Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage
When they weren’t shooting the shit between songs or screaming over records, overnight DJs for New York’s landmark rap station Hot 97 would find themselves with brief pockets of downtime. Isaac Freeman III, known to fans as Fatman Scoop, used these rare quiet moments to write, frequently calling DJ Riz, his partner in the rap duo Crooklyn Clan, to run through potential lyrics for their club anthems. Scoop was once a rapper, but the lines he’d workshop for Riz, on club classics like “Where U @?” and “Be Faithful,” weren’t exactly rap. They were closer to stage directions, the kind of guidance you might find if parties came with instruction manuals. It’s amusing to picture Scoop in pained concentration, scribbling rudimentary commands to women to put their hands up, to throw different denominations of legal tender in the air, to make noise or shut up.
For three decades, Fatman Scoop, who passed away on August 30 at the age of 56, was rap’s preeminent hype man. In a way that is true for few other recorded artists, his art didn’t thrive in his lyrical content — on his biggest hit, “Be Faithful,” his most memorable line is commanding “all the chickenheads, be quiet!” three times in a row — but the quality of his voice. Scoop didn’t invent this approach as much as he remixed it. “Hands Up,” his first collaboration with Crooklyn Clan, is a mix of popular instrumentals stitched together with Scoop’s battle-worn voice issuing the same proclamations DJs have been shouting at partygoers for generations. He wasn’t like Red Alert or Funkmaster Flex — radio DJs yelling over records live on the air (though he did that, too) — nor was he Ol Dirty Bastard, deliriously screaming over the intros, outros, and choruses of his own songs. Like DJ Kool before him, Scoop reclaimed and recontextualized existing songs with records built around his shouting.
A former member of the DJ collective the X-Men (now known as the X-Ecutioners), Scoop got his start doing promo for the label Tommy Boy, which he later parlayed into the job at Hot 97. As his own records blew up, the larger entertainment industry came calling. For a time in the 2000s he was in high demand, lending that voice and spontaneous kineticism to what might otherwise have been disposable pop standards from Timbaland (“Drop”), Janet Jackson (“So Excited (Remix)”), Missy (“Lose Control”; this wonderful video captures Scoop performing his up-close magic), and Mariah Carey (“It’s Like That”).
There’s a school of thought that hip-hop’s origins go back much further than its supposed 1973 birth, to Black southern DJs in the ’30s and ’40s who smuggled African oral traditions into their introductions to the Black pop of their day. They talked their shit with style, verve, and musicality. They rhymed, they spit, they yelled at their listeners. Fatman Scoop — who was born two years before Herc hosted his ‘73 Back to School Jam in the Bronx — descended from this tradition, transfusing recorded music with the spontaneous energy of the impromptu shows and parties that molded the early days of the genre. He soon became a tour guide, a cultural commentator, a Simon Says host. But above all, he was just a familiar type of New York character: a loud man who lights up any room he walks into, making strangers take shots at a cookout while charming everyone with his goofy, profane limericks. In his abrasive, gravel-filled uncle’s bark — one that sounded like every cigarette he ever smoked — he emanated an endearing knowability.
Fifty-three years does not make what many consider a full life, but in a tragic recurring narrative we’ve seen in hip-hop entirely too frequently, it was all that was afforded to a kid from Harlem whose artist name was inspired by his love of ice cream. And yet, there is an aspirational quality to the way Fatman Scoop passed on Friday night in Connecticut. He died doing what he lived for: shirtless on a stage in the tristate area, literally screaming his heart out at a crowd of revelers. In an epitaph a judicious editor would never print for its graceless obviousness, his final recorded words before collapsing were “Make some noise.”
