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Old School means all things to all people. For a 16-year-old, it might mean the Wu Tang Clan, a group that was born in the shadows of artists such as Rakim and De La Soul. For a fan in their 30s, meanwhile, it could describe hip-hop?s late-'70s to early-'80s infancy, a period when very few acts actually recorded, and a time that (barring an occasional VH1 documentary) hip-hop has long since forgotten. For our purposes, old school East Coast means music from the 1980s, the formative years when the genre was old enough to have an impact, yet too young to know what it actually wanted to do. The beginning of the decade was marked by instrumentals, novelty songs and stand-alone singles. U.T.F.O. ("Roxanne Roxanne"), Whodini ("Freaks Come Out At Night") and Kurtis Blow ("Basketball") enjoyed success during this time, but were rarely followed by successful full-lengths. It essentially fell on the Queen's trio Run DMC to define hip-hop for pop audiences. Their terse, three-minute singles were as accessible as they were addictive. And after their success, the floodgates opened for acts such as DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince, Queen Latifah and Salt-N-Pepa.*
*Hip-hop was more than just breaking as a cultural force, it was morphing and taking on a new aesthetic skin. Juice Crew producer Marley Marl introduced the modern art of hip-hop sampling with his seminal work for Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and Masta Ace, while rappers such as Rakim, BDP's KRS-One and LL Cool J redefined not only how you could rap, but what you could say in your songs. By the late-80s emergence of such groups as Public Enemy, EPMD and Tribe Called Quest, hip-hop seemed poised to not only be a major cultural force, but a major political one as well. To say that it hasn't lived up to that promise isn't to say that the ride hasn't been an exciting one.

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