Almost three decades ago, Darrell “Artistic” Roberts decided he needed to document the history of Chicago hip-hop. He’d started breakdancing in 1982, and soon took up hip-hop’s other foundational elements: MCing, DJing, and graffiti writing. His love of graffiti blossomed in the mid- to late 80s, and at a citywide writers’ meeting in 1987, he met his future collaborator in this ambitious project, a graffiti artist named Fere (pronounced “fear”). By 1992, they’d both been involved in the local scene for about a decade, which made them veterans in a still-emerging movement. That year they sketched out an idea for a Chicago hip-hop history book.
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“He and I met, and just talked,” Brockmeier says. “We talked about him putting the book together and everything he still does with Chi-ROCK. Ever since then he’s been a good resource-slash-consultant for us as well.” Roberts and the Midway team have developed a mutually beneficial relationship: Roberts helps the documentary team recognize gaps in their research, and they let him watch interviews they’ve conducted.
WHPK helped Roberts get a grip on what hip-hop culture meant. It played underground national artists as well as demos from unsigned locals, which meant that the Egyptian Breakers, who’d started to rap under the name Curfew Boys in 1985, could bring their cassettes to the station and try to get them played on the air. WHPK also aired bulletins about hip-hop events, such as writers’ meetings and small shows at the nearby Blue Gargoyle.
Chicago Rocks didn’t enter a void. BboyB had cofounded FlyPaper a couple years earlier as The Rap Sheet. “We got a letter from the Rap Sheet out of LA saying, ‘You can’t use that name, we’re a hip-hop magazine,’” BboyB says. “We’re like, ‘Oh shit, this is a lawyer—we’ll leave that alone. Let’s come up with a new name.’ I think we came up with a better name.”
Chicago Rocks started as a bare-bones operation. After studying other magazines, Roberts and Fere laid out and assembled Chicago Rocks by hand—at first, they cut and pasted each page’s contents together. “We’re like, ‘OK, now how we gonna keep these things together?’” Roberts remembers. “We would look at magazines like, ‘Wait a minute, these got staples in them! How do you get them stapled?’ So we started taking staples and literally putting the staples in by hand—putting them through all the sheets of paper. After that we’d fold it, turn it over, and then fold the other side of the staple inward so it can contain all the pages. We were doing it all by hand until we actually got a stapler.”
