Hip-hop renegade Afrika Bambaataa doesn't care what category of music he's mixing, as long as he's got the perfect beat. His views on aliens and UFOs resist categorization, too.
2/15/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Afrika Bambaataa doesn't care what category of music he's mixing, as long as he's got the perfect beat. His views on aliens and UFOs resist categorization: He believes in battling for personal truths, and getting an .overstanding. . not an understanding . of the world by studying pop culture, current events, and history alike carefully. Just as he questions apparent distinctions between hip-hop and techno, he wonders who it really was who built the pyramids of Egypt.
There.s a reason why .Bam. has been referred to as both The Godfather of Hip-Hop and The Renegade of Funk so many times over the years. When DJ Kool Herc and DJ Red Alert . the first two hip-hop soundsystem DJs . invented the breakbeat in the early 70s Bronx, Bam was there, becoming so absorbed by the new musical style that he had lost time and patience for the gang violence and hard drugs surrounding him. Bam saw how music could take on a political and social consciousness, as a unifying element of a well-organized black community. While still in high school, Bam founded Zulu Nation, which in November 1975 put the .First Annual Universal Zulu Tribute to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone and the Pioneers of Hip-Hop.. Zulu Nation became the protector of an emerging musical culture, that of inner-city youths: Instead of guns, DJs and their crews battled for status on the turntables.
From the start, Bam.s style of DJing ran the gamut of musical styles. .Bambaataa was known for mixing the most absurd records into his sound collages, whether they were by the Monkees, the Rolling Stones, or Grand Funk Railroad,. writes Ulf Poschardt in DJ Culture. .In one of his first DJ battles he astonished everyone with his choice of music. . . . Bambaataa opened his show with the signature tune of a television show that he had recorded on tape at home, and mixed the ditty with a hard drumbeat. After this came the signature tune of the television series The Munsters, and a transition to James Brown.s .I Got the Feeling.. Four songs, three transitions, and the young Bambaataa was respected as a grandmaster DJ..
Today, Bam loves to see the influence of hip-hop reaching into all different forms of electronic music . even Limp Bizkit. .You can.t say, .This is not part of the hip-hop culture,. when hip-hop came from so many other styles of music,. he says. .There are people into rap records who are closed-minded for not seeing how far hip-hop music has stretched. It.s made from all other grooves and beats. Techno started getting more funky when it had more of a hip-hop beat. House started getting more funky when it had more of a hip-hop beat. Same with breakbeats, bigbeats, trip-hop, hip-house, jungle-hop, drum .n. bass . those were all from the hip-hop family..
Bam.s most recently work includes guest work on Leftfield.s Rhythm & Stealth, in the hit .Afrika Shoxx.. He appears in the track.s video (was banned by MTV, incidentally), in which the presumably homeless main character begins to crumble, as if he were made of porcelain, losing his limbs. From the fringes of a gloomy, gunmetal-gray subway environment, in a moment of bleak irony, Bam asks the limbless man, now on his back, .Do you need a hand?. The message: Life in the city is dehumanizing; life beats you down.
Taking control
Bam speaks with captivating sincerity and conviction, as if giving a sermon, urging his listeners to question commonly held notions of right, wrong, and real. In a recent in-store visit to Plastik Records, in Phoenix, Ariz., Bam showed up wearing a white towel over his shoulders, as if he had just finished a workout. Indeed, he talks as if he.s working things out, continually returning to the topic of power and control, contending that television networks . what he calls .tell-lie-vision. . have agendas to push, and aren.t interested in revealing the .truth. about governments and technology. If TV were telling the truth, then why was the show .Real TV. made? Does the water we.re drinking contain mysterious chemicals and parasites . a story the media has been ordered to suppress? For this reason, in the 1997 single .Mind Control,. Bam raps, .Who controls your power? Who controls your soul? The power to the people. It.s mis-info..
Old-school hip-hop has been described as the punk rock for black ghettos . a radical language and music consisting of scratching-and-spraypaint rebellion. Bam still has his edge: .If you were free, you.d be able to go anywhere in the world without a passport,. he says. .If you think you.re really free, try saying certain sorts of things, and see how long it is before some Men in Black start visiting your house..
.They. . the greedy power elite . in Bam.s view, is controlling what we learn through movies. Awareness of the ebola virus was disseminated through Outbreak. Retina scans required for withdrawing cash from an ATM was introduced through Demolition Man. The Matrix, says Bam, should be watched six or seven times, because there.s some .heavy stuff. going on in it. There.s a lot of .tricknowledgey. being .played on the people,. after all, and you.ve got to keep your eyes open.
A tenet of Zulu Nation belief stresses alertness of the mind . watching and analyzing . not just the here and now, but humanity.s place in the universe throughout time. Zulu philosophy views the battle between good and evil in terms of the universal stage; if you.re not searching for knowledge . the key term here . of right and wrong, of yourself and the universe around you, you.re a zombie. We are our own best teachers. If our doubts lead us to question the message of The Bible, so what? If we end up referring to our planet as .planet so-called Earth,. as Bam does, so what? We.ve got to be brave enough to wonder to what degree religion is deployed as a means of controlling people. We have to know what.s happening around us, on our earth, and in our universe.
The Web site for the Zulu Nation, which calls itself a universal organization, mirrors Bam.s freethinking ideas on UFOs, too, in the following way: .What if some UFO activity was manifestation of time travel which emanated from our own distant future or an alternative parallel reality? Of course, there is no serious evidence to support this ideal, but the possibilities are intriguing and certainly worth exploring.. If you think that we.re the only civilization in the universe, the site notes elsewhere, we all might as well give up on science, and base everything on falsehood.
.I strongly know that we.re not alone,. Bam says. .If you don.t believe me, check things out for yourself. I can.t make you believe in UFOs if you ain.t seen nothin.. So right now it.s not believable to you. But once you witness something for yourself, you.re going to know..
Outerspace music
Bam.s music over time has explored planetary and intergalactic themes. .Planet Rock. came out in June 1982. With ex-Sex Pistols lead singer John Lydon, the Time Zone collaboration led to recording .World Destruction,. in 1992. Bam released the single .Agharta: The City of Shamballa,. with German techno pioneer Westbam in fall 1998, under the moniker IFO, or Identified Flying Object. The 1995 album .Warlocks and Witches, Computer Chips, Microchips and You,. which warns of how secret societies are dominating the world with clandestine technology, wasn.t promoted heavily because of its skeptical viewpoint. .Beware of the Net,. its cover reads.
Bam says he.s .always thinking interplanetary things,. and is .waiting to sit down and have a nice meeting with beings from other places.. Likewise, he sees hip-hop colonizing the universe. .With all of the galactic stuff going on, [Zulu Nation] will be on other planets out there,. Bam adds. .My feeling is that hip-hop is going to be on Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and some other planets they.re discovering..
And why not? Bam, along with Zulu Nation, has an intergalactic consciousness. What better ambassador to alien races could Earth have than someone who talks to others as equals? Bam is a survivor, someone who has risen far above the problems of his time, putting forth an art that unites listeners of every skin color and upbringing. Music has been Bam.s vehicle . his hip-hop message to the stars.
Other places to explore "Bamology":
hip-hop.com's "Setting the Record"
Afrika Bambaataa: The Unofficial Pages
The interview: Bam in his own words
AlienZoo: Are UFOs a particularly deep interest of yours?
Bambaataa: UFOs have always been a deep interest with me, by watching tell-lie-vision, which is telling us lies in vision. But when you start researching and studying and hearing things, and you get into your Bible, or your glorious Koran, and then you start the thing heard over the mountain, speaking to them, and they heard the word of God, and thunder was coming. And then you get into Ezekiel, and his wheel, and all this type of stuff. You say, .Whoa. Extraterrestrials? There.s some crazy stuff going on in this Bible..
Then they said, .Let us make man,. and you wonder who is the .us.? We made man in our own image . but who.s the .we.? And you say Adam and Eve were the first man and woman . but who put that lie in there? If they the first man and woman? They had two sons . Cain and Abel . and one son killed the other son, and he was worried about them coming to get him. Who was you worrying about, Cain? It.s just your mother and father, what were they going to do? There must have been something there before them making them worry!
In Zulu Nation, we try to stay on the right knowledge, the right wisdom, right overstanding, and right sound reasoning. There.s a lot of stuff out there that doesn.t sound right, and that crap has to go. If you read Genesis, it tells you that this [person] messing with his sister, and this one was messing with this one and that one, and producing kids. But, you know, scientifically, if you do that, you get retarded kids. So who put that crap in the Bible?
On the first day, God made this, and it was good. On the second day, God came across and made the water and it was good. It sounds like there.s a second person telling me what God did. If God did it, it should say, .I did this on this day.. So who.s this second person saying what God did? And who were the cherubim and seraphim that were around before man?
And they.ll tell you that we might have been on the planet back when reptilians and dinosaurs were controlling the planet. But I don.t see where in the book talking about the dinosaur era. They say we came from reptilians. If you look between the fingers in your hand, you see little webs controlling your fingers. Babies in the womb are in sac of water, and you swim in that water for nine months. Sperm cells look like tadpoles. A lot of people don.t sit down and have conversations about this because it questions what has been taught to them for so long. There.s a lot of stuff out there that just doesn.t sound right.
You.re telling me that there.s no UFOs, where millions of people have been abducted. Somebody has seen something . and just, like, whites in general. Because, with a lot of black, Latinos, and people of color, ain.t no UFO chasing their butts down the street of their hoods. On TV, you see the whites got abducted here, saying .They chased me to this place.. White people should be raising hell, ready to cause a revolution! Who the hell is abducting all of us? We.re gonna tear this shit up until we find out what.s going on, we.ve got to start questioning all of this foolishness going on! It.s getting crazy here. It.s a strange universe.
There.s man-made UFOs and alien ones. There.s many books from the 1940s on up telling about how governments have made them, that Hitler made flying saucers, that he was into the occult, he was looking for the subterranean wold called Ngatha, that the Smithsonian Institution was made because because Admiral Bird was looking for the North Pole sample, looking for the tunnels to these subterranean worlds. There.s a show on USA Network that.s about journeying to the center of the earth . like there.s a 1960s show . and there.s a cartoon called Journey to the Center of the Earth. You had the Simpsons speaking about New World Order. You.ve got cartoons speaking about robotoids. You.ve got the Japanese animations.
You can.t just be into music, saying .I.m a raver. I.m a hi-hopper. I.m a funker. I.m rocker,. when you don.t know what.s going on around you in your world. In the 60s, people who were into music were into consciousness, and what was happening. There was always music that made change. If you were against the Vietnam War, there was always some album out there to make you be a thinker, and stand up for your rights. Sly and the Family stone came out telling you to stand; he was talking about racism, saying, .Don.t call me a nigger, whitey.. But what are the groups telling you today? There.s even a conspiracy to keep some of these groups from speaking about consciousness. Even techno music: They have you where you keeping things strictly instrumental.
AlienZoo: How do you feel about other forms of music, like Limp Bizkit and Korn, tapping into the hip-hop vibe?
Bambaataa: I love it, because hip-hop is of all other forms of music, the funk and the soul. It.s made from all other grooves and beats. Techno started getting more funky when it had more of a hip-hop beat. House started getting more funky when it had more of a hip-hop beat. Same with breakbeats, bigbeats, trip-hop, hip-house, jungle-hop, drum .n. bass . those were all from the hip-hop family. It just progresses on. There are people into rap records who are closed-minded for not seeing how far hip-hop music has stretched. You can.t say, .This is not part of the hip-hop culture,. when hip-hop came from so many other styles of music.
What is it with radio DJs, who say they have hip-hop shows, but they.re not playing all of the true schools of hip-hop? When you listen to a hip-hop radio station, all you.re listening to are rappers at 94 to 108 beats per minute. Where.s the up-tempo electro funk? The Miami bass sound? The hip-hop from England? Where are some of the Chemical Brothers. beats? And Q-bit and the DJs. scratch records? And the go-go? And the breakbeats? Even The Prodigy is hip-hop -- as crazy is that sounds, the basic beat of the music is based on hip-hop.
AlienZoo: What do you think of people playing only one category of music?
Bambaataa: There.s DJs who say, .I.m just a jungle DJ. I.m just a techno DJ. I.m just a house DJ.. But you know that in their house, they have Diana Ross, Donna Summers, Foghat, or heavy metal, or salsa, or reggae records.
I just played at the Luxor in Las Vegas, at Club Ra. They.ve got a thing with people being strictly in techno, but I flipped their whole mode, and went back to the funk. And I played the Bee Gees and Sugar Hill. The crowd was going crazy. The owner had a fit; he had to try to rush me to get the hell out of there. I was bringing them back to the funk. How in the hell are you going to have Club Ra when you opened it with George Clinton? I said, .You can.t get mad, because I.m bringing the funk back with all my tunes.. But they said [the club] was supposed to be classy, and everybody had to be dressed nice. Ravers are all about wearing what you want to wear.
AlienZoo: What kind of control does the music industry have over an artist.s message and musical style?
Bambaataa KRS-One is one of the last of the few who.s still trying to keep some kind of consciousness happening. When I put out on Profile .Warlocks, Witches, Microchips, and You,. they made sure that sucker was staying low. There are certain things they want groups to talk about. If you talk about shaking your butt, they think the joke is all fly. But if you.re talking some heavy-deep stuff, sometimes they don.t push that. At one time they did, but like I.ve said, things run their cycle.
I learned from Uncle George Clinton to be on as many companies as you could be on. One company might say, .You can.t make rock music, you.re black. You can.t do salsa, you.re not Hispanic.. If Rod Stewart wants to do soul, they push his soul records. If Mick Jagger wants to do some funk, you don.t tell him what he can.t do. He goes and makes a funk record, and they go and push it. We.ve got something where any time a hip-hop person wants to do something other than his own, they say, .You can.t do this..
You can.t hold artists back. If I want to do jazz, I.ll be doing my jazz. If I call it jazz-hop, I can push it to the people who love the jazz-hop sound. This is why I left Tommy Boy, because when I got into the rock stuff, he couldn.t deal with it. He said, .Stay strictly with the electro funk. That.s what.s been happening for you.. I started jumping around the world, to do different music. A lot of companies are stagnating.
It.s confusing what.s going on in the music industry, because you.re really being controlled. Hip-hop and punk, in their early stages, were coming up all radical. Hip-hoppers thought that disco was being shoved down their throats. In the black and Latino communities, dance has changed every three months, They were keeping the hustle for two or three years
Hip-hop was what brought that whole funk thing back to the forefront. Same with the punk rockers, who were getting tired of being told how to play rock music . so they came in breaking their guitars and making crazy noise. The whole punk scene took off. But then [the industry] snuck back in the punk scene to sweeten it up, so they called it .new wave,. and got the groups out of there who were so wild, and eased them that out of the picture so that punk went back underground. Same thing with go-go. Go-go was happening. Island Records put out go-go albums all over the place, but then they watered it down to get rid of it. Just when you think people are for you, they get into your music scene, and pump the money in, and destroy what you have.