The Story of Memphis Rap Pt. 1

After four years of stop-start work and seemingly-interminable delays, The Story of Memphis Rap box set was released by Now-Again Records in cooperation with Vinyl Me, Please (VMP) in October 2023. Well, sort of.

The boxes––9 albums pressed on 11 180-gram LPs encased in an angular, two-piece slipcase, with extensive liner notes––were rather expensive to produce in their entirety. Financial turbulence at VMP, and subsequent corporate restructuring, meant that, of the 1000 boxes contractually promised, only 600 or so were made. The albums contained therein have been reissued for individual purchase by Now-Again, but the liner notes have yet to be reproduced in their entirety. (If you prefer brevity, an abridged version of the notes is included with those individualized reissues.)

I’m posting the liner notes on Medium in six parts because, though I’ve long since accepted that there will be no meaningful financial or critical recompense for my work, I believe them to be an important contribution to a broadly misunderstood––and frequently misappropriated––rap sub-genre. There are, I hope, more than 600 people who’ll find these notes informative and edifying. If you find my work helpful for commercial and/or academic purposes, please cite it properly. Don’t be a dick.

Beginning in earnest in the late 1980s, Memphis witnessed an outpouring of rap rivaling that of any other city in both creativity and prolificacy. Makeshift bedroom studios in the Bluff City’s ghettos played host to scores of silver-tongued rappers and starry-eyed wannabe super-producers — it was for the hood, by the hood. However, there’s no definitive starting point from which we can extrapolate a linear narrative, only data points between which we can draw and redraw connections as we see fit. In lieu of a gravitational center around which the story orbits, we have constellations. The Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction, the hard-bitten Beale Street saloon impresario Robert Church, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the evocative color photography of William Eggleston, the rise and fall of Stax Records, the de-industrialized white flight wreckage of the 1970s and 80s, the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and the Iran-Contra affair, Craig Brewer’s 2005 film Hustle & Flow — each of these can engender a broader, more complete understanding of Memphis rap.

There are practical considerations, too.

A significant contributor to the difficulty of writing a coherent, unimpeachable history of Memphis rap is that, with a single, somewhat limited exception, no one in the scene paused to dispassionately document dates and times or archive tapes, fliers, posters, and other ephemera. And why would they? These objects were never intended to be durable signifiers of a remarkable artistic flourishing; it was the music that was of personal import, not the cheaply-duplicated tapes or photocopied fliers.

Moreover, the instinct to collect and archive requires a deep belief not only in the artistic value of the material itself, but in a future in which that perspective is shared beyond one’s circumscribed psychogeography. For most of those who made and purchased these tapes, any future was an abstraction — they were largely poor and Black and from the most fucked up parts of a neglected city and, whatever outside influence was exerted upon them was almost uniformly negative. This was art created at the most frayed fringes of the American empire by people whose lives, like those of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, were considered to be of negligible value. While many of those who were part of the Memphis rap scene in the 1990s are still among us, a not-insignificant portion have died, spent years in and out of police custody, experienced (or continue to experience) homelessness, suffered the sorts of easily preventable maladies prevalent in poor communities, functionally disappeared, or some combination thereof. Those who are alive and well fought hard to stay that way.

There wasn’t much to recommend the town located on a sandy bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The unobstructed view of the broad, pale green river was pleasant, sure, but the place was humid and pestilential, and what government that could be said to exist was primarily concerned with policing dray wagons, enforcing a 10 P.M. curfew for Blacks free and enslaved alike, and, on occasion, shooting un-collared dogs. The town’s modest budget allowed for little more.

Still, better to be near the river than further inland. The river provided a source of commerce and, when the city finally found a wharfmaster with some pluck, a possibly significant source of revenue. Before the wharfmaster’s hiring, the city-operated wharf was overrun with raucous flatboat operators who’d refuse to pay city fees when landing, then run amok when ashore. A steadfast wharfmaster backed by armed militiamen was a rather egregious turd in their proverbial punchbowl.

It wasn’t long before one of these flatboat captains decided to test the wharfmaster’s resolve. On the wharfmaster’s first approach, the flatboat captain waved a spiked club in his face, much to the amusement of those nearby. A second approach — this time an attempted arrest — failed, too. A third approach resulted in the wharfmaster, a constable, and a militiaman being battered by the recalcitrant, club-wielding flatboat captain. In retaliation, militiamen and volunteers opened fire at the flatboat captain who, having worn out his welcome, dropped fucking dead. There were no further difficulties collecting fees from flatboatmen, which bolstered the city’s coffers and allowed for the expansion of government and more ambitious public works projects. Memphis had proven itself a real city capable of real violence.

In the 1980s young Memphians were perhaps uniquely well positioned to hear — and be influenced by — as broad an array of new rap as existed. Memphis-based Select-O-Hits, founded by legendary producer and Sun Records owner Sam Phillips and his brother Tom, was the regional distributor for seminal rap labels like Sugar Hill, Macola and, shortly thereafter, imprints like Def Jam, Priority, and Tommy Boy. Appropriately, the earliest years of Memphis rap were much like those of other Southern cities: a few young practitioners doing their best to mimic the still-incipient sounds emanating from New York and, to a lesser extent, Miami and Los Angeles. This is why pinpointing the first Memphis rap release and the first Memphis rapper is both a matter of fact and artistic interpretation.

The first rap single pressed to vinyl by a Memphian was, in all likelihood, 1987’s “I Need Money / Soni D Is Fresh” by Kool K and DJ Soni D (“Sunny D,” like the mass-produced orange drink) on the seemingly otherwise nonexistent Mix Disc Records. Like most independent rap releases from the period, it has all the sonic hallmarks of 80s rap songs — occasionally stilted rhymes, a barrage of hi-hats almost certainly sequenced with a Roland-808 or E-mu SP-1200 — without a distinct regional flavor. It’s a rap song like any other. Even if his beatmaking was unremarkable, Soni D was vitally important to Memphis rap. In addition to hosting a radio show and DJ’ing at popular clubs like Club No Name, Studio G, and 21st Century, Soni D was the first person to sell their cassettes at car audio store Mr. Z’s Sound Express, predating the more widely known DJ Spanish Fly by a couple years.

To say that Spanish Fly rapped is technically true — he kicked the occasional rhyme on-stage and on his tapes — but few of those influenced by him consider him a rapper, exactly. Fly’s greatest contribution to Memphis wasn’t his serviceable rapping, but his reorienting of his young listeners toward quaking 808 bass and gangster rap tropes, particularly through his championing of The Showboys’ “Drag Rap.” The 1986 single, released on Profile Records by the Queens, New York duo of Can Can and Phil D, received little attention until Spanish Fly, stocking up on new records for his Sunday night radio show, the Budweiser No Name Hot Mix, noticed its thunderous 808 beat and catchy, xylophone-adjacent refrain. Audiences didn’t know the song’s proper title — it’s commonly referred to as the “Triggerman beat” because Phil D refers to himself as “Triggerman” throughout the song — but they knew it made them wanna fuck shit up. Or, in the parlance of the times, “get buck.”

There’s more than one way to get buckwild, but in Memphis clubs the preferred method was the “buck jump,” a bouncy, borderline violent expression of glee, malice, and courage commemorated by Pretty Tony’s “Get Buck” (1991). Within about a year, the buck jump evolved into the “gangsta walk,” a smooth, almost liquified strut said to have been created at Club No Name by members of the Bovan family, long-since-imprisoned drug kingpins who trafficked hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Los Angeles to Memphis. Individual gangsta walkers can be profoundly balletic, but gangsta walk circles frequently descended into brawls and beatdowns and, on occasion, shootings. Per Shawty Pimp, “You don’t jump yo’ ass in that shit unless you ready to fight.”

Kool K was the first Memphian to have his rhymes pressed to wax, but that was circumstantial and, ultimately, trivial — he didn’t coin new slang, introduce rap music to his listeners, inspire a broad swath of young Memphians to rap, or perform in a manner that indicated Memphis rap would be transmogrified into something shadowy and funky and haunting. With a sub-low thump, Spanish Fly left an indelible mark on his city’s sound and tastes, but his rapping was too placeless and rudimentary to truly signify the emergence of a new style. Moreover, while Pretty Tony’s “Get Buck” is anthemic, and allows us to understand how Memphis rap and dance forged a symbiotic relationship, Tony was dogged by rumors that he snitched on a criminal co-conspirator, and his popularity was short-lived. Others from this era — W-Def, the winner of a Memphis Cablevision contest; M-Team, the sons of Hi Records founder Willie Mitchell — don’t quite meet my admittedly nebulous criteria. No, to dub any of those young men “first” would strain meaning and unnecessarily circumscribe any useful narrative.

So let’s call Gangsta Pat the first.

Like M-Team and producer Jazze Pha, son of the Bar-Kays’ James Alexander, Pat’s musical lineage was unimpeachable. His father, Willie “Too Big” Hall, was a Stax house musician who played with the Bar-Kays, Isaac Hayes’ band The Movement, and Booker T. & the MG’s. (It’s Hall’s metronomic hi-hats you hear at the beginning of Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft.”) Pat inherited his father’s musicianship and, eventually, the internal strife of his family’s financial and emotional fluctuations. According to Pat’s self-produced, autobiographical documentary, Gangsta Pat: Biography of a Gangster Rapper, his mother divorced Hall after a period of drug-fueled emotional and physical abuse, leaving Pat and his mother bereft.

Pat’s rap career began in earnest when Miami-based On Top Records began distributing his 1990 debut, “I’m Tha Gangsta / Shootin’ On Narcs.” N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton had been released two years prior, and the all-black uniform and stolid “fuck you” demeanor of the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous Group” clearly left an impression on Pat; the cover of the single finds our hero doing his best Eazy-E impersonation: petite, stone-faced, and sporting a voluminous Jheri curl stuffed into a Los Angeles Kings cap. While “I’m Tha Gangsta” sounds like a D.O.C. b-side — and there’s nothing wrong with that! — the chunky slap bass of “Shootin’ On Narcs” feels like a purposeful integration of something identifiably Memphian into the out-of-town music Spanish Fly championed.

Later that same year, On Top released Pat’s album, #1 Suspect. The album’s regional popularity earned him the attention of Atlantic Records who, in 1991, re-issued it. It was the first Memphis rap record pressed by a major label and the last record he’d release with Atlantic. Although the album flopped nationally, Pat was a resounding success among Memphis’ ghetto youth. He looked like them, made music that spoke to them, and, most importantly, hailed from the same humid crook of the Mississippi River. Shit, if he could do it, they could, too.

The Civil War was well underway when, on June 6, 1862, Yankee artillery struck the Victoria. Instead of waiting to be captured, Robert Church, 23, swam from his father’s paddle-wheel steamer toward land. Somewhat unusually for a child born of a white man and a fair-skinned (and almost certainly biracial) Black slave, Church had experienced a modicum of freedom in the Antebellum South; his father loved and cared for him and, when the younger Church was old enough to work, employed him as a steward in the boat’s mess hall. His years aboard the Victoria afforded Church an audacity and cosmopolitanism that would serve him well when he waded ashore in Memphis.

By the 1860s, the slave trade had transformed Memphis from a fetid little burgh into a slightly less fetid city, albeit one with rather pungent politics. The region’s rich, arable land had borne cotton plantations, and the Mississippi was broad and fast, and men became rich trading humans and cash crops. Church was audacious, yes, but, despite his straight hair and beige complexion, he remained Black in the eyes of a benighted society.

It was that audacity and Blackness which nearly got him killed.

From May 1 to 3, 1866, Memphis’ whites rioted. Although Jefferson Davis had capitulated and dissolved the Confederate States a year prior, the bigoted beliefs which fueled secession, and the influential people who held them, remained. They’d consented to surrender, but they’d never consented to fundamental acts of acceptance and benevolence. (Andrew Johnson’s failure to summarily execute and/or thoroughly disenfranchise this class of traitors has never been rectified.) Inspired by a fracas between Black soldiers and white police officers that had grown out of hand, scores of white men indiscriminately murdered civilians, torched buildings, looted businesses, and raped without fear of punishment. In the three days of rioting, 46 Black people were killed, 91 houses and 16 schools and churches burnt, and 5 rapes and 100 robberies were reported — surely an undercounting.

Church in particular was targeted during the rioting. He’d had the temerity to open an un-permitted billiards hall two weeks prior then, when arrested for that rather petty crime, successfully argued in court that he’d been denied a permit because he was Black, a contravention of the recently passed Civil Rights Bill. As a comeuppance for his impudence, he was shot by a police officer and left to die on the floor of his saloon. Policemen drank his whiskey, smoked his cigars, smashed his billiards tables, robbed his till, then set fire to the building. Church survived, albeit with a bullet hole in his skull. The earth-rending headaches he’d suffer for the remaining 46 years of his life served as a reminder that white people could be bargained with and leveraged, but they could not be trusted.

A person who’d spend the better part of five decades with a hole in their skull — and who would survive a second shot to the head twelve years after the first — is someone to be reckoned with. When thousands died of Yellow Fever and thousands more fled the city, Church vacuumed up property; when the city issued bonds to pay off old debts, Church was bond holder number one; when white kingmakers needed the Black vote, they sought out Church; when black workingfolk needed housing, Church built nicely-appointed single-story duplexes and rented them at fair rates; when those same workingfolk needed bank loans, Church founded the Solvent Savings Bank and Trust. Arguably his greatest gift to Black Memphians was Church Park, a four-acre park that allowed his people to enjoy the outdoors in a manner the city’s segregated parks didn’t allow. He was the doyen of Beale Street, Black Memphis’ hub of commerce and culture — and vice. On Beale and its parallel street, Gayoso, one could engage in all the sordid aspects of the sporting life. A particularly vigorous man could eat oysters, drink whiskey, shoot craps, get in a fistfight (or knife fight, or gunfight), and engage the services of a prostitute, lining Church’s pockets almost every stumbling step of the way. Pimping helped make Robert Church America’s richest Black man.

The aptly-monikered Skinny Pimp once told me that Memphis is “a pimpin’-ass city.” Deftly observed. He and his peers, born in the late 60s and early 70s, witnessed the mainstreaming of pimps. The sensational 1967 memoir by Robert Beck, Pimp: The Story of My Life, seems to have opened the floodgates. Fictional macks like Ron O’Neal’s Priest Youngblood (Super Fly), Max Julien’s Goldie (The Mack), and Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite were blaxploitation film heroes, as were silky-smooth ladies men like Richard Roundtree’s titular Shaft, Fred Williamson’s Tommy Gibbs (Black Caesar), and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song). Artistically accomplished soundtracks by soul and funk legends Isaac Hayes, James Brown, Willie Hutch, and Earth, Wind & Fire added dimension and durability to these characters’ legacies — and, when it came time for impressionable young viewers and listeners to begin making rap tracks, provided ample sampling material. Hell, Hayes could be seen motoring around Memphis in his glittering salt water turquoise gold-plated Cadillac pimp sled.

But culture is, unfortunately, downstream from politics.

The sale of flesh and sating of desire are the rawest forms of commerce. They require no formal education, no discriminatory hiring processes, no withholding of taxes, only guile. The boys who came to venerate pimping were, in their own way, reacting logically to the socio-economic trends of the period.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The unanimous 9–0 decision confirmed what every American already knew: Racially segregated schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. However, the court undermined its decision when it wrote that states must end segregation with “all deliberate speed,” a phrase so vague as to be meaningless, and one which allowed segregationists to organize resistance to the ruling. Memphis schools remained segregated until the local branch of the NAACP filed a lawsuit, Northcross v. Board of Education of the Memphis City Schools; on October 3, 1961, 13 black children began attending what were previously all-white elementary schools. Neither Brown nor Northcross broke the spirit of Memphis City Schools’ bigoted board. Schools stayed largely segregated until May 1973–19 years after the original Brown ruling — when Federal District Judge Robert McRae ordered that roughly 54,000 Black children eventually be bused to white schools in two phases, with about 41,000 eventually participating.

Shit hit the fan.

8,000 white children were un-enrolled from Memphis public schools after the first phase of busing was initiated in 1973 and another 20,000 white children joined them after the second. Between 1970 and 1973 about 38,000 white children left Memphis City Schools, with about 30,000 of those leaving in ’73 and ’74. The district went from 46% Black and 54% white to 71% Black and 29% white. The trickle of white families who’d begun moving eastward to the newly-annexed edges of the city and the Shelby County suburbs turned into a flood. The whitebread peckerwoods who’d fought desegregation admitted defeat but, rather than adjust to the new, court-mandated normal, they simply packed up and left, taking their snot-noses, taxes, jobs, and the financial and emotional investments they’d made in Memphis as a community.

What had been a fairly industrial, albeit virulently anti-union city was abandoned en masse by employers large and small. RCA left in 1970, Firestone Tire in 1982, and Holiday Inn in 1991. The iconic Peabody Hotel was shuttered in 1975 and didn’t reopen until 1981. Adding to the pain were the 1993 downsizing of the Naval Air Station in nearby suburb Millington and the 1997 closure of the Memphis Defense Depot.

The city bottomed out in the 1990s. In 1993, 198 people were killed in Memphis, and the city’s per-capita murder rate outstripped even the notoriously trigger-happy Los Angeles. In 1994 and 1995, Memphis ranked first in the United States for burglaries per 100,000 people and second for rapes, vying with Detroit, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Baltimore for the dubious title of most dangerous city in the country. Prospects for young, Black Memphians were grim. They were educated (“educated”) in underfunded and functionally segregated Memphis City Schools, hounded by a racist and notoriously corrupt police force, saw friends and parents get hooked on cheap crack rock, and woke up each hazy morning in either crumbling public housing or redlined homes systematically undervalued by property assessors. Those who chose to partake in the white market economy might be able to find work, but to what end? Minimum wage, non-union labor promised — and continues to promise — little more than a sore back, calloused palms, and swollen feet.

So why not pimp?

So why not sell dope?

So why not lie, cheat, and steal?