Schoolly D - "P.S.K.-What Does It Mean?" b/w "Gucci Time" (Schoolly-D Records, 1985)
In my intro to the Spray Cans series, I said that I wanted
to create a hip-hop analogue to Nuggets.
While most of the songs on Nuggets
barely sold but were great enough that they deserved to be rescued from
obscurity, others were singles that hit #1 on the Billboard charts (such as
“Louie, Louie”) but that hadn’t achieved the respect or attention that they
deserved, hence my choice to cover a single from Fiend’s Gold-selling album There’s One in Every Family in Vol. 008.
On the other hand, some of the artists that found themselves on Nuggets, such as the 13th
Floor Elevators, didn’t sell many records when they were active but their
subsequent influence far outstripped their initial success. This week’s artist
Schoolly D falls into this latter camp. While many people probably know him
best these days for rapping on the intro song for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Schoolly D is a hip-hop legend who arguably
recorded the first gangsta rap song ever with “P.S.K.-What Does it Mean?” in
1985.
Schoolly D’s earliest records were in the immediate wake of
Run-D.M.C.’s debut self-titled album. The big single from that album, “Sucker
M.C.’s” wiped the slate clean for hip-hop, essentially closing the book on the
earlier Grandmaster Flash/Afrika Bambaataa/Kurtis Blow era of hip-hop. While
those artists trafficked in disco-influenced breakbeat-driven songs, “Sucker
M.C.’s” stripped hip-hop to its barest elements, knocking SP-808 and 909 drums
and scratching. Schoolly D jumped on this sound for his self-titled debut, and
the album’s single, “P.S.K.-What Does it Mean?” b/w “Gucci Time” is his purest
distillation of this aesthetic. Listen to “P.S.K.” too loud on a decent pair of
headphones and the drums feel like nails being driven into your skull. The
harsh scratches surrounding the “fresh” sample is the closest thing this beat
has to respite, and other than that, it’s six and a half minutes of
relentlessly driving and overly reverbed 808s. It’s harsher than anything his
contemporaries were doing at the time, which fit well with his revolutionarily
hard subject matter. In the first verse, he cruises around and picks up a girl.
After sleeping with her, he realizes that she’s a prostitute and, completely
unfazed, he pays her. In the second verse, he goes to a party, gets high, hears
another rapper who’s trying to sound like him, pulls out his pistol and presses
it to the other guy’s head, and says “Sucker-ass nigga, I should shoot you
dead.” Instead, he takes the mic and starts rapping and the biter leaves in
shame. While Too Short was doing this kind of sexually explicit material over
in the Bay Area a few years before Schoolly D, this level of violence was
basically unprecedented in 1985.
The b-side, which can also be found on Schoolly D, starts out with more standard subject matter for the
time than “P.S.K.” He calls out wack biting MCs and lauding his own abilities
on the mic (as well as his expensive Gucci watch), but by the end of the song
he’s having sex with a prostitute and killing her pimp. Lots of MCs were
claiming to be the baddest in 1985, but Schoolly D took it one step further,
willing to employ violence to defend his title and status in the rap game. As a
new artist, Schoolly D made himself immediately known by openly threatening all
challengers in a much more vicious way than anyone else had ever done. Also, he
was openly calling out his gang affiliations (P.S.K. stands for Park Side
Killas, the Philly gang that D ran with), another first for hip hop that would
become commonplace, especially on the west coast, just a few years later.
Schoolly D abandoned most of the violence of his first album
on his follow-up Saturday Night! – The
Album in 1987. Saturday Night! is
Schoolly D’s best album. While it doesn’t have any one song with the brutal
power of “P.S.K.,” it’s a much more well-crafted and varied record than Schoolly D. Although he returned to the
gangsta tropes of “P.S.K.” on his third album Smoke Some Kill in 1987, D left a temporary void in hip-hop that
was filled by Ice-T in Los Angeles. Ice-T’s song “6 ‘N the Mornin’” (1986) and
debut album Rhyme Pays (1987) picked
up right where Schoolly D left off, and Ice has been vocal about Schoolly’s
influence on him. “6 ‘N the Mornin’” follows the “P.S.K.” formula almost
exactly, just with less-intense drums and a funky west coast edge during the hook.
Ice-T reached a wider audience than Schoolly D, spreading gangsta rap across
Los Angeles, where the subgenre reached maturity on N.W.A.’s masterful Straight Outta Compton in 1988 and
became the dominant style of rap in the mainstream by the mid-90s.
Like most of his contemporaries (the Beastie Boys are
probably the biggest exception), Schoolly D lost most of his audience and his
relevance during the 90s as he struggled with sonic shifts and changing lyrical
styles, but “P.S.K.” and his first two albums remain among the most important
documents of eighties rap.
"P.S.K.-What Does It Mean?"
"Gucci Time"
Coming Up on Spray Cans:
Wu-Syndicate
Canibus
Rammellzee
& K-Rob
Meccalicious
Cashless
Society
Att
Will
Black
Attack
No comments:
Post a Comment