Sly also created a template for the artist-producer and independent label entrepreneur. He produced other artists for his short-lived Stone Flower label, often playing every musical instrument. His production of Little Sister’s “Somebody’s Watching You” became the first Top 40 hit to use electronic drums — a staple of nearly all hip-hop production.
“I feel like particularly with Sly, [he’s] part of the whole kind of mashup of the streets and the church,” says Lateef Daumont, a Panther cub best known as hip-hop artist Lateef the Truthspeaker of the Quannum collective. “They just had all of the things that would be blueprints for hip-hop later on — even business-wise, in a lot of ways.”
“Sly was the integrationist,” says author and educator Cecil Brown, a Berkeley resident during the ’70s who taught at Merritt College’s former campus on Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way) in Oakland. “Also, Sly had an element of militancy in him, too, that was not flower power, you know? It was like, ‘We got something that is going to make us feel better, and that belongs to us.’”
Remarkably, Stone was able to cross over to the pop charts while maintaining an unapologetically Black identity. In a 1974 clip from The Mike Douglas Show, Sly is asked if his young, white middle-class fans know what he’s singing about. “Yeah, they know,” he says. Hip-hop exemplifies the same paradigm: It appeals to white youth precisely because it offers entry into a different cultural space, with its own reference points and vernacular.
Just as The Coup’s Boots Riley performed his song “Underdogs” during the Occupy Oakland demonstrations of 2011, Sly occasionally performed at Black Panther rallies while living in Oakland. His ear-to-the-street perspective, containing equal parts optimism and cynicism, is evidenced by the No. 1 album There’s A Riot Goin’ On, released in 1971. As cultural critic Okla Jones wrote on the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary, “America was a nation in transition, feeling the effects of the previous decade. The shadow of Dr. King’s assassination loomed over the Black community, and the Vietnam War divided an entire country. What Sly and the Family Stone’s fifth album did was give a voice to a new generation yearning to be heard.”
This dynamic — young people speaking their minds and determining their own identities through cultural expression — not only defined the early ’70s but connected the funk era to the rap era. Once you depart from the New York-centric breakbeat aesthetic, funk becomes the defining element of hip-hop’s sound, particularly in the Southern United States and parts of the Midwest, and especially in the Bay Area.
Before breaking, the Bay had boogaloo
The dance style known as Oakland boogaloo began in the 1960s with R&B and soul as its soundtrack, but the emergence of funk raised the bar for creative expression. “The thumping of the bass and the snapping of the snare drum and the thumping of the bass drum, you started to see people doing this free-form movement, with a hit and with body contortions,” says Will Randolph, whose group the Black Resurgents once performed during a 1977 Parliament concert at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, where they emerged from the iconic mothership in front of more than 10,000 fans.
“When you talk about hip-hop dance, primarily people think of breaking and popping,” Randolph says. “When you talk about street dance on a nationwide level prior to hip-hop dance coming out of primarily New York, you have this whole West Coast sea of dance and street dance. The Bay Area in particular is really the debut for hip-hop.”
From the mid-1960s to the early ’70s, years before hip-hop had a name, Oakland groups like the Black Resurgents, One Plus One, the Black Messengers and Pirate and the Easy Walkers perfected moves that would become part of the hip-hop dance vernacular.
“What I’m saying is that boogaloo, robotting, and strutting dance styles predate hip-hop as a culture, as a name, and even hip-hop dance as an artform,” says Randolph. (In 1990’s “U Make Me Want Some,” Mac Dre’s mentor and namesake The Mac even raps: “You can do the boogaloo / Like they used to do in 1972.”)
As boogaloo branched off into Richmond robotting and San Francisco strutting in the mid-1970s to become the predominant form of urban youth culture in the Bay Area, dancers adopted the sartorial flamboyance associated with pimps, incorporating top hats, canes and pointy-toed shoes into their aesthetic. White gloves created a mesmerizing effect under blacklight during performances in dark halls.
Fueled by talent show competitions, which brought local fame and popularity, the artform continued to develop into the early ’80s. Synchronized group routines, costumes, and stage props all became part of the mix. Most routines developed for competitions were performed just once. Some groups practiced in secret so no one could steal their moves. (The Black Resurgents were an exception; they were known to practice in front of an open window, often drawing crowds from their neighborhood.)
Coded signals between dancers would indicate they were participants in the same culture and ready to battle at a moment’s notice, such as popping one’s collar — which later became a signature hallmark of Bay Area hip-hop expression. Being known as a boogaloo, strutter or robotter also conferred social status, and could give practitioners a ghetto pass through hostile territory or nullify threats of violence altogether.
As boogaloo spread in the latter half of the ’70s to San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno and Los Angeles, a move originally known as “The Oakland Hit” became the “pop,” and blended with the locking style indigenous to Southern California. Pop-locking was born.
But the Bay Area’s contributions didn’t make the history books. In 1979, the Electric Boogaloos appeared on Soul Train and were erroneously announced as the originators of boogaloo by host Don Cornelius. Boogaloo also spread to New York through Bay Area dancers like Jerry Rentie, who served active military duty there, but wasn’t recognized as a distinct style by New York rappers like Run-DMC, who said “let the poppers pop and the breakers break” on 1984’s “Rock Box.”
The Northern California origins of popping became further obscured when breakdancing arrived on the West Coast in the early ’80s, and boogaloo, strutting, robotting, popping and breaking were all subsumed into the amalgamation of hip-hop dance. In “West Coast Pop Lock,” a 1982 hit for Ronnie Hudson that most know as the hook of Tupac’s “California Love,” Hudson shouts out Los Angeles, Watts and Compton — with no mention of Oakland at all.
Pimp culture becomes pop culture
Another key influence on hip-hop was Richard Pryor, who moved to Berkeley in 1969 and soaked up the city’s counterculture vibe. Pryor performed locally at venues like Laney College, and, similar to Tupac, key parts of his development came from the Bay Area before he moved to L.A. and became a superstar.
Pryor has been sampled in rap more than 400 times, which speaks to his street-level Black cultural perspective that placed more emphasis on barbershops, juke joints and strip clubs than churches and schools. And it was Pryor’s involvement in a 1973 movie, filmed in Oakland, that would cement his relationship to Bay Area hip-hop.
The Mack is ostensibly a cautionary tale about the rise and fall of a pimp named Goldie (Max Julien), yet it glorified the illegal sex trade and the flamboyant pimp lifestyle. The movie’s lead was based directly on the notorious Oakland pimp and drug dealer Frank Ward, and infamously featured several real-life pimps and sex workers, in exchange for cameo roles for Ward and his brothers.
In The Mack, Pryor played Slim, Goldie’s partner. Another character, Fat Man, coincidentally had the same initials as infamous Oakland drug kingpin Felix Mitchell. With Goldie’s brother Olinga as a Panther-esque Black nationalist, the film’s subtext hints at the real-life tension between the Black Panthers and Oakland’s gangster underworld. It’s a dynamic that foreshadowed the divisions between conscious and gangsta rap, and predated the way Tupac and many Bay Area rappers mixed elements of both.
When Melvin Van Peebles’ directorial debut Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was released in 1971, Panther leaders used their widely circulated newspaper to encourage Party members to see the film, which also featured the all-Black East Bay Dragons motorcycle club. “No distributors were supporting it,” says the Lumpen’s Dr. Saturu Ned, who worked in the Party’s newspaper office before he became a musician. “Because of the Black Panther Party, millions of people went to see the movie.”
Sweet Sweetback birthed the so-called blaxploitation films of this era, championing a gritty view of street life with an undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism. The genre became a key reference point for hip-hop, along with the Panthers’ messages of Black power and resistance.
