A Look Back on "A Different World" 29 Years Later

When “A Different World” (ADW) debuted on NBC in September 1987, the show that it started out as, was much different than the show it became by the time it wrapped in 1993.  The first season was about Denise Huxtable from “The Cosby Show” who was now attending Hillman College, a fictional HBCU, yet the show was missing something.

Starting in season two, director Debbie Allen was brought in to be the chief creative force of the show, (herself a graduate of an HBCU via Howard University) and had an immediate impact and became the catalyst who helped to transform this show from being a “safe” Cosby Show 2.0 type show, into a more authentic representation of what college life was in general and specifically at an HBCU.  This series along with Spike Lee’s 1988 film “Do The Right Thing” was among the many reasons why HBCU’s saw increased enrollment at the time.  From a mix of both veteran and unknown African-American actors, poignant topics  to the show’s opening montage and theme song, by season two, ADW more accurately represented the look and feel of an HBCU.  

Throughout its six season run, ADW showcased aspects of life at an HBCU such as, student activism, black fraternities and sororities, and Homecoming festivities which had rarely if ever been broadcast on television.  Current events of the time were also tackled such as the first Gulf War and boycotting companies that invested in the South African Apartheid government.  Part of what made this so unique was that these stories were told through the lens of African-American men and women in a college setting, and it stayed away from the usual tropes and stereotypes that too often accompanied African-American appearances in the media, both in fiction as well as on the nightly news, at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic.  Positive role models were featured throughout the show and substantive issues were addressed.  The HBCU vs PWI topic was featured in a season three episode entitled, “Here’s to Old Friends”.   The show’s lead character, Whitley Gilbert, recounted a story her grandfather (who was a Hillman graduate) told her, that she could attend school anywhere, but that “no school will love you, and teach you to love yourself, and know yourself like Hillman”.  I’m sure most students and alumni of any HBCU will agree with that statement as they all have that in common.  The strong sense of identity one gets from attending an HBCU is not replicated anywhere else.  

Many of my classmates at Howard University attended off the strength of this series.  During freshman year, one of the few times I recall signing into the Quad (the freshman girl’s dormitory), was to join a group of friends so that we could watch this show in the same space.  Like many shows today, that have a tribe of folks who watch in real time via social media, ADW brought us together as we felt like we were watching our lives on television.

Another episode that stands out to me was “Dr War is Hell” (Season 2, Ep. 1) which revolved around math major Dwayne Wayne attempting to get out of taking a calculus class with Professor Colonel Taylor (aka Dr. War) who was known as one of the toughest professors on campus.  Professor Taylor was eventually able to convince Dwayne to take his calculus class by impressing upon him that he could see from his transcripts that he was a great student, and wanted to challenge his mind in order for Dwayne to reach his full potential.  

The image of an older African-American male, taking an interest in the future of a younger African-American male was something that was rarely seen on television.  At the same time Professor Taylor made it clear that he was going to challenge Dwayne, but did so with a compassion that is a hallmark of the HBCU professor/student experience.  Moments like this were common on ADW, and no doubt picked up on by many aspiring college bound African-American high school students as well as their parents.

I always looked at ADW as being timeless, since it was set on a college campus.  The cast could be refreshed every few years, while storylines remain contemporary with the times.  Debbie Allen has expressed interesting in reviving the series.  Unsurprisingly, the current racial climate of the country is being credited with the recent surge of enrollment at HBCU’s.  Perhaps this could be the premise for the series revival.  I would certainly welcome its return.

Below is a clip from the first episode "Reconcilable Differences" which aired September 24, 1987, along with a clip from the "Here's to Old Friends" episode.

When I first heard "Rebel Without a Pause"..

Cassette tape recordings of many college, underground, and mainstream hip-hop radio shows

Nowadays it is easy to take for granted that there was a time when hip-hop was not as big on the radio as it is today.  As hip-hop music started to grow, the experience of how to listen to it proved to be an enriching one.  What was lacking at the time in streaming music services, satellite radio, or smartphones to store music, built a certain fortitude when having to record music from hip-hop radio shows on terrestrial radio stations onto cassette tapes.  When music filled up on one side of the cassette, it was common practice to break the tab off of the top of the tape in order to prevent that side of the tape from being recorded over.  This sounds primitive now but it was effective.  If I decided to record over what was previously recorded, all I had to do was place tape over the space or fill it with a tiny piece of tissue.  It was easy at the start of a show to hit PLAY+RECORD and fill up Side A of the cassette, but if you fell asleep, and did not flip the tape over to record Side B for the middle to end of the show? That was never good -- chances were that you would miss the part of the show when all the new, hot records would get played.  Thankfully, when auto-reverse tape decks came out, that helped alleviate this scenario.  To think back on how innovative that auto-reverse tape deck was is hilarious!  The good old days indeed.

A cassette with both tabs broken to prevent erasure on either side. 

In NYC as far as mainstream radio, hip-hop was relegated to mix shows on Friday and Saturday from 9pm to midnight on 98.7 KISS FM and 107.5 WBLS.  Other than this timeslot it was rare to hear hip-hop on these particular stations at any other time of the day, unless the song was REALLY popular like  “Roxanne Roxanne” by UTFO.  Contrasted with today where the same few songs are in rotation seemingly every hour each day.  Fortunately, there were options Monday thru Thursday in the form of underground and college mix show stations and often times these stations would debut songs well before they got recognized by the mainstream stations.  

  One such station was 90.3 FM WBAU at, Adelphi University in Long Island.  On Monday night into Tuesday morning, from 10pm to 1am.  I used to listen to the “Operating Room” hip-hop radio show hosted by Dr. Dre - who would go on to host Yo! MTV Raps - and was from the hip-hop group Original Concept, along with T-Money, Wildman Steve, and a host of others.  Even though Monday’s were school nights I used to listen religiously each week.  Digital radio tuners were around back then, but I had my radio boom box that had a manual tuner.  What does that mean you ask?  Well, unlike the mainstream stations which I could easily turn the dial to line the pointer up properly with the number of the station, most of these stations required PRECISE tuning of the dial.  It was possible that the dial needed to be turned so that it rested perfectly between two numbers for radio stations because the station you needed did not have a number represented on the dial.  So you had to guesstimate.  And if the station was on the lower end of the frequency, it may have required you to contort your body a certain way, like lifting your foot or leg up, in order to conduct the radio waves properly into the tuner.  Crazy as this sounds these are all true stories.  But these were the things we did because of the love of the music.

Boombox complete with manual tuner and tape deck. Batteries not included. 

 

    I remember one show in 1987 like it was yesterday.  Dr. Dre was talking, and said that he had an exclusive new record from Public Enemy that he was going to play called “Rebel Without A Pause”.  Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, had a show on this same radio station called Spectrum City Sound, along with other members of the PE production team The Bomb Squad Hank & Keith Shocklee.  I never listened to their radio show, but knew all about Public Enemy as they had just recently released their debut solo album “Yo! Bum Rush The Show”.  I LOVED Public Enemy when they first came out.  In my opinion Chuck D had the most powerful, distinctive voice and was a great emcee.  So hearing Dr. Dre say he had a new record from Public Enemy, was a big deal especially since their first album was still pretty new up to this point.  The problem for me was it was close to the midnight hour and I could feel myself starting to fade.  Luckily, I managed to turn the tape over in time, and press RECORD so if anything I knew the next day I would have the song on tape.     

My eyes were almost shut when Dr. Dre put that record on.  I remember hearing slight static on the record at first, before hearing the following:

“Brothers and sisters….Brothers and Sisters I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS WORLD IS COMING TO”

And then the beat dropped...followed by the scratching...then that high pitched WHISTLING sound along with Chuck D’s voice:

YES

THE RHYTHM
THE REBEL
WITHOUT A PAUSE
I’M LOWERING MY LEVEL

I ROSE UP out of my bed and was now fully awake and at attention! I had NEVER heard anything like that in my life, and quite honestly have never heard anything like that since.  It was a religious experience.  If that song debuted at a cemetery the dead would have also risen.  Between the beat, that high pitched whistle that kept repeating, and Chuck’s voice, which on this record now sounded more powerful than Black Bolt of the Inhumans, it was like the greatest hip-hop record ever made.  Instant classic, not up for debate!  The greatest five minutes on wax.  And Dr. Dre knew he had one, because after the song ended, I am not even sure he let two minutes go by, without putting that record back on and letting it rock again.  And I had it on tape!  All I could think about was playing that tape over and over again, just so I could hear that sound again.  That repeating whistling sound.  Incredible.   When my father first heard the record he called it something akin to “interrogation music”.  I could imagine some military in the world playing “Rebel Without A Pause” endlessly until some POW broke! (I cannot find this tape to save my life today!) 

    I am not even sure how the next day went.  I imagine I took that tape to school, and asked my friends if they heard the song and played it for those who had not heard it.  I cannot even say for sure if I did that, but I will always remember what I did the night before.  The night WBAU debuted Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without A Pause” before ANY other station had it, and months before PE dropped their classic “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” album which had “Rebel Without A Pause” on it.  I was living in a moment in hip-hop history, but did not even know it yet.  This was the song that solidified Public Enemy as legends in my mind.        

College mix shows and underground stations were where it was at if you were into hip-hop back then which is why I really do not trip off of what mainstream radio does nowadays when it comes to oversaturating the airwaves with the same few hip-hop songs.  For me mainstream radio stations were never tastemakers for hip-hop music.  Let’s go back to when Mr. Magic of 107.5 WBLS and their Rap Attack show played a demo version of one of Public Enemy’s earliest songs “Public Enemy #1” and how Mr. Magic dissed them after the song talking to co-host Marley Marl, “Marley the beat is dope but the rapping is kinda weak” along with the infamous line “no more music by the suckers” which PE ultimately sampled on another one of their songs “Cold Lampin’ Wit Flavor” from Public Enemy’s very own Flavor Flav.  Magic even took a shot at Dr. Dre and the WBAU crew here (“Dr. Duck and the boys from Long Island..Woody Woodpecker and the guys from down the dial”)

check it out: 

The following Monday, Dr. Dre played this bit from Mr. Magic on their show, and you can hear their reaction to the diss at around the 4:46 second mark. Hysterical. 

Do you remember the first time you heard “Rebel Without A Pause”, or “Public Enemy No.1”?  What about the first time you heard any of your favorite hip-hop records?  Sound off in the comments below.   

Peace, Love & Unity

What "The Get Down" Meant to Me

On Friday August 12, Netflix debuted a new original series, “The Get Down” with six episodes.  The remaining six episodes are expected to make their debut in 2017.  I watched these episodes in a day and was left with a strong sense of deja vu.  Over the course of viewing the series, I constantly kept getting that “feeling”.  You know the one I’m talking about right?  The feeling you got the first time you heard “Rockbox”, “Eric B is President”, or “Rebel Without A Pause”.  In a way it is almost indescribable, yet perfectly embodied by the moment you heard the beat drop from any of these songs -- you may not be exactly sure why but all of a sudden the hairs on the back of your neck or arm are standing up, and when that happens it is a good thing!  “The Get Down” made me feel the way I used to the first time I heard my favorite hip-hop records.    

The trailers for “The Get Down” may look like a mash-up of “The Warriors”, “Fame”, or “Sparkle” and some reviews have compared it to  “Westside Story” and “Empire”.  I think those comparisons are inaccurate.  For me,  “The Get Down” is more like “The Goonies” as this is a coming of age story, but I also found elements that reminded me of a Marvel superhero film, particularly their origin movies like “Iron Man” and “Captain America: First Avenger”.  It may seem exaggerated, over-stylized, or at times come off like a fairy tale, but this series tells the story about the early days of HIP-HOP, so I found the storytelling mechanisms to be appropriate.  There have been other movies or shows that contain a hip-hop element or two, but never something that has been able to take all the various themes, and weave them together to tell the story about what hip-hop culture was like at the onset. As more time marches forward and away from that era, those stories may sound like mythology, yet “The Get Down” manages to visually convey the tales that had only existed on vinyl or cassette and present them in a dramatized form.    

“The Get Down” takes place in the South Bronx in the summer of 1977, set to the backdrop of disco, burning buildings, gang violence, a historic heat wave (which ultimately led to a citywide blackout), and a hotly contested NYC mayoral race.  What makes “The Get Down” unique is that the story is told through the lens of HIP-HOP, tracing its roots of bringing people together to have fun in a safe environment while listening to music and dancing, to deejays being able to control the crowd through their musical selection via the ‘get down” -- the part of the record which they loop using two of the same records on two different turntables, to the wordsmith or emcee reciting poetry over the get down section.  Like I said earlier, to some this may look like a story you have seen before, but to the best of my knowledge, the story has never been told from this reference point.  With the fashion, art, slang, and socio-political climate of New York City, these factors combined to yield what may be the most important youth culture the world had ever seen.  This is what makes the main character of the series so compelling.

The secret sauce of “The Get Down” is that HIP HOP is the main character.  The actors are avatars who represent certain aspects of the culture.  Ezekiel (Justice Smith), is the “wordsmith”, too scared at the opening of the series to embrace the gift within him.  Mylene (Herizen Guardiola) is a pastor’s daughter and singer who wants to be the biggest disco singer since Donna Summer and dreams of making it “across the East River”.  Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore), the “B-boy” extraordinaire: graffiti writer, dancer, aspiring DJ who is on a quest to find a rare record for its get down section, by chance crosses paths with Ezekiel, who happens to be looking for the same record albeit for very different reasons. It is through these characters along with some others that drive the plot, and make “The Get Down” one of the most unique television experiences in a long time.

The episodes usually open with a rap narration by Nas, one of the executive producers on the series.  Nas’ rap narrations are done from the point of view of adult Ezekiel, and the series actually flashes back to Ezekiel’s teenage years, starting from the last day of sophomore year in high school, which is also the first day he meets Shaolin Fantastic.  The title for each episode is written in graffiti alongside a passing subway.  What looks to be stock footage of the Bronx from the seventies is also intertwined into each episode, but also at times there are scenes from the show with the actors in them that have that vintage look.  These are just some of the stylized ways “The Get Down” is presented.  The first episode, which is the only episode that was directed by the series showrunner Baz Lurhrmann, is about ninety minutes long.  Look at this episode as a made for tv movie, and not a traditional television episode.  It is long, but necessary as a lot of points need to be established.  For me if the episode was broken up into two parts something would have been lost.  Trust me though, the climax of this episode is worth the long run time.  Subsequent episodes are shorter in length.  I mentioned earlier that most of the characters in this series are fictionalized, but I should point out there are a few real characters that the show introduces, and presents them in a way that makes them come off like superheroes, which further reinforces my comparison of this series to a Marvel film.  

*Mild Spoilers follow*

Grandmaster Flash, who is also an executive producer on the show, appears as a character (portrayed by an actor) on the show.  He is Shaolin Fantastic’s mentor, who sends him out on the quest to find a rare record with the Get Down.  The relationship between the two is presented as in the form of sensei and pupil.  Shaolin aspires to be a DJ, while Flash provides anecdotes for his student to think about.  Among those is learning to trust others, and it is through this that Flash requires Shaolin to find a “wordsmith” which once he does, only then will Shaolin be on the right path to becoming a DJ.  I appreciated the relationship these two had and the way it was presented almost in the form of an old school martial arts flick.  More than a handful of early hip-hoppers were fans of these types of movies as they played in Times Square during the seventies.   I also felt this made Flash seem like a larger than life character and rightfully so.  As one of the founding fathers of hip-hop, his role was treated with the type of reverence that is becoming of someone of his stature.  The last bit of advice Flash gives Shaolin is, “If you want to be a true DJ conquer your street, conqueror your park, conqueror your neighborhood, conqueror your borough, conqueror your city, and the world is yours”. Prophetic words indeed!

Kool Herc is another character who is portrayed by an actor in the series, and while his character has not had as much screen time as Flash, his influence is talked about prior to actually meeting him, and when he is finally introduced he helps set in motion the climax of the sixth episode, which is the halfway mark of the series.  Near the end of the first episode Shaolin Fantastic talks about the “3 Kingdoms”, and how the West has DJ Kool Herc who has the biggest sound in the Bronx, and right on cue the bass from a speaker system can be heard in the distance.  The main cast does not meet Kool Herc until the end of episode four, and he literally appears in the form of a towering, afro silhouetted figure, after Ezekiel, Shaolin, and their crew crashes one of his parties.  The start of the subsequent episode is when Kool Herc is properly introduced, and he talks about how he started doing these parties to keep the kids off the street and out of trouble, and how he is about peace, unity and respect.  As Shaolin relayed earlier in the series, there is a reason why Kool Herc had a kingdom, and his time on-screen captures how magnetic his presence is.  All eyes in the room are on him, and seeing how some of his people have beef with Ezekiel, and Shaolin’s crew, Herc orders them to settle their differences via a DJ Rumble: Herc’s crew The Notorious Three versus The Get Down Brothers using their system, their records, and their rhymes where the winner is determined by who can rock the crowd the most.  I have to say this is one of those times during the series where I got the feeling.  Hearing these stories told in song, is one thing, but there was something magical about seeing this play out on-screen.  My words do not do it justice!

Of course there are other plot lines that take place throughout the series, each of them directly or indirectly playing their part in the formation of hip-hop in these formative years.  I wanted to highlight the ones that really meant the most to me as someone who grew up discovering hip-hop at a young age, and is now an adult who still has love for the culture.  “The Get Down” over the course of six episodes for me has earned its place as an instant hip-hop classic, for simply reminding me that I am not too old to experience the feeling one last time.  

Peace, Love & Unity

A photo of the subway (probably the 4 Train) alongside old Yankee Stadium circa the 70's from the family archives!