Perhaps it began in my grandparents’ living room in the spring of 1990. I watched, quizzically, as my cousin Nancy popped her Walkman headphones over my grandad’s thick ears, and clicked the clunky play button. He looked as puzzled as me, then lifted one of the fuzzy earphones and asked “what is this?” Nancy replied with unabashed enthusiasm, “it’s rap”.
I was up like a shot, grabbing the headphones to find out what rapping delights she’d bestowed upon my grandad, and just in time to catch a succession of disparate spoken words: “Tank… fly… boss… walk… jam… Nitty gritty.” I was listening to ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ by Beats International, which had been at number one in the charts for the past couple of weeks. I scoffed, like any teenage ratbag might, and as the voice in my ears launched into four bars of guttural murmurs, like a rhythmic placeholder for where the rest of a rap should be, I turned to my young cousin and countered, “this isn’t rap!”
It might sound petty, and even a little callous to call out a 13-year-old on the intricacies of what constitutes rap music, and I didn’t mean to take this out on my poor cousin, but I’d already endured years of people misunderstanding rap and hip hop, though, truth be told, I genuinely liked Beats International’s ‘Dub Be Good To Me’, which had been released a few months earlier in 1990, at the end of January.
I don’t think my grandad disliked it either, or at least I’m sure he preferred it to some of the actual rap tracks my brother and I had been subjecting him to for the past few years, such as the sparse and sometimes atonal boom bap of Ultra Magnetic MC’s, Biz Markie and London Posse, none of which was for the uninitiated. You might assume the reggae-inflected beats of ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ were far from the easy listening a man on the cusp of his 80s might prefer, but my grandad had broad tastes. He was also a musician, and though his demeanour was mostly calm and gentle, when he sat at his piano and began mashing up the keys, he was about as raw as a jazz musician could get.
Norman Edwards was born in 1910 in a pub in Stamford, Lincolnshire where the regulars would sit him on their knees and teach him to swear; he’d later claim his first w…
