West Coast

The West Coast Scene

“Locking was the very first professional street dance. Locking was created by Don Camelot Campbell sometime in the late 60’s. He was trying to learn to do the funky chicken… he couldn’t do it, and stumbled onto the style of locking.”

- Fred “The Penguin” Berry (aka Re Run)

The development of the west coast hip-hop scene shared similar characteristics of the hardships and evolution of its east coast counterpart. This redefined branch of hip-hop developed its own inimitable identity from its own roots of electronic dance and disco fever parallel to the east’s hosting of block-parties with new waves of sub-cultural re-invention of James Brown’s funk and reggae scene by way of fathering this new genre. The emergence of DJs and MCs evoked the passionate beginning of the movement itself and had already left the DJ and B-boy in the shadows in favour of the MC before spilling out into the west coast. Striking at the time where disco and electronic funk was failing to captivate the dance floor, many solo west coasts artist came about by trying to emulate their east coast brothers only to find they were better off representing their own social-inequalities and adversity endured. The ambiance was right and darkening into concentrative energy of creative anger set to define the west coast branch-off as hardcore Gangsta rap. The elements were practised but distinctly with a west coast insignia, graffiti played a completely different role in society than of the east. Gang slogans and signing death warrants by crossing out territorial tags scrawled by the enemy changed the purpose from art to war. After the disastrous 1965 riots in Watts, the lower-economic surrounding region of downtown Los Angeles, South Central, brought up a shy young teenage street performer at his first year at LA Trade Technical College. He would make the first inadvertent steps of a new popular dance movement that would bloom throughout the club scene at the time when the west coast club scene was locked into an identity crisis before the disco phenomenon would take over the world. The young visionary, Don Campbell would attempt to dance and momentarily freeze or lock-up in various comical pauses in specific poses. Friends and onlookers would cheer each time he repeated this routine. Upper body movement evolved from this with gyrating hand and arm movements like a hyperactive traffic controller in white gloves together with sudden erratic pauses, Campbell would improvise moves and incorporate props from his current environment. Every time he would, for what he perceived to be a mistake or fall over he received applause. Watts’ pulse was revived and a revolutionary new dance was born ‘The Campbellock’. It wasn’t long before this craze reached the nation and Campbell would cruise the club circuit recruiting dancers to join him. By 1973 he had assembled a brimming and bright dance crew called The Campbellock Dancers. The line-up included Penguin, (Fred Berry), Slim the Robot, Fluky Luke, the flexible and acrobatic Campbellock Jr.(Greg Pope), Toni Basil and later Shabba-Doo Quinones. They were unmistakable in large apple hats, knickers, striped socks and suspenders. They became the face of the funk movement of the ‘70s. Every move was the personification of the rhythm, soul and spirit of funk music. Due to legal problems the name of the group was changed to Lockers and they travelled the nation and were received with celebrity status. They worked alongside Bill Cosby, Lucille Ball, Stevie Wonder and opened for Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas. Like most success stories there was a rift within the group that tore them apart, with Toni Basil, Shabba-Doo and Greg Pope leaving to attain personal goals elsewhere. Basil would later become a successful choreographer and recording artist with the number 1 pop hit ‘Mickey’ in 1982. Fred Berry had left to star in a television series ‘What’s Happening’ as the character Rerun. The lockin’ flame had burnt out by the late ‘70s with the disco fever swarming the scene and with new advanced dance routines holding aspiring dancers captivated. A new wave of an updated version of the Robot had made it onto the scene of Long Beach to Fresno. In the middle of this was a young ‘Boogaloo Sam’ Soloman and his click the Electric Boogaloo Lockers, still enthralled by the locking traditions which was their major contributing influence. After Soloman saw a man walking with an obvious disability he envisioned a new dance. He called this distinctive angular movement the Old Man. They were inspired by early cartoon exaggerations, slinky toys, a wavering drunk and miming formats. With the intention of cracking Hollywood stardom Boogaloo Sam came to LA where his half brother Pop’in Pete Soloman lived. The group recreated themselves as the Electric Boogaloos and they carried the torch for the new generation of urban dance. At this same period were many clicks developing their own unique dance styles, the Fillmore Boppin’ and Dime-Stopping. Hollywood answered Sam’s request and exploited this scene by showcasing their dance movements in several low-budget films, ‘Breakin’’ and ‘Breakin’ 2: the Electric Bugaloo’ featuring the area’s top dancers of that genre which was showcased to the world as LA’s premier fad at the 1984 Olympic games closing ceremony performing under heavy fireworks display to Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’ with over 200 dancers popping and locking. In clubs throughout the west coast it was cheaper for club owners to pay one record spinner than a whole band, so naturally the house DJ phased out the bands in the late ‘70s. Former street dancers of the late 70’s would graduate to DJing as a way to earn a living when DJ’s were in high demand for clubs. A former dancer off Soul Train and the American Bandstand, Roger Clayton who begun hosting house parties from 1973 witnessed many performers going from the locking dance to becoming professional disc jockeys as he was one of them that made the transition. He was also known as Ace of Dreams and he hooked up with another dancer and aspiring entrepreneur Alonzo ‘Grandmaster Lonzo’ Williams who hung up his locking gear and begun to DJ for dance parties under the name of Disco Construction. They first put their efforts into organizing a mobile DJ party crew, setting up parties and dance events across the LA region with electronic-funk DJs, Andre ‘Dr. Dre’ Young and Antoine ‘DJ Yella’ Carraby Lonzo owned an all-age Compton club called Eve’s After Dark that opened in 1979 with The Unknown DJ as the house musical director. The sound at that period was a fast-paced electronic music. Unknown was from Detroit and both preferred the east coast sound, Afrika’s Soulsonic Force, Orbit and Scorpio.

Within a few years, the disco scene had phased out and Lonzo underwent a reinvention of the identity of the club, moving towards an electronic funk persuasion, renaming his group to the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, so called because of the amount of equipment they had to tear down to pack away every night. With local acts taking stage every night the place became the stomping grounds of some of today’s most respected performers it was at Eve’s under Lonzo’s supervision where rapper Ice Cube and his CIA crew first held public attention. With interest from CBS Recordings Lonzo built a studio in the back of his club in which to churn out records for his now Kru-Cut Records promising artists. Dr Dre and Yella produced many beats behind Cube and CIA’s recordings, not to mention the library of successful World Class Wreckin’ Cru joints. Local Compton crack-dealer Eazy-E had the foresight to circle around the club before pouncing on his prey and signing them to his undeveloped recording company Ruthless. With Dre in dire straits for money, he was hired as the producer for a New York group HBO with lyrics penned out by Cube, Eazy-E was hiring the use of Lonzo’s recording studio and making the foundations for the next generation’s most explosive rap group ever assembled. Eazy suggested to Cube they form together with Dre and other promising acts in the neighbourhood and form a South Central all-star super group.

At the same time Lonzo had captivated a Compton audience in his evolutionary Eve’s After Dark club, across the way on 156th and Wilmington, Mixmaster Spade was a local legend, in his garage situated across Compton Airport’s two-strip flight path saw the young impressionable DJ Toddy Tee taking lessons in ‘70s funk and early electronic Djing which Spade was brought up on. Spade was renowned as a mixtape and house party guru from South Central to Long Beach rivalling Lonzo’s Wreckin’ Cru organized events. He held classes with a young crew of burgeoning artists who called themselves the Compton Posse including DJ Pooh, Aladdin, Coolio, King Tee and J-Ro of the Alkaholics. Unfortunately their untimely breakup was due to an LA County Sheriffs interruption in 1987 as they attempted to raid the property. Spade and seven others engaged them in a shootout resulting in one officer getting shot in the back and sent to King-Drew Hospital by his fellow officer. As the smoke cleared and Spade’s crew surrendered and they confiscated $3,000, a Mac-10 and 25 gallons of PCP. The local rap fraternity had been a front for a narcotics operation.

Before the break-up, in 1985 the hottest mixtape circulated on local Los Angeles radio and clubs was nineteen year-old Toddy Tee’s rapping over the East coast’s hits which sampled Whodini’s instrumental “Freaks Come Out at Night” renaming it into “The Clucks Come Out at Night”, UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne” became “Rockman Rockman” and most famously Rappin’ Duke’s ‘Rappin Duke’ became “Batterram” a detailed report on military armoured personnel police vehicles used by Darryl Gates during his disastrous war over drugs and gangs throughout the inner city ghettos of Los Angeles. The track personally described a hard working man being disturbed by crackheads and the batter-ram paying a visit through his house. After witnessing a live invasion of this vehicle into a crackhouse on television, he felt inspired to rap about the significance of this growing trend of injustices sweeping through the area. This marked the beginning of the social reports on such changes to the community. Recorded in his bedroom-turned-studio, he duplicated them onto cassette and immediately hawked them on the street. This became an instantaneous sensation, almost unintentionally pandering to the frustrated thoughts of those around him. It had round-the-clock airplay on KDAY radio a local station shows that supported the cause by hiring the notoriety and expertise of Dre and Yella. By the end of the year the track was being revamped in an expensive studio with accompanying budget using funk musician Leon Haywood for production. At local LA club called Radio, modelled of the Roxy’s ‘Wheels of Steel’ night resident performers Ice-T who was a renowned kingpin on the mic at the time would collaborate with the DJ Afrika Islam every night making it an infamous hotspot for west coast locking dancers and b-boys, hardcore hip-hoppers, gangsters and colours from all sides of Los Angeles. Fellow artist Kid Frost and his Chicano homies rolled up to the venue in lowriders sporting Pendleton shirts and khakis and introduce their brand of Latino pride. It was here where Carson Blood gang affiliated Samoans brothers (related by blood) pranced their Strutting dance moves and called themselves the Blue City Strutters, later they would be better known as the hardcore gangsta rap group Boo-Yaa TRIBE. They were not a crew to be fucked with even by hardcore bangers looking for trouble. After the fade of LA’s club Radio scene, live hip-hop parties spread through LA filling the void of the phasing out the clubs. One popular production crew that would set up dance events in the Los Angeles Convention Centre and the Sports Arena was Rodger ‘Uncle Jam’ Clayton’s Uncle Jam’s Army.’ At these functions the Army would show up in army fatigues and bright Egyptian outfits and would stack thirty-two Cerwin-Vega speakers in the formation of pyramids. Their most recognized track was ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’. Uncle Jam marked the end of the relationship of the electronic DJ and dance marriage. Making way for the inception of hardcore gang-related rap music set to revolutionize the next several decades of the west coast scene.

South Central rap music had replaced the south’s old Mississippi Blues. The blues culture rose from conditions of hard-working oppressive times whereas united American ghetto hip-hop came by way of destructive loss of structured society and alienated behaviour by those mainly affected by lack of stable employment and education, black youth, the new urban warriors. With employment in the southern Los Angeles area desecrating due to Firestone, Goodyear and General Motors manufacturing plants in South Central LA shut down with 131 plants closing down leaving 124,000 people unemployed in the city of LA. Residents of South Central and Watts who had managed to become middle-class had lost it all and descended to the lower-class, in South Central at least 50 percent of youths were unemployed and without direction. Almost half of the children in South Central lived below the poverty line with the Watts area being hit the worst. This destructive pattern forced the introduction of self-defence methods of survival by way of making money, paving way for the powerful drug trade which inevitably produced do-or-die gang mentality and creating the market for arms dealing.

Established Crip and Blood gangs matured monstrously into the most dangerous organized gangs in America and capitalized themselves into both trades of drugs and guns. This scourge completely alienated black youths from functioning society and gave birth to a “them and us” separation between the neighbouring white suburbs and governing police factions. Either way this had a devastating and profound effect on the continual evolution in music in the west coast. It wasn’t long after this, the landscape turned for the worse and serious gang-related lifestyles overtook any contemporary music development like a diseased plague. Dance crews like the Carson Freakateers, Hot Hoochie Mamaz and Group Sex had taken a step back into the shadows of the Rolling 60’s Crips and the Grape Street Boys with the musical direction swaying in favour of Roger Troutman and Zapp’s ‘So Ruff, So Tuff’ and George Clinton’s parliament P-Funk hit ‘Atomic Dog’. The Freak and locking dances were replaced with the Crip Walk and the American-made .22 was replaced with the Israeli-made Uzi. People were robbed and brotherhood was relevant to those who promoted the same colour and neighbourhood identity. This taste was sour and hopes were dashed of any re-establishment in social integration. By the mid 1980’s everything was out of control and the only voice emerging from the ghettos were that of young, angry black youths detailing the realism of their environment through rap. Or Reality Rap.

Ice-T released ‘6’n The Morning’ when Dre’s weakened electronic-based World Class Wreckin’ Cru was no longer appreciated by the turn of the new season of hostility. Affected by the change of social climate, Dre was forced to redefine his identity to something resembling the walking-talking effigies of LA’s ghetto-life. With Eazy-E and Ice Cube, Dre was primed to release the street-level ‘Boyz N The Hood’ anthem of South Central and their prophets were Niggas With Attitude. Music being a sign of the times had never become as apparent as this period in west coasts’ time line. Although Schooly-D and his Park-Side Killers may have rapped Gangsta with baby breath, N.W.A. took it to the public outside of county ‘hoods to the attention of middle-America with amplified hardcore, Ice-T too. And middle-America was to blame for labelling this gangsta-rap as opposed to reality-rap, a much preferred tag by most rap artists. Before too long South Central’s Compton, Watts and Long Beach was labelled as the home of gangsta rap. Every kid who escaped the vacuum of gang-life was recounting their haunting experiences with a limping, low tempo backing track. And with the attention of popular culture, they were getting paid too! This is the story of the west coat rap scene. We witness a perpetuated cycle of a new generation of this art form, way out and slow release to the heat of the platonic surface of the west with burgeoning careers of Eazy-E’s own son Lil’ Eazy, Dre’s oldest child, The Surgeon and a young N.W.A. fan, ex-blood gang-banger The Game still warm from being tucked under Dr. Dre’s wing. A new era dawning in the 21st century and the heights of gangsta-rap is still out if anyone’s vision, Dre is still in charge from atop the heap and Suge Knight is still shooting out like the old west… But same as before, this was how the west was won.