"Hey, Ball-i-more!" shouts Club Queen K-Swift, a mane of shiny black ringlets cascading over her face. Chants of "Hey, hey, hey," from Blaq Starr's "Hey, Motherfucker (Clean Version)," punctuate a wall of kick drums and bass as the tension rises. In a voice like a drill instructor, K-Swift commands, "We bangin' the club music real sir-ious." Her French-manicured fingers flip the fader as she delivers the payoff -- handclaps crashing over shuffling percussion -- and the studio monitors rattle and bounce. It's 9:34 p.m. on a Monday, and K-Swift (real name: Khia Edgerton), 27, is making her job of the last four years -- hosting the Off the Hook mix show on 92Q Jams, Baltimore's 92.3 FM (WERQ) -- look easy. From 6 to 9:30, Monday to Friday night, the show is standard hip-hop and R&B. But the last half hour (more on Fridays) is dedicated to the raucous sound called Baltimore club.
For the 650,000 or so residents of the predominantly black, working-class town known variably as "Bodymore, Murderland," or just plain "B-more," this is their homegrown soundtrack. K-Swift quickly segues to another record, on which her friend and scene godfather Rod Lee sings with a surprising earnestness, given the music's often lewd subject matter.
"Now listen to my story
Bill collectors on me
Have to file bankruptcy
Need some help from somebody
Doctor bills are stacking up
I'm desperate to make a buck
I played the lottery today
Won't you please wish me luck
I'm going to dance my pain away."
When the steady boom kicks back in, one of the speakers is left shredded. K-Swift calmly changes the blown fuse. Evidently, she's had to do this before.
Ever since 50 Cent's The Massacre blew up the spot, millions know about the city's brutal romance with heroin (see Fiddy's "A Baltimore Love Thing"). But that's not the only problem. Baltimore is second in the country in murders per capita (tied with Detroit), trailing only New Orleans. They don't film the gritty HBO series The Wire here for nothing. But when B-more residents want to escape the grind, they know how to get down and dirty. Baltimore club is raw party music that crosses the incessant thud of house with hyperspeed hip-hop breaks and sampled sound bites (often X-rated and repeated ad infinitum). Its aggression reflects the city's harsh urban landscape, but there's also a reckless, playful quality that mirrors a drive to transcend the blight. Similar to other regional mutations of rhythm -- crunk from the Dirty South, grime from East London, or baile funk of Brazil -- B-more club is staunchly local and has developed out of the spotlight for years. These days, though, it's bubbling across the city's beltway and beyond. Rod Lee recently released the first widely available B-more club music album, his Vol. 5: The Official, on local label Morphius, tapping into its global distribution network. Meanwhile, DJs like K-Swift, Technics, and Scottie B spin to packed rooms in Philadelphia and New York. Blogs have been buzzing about the sound being the next big thing, but its roots run deep.
Rewind to the mid-'80s, when Chicago house music was transforming the world of beats. Atlanta radio personality Frank Ski, who was then DJ'ing at Baltimore's urban powerhouse V-103, started playing just the break, or the most climactic part of house records, in much the same way that Kool DJ Herc and Afrika Bambaataa created hip-hop out of snippets of old funk, soul, rock, and jazz. Until then, house had been a mostly gay scene that was shunned by the macho rap crowd. "[Frank] made it cool to be into house," says Scottie B, a.k.a. Scott Rice, 37, a Baltimore DJ who also worked in a local record store. Inspired by artists like the U.K.'s Blapps Posse and Dynamic Guvnors, as well as the Chicago sound of DJ Fast Eddie, Tyree, and Farley Jackmaster Funk, Scottie B and his friend DJ Shawn "Ceez" Caesar, 34, began to dabble with their own tracks. They spun the results -- Caesar's "Yo Yo Where Tha Hoes At" (1991) and Scottie B's "I Got the Rhythm" (1991), in particular -- at clubs like Paradox and Godfreys.
Then, in the summer of '92, Frank Ski, using the alias 2 Hyped Brothers and a Dog, unleashed the breakout hit "Doo Doo Brown," which was simply a two-bar loop from "C'mon Babe" by Miami rappers 2 Live Crew with the repetitively chanted title as the hook. "When Frank dropped that, it pretty much set the tone for what was gonna be goin' on as far as club music," says Grant Burley III, 33, better known in the B-more scene as producer Booman. Even today, many B-more club tracks use the break on Lyn Collins' "Think (About It)" featured in "Doo Doo Brown."
Around the same time, Scottie B and Caesar were recruited by independent entrepreneur Ronald Mills, then a manager at Paradox, to make a track with Miss Tony, whom he describes as a "six-foot, 300-pound Biggie Smalls look-alike drag queen." (Tony passed away in 2003.) This became the local hit "Whatz Up? Whatz Up?/How You Wanna Carry It," which Mills released as a 12-inch single on his Sinical imprint in 1993. At the song's conclusion, Miss Tony chants, "Unruly, unruly, unruly," a rallying cry that became so closely associated with the producers of the record that it helped popularize their soon-to-be influential label Unruly Records.
