PITTSBURGH — Monie Love grew up 3,500 miles from the center of hip-hop, but the message the South Bronx was putting out reached her as a 12-year-old kid in London.
It didn’t come via the Sugarhill Gang or Kurtis Blow or any of the seminal rappers. It came from an unlikely source — Malcolm McLaren, the British rock impresario who managed The Sex Pistols.
“The kids in London got hip-hop by way of movement,” says Love, who will headline The Legacy of Women in Hip Hop, a concert and panel discussion that is part of the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival on Friday.
“What exploded upon us, before the actual music, was the b-boy movement and the graffiti movement. My friends and I, everybody was a b-boy or a b-girl and what was crazy is that we got it by way of Malcolm McLaren, who did a song called ‘Buffalo Gals,’ and we saw a lot of the movement in that video, a lot of breakers and things like that.”
McLaren’s 1982 British novelty hit, inspired by a visit to a Bronx block party, was a joyful demonstration of the four elements of hip-hop culture: graffiti art, turntable scratching, rapping and, of course, breakdancing, from Rock Steady Crew. Weirdly enough, it was mostly composed by Trevor Horn, the producer and singer-bassist whose resume includes The Buggles, Art of Noise and Yes.
“Buffalo Gals” became her gateway to Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and other revolutionary things happening across the pond.
“We definitely was playing catch-up with what was going on in the United States,” she says, “because by the time all those things came to us, hip-hop was already 10 years old.”
What really inspired young Simone Johnson (her real name) and changed her life was seeing “Beat Street,” a 1984 film set in the South Bronx that showcased the pioneers of hip-hop.
“There's a scene where the first official female MC, Sha-Rock, is rapping with Debbie D and Lisa Lee — they call themselves in the movie the Us Girls,” she says. “They did a whole number, and thank goodness, because seeing that allowed me to feel, um, unafraid, to enter that realm. And then with people as fierce as Roxanne Shantee coming out and really taking a stick and poking the bear as far as men are concerned, that definitely put the battery in my back to have no fear to be fearless.”
Inspiration alone won’t get you anywhere. Fortunately, Love had the looks and word skills to put into play.
“I was a poetry fanatic in school,” she says. “I went to Catholic school in England and I just excelled, especially in English lit, poetry, comprehension. So my love for words, my understanding of the English language, my sheer joy of using words — I'm very wordy — those things certainly helped.”
She released her first single, with friends, under the banner of Jus Bad Productions in 1988 and had her first UK hit with “Freestyle” in early 1989. Over the next year she would hook up with the Jungle Brothers, the Native Tongues Posse, Afrika Baby Bam (who would produce her debut album) and Andy Cox and David Steele of Fine Young Cannibals, who produced her 1990 Grammy-nominated single “Monie In The Middle,” a sassy take on grade-school crushes.
During this stretch, she relocated to Brooklyn, home to her paternal Jamaican grandparents, to work for her American label Warner Bros., where she released two albums: 1990’s “Down to Earth” and 1993’s “In a Word or 2.” The debut featured her one Top 40 hit, the also-Grammy nominated “It's a Shame (My Sister).”
On the side, she appeared on a 1989 remix of the Fine Young Cannibals hit “She Drives Me Crazy” and on the LA Reid & Babyface remix of Whitney Houston's “My Name Is Not Susan." She also became acquainted with a certain WB labelmate — Prince — who produced her single “Born To B.R.E.E.D.” and recruited her to write lyrics for Carmen Electra's debut.
How was the Purple One to work with?
“Extremely professional,” she says. “There's no way you could leave the room with Prince and not learn anything — I mean, once I got past being intimidated because of who he was, like, ‘Oh my God, it's Prince!’
“I'm sitting in the room with him and all his famous guitars are all on stands and he was like, ‘You can pick one up and touch it.’ And I'm like, ‘No, I'm not picking that up. I'm not touching that. What if it falls?’ He was very reassuring, very calming, like, ‘Look, we're in a studio, those are instruments. Pick it up. Do you play? Let me show you a few things.’”
That friendship led to one of the most intense put-up-or-shut-up experiences of her life. While they were working on Elektra’s album in 1992, Prince flew the whole entourage to England for his shows at Earls Court. They would do studio sessions after the shows. One night she was standing in the wings with her baby daughter.
“And in the middle of ‘Sexy Mother---,’ there's a breakdown,” she says. “He comes over and he's like, ‘Go do 16 bars!’ I’m like, ‘What? I'm not prepared! Nobody told me I had to go on stage today!’ It scared the crap out of me.
“But the craziest thing happened” — other than Prince holding the baby — “and that's how I knew I was in the presence of greatness, that he had that much faith in me. When I got out to the stage, I totally blacked out, I blacked out from my conscious self and my mouth just started moving and it just started coming out. And before I knew it, 16 bars was over, and I walked to the side of the stage and he handed me my daughter back and took the mic from me and ran back out on stage. And after I got off the stage I was like, ‘I need to go to the toilet, because I feel like I [bleeped myself.’”
That same year, Love’s career spun off in a new direction when she got a call from legendary radio programmer Steve Smith, who launched the first 24-hour hip-hop station, New York’s Hot 97. She went down with her manager to the station, where Smith asked her if she’d ever thought about being on radio.
“I said ‘I’ve been on radio, such and such has interviewed me.’ He's like, ‘No, have you thought of being on radio as an actual job, a personality yourself?’ And I was like, ‘No, why would I think about that?’ He said, ‘I think you'd be great.’ I said, ‘I don't know anything about radio.’ He said, ‘I'll teach you.’ And his vision turned out to be right. It turned out to be something that I actually love. I love to connect with people through music.”
She’s been a jock ever since — in Philadelphia, Houston, on XM Satellite Radio and now on Atlanta’s KISS 104.1.
The 52-year-old Love still performs and drops singles, most recently the soulful, exotic “1NE People,” with Nana Fofie.
“I’m very energized by hip-hop right now,” she says. “It's grown into a thing where it has all kinds of factions coming from it, and I think it's like a beautiful forest that has spread. Now, within the forest, there are things that can threaten the forest. You know what I mean? Like, this person doesn't like girls that don't dress in full clothing. This person doesn't like all the thuggery. There's always gonna be something within it that somebody somewhere out there does not like.
“But what I see is the fact that it's still here, because I come from a time where it was looked at as ‘Oh, this is a fad. It won't be here long.’ And now here we are sitting here having a conversation during hip-hop’s 50th year anniversary. So, for me, I'm happy to just have seen the growth period.”
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The event, presented by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and The Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University, begins at 8 p.m Friday at Trust Arts Education Center, downtown Pittsburgh. Tickets are $20; trustarts.org.
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