-- Joe D'Angelo, with additional reporting by Andrew Millard
By throwing back to rudimentary rhymes and basic beats, three young women calling themselves Northern State are out to show the time for retro hip-hop has arrived.
Hesta Prynn, Guinea Love and DJ Sprout pass the mic like fellow New Yorkers the Beasties Boys did in the '80s, rhyming atop beats that could be just as comfortable in that era. They balance tough, amusing talk with lofty harmonies akin to those on Luscious Jackson's 1994 debut, Natural Ingredients. While the flavor has been tasted before, by swapping contemporary hip-hop's fixation with bling and bang for a flow that's simply fun, Northern State serve it straight from a plate that critics are fervent to propagate.
"What we are trying to do is [say that] you can love hip-hop music and not hate how much you love it," said Julie Potash, a.k.a. Hesta Prynn. "In 1994 I was listening to a lot of hip-hop music and blasting it in my car, but I felt that I was doing something wrong because what the artists were saying was so offensive to me, so offensive to other women, and I didn't want to be paying money for it, because I felt I was really adding to the problem and not the solution."
With a few credible press clips under their belt, the underground Northern State broke the topsoil in July with a grade-A review of their self-released four-song EP, Hip Hop You Haven't Heard, in The Village Voice by respected critic Robert Christgau. The scribe followed his glowing local coverage with some national attention in the form of a four-star review in Rolling Stone, rare given the disc's size and scope of release.
From there, music industry buzzers buzzed fanatically, prompting a bidding war for the trio's debut full-length. (To stave off the hipster hoards, the eight-song Dying in Stereo was released this month.)
Not bad for a group of Long Islanders who take their name from a local parkway. In 2000, Potash, Correne Spero and Robyn Goodmark decided to write some rhymes after they graduated college and the foundations of Northern State were laid.
"We had this idea," Potash said. "We were all gonna get together on a Tuesday night and put our rhymes together and see if we can come up with a song. And we did it, and it was good."
They repeated the procedure every week, and after two months they had an arsenal of songs. The next step was to take their music to the people, which served to pull them back into the studio in a self-perpetuating process.
"It was like, 'OK, we have the elements to do this onstage live, but now we can add more things to them in the studio,' " explained Goodmark, a.k.a. DJ Sprout. "It's kind of this ever-growing process. The live show drives us to have a certain amount of musical things going on, and then we have the opportunity to do a recording and then we add more to it, and we bring those things to the live show. It feeds itself."
Though the women of Northern State started spitting rhymes for themselves, they're inspiring a new generation of B-girls to pick up the torch.
"The most exciting thing so far has been the response that we've gotten from the other women and girls and people out there who hear what we do and are like, 'Oh my God, this is such a good idea! You guys are speaking your minds and I'm so interested about what you have to say. It makes me wanna go home and write rhymes.' "
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