the bank

Look at the picture above. Now imagine it at night time, with spotlights aimed straight up the walls and burly bouncers dressed in black, three or four of them out front behind velvet ropes controlling the influx to the club. You walk inside through a small dark entrance, where stands another bouncer taking your tickets. Muffled music pounds from inside. The door opens to the main floor and you are ushered into a room with cathedral ceilings and twirling lights and loud music and teeming bodies. A balcony runs around the entire upstairs and people are above looking down at you. Groups of people stand on the side by the bar, sipping on drinks, gulping water, waiting to hear the right song to get back onto the floor and dance again. That is The Bank.

I was supposed to meet Shannon Henry there. She is the manager and owner. We had no preset meeting time, no preset meeting place. I was just going to find her. It didn't take me as long as I expected. Through a door in the back of the main floor, up a winding staircase that opens to a hall that leads to the balcony, a little side room with a bar sits apart. It is more subdued in there, some leather couches to crash on, music a little muffled again, people sitting down. Shannon is at the bar. I introduce myself. She ushers me down to her office (back down the staircase, through the thumping dance floor), and leads me into a small, somewhat cluttered room. She sits. "So, what do you want to know?"

Shannon Henry used to work in advertising in New York City before moving down to Washington, D.C. She and her boyfriend wanted to do something different with their lives and decided to open a dance club. They wanted something similar to the clubs they had gone to in New York, but not completely the same. Thus, the birth of The Bank.

She felt all the clubs in New York were the same inside. "It was either raves, or older people," Shannon explained, "Here we wanted something everyone could go to." The club fulfills that one simple requirement. Diversity. Diversity. Diversity. Their schedule (Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Monday nights) promotes deep house, hip hop, acid jazz, funk, progressive, techno, latino and underground music. They have just recently added "Home Cookin'," a showcase every Thursday night for local talent.

She is proud of the different people her club draws, and the good turnouts that prove she is doing what people want. However, she doesn't take all the credit. People come to have a good time, and they come for the freedom of dancing, but "they come for the DJs" Shannon emphasizes. The dancers know which DJs they like and come out of loyalty to the music they play so well.

Which leads us back across the main floor, down the winding stairs this time, through a narrow brick passageway, and coming out in the hip hop room, a shadowy subterranean room with loud bass and a thick atmosphere. Random couches are placed at one end, and the night is still young, so some people loll around this area, not yet dancing. I venture into a back room off of the DJ booth to meet the people who will tell me what I want to know about hip hop in DC. This is where I met Kadeem, or "DJ Taek-One." He has been listening to hip hop since he was a kid, growing up with Run DMC, The Source and Kurtis Blow. He views DJing as an art form. It requires a balance and discipline on his part. He has to play crowd pleasers (songs everyone knows and likes) and at the same time he wants to play songs he likes and thinks expands and defines the realm of hip hop that might not yet have made it out of the underground scene. Trying to walk that tightrope is harder than it might sound.

He tries to mix both desires, letting the music flow from hard beats to jazzy songs to r+b and back. Depending on how the dance floor reacts, he gets an idea of what style he should keep playing. Nonetheless, he doesn't stick to one style. He believes in variety, shifting the grooves around to give an assortment of beats to dance to. Sometimes he even tries to relate the songs he plays, say going from a song about Queens to a song by a group from Queens, attempting to show continuity in the music. (Kadeem gave me a much better example, but I failed to write it down.)

Kadeem prefers New York City music to the west coast style, feeling the east coast is "more jazz influenced," giving the tunes a more fluid groove to dance to and mix with. He does dig two west coast bands out of L.A. however, Defari and the Alcoholiks. He tries to incorporate local artists into his play list, but feels the hip hop scene in DC still has to grow more. Encouragement from the local community is needed to help these young artists get recognized and gain the experience they need. But the DC dance scene is more attuned to go-go, Kadeem feels, with syncopated beats the norm for most dance clubs.

For his part, Kadeem is trying to get things started with his own production company, ILL CON PRO., a venture he runs with a few other local DJs. But he admits the production capabilities are inherently better in New York City since the scene is much larger and more accepted there. He tells me the potential is here in DC for a good hip hop scene, it just needs to be accessed and promoted.

Kadeem works with Chris ("DJ Kong"), a freelance DJ who has done shows at clubs, radio stations, and even private parties. Chris has his own view on the art of mixing the tunes, which sometimes contradicts those of Kadeem. He plays a few different tracks, finds a beat, and then sticks with it the whole night, not changing the tempo at all. Sometimes he will go out and dance with the crowd to try and attain a feel for the mood.

His background, according to him, is "oldies but goodies," more of an r+b funk flavor, including Stevie Wonder and PFunk. He wants every beat to be felt, every part of the music he plays to get inside of you. He also tends toward east coast music, but will play "anything good," no matter where from. He thinks hip hop is on the rise, that it has been underground so long and has become its own genre of music, that from this solid base it is beginning to seep up into more popular and mainstream music.

The impression I got from everyone I talked to at The Bank was one of the need for originality in the music. "Anyone can get up on stage and play someone else's music, " I heard from Kadeem and Chris both, referring to the recent surge in sampling. What they want to hear is someone doing their own thing, expressing who they are, not who someone else was. Kenya, a manager/DJ/player (I never quite figured out what exactly he was) on the hip hop scene, says he has his rappers get on stage, and then improvise while he throws varying music and beats at them. He wants them to feel the tune and go with it, freestyling over the music. Expressing.

Expression is the base of any form of music, and it pervades hip hop. The music represents the life the artists live, and the DJs enjoying playing the music for its simplicity, and the feeling it provides when you dance to it. Dancing to the music is an individual expression also. I ventured back out into the basement room after meeting with Kadeem, Chris, Kenya and Dwight. The floor was busy now. I witnessed people barely moving, to arm waving dancers, all grooving to the same song. What the beat means to you, does to you, is what music is about.

The music is open to re-mixing and being manipulated, giving the DJs at The Bank freedom to create something new every night, even with the same music. They keep a tape recording the whole night, capturing nights that they feel are on, and giving them opportunities to listen to their mistakes, and what they could do better next time. The setup in the booth consists of an equalizer and two turntables. Boxes and stacks of records take up most of the other available space in the room. (Kadeem himself has a staggering amount of records at his home and brings in up to 300 every time he DJs.) Keeping both platters full, the DJ will go from one song to another fluidly. Underneath the actual level where the record sits are up to four revolving levels. Depending on which level they put their finger on, they can slow the music at varying speeds. Keeping a set of earphones on all night, DJ Statik (Chuck), leaves one earpiece on and the other around the back of his head, the standard pose anyone who watches MTV will know. This allows him to hear the beats, both straight from the record, and the music coming out through the speakers, enabling the transition from one song to another to sound good.

During my stint in the back room, Chris, Kenya, Dwight and I discuss who the national leaders of hip hop are. The names include Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, KRS-One, the Wu Tang Clan, and A Tribe Called Quest. Though I feel Tupac isn't the best example of hip hop, their reasoning is that he has helped popularize the music and take it in different directions. He includes a good amount of sampling but tries to not let it overtake his music. And not all of his music contains sampling. It just happens to be something to do right now. Thus, the conversation comes around again to originality and the need for creation and expression, not the redoing of old grooves.

At the end of the night, I make my way up the staircase, out of the basement, back across the main floor, and out onto the street into a crowd waiting to get in. And dance. And express.

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