Critics’ Cult Classics: Hanif Abdurraqib on Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night”

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2:13Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, guys. Hello. Happy August. Happy August. A summer podcast from The New Yorker. A summer podcast from The New Yorker. You know, we have an August tradition on this pod, okay? We do things a little bit differently. It's the Critics at Large Summer Interview Series. Woo-hoo. Woo-hoo. Yeah. Okay, and what this gives us is the chance to bring some of our brilliant New Yorker colleagues into the fold, right?

2:55Yeah, in my experience, people kind of imagine us all kind of around a table or something talking to our New Yorker colleagues, and the truth is different. We see each other in passing, we trade compliments about pieces, but we don't often get to sit down and really kind of get into the brain of our colleagues. So honestly, it's kind of a selfish pleasure for us, and we hope it feels the same way for the audience. So over the next three weeks, we'll each be interviewing one of our dear colleagues, a guest critic, if you will. And this year, these conversations are all going to be focused around the idea of cult classics.

3:30You guys, why did this theme sound exciting to us? Can we take our listeners through it? Well, a cult classic by definition is something that a certain group of people are obsessed with, just really rabidly into. And so there's a built-in community of people who think that this is the greatest thing. And there's also the corresponding idea that it was something that was missed at the time. Maybe tons of people love it now, but they didn't then. So if you're one of the people who did love it, you have a little smug sense that you're one of the elect and you get it. so I think you know I was just really excited to find out what some of our colleagues loved in this category what they are the cognoscenti of yeah I think one of the things that is always sort of humming under our show but we never talk about it just straight on is just taste oh yeah how you get it where it comes from and so to be able to use this idea of the cult classic to inspect the tastes of people that we enjoy and who's writing we love I think it's hard to pass up on.

4:32Absolutely. And so, Alex, what are you going to be talking about? I will not spoil what it is here, but it takes place at a Shakespeare festival. Well, color me intrigued, Alex. As for myself, I'm going to be talking to my friend and colleague, Hannah Goldfield, who covers restaurants and food culture for The New Yorker, about what a cult classic looks like when it's in the world of food. Vincent, however, today you're up. And who are you talking with? Yeah, today I'm talking with our colleague, Hanif Abdur-Aqib. He is, in addition to being a very accomplished and talented poet, is, to my mind, one of the chief people working today about the intersection of personal life, the life of the emotions, and our engagements with art, you know, whether it's music or even basketball, he writes about very beautifully.

5:27So when I reached out to him to see what he might want to talk about as a cult classic. He mentioned an album that I knew about when I was a kid, Uptown Saturday Night. It's a 1997 album by this group, Camp Low, from the Bronx, Sonny Chiba and Geechee Suede. Uptown Saturday Night is this duo engaging in a kind of, it's almost a work of historical fiction. It's two rappers immersing themselves in the world of 70s blaxploitation. Capers, a kind of jolly criminality talking about diamond theft and pickpocketing, robbery in a way that's, I don't know, charming and fun and an example of how rap can have, you know, one foot in social facts but also another in a kind of imaginative role playing, a kind of time travel.

6:24So just to listen to Hanif talk about this album as one of his private obsessions. It's just a joy. So that's today on Critics at Large. Hanif Abdur-Aqib on Camp Lowe's Uptown Saturday Night.

6:44Hanif, thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate y 'all making the time. So part of the brief here is to talk about the cult classic. So before we get into the artifact that you chose, Campelo's Uptown Saturday Night, I would just love to hear you talk about the idea generally of cult classic. What does that criterion mean to you? What section of the brand does the cult classic live in and how do you know that something is in fact a cult classic? You know, I think I spend so much time immersed in a world of my own making where everything that I stumbled across that I did not know existed before automatically gets catapulted to this place of high reverence in my own kind of self-made world.

7:34I'm the youngest of four. I spent a lot of time alone when I was young. And this was at the dawn of, not the dawn of the internet, but the dawn of the internet as we have come to know it now. There was a lot of, particularly our music message boards, there was just a lot of information that one could consume, which intersected with the Napster peer-to-peer sharing era. I remember, for example, when I was just messing around on the internet and I found like Vashti Bunyan, you know what I mean? And I didn't know anyone who knew who she was. I didn't know anyone who listened to her. I didn't know, you know, my life has been kind of predicated on seeking out my own moments of self-discovery and revelation.

8:19And so I didn't have anything to kind of sharpen my own taste against. There are artists like I think Alice Coltrane, for example, who have what some would consider like a cult following. which in my mind simply means she is not as recognized as she should be in the mainstream ecosystem but there is an ecosystem beneath the mainstream where she is revered but like to me i didn't have access to that to either of those ecosystems to weigh someone like alex coltrane against the mainstream in the underground and so to me she was just like a goddess onto herself in the world i created so this is a long way of saying i maybe don't have a good grasp you know So when I got asked to do this, I was like, I hope I picked something that is actually considered a cult classic.

9:04So speaking of this sort of process of a kind of solitary discovery, tell me how you first happened upon Camp Lowe's Uptown Saturday Night. Yeah, you know, this is interesting because a benefit and a detriment to not having that kind of sharpening is that every now and then something comes along and you think it's singular. And then you step outside of that self-made world and everyone else is like, what the hell is, you know, in Camp Lowe's Uptown Saturday Night was one of those things for me. because I had older siblings who, two of whom were in college during a golden age of college radio in the 90s.

9:47And so they were bringing all kinds of stuff into the house. Campo's Up Till Saturday Night's an interesting record because my brother got the album on his set and I remember him being almost instantly lukewarm about it. Lucchini was big. That single had been big that summer. Huge song. Huge song. That song's incredible, right? But I think in that era of rap, many people were like, I love this song. Hopefully the whole album isn't like this. And it is.

10:31So why is that? Is it like the sort of bright horns? Is it the sort of the relative kind of upbeat nature of it? What is it that people wanted, but only in this one dose? Well, I think it's a perfect single because it's playing on this kind of blaxploitation era nostalgia, both sonically and just like aesthetically, narratively. and I think for I can't really speak for my oldest brother but the vibe I got was in a small dose this works in a large dose this becomes a bit cartoonish you know fair that wasn't the case for me I loved it I thought it was transportative I thought it was brilliant and smart I thought it was funny at times that the cover of the album is paying homage to the Sugar Shack that Ernie Barnes painting that was also featured on the sitcom Good Times you know on my Marvin Gaye record.

11:28Yeah, yeah. I Want You. Uptown Saturday Night came out in January of 97. I remember bundling up and walking the streets of my block, listening to Campos Uptown Saturday Night and feeling transported and feeling like this is a smart record. And then I remember reading the reviews when it came, when the reviews hit particularly in a source. And, you know, shout out to him. He's a legend. But I remember Elliot Wilson had a lukewarm review of the record where he was like, these guys aren't talking about anything. They sound kind of foolish. I remember being so offended by that. You know, as a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, I remember being so offended by that.

12:11Yeah. So how much of the sort of the identity of the group were you aware of? Just to sort of lay it out for the listeners. As we mentioned, the album comes out January 97. You know, it's these guys, Sonny Chiba, Geechee Suede. Their real names are Salah Hedin Wilds and Salah Dean Wallace, produced mostly by the producer Ski, who worked famously with Jay-Z around the same era. the record even from the title of the record on down Uptown Saturday Night a reference to a kind of comedy crime thriller a callback to the blaxploitation era if you listen to the record they're talking about a lot of recognizable figures in that kind of mythology Iceberg Slim the famous sort of almost tall tale pimp stuff like that is the references go back to that time but also the soundscape at a time when hip-hop is still it seems to me clarifying its relationships to its antecedents right so part of it is like hey we still yeah it's the 90s but we grew up with funk music yeah and and a certain relationship to horn lines and so on some level it's it's kind of I don't know, myth-making, storytelling.

13:33But on the other hand, it's saying, well, I genuinely love these sounds and I want them to be part of the texture of this music that is still kind of emerging. Absolutely. Here's the thing. I think that 1997, particularly early 97, was such an interesting time for rap music because it was, you know, Camp Lowe's Uptown Saturday Night came out after the murder of Tupac, but before the murder of Biggie, right? And so there was this high tension that was being reflected in the music. And there was this, of course, not only a coastal divide, but a sense of rage undergirding a lot of this music, particularly in the mainstream.

14:19A sense of needing to be aggressively authentic in a way that tied to one's geography. you know like I'm 10 toes down I'm digging into this this particular type of New York rap in 1996 was also I think one of the great years for rap albums in history a heyday of the hip hop group this is another thing truly and for me it was Fuji's the score was my bible but Mobb Deep Camp Lo I mean Tribe Called Quest the idea of hip hop as a collective art that happened within the context of a group was at its high point at this point as well Yeah. And so by the time I got into Uptown Saturday Night, it was such a divorce from what I had been listening to.

15:06In some ways, not a big divorce from the score, which is also a heavy narrative based thing. But it was a divorce because it's this kind of 70s. It's almost like they are mapping the aesthetics of the 70s on to present day New York. And so these two guys are like aliens in another place. You know, it's like they're like aliens dropped into a present. And they're still very strictly embedded in the aesthetics and cultural language and survival tools of 1970s New York. Even at that early age, I was very clear in understanding they are building a world that is not the actual world. And they are characters in that world.

15:51So it actually doesn't matter who they are or, you know, in the context of this record. It doesn't matter who they are or what their families are. The sociological facts of their lives and all this stuff doesn't matter.

16:06When we're back, we're digging into the album itself. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

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18:16Let's get really granular. Which songs were especially important to your growing into this album? The songs that really pulled me in. I actually didn't love Luchini. Luchini, it was kind of everywhere. And it was a hit, but I didn't love it. I love Sparkle. and I love there's a stretch on on Uptown Saturday night where you go from like Sparkle to Negro League so I think that's like track five to ten and I lived there I really lived in those five songs those to me you know Sparkle on its own is good and on that album there's a mix there's a Mr. Midnight mix of Sparkle it's the very last song and it's so hypnotic and haunting yes let's play the openings to some of these songs you want to hear which version of sparkle do you want to hear oh the mix the remix for sure the mix uh very last track on the album uh sparkle mr midnight mix diamond running strangers in paradise hobo flash sugarcane alley scarce low and parade with the black space kovar c8 spilling on the rocks intoxicating the setting doors for this probably don't stop to the midnight this glass got me right only left low light and drowned in

19:44The language of Camp Lowe, which I think is an important part of this whole thing. Yeah. You know, because we talk about the sound or we can talk about the production or the world building that they were doing. but the actual material language sounded as though it was being pulled from an ancient dictionary for me yeah i was like i think i know what these words mean but i maybe don't know what they mean pressed up against each other you know so i mean to use the technical term that they're doing a lot of talking their shit on this yeah on this right yeah and it's like i don't know diamante i mean sounds like diamond i don't know what it means there i know exactly what you mean that bar for bar.

20:22There's a lot of study to do. Well, yeah. I mean, you look at that first Sonny Chiba verse where it's like Diamond Runner, Strangers of Paradise, Sugarcane, Ali Skatz, Low End Parade with the Black Spades. You know, it's almost as though he's simply described. It's very actually I don't always like rap jazz comparisons because I don't. They're often sonic, but from a linguistic standpoint, I tend think that sunny chiba is almost often not always but often borrowing from like the language of duke ellington standards you know this not just rhythmically but from a standpoint of image you know the satin doll kvasia spinning on the spilling on the rocks these kind of things so they're not only uh pulling from c70s references which are already like steeped in their midnight express you know they're referencing that that movie from 78 these kind of things but um from a language standpoint i remember at age 13 which i was when this album came out not actually caring as much what they were saying on a beat by beat language level but really enjoying how it was said sunny cheapa is such an interesting rapper because um there are points on this record where he goes some stretches without rhyming in a traditional sense, right?

21:49But he can make you feel, he always makes you feel like he's rhyming because there's either some complex internal rhyme happening or he's swinging up on the vowel sounds. So you heard it in that first verse, the Diamond Runner's verse, Ali Scats, where like the A's and Ali and Scats really have an upswing and Black Spades, the A has an upswing.

22:16spilling on the rocks of I. So on these vowel sounds, he's almost like taking you up a roller coaster. So it feels like everything is intertwined, even if he's not rhyming, doing these like N bar rhymes that people's ears are more trained to. This all brings to mind another big question, which is how at this time in your life were you developing your taste in rap itself, the art of rap? because it seems to me that, again, in the mid-90s, we've got this great upswing. The art form is on its way to sort of its eventual mainstream flowering. And one of the things that is contested is what does it mean to be a good rapper?

22:58Is it about rhyme scheme? Is it about pocket? Is it about flow? Is it about subject matter? Of course, it's going to be a mix of all these things, but what matters most? For you, what was happening in your mind about what makes rap good? Yeah, you know, I was one of those people who admired technical skill. I loved Big Daddy K and I loved G Rap. Like, I liked a technically skilled rapper. However, my first favorite rapper was Slick Rick. And my second favorite rapper was like Biz Marquis. Great, just great voices. Great voices who, in some ways, did not mind sacrificing a bit of technical skill for the sake of narrative world building.

23:42You know? And so Camp Lowe was kind of perfect for me because I do think they're technically skilled. I actually think Sonny Chiba's far more technically skilled than the reviews gave him credit for. but if they could sacrifice technical skill for the sake of telling a story saniciba specifically would do that even if the language wasn't as clear he was interested in kind of building a world where that language would make sense to you yeah let's keep let's stay in that middle of the album that you said was so important to you which what's uh what's another um we got sparkle we got black connection we got swing yeah i feel like study chiba's verse on black connection is very memorable to me that second verse because i think he has two different verses but the second verse on black connection is so memorable is that about like a minute in or something like that yeah probably like 40 seconds 40 seconds in black connection

25:12I love Black Connection because it's referencing a film from the 70s, unsurprisingly, about like, I don't know if, have you ever seen The Black Connection? No, I have not. It's like a very, it's about this drug dealer who gets in, who kind of, there's a drug deal gone wrong in Vegas and the Italian mob gets after him. And so it's just about him, you know, attempting to outwit and escape the Italian mob while holding on to his riches. You know what I mean? Like while trying, it's so much about Black Connection in the song is almost the two of them mirroring this and saying, you know, we've copped these diamonds and we have to make our way to safety.

26:02We have to make our way to prosperity and keep moving. Like so much of what I love about Camp Lowe in Uptown Saturday Night is that really, if we do like a wide angle lens of the record, it's essentially a heist film. You know what I mean? Were you a fan of that cinema? The heist film, the blackploitation film, the mob film. Was that a part of your consciousness before you heard this record? Oh, yeah. Okay. I loved, you know, we didn't have cable often in my house growing up. Yeah. So we only had the basic channels. And one of those channels was like a weird black public access channel. And on Sundays and sometimes Saturday nights, they would show black exploitation films from the 70s.

26:50So like, you know, I knew who Pam Grier was when I was like 10, you know, because all those Pam Grier films. That's a coming of age, geez. A true coming of age. And like Richard Roundtree. And, you know, so I loved all those films. And I understood as I got older, I was like, okay, these are a little ridiculous. and in some ways maybe harmful from a stereotypical standpoint, but I also just loved the idea of the black antihero in a way. The regular black antihero, not like a superhero set down from somewhere else, just a person who has done some level of wrong trying to make the world right. Yeah.

27:35Yeah. And did that narrative or did part of the power of that narrative over you have anything to do with like, did you see that archetype in your real life? Did it pluck some chord of feeling in you that, was there some recognition there or was it purely escapism? them no no no yeah i grew up around i grew up around like real hustlers i grew up around hustlers who had a code in a way of life that i found in some ways admirable yeah there's for example when i was 12 or 13 years old there were some kids in my neighborhood young black kids who got beat up by the cops right they were stealing from the store um stole some candy bars at the store which all of us did and cops caught them and chased after them and because they ran the cops caught up to him and beat him, right?

28:23And when that story started to circulate around our neighborhood, there was this thing that happened where a lot of the hustlers post that incident would let the younger guys like me and my friends hold their gold chains while they played basketball. And if we did that, they would give us$10. And I realized now what they were doing was saying, we are going to give you money so that you don't have to steal, so that you never actually have to come in contact with the cops because you don't want the cops around and we don't want them around either. But that's also saying we're going to live by a code that protects this neighborhood.

28:55And I really loved what can't blow, particularly in Black Connection, because Black Connection is not this song about selfless means. They're talking about bringing people along with them. And so the hustle, if done well, if operated well with the code, is almost like a communal activity. It's not just a singular activity where one person benefits and no one else touches anything yeah i mean one of the things that that anecdote brings to mind too is like yes there's that moral edge but it's also the emphasis on the sensual on just things and their beauty like the gold chain in black connection you know in france i dance by the moon sailing from cancun that There's just this emphasis on images and feeling and the world of the senses.

29:47And for this reason, we've been talking about it a lot, but can we just listen to the beginning of Luchini real quick? Just to be like, damn, this sounds good. Yes. Yes.