Dedicated
Microphone fiend Rakim is back
by Ericka Blount Danois
Michael Wong Photography
“The audience was vibing on what we were bringing to the table and what was the next thing,” says Red. “That was the next thing when Rakim came in ’86. Dr. J changed the game in professional basketball, and that’s the way I look at Rakim. He changed the game with his style.”
“When he came from that angle from the streets, from the movement, the righteousness, it was love,” says DJ Kool Herc speaking on a panel at National Geographic on hip-hop’s roots. “His platform was from the man in the street.”
In D.C. in 1986, go-go music was king. A few bands were melding go-go with hip-hop, mostly performing covers. But they were few and far between. I was fourteen years old and headed to a go-go at the Black Hole on Georgia Avenue and Park Road, a dangerously sweaty literal hole-in-the-wall. My girlfriend was thumbing through my father’s record collection—a Kemp Mill record store manager, he would later become a radio station DJ. She paused on “Eric B. Is President,” then played the line “Thought I was a donut/You tried to glaze me!” over and over until I was hooked.
That was then. Old school has gotten old. Red Alert, with a graying beard and a grandpa’s sweat suit, walks with a gait to match. The G.O.A.T., Rakim Allah, the Keyser Soze of hip-hop and the father of four young adults, is more effusive. He’s traded his neat parts that complemented his fade for a baldie. But there’s no trading the nostalgia for a time that was much better than anyone originally thought. The amalgamation of talent that came out of an apartment in the projects produced a perfect storm, of, well, perfection. Of course, 1986 was about the music, but it was also about the feeling.
It’s the feeling you get watching an inexorable Rakim Allah, aka the God MC, as he returns to the stage to promote his first album in a decade, The Seventh Seal, released in November 2009.
At the Black Cat, a club in D.C., fans wave all of his albums, some of them limited releases—albums they’ve been clinging to like an old woman to a compliment. The trumpets come crashing in and the disembodied blare of horns precedes an announcement: “I’ve been watching you, watchin’ me/Looks I received made it hard to MC.”
Later in the show, he co-opts the turntables from DJ Technician, bluffing like a pool shark that he doesn’t know how to DJ, and mixes and scratches Chic’s “Good Times” with the precision of a sniper, his brown Yankees cap flung to the back, his gold medallion swinging, and that feeling comes rushing in—the feeling that all those cried-over bad times were really good after all.
