A User's Guide to Electro Hip-Hop

While Kraftwerk's legal team was busy trying to sue Tommy Boy Records for bogarting a synth riff, Los Angeles electro hip-hop went on to clone both plaintiff and defendant throughout the 1980s, long after New York had ditched the 123 BPMs of "Planet Rock" for RUN-DMC, Marley Marl and Roxanne's grandmother.

Because of this, the early ‘80s L.A. electro scene has often been treated with snickers and neglect, despite boasting some of the nastier DJs by any time zone. For a while, knowledge of early West Coast hip-hop was dependent on either Breakin', the Gap Band video for "Party Train," or maybe What's Happening, which starred L.A.'s most famous pop-and-locker in red suspenders, Fred Berry, aka Rerun. Yet someone must have been doing something right if Dr. Dre, George Clinton, Roger Troutman, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were showing up at your functions. Thrown by a crew of DJs called Uncle Jamm's Army, these parties were all fast times and wall sweat, an obsession with Prince, Kraftwerk and the word "freak." Homemade jheri-curl activator was distributed in tiny vials, and on more than one occasion somebody lost their pants on the dance floor.

On the turntables, breathing all over the beat like a respirator gone wild, was Egyptian Lover, DJ/producer from South Central, who's been enjoying his own revival lately. As a younger generation gleefully catches up, Egypt ("Greg" to his parents) continues to casually murder his old-school sets, beating his chest with the tympani of "Electric Kingdom.” Recently he opened for M.I.A. and played "Planet Rock" backwards, something that I will always find to be incredibly mysterious. His first hit, "Egypt, Egypt," made life in Cairo sound like a panty raid, even if he was thinking Venice Beach, which in 1985, was downright exotic when described in terms of freaks, “drum computers,” and more freaks. Yet what reactivated Egypt in the 00's wasn’t “Egypt, Egypt,” but "Freak-A-Holic," a song that wishes the Jesse Johnson Revue never broke up.

Another prominent L.A. electro figure in a purple Nissan truck, Kim “Arabian Prince” Nazel, spent afternoons on Venice Beach, using stale donuts to lure seagulls near his tape recorder. The results — a chalkboard screech worthy of Public Enemy — are impressive and can be heard on “Let’s Hit The Beach,” which is part of an Arabian Prince retrospective being issued by Stones Throw Records. Amid the panting and German pulse redial, there is the thunder of “Panic Zone,” recorded by Nazel, his voice pitched into a moat, during a brief stint as a producer for N.W.A. Released in 1987 (the year Dre produced an obscure car-jacking song called “Killer Daytons”), “Panic Zone” was, in some ways, electro's last stand in L.A., sharing an EP with “Dope Man,” at a time when L.A.'s all-hip hop format KDAY went off the air, before N.W.A. came in and shot up the place — or at least imagined they did.

Not far behind was MC Eiht of Compton’s Most Wanted. Eiht and producer DJ Slip were once complicit in yet another Kraftwerk vehicle, this one called E.V.I.A.N. (Cover art: seahorse in goggles playing Keytar). Their 1990 debut It's A Compton Thang never really got its just due (cough! The Chronic), though there are times when you can’t help but think Snoop’s going to pick up a verse, just on principle. Nowhere is this more apparent than "Late Night Hype," a drowsy G-funk masterpiece produced by DJ Unknown, an L.A. electro alum who once rapped, "Take a sip of Coca Cola and comb back your wave" on his school's out anthem "Let's Jam." Last summer "Late Night Hype" completely Sasquatched my carbon footprint as I drove around fabricating errands (popsicle shortage!), looking for any excuse to hop in a car with that classy Anita Baker bassline. (Baker's Rapture LP is a gangster producer's paradise waiting to happen). "Late Night Hype" is quiet with the seatback, but never caught off guard — even when Eiht passes out on the floor in the second verse. Like the man says, “Philosophy excused when it’s time to get bent.”