The raw girth and lyrical genius in the rap game is, without question, attributed to hip-hop’s most anointed MC, Big Daddy Kane. Delivered into the exploding genre of hip-hop in the 80s, Kane made his way up the ranks aspiring from the mean streets of Brooklyn, surrounded by street and B-Boy culture, writing battle rhymes, dancing, contending and successfully leaving MCs choking on their words and gasping for air.
By the late 80s Kane released his debut, Long Live The Kane, a rapid fire demonstration, defining Kane’s lyrical ability, featuring the miraculous DJ, Mr. Cee -sampling some of the most profound classic funk and soul jams tweaked and brought up to date .
The two were a credit to not only what rap fans were thirsty for, but to what the genre needed to appropriately take itself into the 90s, upping the anti from lyrical and conscious rhymes, fast break beats, kinetic performances to hip-hop fashion, changing the way audiences perceived and responded to rap music.
Twenty five years later, and with an arsenal of classic material, Kane is still with us delivering his lyrical technique and epic stage performances-this time with his new project Las Supper; a live outfit featuring New York’s Lifted Crew as well as soul singer Show Tyme, combining the nostalgic sound of funk and soul the way it was intended, coalesced with the essential sound and groove of old school hip-hop. Currently on the road with Las Supper, and prepping up for the release of their album, Back To The Future, Kane gave us a few minutes to discuss the new project, the definition of 80s hip-hop, and to stress that this is not a comeback, it’s a Big Daddy thing.
You’ve been keeping busy since the beginning making appearances on tracks by DJs and r&b artists. Although your first album in almost 15 years, People should know this is not a comeback.
A comeback? Mmmm…No. It’s not a Kane project. It’s a Las Supper project. This is not me trying to shine, or nothing like that or relive my glory days. This is me doing something completely different.
Las Supper fuses together the vintage sound of classic funk and soul music combined with the aesthetic of 80s hip-hop?
Yeah, what we’re trying to do is go back to vintage soul, you know? Everything is live instrumentation and everything’s got that vintage ‘60s/’70s feel of soul music and then you got . It doesn’t involve no auto tuners, it doesn’t involve no keyboards, it doesn’t involve no drum machines.
Hip-hop and r&b have shared the same medium before, what makes this different from, say, getting an MC to rap a verse over an r&b track?
Because it is something that no one has really done. You know, it’s like one unit as opposed to ‘it’s an r&b song, let’s get a rapper to put a verse over it’. As I said, Las Supper is trying to go back to vintage soul, and lyrically, vintage hip-hop -merge the two but do it in a way that it works as a group.
A comeback? Mmmm…No. It’s not a Kane project. It’s a Las Supper project. This is not me trying to shine, or nothing like that or relive my glory days. This is me doing something completely different.
What was the foundation of 80s hip-hop?
It was lyrical, conscious rap. You’re talking about a time period where a lot of artists didn’t get arrested with dope and many didn’t get radio play unless you had good songs -a conscious song- a fun song. I mean, it’s deeper than the 80s. When this thing first began in the ‘70s, cats were just rhyming at house parties and block parties.
With that said, do you think contemporary hip-hop and r&b has lost its backbone? Unless your talking underground, it’s like club music has jacked their identities.
Well, I mean, at this point in time, hip-hop and r&b are pretty much one. Artists like Niki Minaj and Lil’ Wayne, what they’re doing is pretty much singing. The categories at the time are almost like one in a sense.
Copyright infringement stigmatized hip-hop with condemning the art of sampling-which was quite definitive of 80s and 90s hip-hop. Do you think MCs and DJs try to avoid it now?
I mean, you can sample, you just got to pay for it (laughs). I think what happened in some point in time, you know people like Dr. Dre, he comes from an r&b feel and he’s a musician. A lot of producers came in the game as real musicians. I guess the thing was not to sample, the thing was to create because that’s the mentality of a real musician as opposed to a hip-hop artist. A hip-hop artist’s thing is to sample because that’s what we were doing in the studio.
Before you emerged as an MC were you immersed in any musical skills or background?
Not at all. I always wanted to sing real badly- I just can’t. What happened was an older cousin of mine named Murdock, he started rapping. He was that older cousin I looked up to, so as he was doing it, I started doing it. You know, just try to hang with him. He was rhyming with two other guys so when I started writing I started off trying to write battle rhymes so I could beat the other two dudes battling, and I’d be down with Murdock.
Then once you came into the game, It seemed as if rap fans were dancing more, and in a way they hadn’t been doing beforehand.
When I came out, everybody was dancing to hip-hop. I think that in the mid-eighties, because normal cats, normal hip-hop fans…I say normal because what I mean is non B-Boys. Prior to that in the ‘70s and the early ‘80s, hip-hop dancing was basically done by the B-Boys -hopping and breaking. By the mid-eighties, normal hip-hop fans which, you know, weren’t really B-Boys, got into hip-hop. I think that’s what really made break-dancing and stuff decline because now you got cats in clubs doing all those flips, spins, and sliding on their knees but it was part of a different kind of hip-hop dance. It was happening in Latin Quarters, Union Square, you know, Rooftop- all those places.
Dancing became more of the stage show.
Right. But, there was always dancing in hip-hop. It just changed from the B-Boy style dance to what you would call, I guess, Club dancing. It was always there. Then you had artists like Whoudini who had dancers on stage. Heavy D had dancers on stage. Salt & Pepper had dancers on stage.
When Rick came it was like he had this unique British voice that no one had ever heard. I don’t think anyone ever heard a British MC. He had that accent that was incredible and his stories were just so funny.
The beats became faster and the lyrical flow was break neck too.
Yeah. Rapid flow. You had aggressive MCs like Run DMC, L.L. Cool J, but it was more aggression, like a whole bunch of words into one line. Around like ‘86, Rakim and KRS came out, but they had slower flows. The game was starting to change and become very lyrical. It became rapid fire, like, ‘Ok, now somebody is saying some hot stuff, but damn, they’re going top speed. And after he finishes the verse, he’s jumping back with these two dudes where he’s doing dance moves’. It became where cats had to step their game up lyrically and in their stage show.
Did it ever become exhausting?
A lot of times. But I was always that dude that, you know, doesn’t drink before I go on stage and I never really been that much of a smoker, but there were definitely times that I was on the road playing lots of dates that I’d be beat down.
Some artists had no choice but to lip sync while they had to dance and perform simultaneously to keep their wind. Some still do. I never understood why some singers, though, would lip sync on a show like Soul Train.
For some artists, that’s what they were taught. You know, that was pretty much the thing to do for pop stars. I don’t know why Don Cornelius did that but that was his thing to have everybody lip sync. When I did it, I couldn’t take it the first time, so the second time I did Soul Train, what I did was go back into the studio and recorded my vocals dry and recorded myself in the studio telling the crowd to put their hands in the air and say ‘Ho’ and all of that. That’s how I went to Soul Train. I was lip syncing but it still sounded live, because my voice was dry and I was doing crowd participation so the audience thought it was live.
You’re doing some dates with fellow MC/ friend Slick Rick. What would you say Rick brought to hip-hop?
Storytelling. I’ve heard stories being told before like Grandmaster, L.L. Cool -you know?
When Rick came it was like he had this unique British voice that no one had ever heard. I don’t think anyone ever heard a British MC. He had that accent that was incredible and his stories were just so funny. It was like he was writing a fold-up nursery book. I mean, his way of telling stories was just hilarious, you know? He really changed the game with his accent and art of storytelling.
Who are some of the contemporaries you find are true to the lyrical form?
I guess those true to the lyrical art form, uh…there’s Joell Ortiz, Joe Budden, those of the Slaughterhouse camp, all those dudes, Eminem too. There’s a few that are out there. There’s a lot in the underground like Saigon. It’s just that not too many of them are well known. In this new generation, they are out there, there’s just not a lot. It’s not what they are known for.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with trying to get the fame. Make some money. I think that’s beautiful- ain’t nothing wrong with that. It’s just a matter if you have respect for the art.
A rapper can pull off being lyrical perhaps, but being conscious and coherent is a whole other thing. I like when the art of story telling is intact in a rhyme. Otherwise, you’re just a windbag. MCing is an awful thing to fake.
Oh yeah. I explained that in Ice T’s movie The Art of Rap. What I said was that, you can call Dr. Seuss a rapper. He’s making words rhyme. Anybody can make ‘hat’ rhyme with ‘cat’. MC, that’s something like, you know, a serious force to be reckon with. From a lyrical standpoint, you got MCs such as myself, such as Kool G Rap and KRS One, who put lyrics together. To make you think about what you just heard -make you press the rewind button and hear it again, ‘What did I just miss?’ Tupac, Chuck D, y’know, lyrics that touch your soul and make you think about what’s happening in your life. Then you have a party MC- people like Doug E. Fresh and Busy B. get on stage and just rock the house, everybody losing their mind, everybody sliding from left to right. MCing is really an art form.
When hip-hop broke, most of the successors emerged from the underground, many without the insight on how big they would become. Most contemporaries strive for getting big and getting fame right of the bat. A recipe for disaster you think?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with trying to get the fame. Make some money. I think that’s beautiful- ain’t nothing wrong with that. It’s just a matter if you have respect for the art. That’s all it’s about. I mean, you can make a hit record but at the same time, if you’re an artist and you got a song out and all the people are saying ‘you hear that new joint from such and such? Aw, man that shit is crazy. Kanye did the beat’. Then all you’re doing is making Kanye big. You got to get yourself big because you didn’t say nothing. You didn’t do nothing to make them embrace you, and nothing for your career. If that producer wants to work with someone else instead, man, your career might be over.
Well Kane, Thanks for putting in the time to chat.
Thanks for having me brother.
Words: Craig Terlino
Back To The Future is out now and Las Supper will be touring the UK later this month.
