We knew that hip-hop was many things, but not static. Kids who came back from a trip to New York with bootleg hip-hop mixtapes from Canal Street or off-the-radio recordings from Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia’s underground show were lauded like pirates returning home with a bounty. Sundays, when the school’s alternative-rock station turned the airwaves over to what the industry termed “Black music,” were a day of revelry. You could find us, every Thursday, at Funk Night, dancing to Foxy Brown or Big Pun. It also became a way for the few students of color to create community. Hip-hop became a care package or a phone call to your best friend from home: a way to transcend time and space. There were no car stereos blasting anything, much less the latest Mobb Deep. When I went to college in Providence, I realized all that I’d taken for granted.
If Casey Kasem was the voice of America, on my radio, Angie Martinez was the voice of New York.
I was a Nuyorican girl in Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s hip-hop soundtracked my life. The music and culture that emerged were shaped by the unique mix of Black and Puerto Rican people pushed, together, to the margins of society. Hip-hop was born at a birthday party in the Bronx, a neglected part of a neglected city. The genre was still viewed as subversive-“Black music” or “urban music,” music that was made not for the polo-playing swells, but for the inner-city children whom their charity matches benefited. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the year before, it was only the tenth rap track to do so. When Combs’s single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” hit No. But to those young white Americans, in 1998, he was just the newest rap sensation to ascend the pop charts. Combs was well known to hip-hop aficionados as an ambitious music mogul-his story of going from a Howard University dropout turned wunderkind intern at Uptown Records to a mega-successful A&R executive there was the kind of thing that made you wonder why you were paying tuition. To be clear, hip-hop was already a global phenomenon whose booming sales were achieved through crossover appeal to white consumers. The polo-playing swells had invited him and he had agreed, as long as the day could be a benefit for Daddy’s House, a foundation he runs that supports inner-city children.” That summer, The New York Times reported, “the Harlem-born rap producer and performer had played host at the Bridgehampton polo matches, looking dapper in a seersucker suit and straw boater. Against the cultural landscape of late-’90s America, the simple fact of a Black music executive coming to the predominantly white Hamptons was presented as a spectacle. The house was all white and so was the dress code: not a cream frock or beige stripe to be seen. It’s been 25 years since Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, hosted the first of what would become his annual White Party at his home in the Hamptons. Although Sundays at the Tunnel would endure for a few more years, nothing in hip-hop, or American culture, would ever be quite the same again. Relocated not just to another club or another borough, but to a beachfront estate in East Hampton. What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. I n the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation.
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