Giant Step
The hiphop version of my life.
Late one night in the West Village in the fall of 1991 I found myself dancing by myself in my homeboy suit. I wore black died Levis 501s, fingerless leather gloves, black leather boots with the tops and tongues splayed, a black cotton sleeveless t-shirt and a full length duster. It’s very likely that I was also wearing a black paisley bandana tied doo-rag style on my head, with the knot in the back, of course. A white girl with an English accent had been staring me down and finally approached when the music calmed. She said that she was fascinated by the way I danced. But I was already deep into the kind of adolescent funk I get when I find myself dancing by myself. She wasn’t The One. The One was nowhere in sight, and if She wasn’t at this club tonight, I don’t see what’s the point. The club was Giant Step, and that was one of the loneliest nights of my life.
The first time I found Giant Step was at a little joint in Las Feliz, an avant-garde neighborhood of funky fools just north of LA City College. LACC was in the more feral sections of LA, Off-Hollywood. It had a massive pinball arcade whose miasma of cigarette smoke and electric bells takes one down a particularly grubby road of memory. When I was comfortable slumming there, I stayed away from Las Feliz in the way people with holes in their shoes shuffle to the dark edges of the sidewalk like human roaches. My highschool French teacher would take her best third year student to a fancy French restaurant there at the end of the school year. Las Feliz had exactly the kind of bohemian vibe you would expect to find aficionados of French cuisine, jazz music and the kind of cool homeboy I was at the time. But there was a difference. This was acid jazz. It was, finally, the music I’ve been trying to find for years - the perfect mix between Windham Hill, Quiet Storm, Eric B. & Rakim, and Chic. It was minimal, smooth, seriously bumping and danceably classy all at once. Plus there was jazz instrumentals. What!? It had been several years since I wore out my jonesing for the hard industrial edge of hiphop. I still dug the On-U Sound from Gary Clail and loved albums by Keith LeBlanc and Tackhead. You may never get Fishbone and Skinny Puppy out of your head, but sometimes you want to dance with girls who wear warm colors and have all their teeth.
Like all the clubs in those days, DJs and producers would rent out a joint and put flyers out at notable intersections and in the LA Weekly. Giant Step was no exception, but I can’t remember where I first heard of them for the life of me. I might guess that the selection of clubs I frequented when I wasn’t in the Dancing with Suits crowd. So that might have been Funky Reggae & White Trash at the legendary Osko’s on the edge of Beverly Hills. Or it might have been Al’s Bar in what is now LA’s downtown Arts District. Or maybe that punk bar in Silverlake, or the 18 and up bar in Chinatown with the $2 kamikazes. That bar was great fun, precisely because they had bouncers that made a great show of bouncing drunks out the front door, sometimes dragging down the stairs first, but always giving them a literal heave-ho by the scruff of their pants.
The vibe at Giant Step was right in the pocket, it was sort of the international cool I thought I would exude given the right circumstances. Little did I know at the time that I would be headed to NYC. In many ways, I never got over the fact that hiphop got swamped by Gangsta as it did within a few years. In my mind, the success of Onyx got the ball rolling down hill and by the time Ice Cube’s Lethal Injection went platinum I shrugged my shoulders and gave up. Fortunately, I discovered French hiphop and so the good times rolled for a little while longer. But I can’t tell you how sad I was that the gravity well of hard hiphop became a virtual black hole that swallowed up the entire Soul II Soul vibe that was my deep groove.
Like an angry ex, I was determined to snipe. But I got married and had other things to deal with. I was encouraged by a few standout records and quite frankly I was still excited by the hard beats, but I couldn’t stand the stupid lyrics. So French rap like Raggasonic was my methadone, hard yet obscure enough to play around my toddlers. Plus I could take it or leave it. Did I mention Fishbone? No I don’t suppose I should. More heartbreak.
These days the only hiphop I listen to is LoFi. That’s a kind of final evolution of the stuff I learned to dig around the Millenium which is still around on Soma.fm’s Groove Salad. Nevertheless, there were days back then when I was passionate about the fate of the entire genre circa 1992. Hell, I even wrote lyrics. One of the few I’d bother to mention is this bite off P.E.’s Don’t Believe The Hype.
don't forget the nukes
blast!
caught you livin' in the fast lane
well here it is again, another birth pain
just another trillion or three under the deep sea
comin up with a mirv to fricasee me
some deny it defy it try to forget it
but their taxes buy it on credit
but can i grab the mike and say it clearly
there's my forty acres, we paid dearly
to build this country without trying
against force that kept our ancestors crying
love of private property the euro
merchant delivered america a zero
i tried to be neibuhr to give up the flavor
but they dissed my roots and said there's nothing to savor
was offered the modern world in which to play
with philadelphia freedom - until doomsdayYeah some classic bohemian Lefty rap. I’m kind of glad I never succeeded. But I did write raps about:
abortion (The Scoop)
economics (Economic Slavery)
environment (Ghettos Need Green)
vegans (Sista Don’t Eat No Meat)
invisibility (Elision’s Decree)
war (Don’t Forget the Nukes)
And that was just half of the first album. Whew. Anyway then as now I’m on the side of the Peasant, but I was clearly all blackified, which I suppose was necessary. It was the moment, and I was hooked on Cornel West and bell hooks. These days, I’m glad to be beyond those unfortunate side-effects of affluenza, but am almost always happy to reminisce about my longhair days in Brooklyn when I was looking to hookup with The One.
So here’s your video.
P.S. Chances are that English bird I ignored was one of the Giant Step producers. Pivotal moment.