Post Script

A new book fits classic hip-hop albums with the liner notes they never had.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Aug 14, 2007

CAN U KEEP A SECRET: Author Brian Coleman figures most of the artists in his book - 2 Live Crew, De La Soul, Beastie Boys - would have lost some mystique if they'd printed proper liner notes with their albums. Photo By: Carina Mastrocola (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

On page 49 of Brian Coleman's new book, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (Villard), Biz Markie finally breaks his silence on the story behind "Pickin' Boogers," the opening track on his 1988 album Goin' Off.

"I wanted to do a record like that," explains the Diabolical One, "because I knew a lot of people that used to pick boogers."

OK, so it's not especially enlightening. But many of the stories that Coleman relates in Technique are, and they unspool in the words of the artists themselves. It's something they've rarely been given the chance to do as the albums hit shelves, an oversight that Coleman noticed while working with a jazz-oriented public relations firm.

"When you do a jazz album," Coleman says, "the first thought after you master it — or even before — is, 'Who's gonna do the liner notes?' With a hip-hop album, it's more like, 'We gotta get this shit out now.' There's an immediacy and an urgency to get music out as quickly as possible. You want to just get it the fuck out, get it on the street, and have people listen to it. So really, what I'm doing is going back retroactively and retrofitting these albums with the liner notes that they should have had."

Coleman delves into the background of 36 classic hip-hop albums in Check the Technique (15 of which were culled from his self-published Rakim Told Me: Hip-Hop Wax Facts, Straight from the Original Artists), in each case letting the artists talk their way through, track by track. That may take the form of a guided tour through the combination studio/clubhouse where the Beastie Boys brainstormed Check Your Head; Digital Underground's Shock G coming clean on his transformation into Humpty Hump; De La Soul ruing the hippie image that "Me Myself and I" painted them into; Bushwick Bill regretting his post-shooting cover photo for the Geto Boys' We Can't Be Stopped; or even letting 2 Live Crew defend their legacy.

"To be honest, that was me steering the subject as much as them," Coleman says of the "As Nasty as They Wanna Be" chapter, which finds Luther Campbell touting his groundbreaking role as head of an independent label in the South at a time when it was nearly impossible for hip-hop to come out of anywhere but New York or L.A. "I think that it's easy to overlook how important 2 Live Crew were, even artistically, but really as pioneering independent label owners. That's really where they were hugely important. It doesn't mean that you have to like 2 Live Crew, and if you were offended by them back in 1988, you might still be offended by them now — but I think it's important to strip away as much of the booty-shaking stuff as you can and really look at them as pioneering entrepreneurs."

Coleman, 37, initially came to hip-hop as an adolescent watching early MTV, when it would show videos by the likes of Run DMC or his favorites, the Fat Boys. "I still think the Fat Boys were awesome," Coleman says now. "They were produced by Kurtis Blow. They were no joke — well, they were a joke. But they were really entertaining, and that's a big part of hip-hop."

But he really got hooked a few years later, after hearing the first Public Enemy album. "At that point I started to see hip-hop as a separate entity, not just pop music," he says. "I was actually listening to a lot of punk at the time, as I still do today, and I saw a direct correlation between hip-hop as a subculture and punk as a subculture. So I started digging more into it, and that was really the point of no return for me."

Never intending to be a journalist, the Boston-based Coleman started writing pieces for magazines like XXL and Urb in the mid-'90s, simply because he wasn't reading the type of information on hip-hop artists that he wanted to know. The same urge led to Rakim Told Me and then to Check the Technique.

Though he mostly credits the lack of liner notes in hip-hop to the rapid pace at which albums are dropped, especially today with the looming threat of tracks being leaked to the Internet, Coleman admits that certain bands benefit from a dearth of information. "If there were liner notes for the first Geto Boys record, would they have seemed as mean, or would it have seemed like as much of an outlaw record if you would've had Bushwick Bill speaking seriously about Chuckie or something like that? You can draw it back to rock — if there were liner notes for the first Black Sabbath record, would it have seemed as creepy and scary as hell and deep and dark? I'm guessing Marilyn Manson probably doesn't have liner notes for his records, or if so, they're not very serious."

Though Coleman says there were some disappointments in chapters that had to be cut or interviews that he just couldn't nail down, he poses the possibility of a second volume. He's already interviewed Ice Cube, which he couldn't arrange for this book. But in the end, the albums he chose to examine were derived from his own love of the music.

"I'm not trying to put an objective canon out there of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made. I think some of these are, in fact, the greatest hip-hop albums ever made, but really albums that mean a lot to me, every single one of them. And I know that I'm not alone. I see myself as a very typical, average, maybe a little more fiendish than most, but an everyday, old-school, hip-hop fan. So if I like something, chances are there are other people out there who like it too."

This weekend, Coleman hopes to gather some of those people at Fluid, where he'll be on hand to discuss and sign the book, but in an informal setting, with DJ sets by Philly's DJ Mike Nyce and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest.

"I'm not a big fan of book signings in general, and definitely not book talks," Coleman says. "There would be nothing more absurd than me reading as if I was KRS-One. So I try to make these events a celebration of the music."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Check the Technique book release party, Sat., Aug. 18, 9 p.m., $10 until 11, $15 after, Fluid, 613 S. Fourth St., 215-629-3686, www.fluidnightclub.com, www.waxfacts.com.

 

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