The Teacher's Bass

This is a Boogie Down Productions favorite of mine, with a bass line so simple it’s almost embarrassing to write a whole post about. A handful of notes, a lot of space, a record that sounds like it was cut yesterday even though it came out in 1989. And the lyrics, which argue about the Bible. Dare I say the bass is biblical too.

It’s here for a reason that took me a while to see. Tiny Bass Lines is my library of favorite bass lines, many derived from the golden era of hip hop, a few notes each, learned as a beginner on a uke bass and played on my mini ramp. Every hip hop line so far was sampled or programmed. This one may have been played, live, by a Jamaican session bassist with twenty years of records behind him. If you just want to play it, skip to the line.

After Scott La Rock

I came to Boogie Down Productions as a teenager interested in the early days of this genre, and somewhat fascinated by the rivalry between competing parts of New York City, who couldn’t seem to agree on who invented it. I didn’t pick sides, I enjoyed both, and listened to Marley Marl, MC Shan, and the Queensbridge DJs and rappers every bit as much as the Bronx-based BDP and others. Living in Tennessee, so far outside of where the music was getting made, I had the luxury of enjoying all of it without really caring much who got the credit.

Boogie Down Productions had made one album, Criminal Minded, when DJ Scott La Rock was shot and killed in August 1987, and for a while it looked like the group would end with him. KRS-One kept the name and made By All Means Necessary the next year, with a Malcolm X pose on the cover and a turn toward the lectures that would define him. The third album, Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop, came out on Jive on the fourth of July, 1989, and it’s the one where live players show up in the credits next to the samples.

He produced it himself, with a crew that included Sidney Mills, the keyboard player from Steel Pulse, and the album credits list a rhythm section: Val Douglas on bass, Anastas Hackett on drums, Jerry Johnson on saxophone, Kevin Batchelor on trumpet. The sleeve puts the sessions at Power Play Studios in Queens, of all boroughs. The same year he produced Silent Assassin for Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the drum-and-bass pair behind Peter Tosh’s band and Black Uhuru. KRS had always leaned on reggae, from the Bronx Jamaicans he grew up around and the sound-system style he rapped in. On this record he hired the musicians.

What the song argues

“Why Is That?” went out as a single that summer and made the top five of the rap chart. It’s KRS the Teacher at full strength: a lecture, in rhyme, on why Black kids are taught a history that leaves them out, with the Bible as the evidence. He walks through Genesis, Shem and Abraham and Moses, and argues that the people in those stories were Black and that no school will say so. It’s blunt, it’s funny in places, and it ends on knowledge as the thing that beats a stereotype. I’m not here to referee the theology, other than to say that even as a teenager I appreciated KRS’s questioning of mainstream assumptions. I’m here now because the bass under it is one of the most relaxed grooves he ever rapped over, and that’s no accident.

A session man from Kingston

Val Douglas is a name you find in the small print of Jamaican records going back to the late sixties. He was the bassist in the Now Generation, a session band that cut for the big Kingston producers in the early seventies, and his name sits on early Peter Tosh sides for Joe Gibbs, on Ken Boothe and Dennis Brown singles, and, since the mid-2000s, in the touring lineup of the Skatalites. He’s the kind of bassist who played on more hits than most people have heard, without a solo credit to his name. The Ghetto Music sleeve puts him on bass. It doesn’t say which tracks.

A session man from Kingston.

So here’s the honest version. To my ear, the bass on “Why Is That?” sounds played: a hand on a string, a note that rings and stops when a finger lifts, a pitch that drifts a few cents the way a sampler never would. The album credits one bassist. If it’s Douglas, then a man who spent the seventies in Kingston studios is playing the line I’m learning on a uke bass on a skate ramp in Nashville, on a hip hop record from the Bronx. If it isn’t, it’s still a live bass on a 1989 rap record, which was rare enough. I’ve gone with Douglas on the site, flagged, until someone who was in the room says otherwise.

The line

Here it is, with the drums. Hit play, then mute the bass and play along.

Dots at the front, air at the back

Five notes in one bar. The first three come in a hurry, leaning forward, the second and third each landing a little ahead of where you’d expect them. Then it stops leaning: a plain note in the middle of the bar, a quick flick after it, there and gone, and nothing at all for the rest of the bar.

I got that wrong first. My first pass at tapping the rhythm out along the record was a sixteenth off, at full speed, and it played back with a limp I couldn’t name until I slowed the record down and laid the notes again by ear. The fix turned out to be two little dots in the notation, which I had to look up: a dot makes a note longer by half, and those two are what push the next notes early. Once I could see them, I could hear it. Then the back of the bar is rests, and the job is to count that silence instead of filling it, which every line in this library keeps teaching me and this one teaches plainest.

One more thing the tool taught me: the record sits about a third of a semitone sharp of standard tuning, so tune up a hair to play along. Records weren’t always in tune with your tuner.

A bass that says its piece and drops out before the bar ends sounds like reggae to me, and the album credits a reggae rhythm section. The drums keep going; the bass leaves. The one drop in reggae is the drummer leaving the front of the bar empty. This bass leaves the back of it empty, the same instinct at the other end, as far as I can tell, and it’s why the record feels unhurried at a tempo that isn’t slow.

The uke bass

The Fullerton’s roundwound strings squeak on every sloppy lift, and this bar has five lifts and nearly a third of silence to hear them in. There’s nowhere to hide. A note that stops when you ease the finger off is what the instrument does best, and a bar this empty makes you prove it.

The note-by-note breakdown, the printable line sheet, and the scale are at Tiny Bass Lines.

KRS spends the record telling you what the schoolbooks left out, and challenges any of us who spent years sitting through sermons in mostly white churches. The bass under him leaves out most of the bar, and may have been played by a man whose name is on a lot of records and almost no covers. A few notes and a lot of air. I spent longer on the air than the notes.