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The original renegade of funk

The inventor of hip hop plays Whistler next week
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WHO: Afrika Bambaataa

WHEN: Thursday, November 25

WHERE: Moe Joes

COST: $15

This guy invented hip-hop. No, really. Afrika Bambaataa named the emerging Bronx-born subculture in the early 1980s when reporters stuck microphones in his face and asked him what all this free stylin' and break-dancin' was all about.

To be fair, Lovebug Starski and Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins used the word in earlier raps, but it was Afrika Bambaataa (or Bam, for short) who helped popularize the term as it grew into a cultural force throughout the 1980s.

"We could have called this the 'boy-oi-oing', 'the go-off' or whatever, when it came down to media sayin', 'Whatchoo call it?'" he says, speaking from New York just days before embarking on a West Coast tour.

"So I decided to take it from the cliché they was rapping from and say 'This is hip-hop because it's hip and we hoppin' to the beat.'"

His music has also been hugely influential in the hip-hop world, even though his 1982 song "Planet Rock," was his only commercial hit. His tracks, "Looking for the Perfect Beat" and "Renegades of Funk" (covered by Rage Against the Machine in 2000) have been regarded as groundbreaking and his activism and leadership within the hip hop culture have earned him the name "Godfather of Hip Hop."

Bam's been "diggin' into digital crates" to keep busy these days (though we're not sure what that means). He's still travelling the world, hip-hoppin' and so on, "wakin' up and try to keep the peace in the streets," he says.

This has been a mission of his since the 1970s. As a child in South Bronx, he was a founding member of the Black Spades - New York City's largest street gang at that time. Gangs at that time were essentially a police force since law enforcers didn't touch the ghettos, and Bam (still known then as Kevin Donovan) rose quickly to the rank of warlord. Yes, Afrika Bambaataa, the original Renegade of Funk, was once a warlord, presiding over the Bronx River Projects, building ranks and expanding the Black Spades' turf.

It was after a trip to Africa and meeting the community-oriented Zulu that he adopted the name Afrika Bambaataa, (Zulu, he says, for "affectionate leader"). When he returned home, he decided to turn his turf-building skills away from violence to peace making instead.

And music. It's been written that the rise of the Black Spades had a dramatic impact on the explosions of hip-hop throughout the Bronx, and Bam was at the forefront of it all. These were the days of DJ battles at community centres and high schools. Of MC battles and break-dancing competitions.

"At the time, it was something that we was doing but after seeing so many people coming to our events and we started traveling in different cities in New York and then through the Tri-State areas, I saw that, yeah, this could be made as serious culture movement and started taking on that mission to spread this all over the world as hip-hop culture."

As the subculture grew into something much larger, the Black Spades eventually became the Zulu Nation in the late 1970s and the Universal Zulu Nation of today - an international hip hop awareness group formed and headed by Bambaataa.

And hip-hop, well...hip-hop's how we all know it now.

"The current state of hip-hop, as a culture, you have two split sides," he says. "When most people say hip-hop, they just think you talking' about rappers. So you get people who follow the rappers; or as some say, 'What was your last hit record?' Then you have others who follow the whole culture movement of hip-hop, who follow whether you had a hit record...or if you're out there still doing it all around the world."

He admits that hip hop has lost its way, as people seek profits based on only one side of the hip hop culture. Rap music - which Bam stresses is only one aspect of the entire culture - has gone through a dark phase and has yet to fully recover from the Tupac-inspired, 50-Cent-certified manifestation of society's most misogynistic and violent tendencies.

"I knew that sometime it was going to backfire because everything goes in cycles, but it's just then that it was bein' planned by others that just pushed this one side of rap and (didn't play) all the other parts," Bambaataa says. "We got to look at who's behind all this programming and tell them what they need to be playing and forget about the rest."

It's something he's experienced himself. In 1997 he was spinning some James Brown and Cameo tracks on a New York radio station and the programmer approached ol' Bam and said, "James Brown and the Cameo are secondary here." That very idea is way, way off in Afrika Bambaataa's world.

Music, whether it's old or new, needs to be played together, mixed and matched to broaden one's understanding of the art form and of the world at large. This idea has run through his entire discography; beginning in 1982 when he ditched live instruments and wrote "Planet Rock," build on the melody of Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express."

"Musically, with some of these radio stations and these program directors, they really fakin' the funk on many of the different categories of good music that's out there. That's why internet radio stations and satellite radio stations have become more powerful, because people can't hear on these so-called stations that are supposed to be on your radio dials, the different music and categories of music that is out there, whether it be hip-hop, soul, funk, house techno, rock. Too many are not playing the old with the new, the new with the old for it to be true."

So yeah. Expect some old blending with the new next Thursday at Moe Joes. The Godfather wants you to party. And to hip. And to hop. Et cetera.