When the Going gets Tuff… Hip-Hop, Funk & Soul by Tuff City Records

To say the history of Tuff City goes way back is an understatement. The label started out in 1981 when founder Aaron Fuchs decided to quit his work as a music critic for publications including Rolling Stone, Village Voice & Cashbox to pursue his new label fully dedicated to hip-hop. He was right there, at the rise of the culture from the boroughs of New York to the rest of the world. As the story goes, Fuchs was even the person who handed Marley Marl a copy of the Impeach The President b/w Roy C’s Theme Song 45, a break that changed the face of hip-hop production: using a Roland TR-808 and Korg SDD-2000, Marley Marl chopped up the funk breakbeat into a new pattern whilst staying true to the original groove. The rest is history…

No wonder Fuchs once described the early days of drum machines as a time when “a thousand flowers bloomed.” “I made that remark because prior to the drum machine, DJs were working off of a finite body of records that they were using to sample.,” Fuchs now tells Tracklib. “Unless you were a Zulu, the body of music you were working off were the first six to ten volumes of the Ultimate Beats and Breaks albums. When the drum machines came around, they offered a lot more opportunities to express individuality. Machines like the LinnDrum LM-2, the Oberheim DMX, and the Roland TR-808 each had a different sound; a different texture that offered a different personality for the beatmakers. Within the rhythmic patterns, these machines offered the DJs an almost ethnic personality.”

Tuff City’s roster features music by early hip-hop heavyweights like The 45 King, The Cold Crush Brothers, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizard Theodore, their own breakbeat-digging production team Tuff City Squad (Sha Harry, The 45 King, and graffiti writer and the man behind many Tuff City sleeves, Joey "Serve" Vega), and New York lyricists like Lakim Shabazz, Knowledge, and The Flavor Unit’s Apache. “Grandmaster Caz is my favorite Tuff City rapper because his skill set meets the most classic standards of poetry and literacy,” adds Fuchs.

As said, Tuff City’s history goes way back. Another Tuff City gem on Tracklib to illustrate this: Fuchs shared a record with the original James Brown-produced “Unwind Yourself” to The 45 King, which led to his iconic 1988 breakbeat track—and soundtrack to Ed Lover’s infamous Yo! MTV Raps dance—"The 900 Number" (as sampled by Public Enemy, DJ Kool, Breakestra, among others). In a 2015 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Fuchs reveals “Beat Suite” was its precursor. “It started out as something called 'Beat Suite,' he told Rob ‘Unkut’ Ettelson, “the fourth movement of a four-beat concerto, and slowly but surely a couple of versions later it became ‘The 900 Number.’”

Or take that classic photo of the Tuff City wholetrain in New York by Skeme & Phase2 (RIP): "I have been asked on more than one occasion; 'Aaron, did you take the name of your company from the Tuff City inscription on the train?' To which I’ve had to tell people 'Are you kidding? I was the one who commissioned the hit on the train to promote the creation of my label!"

From the mid-90s onwards, Tuff City branched out to R&B, soul, and funk. From reissues to should-have-been-classic records with sublabel Funky Delicacies. All the way to The Honey Drippers’ Roy C Hammond—where it all started way back when: amidst hip-hop’s early days, building Tuff City one beat and break at a time.