Though started on the East Coast, the Bay Area launched Freestyle’s commercial explosion and laid the foundation for contemporary EDM.
The July 25th Stevie B show at San Jose’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez has been one the fastest selling shows of Music in the Park’s 35 seasons. Mario Cruz of Latin Bay Area called it “the Bay Area’s Freestyle Show of the Year.”
This level of enthusiasm and the persistence of freestyle may be a bit mystifying to followers of other popular genres. Freestyle has historically been largely ignored by the mainstream music press and its critics.
All the while, this brand of Latin hip hop remained the underground soundtrack of backyard barbecues and dance clubs around the Bay Area, and in New York, Miami, Southern California and Texas—with no signs of abating four decades later.
It has even inspired a new generation of dance music artists. The Stevie B show bill features a deep bench of Bay Area DJs and artists: turntablist Cutso of the Bangerz, and freestyle hitmakers from the 1980s Jaya and Shannon.
Steven Bernard “Stevie B” Hill called from Miami and related how he put his genre-defining band together while living in the Bay Area and then went on to disrupt an industry and become freestyle’s top selling artist.
As the disco era sunsetted in the 1980s, Stevie and his contemporaries saw new electronic production tools as breakthrough technologies that enabled low-cost, high-impact production. “Electronic music started to come in because it could be done on a computer,” he said. “You didn’t need a band anymore. You don’t need a producer.”
His longtime drummer shares the band’s origin story. “Stevie did a show over at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds. This was back in December of ’87,” Donnie Macala remembers. “The show bombed,” Hill laughs. Macala remembers Hill walking around the Fairgrounds after his set and being introduced to freestyle producer Dadgel Atabay.
As Hill tells it, “I said, I’m looking for a keyboard player. You want to go on the road with me? This was three days before Christmas. They both came with me and have been with me now for almost 35 years.”
The team recorded in New York and the debut album came out in 1988. It featured three blockbusters, including “Party My Body” and “Spring Love,” two of the biggest hits of the freestyle era.
Between 1988 and 1991 Stevie B had seven singles that charted on the Billboard 100, including five in the top 40 and one that spent four weeks as the chart’s number one hit. That one, “Because I Love You (The Postman Song),” knocked Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” out of first position in December 1990 and blocked Madonna’s “Justify My Love” from reaching the top spot until January 1991.
The fusion of electro pop, hip hop and dance music ensconced itself as an underground counterculture when the previous alternative movements became dominant cultural forces. Freestyle emerged sometime after the late ’70s dance music heyday remembered for artists like Donna Summer and the Bee Gees, and movies like Saturday Night Fever.
It produced some chart topping hits and influenced contemporary culture until Seattle bands and their followers replaced gold chains and hair product with ripped jeans. Demographic bias marginalized LGBTQ dance culture and music deeply rooted in the culture of New York’s Puerto Rican, Dominican and Italian American communities, Miami’s Cuban American dance scene and California’s Latin American and Filipino American communities.
In Miami last month, a stage full of break dancers, spinning on their heads, was on full display at the Dolphin Mall’s Vivo venue. Band after band and deejay after deejay took the stage before headliner Stevie B, who carried the vocal duties with the help of a backing track due to losing his voice earlier in the evening.
During an interview over lunch in Miami last month, Hill explained that the electronic dance music of the late 1980s emerged from Latin hip hop. “It wasn’t called freestyle. We came off of Planet Rock.
We took that beat. But it wasn’t the freestyle beat. It was called Latin hip hop. We were closer to Al Naafiysh, disco. And we made disco a little bit more driving.
“So we’re the ones that really put the death nail into disco. That was us. Because everything has a transition period and it was pretty much done. Our problem is we jumped on the rock and roll boys and that’s why Sleeping Bag Records and all those little independents start to catch on fire. Electronic music started to come in because music can be done on a computer.”
Stevie says that the new beat caught on first on the East Coast. “Miami, New York. Then it started taking off in Texas. We call it ‘the smile.’ Go to New York. Florida took it all the way around the panhandle, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. And it went out to Cali.”
Today, he’s known as “The King of Freestyle” and the movement’s most successful artist. Stevie B spent much of his youth navigating the hardscrabble neighborhoods of South Florida, before heading to Tallahassee for college on a tennis scholarship. “I came back to Miami, started my studio.” California became his next home, where he developed his “love affair” with the Bay Area. “That was before Silicon Valley,” he says.
Notes: Dan Pulcrano is a former partner in SF Station and produces the Music in the Park series.
Stevie B plays on Friday, July 25 at San Jose’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez. Jaya, Shannon, and Cutso support.
Tickets for the show are available at CalTix.com