45 King: 'Grooves For A Quiet Storm'
John Morrison looks back at a seminal, forgotten Instrumental hip-hop album.
The Less Than 1,000 Spins playlist is a collaborative project that includes an exclusive DJ mix by Kenan Bell and a livestream with DJ Manipulator. Today’s collaboration is an article by John Morrison about DJ Mark The 45 King’s ‘Grooves For A Quiet Storm.’ The album track ‘Bluez Melodic’ appears on the reissue and the Less Than 1,000 Spins playlist. John’s article creates space to appreciate the beauty of ‘Grooves’ in its entirety.
John Morrison is a writer, DJ, and sample-flipper from Philadelphia. As a writer, his work has appeared in NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, Jazz Tokyo, Grammy.com, and more. He is also the host of Culture Cypher Radio, a hip-hop radio show on NPR member station WXPN.
You can find him on Instagram and Twitter.
It may be hard to imagine today, but in the late 1980s, hip-hop and r&b were at serious odds with one another. With both genres struggling for the hearts and minds of Black America, the schism between hip-hop and r&b played itself out on Black radio. Representing the youthful, confrontational energy of Gen X, hip-hop in the ‘80s not only challenged the musical rules, its brash, and sometimes playful vulgarity flew in the face of established societal norms. On the other hand, r&b had smoothed out most of its rough edges by the 1980s. The slick, lush sounds Anita Baker, Freddie Jackson, and Peabo Bryson had become the soundtrack of the desires and aspirations of Black baby boomers across the country.
While hip-hop had been carving out a space in Black radio since 1979, the old guard of program directors and jocks still preferred the sound of r&b to rap. With many Black stations like Power 99/WUSL in Philadelphia and WPGC-FM in D.C. promoting “no rap weekdays” and effectively relegating hip-hop to late-night/weekend mix shows, it was clear that older Black gatekeepers still held the power to reflect their preferences in the station’s programming. Young hip-hop fans naturally bucked against rap’s marginalization on Black radio but held little institutional power to change it. In a Washington Post piece from 1991, a 17-year-old rap fan named N’Dieye Gray complained that Black radio’s hostility to rap was, “indicative of teenagers not having a voice in what’s played.”
It was against this backdrop that late Jersey legend and Flavor Unit co-founder DJ Mark The 45 King made his first forays into the record business. Right out the gate, he put together a string of classics like Latee’s “This Cut’s Got Flavor,” Lakim Shabazz's “Pure Righteousness,” and a number of Queen Latifah-helmed hits like “Dance To The Music,” “Ladies First,” and “Come Into My House.” Throughout the late ‘80s and ‘90s, the 45 King was also a key pioneer in the creation of instrumental hip-hop with releases like 1987’s Just Beats and The Lost Breakbeats series, holding status as some of the earliest and most influential albums in the subgenre’s history.
Originally released as a vinyl EP on Tuff City Records in 1996, 45 King’s Grooves For A Quiet Storm is both a novel experiment and a musical hand stretched “across the aisle,” uniting two great pillars of Black music. Taking its name from the Quiet Storm radio format created 20 years earlier by Howard University radio DJ Melvin Lindsay at WHUR, Grooves For A Quiet Storm smooths out hip-hop’s rough edges with lush, unobtrusive beats. The irony of a hip-hop producer paying homage to r&b radio’s most notoriously laidback programming format is clear, but 45 King’s experiments are a sincere attempt at infusing his production with some real soul.
The album opens with “Magic Beans”, a head-nodding tune built around some tasty electric piano chords and arpeggios. The live electric bass bounces against a shuffling kick, snare, and hi-hat pattern, making for an endlessly playable groove. “No Problem” takes the tempo down a bit with its punchy drums and a quirky synth lead. “Side Dish” has the kind of muted, bubbling bass tone that producers like Dilla, Hi-Tek, and Shawn J. Period were experimenting with at the time. This combined with the song’s drums, keys, and vibraphone also put it in the same sonic world as chilled-out “acid jazz” adjacent acts like Galliano, Attica Blues and DJ Greyboy.
Most famously known for ultra-hype instrumentals like “The 900 Number” and his ear-catching work with everyone from Queen Latifah to Jay-Z and Eminem, it’s a delight to hear the 45 King trying his hand at this style of breezy low-key instrumentals. Grooves For A Quiet Storm is not a concession made by hip-hop to r&b as much as it is a prediction of the future symbiosis of both genres. While the ‘80s and early ‘90s were marked by an intergenre/intergenerational culture war embodied in the music, the years since have seen an increased friendliness between rap and r&b. Today, every commercial radio station that plays Black music has embraced both genres, and the gulf between the two has never been smaller. With its supple instrumentation and subtle ambiance, the 45 King’s beats here are not only a stylistic nod to r&b, they are a distant ancestor of the instrumental hip-hop and “lo-fi” beats that dominate YouTube and Spotify algorithms today. Rich, soulful, and grossly underrated, Grooves For A Quiet Storm is as much a product of its time as it is a prediction of things to come.
Listen to the full album on your preferred platform here.
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