DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker's Hip House mix

Just like the best below-the-radar hip-hop instrumental of all-time is East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (freestyle bed for discerning rappers up and down the FDR Drive, the Belt Parkway, and the Deegan), the worst-kept-secret of house music has always been "Hot Music," by Soho, one of the recording aliases of NYC nightlife lifer Pal Joey (Central Islip—holla!)

Dating to around 1990, the song isn't even house music as anyone would recognize it today, based largely on a simple piano loop, garnished with skittish snares and recurrent blasts of a disembodied voice yelling: "Hot!" There are echoes of soul and jazz in the track, but Joey found at the time that the love the song was getting was universal: "That was one of those records you could throw on at a hip-hop club, at a regular club. All the party DJs and the serious DJs played it, too. It was a worldwide record."

Perhaps its longshot embrace by the hip-hop world wasn't much of a longshot after all. Pal Joey had produced tracks for Boogie Down Productions ("Love's Gonna Getcha"), among others. But the relationship between hip-hop and house wasn't always so sweet, as evidenced in the short history of that most-maligned of subgenres, hip-house.

Whether or not you know it or admit it, hip-house is the real party shit. And you probably thought it was just "I'll House You." Well, there are loads of things you can blame Mike G and Afrika Baby Bam for, but they only get partial credit on this one. Take a two-hour flight to Chicago and you'll find hip-house ground zero. An offshoot of that city's famous (and famously insular) house music scene, the nascent genre minted its own set of stars in the late 80s.

Producer Tyree Cooper is often credited with helping to create the hip-house movement, thanks to his track "Turn Up The Bass," a collaboration with local MC Kool Rock Steady. The rhyme wasn't complex (it was what Pal Joey calls a "jack-your-body type of rhyme") but the idea of bringing someone in to rap over an otherwise spacious house track began to gain traction. Chicago's Fast Eddie, in particular, became widely known for his nimble flow, and he paved the way not only for "I'll House You," produced by legendary house maestro Todd Terry, but also for Washington, D.C.'s Doug Lazy, the lone hip-house artist signed to a major label (Doug Lazy Gettin' Crazy was released on Atlantic in 1990).

In 1989, Doug, who was primarily a producer, released "Let It Roll" with his own vocals because the rapper he'd asked to drop by the studio never did. It became a hit almost instantly. "I didn't really talk a lot. I was shy. But three weeks after the song came out, I was booked for a two-week promo tour in London. My first show in New York was a disaster. I was so scared. This girl at the bottom of the stage untied my shoes."

It didn't matter whether or not Lazy was long for fame, because the one-two knockout punch for hip-house came in 1990, just as the movement was getting its balance. First came Hammer, whose club-friendly pop raps set a new template for danceable hip-hop. "The label was asking me, ‘Can you do stuff like that?'" Doug recalls. "And that just wasn't me." A moot point anyway, because then came the mainstreaming of gangster rap, which closed the casket on Hammer, Lazy, Eddie, and all their uptempo peoples.
Fortunately, no good genre goes unappreciated—or unarchived. Usually we'd be buying this stuff on some Japanese or British trainspotter website. But on Hip House, the excellent mix-CD by DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker, the local boys hold it down, mixing classics from KC Flight and Chill Rob G with little-known hip-house experiments by Craig G and Big Daddy Kane and equally hot-stepping raps from Ghostface Killah and Joe Budden.

And nostalgia for that time is beginning to creep into hip-hop itself. Canadian MC K-os rapped over the "Hot Music" instrumental on his song "Superstarr Pt. 0," which became a staple on BET and likely begat the most recent high-profile use of the Soho classic: the video version of Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot." During the video, after Missy spits a couple of slithery verses, the action stops, and two dance troupes battle it out over 16 bars of "Hot Music" like You Got Served filmed in a Japanese recreation of The Tunnel circa '90, before Funk Flex took over and you had to tuck your chain in.

But if you're looking for the real throwback, you might have to crack Pal Joey's vaults. At the time of its release, no MC rapped over "Hot Music" (at least, not officially), but sitting in the archives is an alternate version of "Radio Song"—the highly gauche collaboration between REM's Michael Stipe and KRS-One—performed over that indelible instrumental. "I don't think either of those people is at a point in their career where they want to see that song put out," Pal Joey says. "But I could always bootleg it… "

JON CARAMANICA
Send materials to 217 East 86th St. #226, NY, NY 10028. Go to turntablelab.com for the Ayres/Baker Hip House mix.