Marley Marl, KRS-One and 50 Cent in NYC in 2007. (Getty)
Lovers of neck-breaking beats and rapid rhyme schemes rejoice: your weekend is about to get a whole lot funkier thanks to a newly-recovered tape recording of classic NYC hip-hop radio programming. The 90 minute set comes from Marley Marl's regular "In Control" show on WBLS and features enough golden-era boom bap to convince you that the subways still take tokens.
Marl is revered as one of the legends of the city's early hip-hop DJ scene, a figure who along with Stretch & Bobbito, Kool DJ Red Alert, and others formed a radio culture unlike nothing seen today. DJs would edit and mix tracks on air and in real time, embellishing their records with personal style, and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s, hip-hop fans would dash to their tape decks to record shows off the radio, snatching up one-time-only broadcasts for their private home collection.
Marl and his peers regularly invited rappers to kick freestyles and share world premieres during their shows, and across the city listeners were taping, editing, and making their own mixes. This was analog, Koch-era music piracy and the NYC scene thrived on it.
"When Mr. Magic and Marley were dropping exclusives, musically that was sort of the pinnacle of a Friday or Saturday night experience," Stretch Armstrong remembers in the immersive Red Bull radio documentary Revolutions on Air. "The music would drop out and you would hear 'World Premiere!'"
"That was like everyone shut up, dive to the tape deck. So, you had to cop."
The mix below, recorded live on July 14th, 1989, opens with 30 minutes of pure vintage hip-hop, with Marl scratching over The Bizzie Boys, Heavy D, and EPMD. We're then treated to a sit-down with The Ultramagnetic MCs, who at the time were pushing "Traveling At The Speed Of Thought" and looking forward to weekend shows at The Red Zone, a long-gone Manhattan hip-hop mecca. Marl also welcomes 3rd Bass (the "second white hip-hop group"), who play the classic single "Steppin To The A.M." and practically trip over every word as they talk shop with the DJ, perhaps understandably so, given that their debut album was only four moths away.
But the greatest performer of all is Marley Marl himself, who by 1989 was already long-established as a vital tastemaker and producer (as well as the inventor of modern sampling). The tracks heard on this 1989 show sound absolutely incredible coming off of vinyl into studio equipment, out through radio antennas across the five boroughs, onto cassette tape polyester and, now, through modern headphones. We all have Mixcloud user DJ Step One and radio tape collectorA to the L to thank for its resurgence. Press play and enjoy a bit of the best hip-hop ever made and played.
