Sweat the Technique by Rakim

Author:Rakim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Strong Island to Latin Quarter

We did our first show at a club on Long Island. We performed “Eric B. Is President,” “My Melody,” and a freestyle. Three songs for $1,500. We did a few more shows before Eric booked us at the legendary Latin Quarter, the most famous, most notorious, and most prestigious rap club in the city.

The Latin Quarter was in Manhattan in Times Square at 200 West 48th Street, between Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Back in the day, this was the club known as the Cotton Club South. Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and the Nicholas Brothers had all performed there. By 1986, it was a burlesque club during the week. But Friday and Saturday nights hip-hop took over, and everyone who was anyone in the hip-hop game performed there, or DJ’ed there, or went there to hang. Overnight it became the center of the rap universe.

The host and stage manager was Paradise Gray, who a few years later would form part of the rap group X-Clan. Paradise had a knack for getting industry reps in the room—not A&Rs, actual label heads from companies like Profile and Tuff City Records, who showed up every night. A lot of careers were made and ended on that stage. Label owners like Tom Silverman and Monica Lynch (Tommy Boy Records), Fred Maneo (Select Records), and of course Russell Simmons (Def Jam Recordings) were regularly in the crowd. The saying associated with Latin Quarter was that you could perform on Friday and have a record deal by Monday.

The house DJs were Red Alert and Chuck Chillout, the hottest two turntablists in New York City. Their radio shows reached as far north as Connecticut and as far south as Philly. So people came in from Connecticut, Long Island, New Jersey, and of course the illest people from each of the five boroughs showed up. The club’s location made it a bit of a neutral territory but there was a lot of tension—violence, robberies, and stabbings. Paradise had a vision for the Latin Quarter as a hip-hop dance club, so people came there to dance to hip-hop. Paradise even had his own house dancing crews, not break-dancers but hip-hop freestyle dancers: the IOUs and the JACs. Before the Latin Quarter, hip-hop acts traveled with a DJ, a rapper, and a hype man. After the Latin Quarter, folks added dancers to the performance.

All of these dynamics earned the Latin Quarter its reputation as the hardest place to perform. It was one of those places where you couldn’t come in with nothing but your A game. You had to be one hundred percent on point.

The day before I was hitting the stage, I thought a lot about my aunt Ruth Brown, the famous R&B singer, who had five number-one hits in the 1950s and won a Tony for Best Actress in the ’80s. She wasn’t really my aunt. She was my parents’ close friend. Moms used to drop me off at her house when I was little, and I’d sit and watch her get ready to perform.

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