone, Shango, Hydraulic Funk, all these different names in hip hop, to be on different labels.

00:25:25 Introducing new records: the brainwash technique

Brian Rose: You were quoted as saying about yourself, “I was a pushy person, to go and do what I had to do.” Did you get a lot of pushback from your peers in the community when you started throwing in these tracks, whether it was punk, or music from the 1980s, or something from Kraftwerk? Did you get resistance at first, and did you have to say, no, this is the way I want to do it?

Afrika Bambaataa: The people who came to my parties were progressive-minded, and they knew I was crazy anyway. I could have you in sync, dancing like crazy, and then I’d just swipe the record, and the next minute I’m throwing on a Mountain Dew commercial, or Sweet Georgia Brown by the Globetrotters, something people remembered, or might have heard on a cartoon or a TV show. Or I might say, we’re getting ready to have some fun in the party, I want you to dance like your mama and papa used to do, and then I’d go into songs from Motown or the 1960s. It was interesting to see people start dancing, doing the jerk, the twist, the monkey, all the old dances. After a while I started using that in a lot of other parties as it started crossing over, and many of the other DJs, like Flash and others, would wait to see if my crowd would be okay with the different things I was trying before they played that song at their parties, because they might have had a more hardcore audience that might not go for it.

Afrika Bambaataa: And I used to try different music. There was a group from the Philippines with a record I was throwing on, and people weren’t moving to it at first. So I’d go back to a record I knew made everybody move, and then come back, what I call the brainwash technique: throw it back in, go back out, throw it back in to another song, until it started becoming like an anthem and everybody wanted the record and went crazy for it.

Brian Rose: So there are techniques where you can introduce something subtly, bring it back, and pretty soon get a party or an audience hooked on what you’re playing.

Afrika Bambaataa: Yes. It’s almost like what the radio stations do today by playing the same ten records over and over, but we weren’t trying to play the same ten records. We would come in with the record, flip to something else, and then come back in with the record. This way they start knowing and feeling the record until they really know it, and then it became a request at the parties, and people would go crazy after a while. Then I went back and dug up some other stuff, like the remake of Sly and the Family Stone’s Sing a Simple Song, which is a classic breakbeat record today.

00:27:50 The state of hip hop and radio

Brian Rose: The reason I know your name is because one of my favourite artists, Ice-T, had a song called MVPs. I was listening to it yesterday, and about 15 seconds in he mentions Afrika Bambaataa as one of the key people who influenced him. Today Ice-T has just released a Body Count track because he was a little frustrated with the state of hip hop. How do you feel about the state of hip hop, and about radio in New York, and how that has changed the industry?

Afrika Bambaataa: The state of hip hop, under the word, because most people when they say hip hop just think of a rapper. Many people try to say hip hop is dead. I beg your pardon: hip hop is still rocking the planet. I’m speaking of the culture of hip hop, with the DJs, the MCs, the aerosol writers, the b-boys and b-girls, and that fifth element, the most important, knowledge, which holds it all together. Many try to stay with the four basics but leave out the knowledge, but you can’t do the four basics without the knowledge. The fifth element is really the first, but we put the b-boys, the DJs and the MCs before it, so we say we plead the fifth, which is the knowledge. The culture side of hip hop is still moving strong. It’s still saving a lot of lives and helping a lot of people. But then you’ve got the industry side, which is playing a potty game. You have certain stations that claim to be hip hop and R&B, and when I go in there and question them, they try to rush me out. You say you’re hip hop and R&B. I want to know: where are your breakbeats? Where are your DJ records, your go-go, your Miami bass, your trip hop, your hip house, your electro? Where are all these different categories of hip-hop music that you’re not playing on the air? You’re basically just playing payola, and you’re not playing all the different categories of music.

Afrika Bambaataa: In the Universal Zulu Nation we say: play the old with the new and the new with the old, and it becomes true school. We’re not talking about censorship. If you’re playing a song that’s calling a woman out of her name, using the b-word or the n-word a lot, or just cussing, cussing, cussing, then you also want to hear a song that’s talking about “fight the power”, or calling a woman a queen, or some type of love song. Where’s the news on your radio station? This is happening with many radio stations throughout the world. Too many are trying to be like the American Top 40 stations, or be with Clear Channel or Emmis, and are not open-minded like they were in the 1980s with progressive-minded DJs. So you have to question them: who’s telling you to play this? Which program director is programming the minds of the masses of the people, and telling them they must stay in one style, whether it’s gangster rap or trap, instead of being progressive-minded and playing a mixture of music? That’s why so many people are turning to internet radio stations or satellite radio stations. They have a variety of different styles of alternative music.

00:31:30 Language and the meaning of words

Brian Rose: Talk to me about language. You seem to think it’s a very powerful medium. You talk about the n-word and the b-word. I listened to an interview from ten years ago where you called television “tell-lie-vision”, and you seem to think language makes such a big difference. It’s a subtle way of making a distinction between, say, hip hop and rap. Has that always been something you thought was important?

Afrika Bambaataa: Definitely. Language has always been important in dealing with any people on the planet from different cultural backgrounds: how we speak to each other, talk to each other, how we give emotions and feelings to each other as human beings. But many of us really don’t understand and know words. We don’t know the etymology of words. Many of us would say God bless you, Allah bless you, God bless the child that’s got his own. We use the word bless but don’t know that it’s a German word that really means blood sacrifice. When did that word come to be? It definitely wasn’t in the ancient African languages, or in the indigenous Moorish language, or Arabic, or the languages of India, or Chinese. So when did we start using the word bless? The real word is another German word, bliss, which means more your peace, your harmony, your love. That’s more the real word we’re really saying to each other, even though we say God bless you. Many people get caught up in certain words, like hello: you’re really telling somebody to go to hell and stay low. Back in time, according to your scriptures, the Bible and many other books, people would say, peace be unto you, and you’d say, unto you peace. That’s how all these prophets spoke to each other. So we have taken many words and changed them around. Good can mean bad and bad can mean good. Hot means it’s hot and will burn you, and hot also means, that’s tough, that’s fantastic. That chick over there is looking good, or that chick over there is looking bad. So it causes confusion, especially when you use the English language, which takes from so many other languages. We’ve lost the meaning, the etymology of words. You can’t even find the word dictionary in the dictionary. So we’re always looking for the etymology, where the roots of words come from.

00:33:40 The UNICEF trip to Africa

Brian Rose: You won a writing contest when you were younger and took a trip to Africa. Again, if it’s Wikipedia it could be wrong, so correct me. When you came back, I think you had a vision for what would later become the Universal Zulu Nation. Some have said people stopped fighting and started breaking, although I don’t think it was that simple. Can you talk about what happened, the people you were with, whether it was the Black Spades or your crew in the Bronx, and how the concept of the Universal Zulu Nation came about?

Afrika Bambaataa: Definitely. I won the trip to Africa through UNICEF.

Brian Rose: Is it true you could have gone to India the year before?

Afrika Bambaataa: Yes. The year before, I was supposed to win a trip to India, but I was outside partying and giving out flyers and didn’t make it to the question-and-answer part I was supposed to be at, at the UNICEF office.

Brian Rose: So that was lucky, probably.

Afrika Bambaataa: It was lucky, because the next year I got to go to Europe and Africa. My first trip to the Ivory Coast was very exciting. My first trip to Nigeria was amazing. I loved it when I went to Lagos, a very crowded city, where I saw so many people walking in the streets alongside the vehicles. Then I went from Lagos up to Kano, the more Islamic, Muslim part. At that time you heard all the stories that the Africans didn’t like the so-called black people of the Americas, which I found out to be lies. They were very interested in Muhammad Ali and Elijah Muhammad, and I was welcomed into many mosques that others couldn’t even go into, because I was talking about the Nation of Islam. I got to see hardworking people doing their agriculture and getting up for work. The first time I ever saw a house with a downstairs and an upstairs was in the Ivory Coast. Then I left there, headed to Europe, went into Belgium and saw the different parts of Belgium. So it was an exciting trip culturally for me.

00:36:40 Fela Kuti and James Brown, the king of soul

Afrika Bambaataa: I also brought back some great music from Nigeria that many people in the Americas had never heard of, by the man I called the James Brown of Africa: Fela Ransome-Kuti, as he was at that time before he changed his name. I used to play his music at a lot of hip-hop parties, where people would do a dance called the Bus Stop, which is better known as the Electric Slide today, or the cowboy dance they do. It was amazing to see 300 people going one way and 400 going the other, dancing to this man’s music, which was 12, 15 or sometimes even 20 minutes long. He learned a lot of his funk, to make Afrobeat, from what he heard of the king of soul, James Brown. I don’t say the Godfather of Soul, because we want to bring him back to his rightful status as the king of soul. We call Elvis Presley the king of rock and Michael Jackson the king of pop.

Brian Rose: And you collaborated with James Brown in 1984, is that right?

Afrika Bambaataa: Oh yes. James Brown, the king.

Brian Rose: There’s a movie that just came out, Get On Up, a biopic of him. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it. I knew something about James Brown, but when I watched that movie I realised he really was the hardest-working man in show business, and I’d forgotten how much impact he had on the industry and on the music. I think generations tend to forget. I needed someone to remind me of you, and we needed someone to remind us of James Brown. What was James like, and what effect did he have on the music business?

Afrika Bambaataa: There’d be no hip hop without James Brown. James Brown is hip hop. Music would stink without James Brown. His music was so powerful and so funky that so many people tried to emulate it or get their funk from it. I always give a lot of credit to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Uncle George from Parliament-Funkadelic for really pushing and making the funk happen for many people. The way James spoke, the way he took care of business, his ideology: Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud. He flipped that whole coloured and negro stuff overnight, at a time when people wouldn’t respect each other as black, or would fight you because you called them black. And all this music: Funky President, It’s a New Day, Give It Up or Turnit a Loose, Sex Machine.

00:38:50 Sly Stone, George Clinton and doing it your way

Afrika Bambaataa: Sly Stone also did a 16-minute version of Sex Machine. He was one of the first who started using the vocoder and making instruments talk and speak to each other. There was the music before Sly, and the music after Sly, because Sly really changed the whole scene, especially black music, with all that funk and wildness and guitar. Even James had to change some of his stuff after Sly came out, and the whole Motown sound changed after Sly came out, when you had those great producers, Holland-Dozier-Holland and others, doing different things for the Undisputed Truth and all those groups. Everybody started changing to that funk, dressing wild like Sly, and everybody was always trying to get that groove and funk like James. And when Uncle George and Parliament came out, they were dressing more like the Temptations and the Dells. Then when they heard Sly, they flipped to the whole Funkadelic thing, and Uncle George became the king of that funk empire. These three are very important to the music industry, just as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were over here with what they did in rock. That’s why I respect Mick, and John Lennon, and Sly and James and all of them: they did it their way. They didn’t care. If the Rolling Stones wanted to do funk, the companies had to go and push the funk music the Rolling Stones wanted to do, whether it was Miss You or Hot Stuff. I just did a version of Hot Stuff myself. So I give a lot of respect and tribute to all these groups for doing it their way, just like the Sex Pistols did it their way too.

00:41:00 Costumes and stagecraft

Brian Rose: Talk to me about costumes. Anyone who’s seen your videos for Planet Rock sees you in the headdresses and the outfits, and it’s incredible. But apparently you didn’t always dress that way. There were other people stepping things up around you, and then you thought, it’s time to really get dressed up for the stage. Is that how it happened? How did you get inspired to dress that way?

Afrika Bambaataa: I got inspired by Sly and the Family Stone, and then Parliament-Funkadelic with Uncle George. When we came out there were really no other hip-hop groups we were up against, because we were the architects of it. So you had to go and play against groups like Cameo. Imagine getting on stage with Cameo: you’d better be right. Or the Bar-Kays, or any of those funk groups of the time, because they put on a show. So we had to come out just as wild as them. My influence came strongly from Uncle George and Sly, and the costumes grabbed everybody’s attention when we started walking on the stage one by one, trying to be just as wild as Funkadelic. Many of the early hip-hop groups were dressed in tuxes, looking more like the Temptations or the early Motown groups. When we came, we said, we’re going straight wild and crazy. That’s also when I tried to grab that punk crowd, because I saw the punk happening, and I said, wow, that’s the way I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get that other wild side. The Rolling Stones were the bad boys of rock, while everybody just enjoyed the popular sound of the Beatles, and we were like that in hip hop.

00:42:50 How the Universal Zulu Nation began

Brian Rose: I want to finish the story of the Universal Zulu Nation. You said it wasn’t as simple as stopping fighting and starting breaking. When you came home from that trip to Africa and Europe, what vision did you have in your mind, and how did that end up becoming the Zulu Nation?

Afrika Bambaataa: Definitely, coming back and taking the different things I had seen in Mother Africa, and the different ideologies I learned from people like the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and seeing the Panther Party, the Young Lords, SNCC, CORE and all those groups that were happening at the time. And I had seen the movie Zulu, with Michael Caine, about the fight against the British and the imperialism they were trying to put on the indigenous South Africans. It played a big role in me. I said, when I get older, I’m going to have me a Zulu Nation. I didn’t know what I was going to have, but then I started adding all the different ideologies I was reading, whether it was Malcolm X or the Honorable Minister Farrakhan, hearing speeches from the Young Lords, hearing Gary Byrd and the GB Experience on the radio, talking over instrumental songs, which I incorporated into my shows when I used to DJ, playing speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X over instrumentals, even over Trans-Europe Express. So I took all that and put it together, and that’s when I decided to form the Zulu Nation, off the backs of what we had as the Black Spades, the Seven Immortals, the Savage Skulls, the Savage Nomads, all the groups that were around at the time.

Brian Rose: And how was that transition? Was it as simple as, stop fighting, start breaking?

Afrika Bambaataa: It definitely wasn’t. You didn’t just hear the music and stop fighting, because you also had things at parties that might cause a little beef: you stepped on someone’s fresh new sneakers, or you looked at somebody’s woman wrong. But music definitely played a big role in calming down a lot of beef in the streets, because people started to want the music more. They wanted the breaks, they wanted to have fun, they wanted to feel the bass and the rhythm, and they wanted to hear these old, rare songs they hadn’t heard before, which weren’t being played on the radio. That played a big role for many of the brothers and sisters, and as it progressed, more and more people got involved. It became a feel-good thing to go to the parties. There were people who wanted to enjoy themselves, get high or get a little crazy dancing and feeling the groove, and others who came because they just felt the rhythm and the vibration. It was the place to be at the weekends, and sometimes during the week. Sometimes we could play from Thursday to Sunday.

00:45:50 Vinyl, crates and Cornell University

Afrika Bambaataa: It wasn’t like the DJs today, where you have ten DJs who come and play with Serato for an hour or two. It would be one DJ, or four, or whatever crew you had, and you’d come with ten or 15 crates and play from six until four in the morning.

Brian Rose: Crates of vinyl?

Afrika Bambaataa: Correct. Crates of vinyl, LPs and 45s.

Brian Rose: So you’re a vinyl guy. How big was your record collection at its highest point?

Afrika Bambaataa: They said I had the Bat Cave, the Graveyard and the Dungeon. I had enough to fill that big HMV store they have on Oxford Street.

Brian Rose: And you kept all these in secret locations?

Afrika Bambaataa: Yes, sir.

Brian Rose: And you’ve lost vinyl in transit before, right?

Afrika Bambaataa: Oh, big time, especially on the airlines. The airlines are among the biggest robbers out here. When we were moving with vinyl, any DJ would tell you the airlines would take you for your money like crazy. You could go to one airline and they’d look at two or three crates and say, give me $500, and you start arguing. Or you’ve got three planes to take, and you have to deal with different attitudes, so it might be $500 here, $200 on the next plane, $1,000 on the next one. So thank God for Serato and Traktor and all these MP3 and digital vinyl companies that came out, because now you can play and carry more music than you ever could with crates, and save your crates as a backup, just in case all your backups of MP3s start disappearing. MP3s are good, but the technology still hasn’t got to where it definitely stays there. It’s easy for 20,000 MP3s to get wiped out in seconds.

Brian Rose: Speaking of digitisation, is it true that Cornell University is archiving your entire vinyl collection?

Afrika Bambaataa: Yes. Cornell University has a large collection of mine, over 40,000 records. I might have sold the same amount to Japan earlier, with a lot of extras, because I used to get a lot of vinyl to give out to people at the anniversaries. And at the radio stations I used to say, give me your garbage, and they would have all these boxes of records for me. That’s how I built up a large collection, besides all the ones I paid so much money for. My mother bought the first 200, and I bought the next couple of thousand. I was getting vinyl from all over the world, especially on my travels, as we became hip-hop artists travelling from land to land.

Brian Rose: Does a true DJ use vinyl, or are you okay with people using digital?

Afrika Bambaataa: I’m okay with them using whatever they want to use: vinyl, digital or both. I used to use both at a time, but when I started losing so much vinyl around the planet, I decided to go strictly digital. Every now and then I might bring some vinyl here and there, but I hate losing my vinyl. That really irritates me.

00:48:50 Touring and what kept him going

Brian Rose: What brings you to London, and what keeps you touring the world, giving your message and performing? What keeps you motivated these days?

Afrika Bambaataa: It’s definitely the people, and spirituality. I thank the Creator that I’m still popular, that I can still travel in good health and still perform and play before the people, whether I’m DJing or coming back out with some of my groups, like the Soulsonic Force or the Time Zone band, or recording with other people. I’m very honoured and humbled by that, travelling to many of these different countries and still working with many different artists around the world. It’s very interesting that I can still do that in this day and time.

Brian Rose: What about Asia? You’ve always been a fan of Japanese music, and you mentioned the Philippines earlier. Is that area of the world still dear to you? Do you ever get over there?

Afrika Bambaataa: I just came back from a nice trip in Asia, to China and then Japan. I’m always going over to Asia, visiting and performing or DJing, and I’m honoured by all the musical styles and tastes coming out of Asia in this day and time.

00:50:40 Planet Rock and the birth of electro funk

Brian Rose: Can you take me back quickly to Planet Rock and talk about why, in your opinion, it became such a big track? Did it resonate with people, was it unique, did it just have something at the time? Could that track have come out two years earlier or two years later and had the same effect?

Afrika Bambaataa: I think Planet Rock came at the right time, in 1982, and Looking for the Perfect Beat in 1983, because of the sound that was happening then, with many of the DJs being progressive-minded and not being scared to play different fields of music on their turntables. That was also the time when Kraftwerk was killing it with Computer World, and I said, it’s time now that I’d better grab this and jump and make this happen. It had been in my mind all this time. I was already moving hot with Jazzy Sensation on Tommy Boy Records, with the Jazzy Five, and I said, I’m ready to bust this thing I call electro funk, which was taken from the techno-pop of Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Gary Numan, and my man John Carpenter, who made the Halloween soundtrack. He gave me permission to use the music from his film Assault on Precinct 13 for Bambaataa’s Theme, which was another electro-funk record of mine. And Dick Hyman, who did a Moog version of James Brown’s Give It Up or Turnit a Loose, which I used to play a lot. I took the sound they were making with techno-pop and added the funk of James, Sly and George to it, and that became the birth of the electro-funk sound. It just caught on: using Trans-Europe Express and Numbers by Kraftwerk, Super Sperm by Captain Sky, and The Mexican by Babe Ruth, and mashing it all up together came the birth of that electro-funk sound, that Planet Rock sound. And from electro funk came your Miami bass, your trip hop, your hip house, and all the other electronica and different sounds, Latin freestyle, all off of Planet Rock and electro funk.

Brian Rose: And that voice synthesis. Where did that come from?

Afrika Bambaataa: That’s the vocoder. We were also trying to get that funky sound like Kraftwerk were doing with their style. We had a keyboard player named John Robie, working with Arthur Baker, and they were both phenomenal. John Robie was a killer on the keyboards. Everybody thought we sampled Kraftwerk, but there’s no sample whatsoever. It was all played on keyboard by this incredible wizard named John Robie, with the production skills of Arthur Baker and all the different vibes I was adding to it, telling them which way to put it, which music, to speed it up and all that. We all worked together with the Soulsonic Force, and the rest is history.

Brian Rose: I remember the first time I heard Planet Rock. I’m a white boy from San Diego, and in my neighbourhood I never heard much funk or hip hop. But I went to a magnet school in south-east San Diego, where everybody was bussed in from around the city, and we used to have these dances after school. They put trash bags over the cafeteria windows, and I was too scared to dance, but I still remember Planet Rock coming on. It just made everybody stop, because I don’t think anyone had heard anything like it. I’m guessing you hear reactions like that all the time.

Afrika Bambaataa: Big time.

00:53:56 Advice to his 20-year-old self, and travel

Brian Rose: I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Afrika Bambaataa and give that young man a bit of advice, now that you’ve lived 57 years, is there anything you would tell him?

Afrika Bambaataa: I would tell him to visit more places and try to speak with more people from many other areas who want change, or want to get out of their social ills, on the many trips he might make. That was very important: being an artist who didn’t act like a superstar, like the sun with everything rotating around him. Visiting so many different people and places, going into people’s homes, not being scared to get on a train or into somebody’s rundown car, going to museums to learn some of the history of people’s past, so you know where they’re at in the present and can see where they’re going in the future. All of that played powerful roles, and I would tell him to keep on pushing that.

Brian Rose: Do you think that when people travel they end up learning things about themselves? There’s a famous expression: what should they know of London who only London know? It’s hard to know yourself without going to other places.

Afrika Bambaataa: It’s definitely of great importance that people get to travel and see our great planet and our great people from all over Earth. There are many who don’t get that. That’s why I take my time with my camera and catch anything in the streets: a bus riding down, a train station, a toilet, people sleeping in the street, people living rich, people talking, a cafe, a stadium, showing the different lights of different areas from place to place, town to town, as well as going into different museums, showing things from people’s past history and what is supposed to be their popular version of the truth, and sending pictures out on the internet or putting them up on our website for others to see who might never have got the chance. That’s what hip hop has done. It has crossed many boundaries. It has brought people together from different nationalities, so-called races and religions, who would never have thought of speaking to each other before.

00:57:00 Advice from James Brown, and for young artists

Brian Rose: Can you tell me the best advice you’ve ever received? Maybe musically, or maybe someone told you an important lesson that really stuck in your mind.

Afrika Bambaataa: There’s so much spiritual advice. And James Brown, showing me how to write lyrics. When we wrote Unity, I put “anti-God, anti-Christ”, and James said, you’re just talking to Christians, to the people who are just into Jesus. You should come with a word that speaks to all people, if that’s what you want. So I went back and put “anti-God, anti-life”, something that all religions and all people could relate to. So he definitely told me how to write certain lyrics.

Brian Rose: And finally, to the 20-year-old listening to us from around the world, who could be in any of the countries we’ve talked about: what advice do you give them if they want to be in the music business? I know it’s a dream for so many people. Some have realistic expectations and some not so much. What do you tell people when they ask you?

Afrika Bambaataa: Never give up hope. Keep pushing on, or as we used to say back in the old days, keep on trucking. Keep your spirituality up. I don’t know if you ever read the book The Secret: you tell the universe what you want to do and tell her to make it happen. And research everything you want to be in. Don’t just step into the industry thinking all you’re about is making a record, because you will get taken if that’s all you’re about. If they tell you, don’t worry about money, don’t worry about contracts and law and all that, you’ll be taken for a ride as a slave. So study, study, study, and research, research, research.

00:58:58 The internet, Cornell and the Zulu Nation today

Brian Rose: Do you think YouTube, iTunes and all the technology these days make it easier or harder for a new artist to make a break, because there’s so much noise out there as well?

Afrika Bambaataa: It’s definitely making it easier, thanks to Prince putting “slave” on his face and showing you how to cut out the middleman.

Brian Rose: That was 20 years ago, right?

Afrika Bambaataa: Yes. Prince changed the whole industry. There’s even a book about that. But it has also made it so that now they’re giving away MP3s, so it’s back to: you’ve got to give a show, know how to get out there and promote yourself, and understand that many of the labels are now folding. They’re all trying to grab hold of the internet, and you’d better use it as much as you can before they start asking you for payments, because it’s coming down the line to be paid for everything, even your emails.

Brian Rose: You’re a visiting scholar at Cornell. What’s it like working with the university and having them make a copy of all your work? What has that experience been like?

Afrika Bambaataa: It’s definitely a fun thing, going to teach and learn with the people at Cornell. It’s not a boring class where I’m just sitting there talking. All of us are talking to each other and learning from each other’s abilities and ideologies, or whatever we want to talk about.

Brian Rose: Last question. What does Afrika Bambaataa like doing in his spare time, when you’re not performing or listening to music? Is there a way you can relax and switch off?

Afrika Bambaataa: I’m never really relaxing. I’m always doing something, some type of community work, speaking to people, or trying to stop beefs here and there. And the main powerful thing, when you really need feeding, is reading books and travelling into other worlds, whatever the book is trying to portray to you.

Brian Rose: And lastly, as far as the Zulu Nation goes, should people look out for the Zulu Nation in their own countries? Is that something they can find on your website? What’s the best way for people to find out more?

Afrika Bambaataa: They can look in their respective country to see if they have a Zulu Nation chapter online in those territories, or they can go to zulunation.com and see where the Zulu Nation is in the different parts of the world, to join, or just become universal.

Brian Rose: Fantastic. Afrika Bambaataa, thank you so much for your time. As you list off these names and producers and all the people you’ve worked with, there’s so much history. We could dive down for an hour on each piece. So thank you so much for coming on, telling us a bit of your story and reminding us about history. I think it’s hard these days for the younger generation, and now I’m the older generation, to even remember what happened ten years ago, let alone 40 years ago. So I think it’s important that we keep talking about it and always let people know. Thanks so much for being here.

Afrika Bambaataa: Thank you. It’s an honour.

Brian Rose: As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey, and I wish you well on yours. Peace and blessings.

Afrika Bambaataa: Peace and blessings to you.

01:02:08 Next week on London Real

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