In Columbus, our underground hip hop night was literally underground. Bernie’s Distillery sat below North High Street, accessible through a black staircase that carried you down 10 feet, past a mural recreation of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” then down another set of stairs to the bar and “stage”—the latter a barely raised plywood platform, black, like the walls and pillars and tables and chairs. I’m sure the ceiling would have been painted black but there wasn’t a ceiling, just the underside of the floor above, exposed rafters and leaky copper pipes, and other building bowels I never inspected too much. The hip hop night that took place every Sunday for six years ended a decade ago, but the history of that place and time is just beginning to be written. The sounds from those nights are gone, as well as some of the people, and soon, the building will probably be gone, too, as Ohio State facelifts North High Street on either side.
In those days, there was no place for hip hop in bars and nightclubs in Columbus, and the geography of the scene was dispersed. There was Groove Shack for a while, a record store and meeting place that hosted open mics, though that was a bit before my time. I was a senior in high school when the Bernie’s night started, and my best friend would go to breakdance on the mostly empty floor, and other nights he’d go to Smiling Rhino, an event put together by my future wife, but I never made it out to that one (perhaps I wasn’t supposed to meet her yet). Driving out to campus seemed a bit far to go to hear hip hop, and besides that, Bernie’s didn’t sound like much. That summer, driving out to campus started to make more sense after I went to Thieves’ World, a hip hop event held in the storage space behind a record store, with a makeshift stage, linoleum on the floor for breakdancing, plywood stacked against the walls for tagging, a real crowd, real hip hop being spun and real turntablists like Drastic crab scratching at impossible speeds.
It was as if I walked into a rap movie. No, it was better than that–it was not a movie set, but an unfinished place, an in-process place, with the acrobatic Alain doing the Rerun then morphing it into an inimitable toprock, passing the baton to Epic (now Manwell) who had just destroyed the turntables and transitioned effortlessly into windmills and 1990s. I got the sense that things were being made there, not just the things themselves but the way of making them too. I saw a young, Abe Lincoln-bearded Aesop Rock perform there, the Atoms Family (which included a fledgling Vast Aire of Cannibal Ox fame); I spit one of my verses on a stage for the first time. It was way, way too fast, but the crowd still approved, and the whole scene produced such a rush because it was the first time we had proof that hip hop was happening in our city, beyond our karaoke recording sessions in our own basements. I saw Christian rap star John Reuben before he was a star, with his massive energy and charisma. But the Thieves’ World events were sporadic. It was only with the arrival of the Bernie’s night that there was a dependable weekly event, where you knew you could hear raw, unfiltered set lists from deejays tapped into the veins of the culture.
DJ Przm (RIP), an import from Detroit, founded and magnetized the Bernie’s Hip Hop Night, and brought to it his energy, eccentricity, freshness, and, in a word, his genius. As Columbus hip hop great Blueprint wrote in a remembrance of Przm: “[he] single-handedly defined the grimy, lo-fi sound of Columbus hip-hop.” Przm was a close friend of a close friend, and a fixture of the Columbus hip hop scene, so we crossed paths plenty, though I only spoke with him a few times. I was much more familiar with his music. His wide-ranging tastes and knowledge attracted a wide range of characters to the underground space, creating the kinds of scenes I haven’t seen since: dreadlocked bicyclists freakin Black-N-Milds on the two tops beside b-boys hogging the floor for hours, way too many people on a tiny stage, including the official unofficial host and local legend and tastemaker, Daymon Dodson (RIP), aka So What!, aka Racist Joe, who stood over six feet tall and weighed, unofficially, close to 400 pounds, still rocking a gigantic afro even years after most of us had moved on to some form of braids or locks or retreated back to the skin-tight fade. There were young women majoring in dance and design who drove up from OU-Athens, spike-necked punks left over from happy hour, now playing pool, purple mohawks and pierced septa and wallet chains all around. There was the bartender who seemed to always wear a basketball jersey but seemed to never wear deodorant, a million names stickered and stenciled on the walls of the worst bathroom in history, the random cipher above on the sidewalk outside, which must have seemed like an alien landing to the drunk Buckeyes passing by, future assistants to the leaders of America, as Andrew Bag O’ Donuts of the Spitball crew released drug-induced punchlines and the most unlikely feminine rhymes–I remember one about “doing the smut dance in butt pants”–into the midnight air, or as battle fanatic Meta4ce Omega challenged (and lost to) the resident rapping bum of OSU campus, Help Is On the Way.
In a way, those scenes at Bernie’s paralleled the composition of crowds in early hip hop in New York, where Przm and Daymon served as our composite Afrika Bambaataa, who first brought together the downtown rockers and the uptown hip hoppers through an authentic connection and great love he felt for the music swelling from both scenes. If Daymon was the connector, then Przm was the sonic genius, with a gift that cannot be unrelated to his upbringing in Detroit, a city as important as New York or Chicago or New Orleans in the history of American musics. Both Daymon and Przm died too young—I remember seeing Daymon last, smiling, this huge man drinking a comically bright and small fruity cocktail at that tiny spot next to the old Vic’s Midnight Cafe, where Detox spun a few times—but their impact on the quality of the artistry and, at the risk of sounding corny, friendship within the scene remains substantial.
Przm, while gone from this world, certainly created sounds I still listen to, sounds that are still grimy and fresh, including a couple of my favorite beats of all time. Przm himself introduces the title track from True Hollyhood Stories, a limited release EP by Meta4ce: “Ay man, this beat is sick. Matta fact it ain’t no beat. But only I can do that.” It’s true—it can’t really be called a beat, and I still haven’t heard anything like it, except for some of the other sounds that have come out of Detroit, such as those from the late great J. Dilla and others in his camp. On “True,” the bewildering chops of the game show-sounding sample (I think there might be some Pac Man in there as well), the uncaged bassline (if a line it can be called), the sound-byte punctuation point to both hip hop aesthetics and the electronic music culture that is rooted just as deeply as pop Soul in the Motor City. There are elements that I hear in Dilla’s production on “Love It Here,” “Baby,” or on Black Milk’s impeccable track “About Me,” though, those tracks are rhythmically more predictable and conventional than Przm’s highly unorthodox “True.”
The prime example of the greatness of Przm’s production is Camu Tao’s (RIP) “Hold the Floor,” unsurpassable in its fierce, terse instrumentation and almost uncomfortably tense bounce. The song almost always swirled crowds into mosh pits when played or performed at Bernie’s or Newport or anywhere else I heard it. Other classics include his beat deployed by Zero Star on the mixtape track “You Wish,” and the list could go on. But again, this history is just now being written. There is much more to say, many more Polaroids to flip through, classic flyers to frame and display, video recordings to dig up and digitize. Until then, this is a small memorial to the small and momentous art that is most hip hop art: local art, art amongst friends, art unheralded, underground art, forgotten art. Perhaps such small memorials can accumulate into something more solid, more permanent, and again give bodies to places of memory about to be erased by revitalization.