The Chronic, Part 1: Origins
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| Posted : Dec, 24, 2010 | Author [DonnyShell]
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(Over the next month or so this blog will feature excerpts from The Chronic: The Last Album that Changed the World, which MTV Books recently backed out of publishing.)
1987
Santa Monica Boulevard, near Vine. Not up on Sunset. The only hair band members setting up are setting up side hustles, any kind of day job they can get. Here is a run-down stretch of Hollywood where ladies and trannies of the evening pedal their wares. Not a terrible neighborhood, just not the kind thata^EUR^(TM)s shot to show the citya^EUR^(TM)s gritty side on L.A. Law. The Reagan Era is losing its luster as Ronald loses his memory. Chief Darryl Gates runs LAPD, combating crime with a literal battering ram.
Music on vinyl should be dead. Regardless, here in gray. workaday Hollywood a^EUR" behind three yoked-together storefronts a^EUR" lay a black platter pressing plant called Macola. Ita^EUR^(TM)s a vintage shop whose best clients arena^EUR^(TM)t even familiar with the term. Macola, free of glamour or import, is the local business that will function as the delivery system for a miracle.
Millions of American consumers are switching over from vinyl and cassettes to a shiny little innovation called the compact disc. Macola doesna^EUR^(TM)t do CDs. Stored in a dank room sequestered from the citya^EUR^(TM)s famously optimistic light are brown boxes full of music. These are stacked in cases of 25 units per container. Only in the office is anything reflective of a disc tray. There is no downloading or sticky P.R. The distributor is strictly a vinyl outpost a^EUR" a messy, musty 15,000-square-foot museum in the making. Or so it would seem; pouring out of Macola are sounds that sell. itself on the content of its character, a miracle product possibly more popular than crack.
These boxes go from stacks in storage to hot trunk cargo. Most often the auto booty are beats that the major labels a^EUR" Capitol, Warnera^EUR^(TM)s, Columbia and the rest a^EUR" considers cheap fad music, regional songs that in the best of circumstances land on the R&B charts. Others will throb along as secretive club hits. The next George Michael wona^EUR^(TM)t be coming out of Macola, instead ita^EUR^(TM)s narrowcast titles that insist you be teenaged or in nightclubs to know.
L.A. Dream Teama^EUR^(TM)s a^EURoeDream Team is in the House,a^EUR? J.J. Fada^EUR^(TM)s a^EURoeSupersonic,a^EUR? and a gang of hits from Too $hort are Ghetto Gold, that rare harbinger of an American hit, a unit-mover thata^EUR^(TM)s utterly unknown to Casey Kasem. The more established of these ride the wave of unlikely electro influence: Germanya^EUR^(TM)s Kraftwerk, for one. $hort Dog is about to explode into rapa^EUR^(TM)s mainstream, but as a rule the West Coast anthems dispensed from Macola sound about as far away from the stripped-down sensibility of Queens hip-hop royalty Run-D.M.C. as one can get without obtaining a passport.
A pimp rapper from the East Bay, Too $hort a^EUR" slow and filthy a^EUR" is the sound of Oakland, an ethnomusicologista^EUR^(TM)s dream case. He poised to take the Macola ethos to a level where no urban music pusher has ventured, graduating from cassette tapes that circulate literally from hand to hand to shiny Macola platters that move from up on I-5 to mom and pop stores in the Midwest and South. Therea^EUR^(TM)s zero record label promotion coming out of Macola, just slabs oa^EUR^(TM) wax.
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