Rap Music

Rap Music

Roughly fifteen years ago, the initial rumblings of rap music were eminating from the streets of New York City. Rap music is very much a product of its urbanized, literacy-based environment, as can be seen in the advanced technology necessary to produce the music. Although the connection between rap music and its modern roots is impossible to ignore, rap's dependence upon high technology is often over-emphasized, eclipsing any opportunity to connect rap culture to a time before the world of turntables and written lyrics. Hip-hop music maintains distinct oral influences, carrying traces of an oral tradition preceding the advanced, literacy-based era from which the music emerged. The world of literate technology that gave birth to rap music represents a threat to the maintenance of these traces, making them increasingly difficult to discern.

The use of rhythm and repetition are highly characteristic of the semiotic, sound-based exchanges within a purely oral culture. Tricia Rose writes of the importance of rhythm in modern black tradition:

Rap's primary force is sonic, and the distinctive,

systematic use of rhythm and sound, especially the

use of repetition and musical breaks, are part of a

rich history of New World black traditions and

practices. (Rose 64)

Rap's distinct sound has been repeatedly likened to tribal African music, linking rap's use of heavy percussion, bass, repeated loops, and short, staccato vocals to the instruments and chanting used in the pre-literate tribes. But this common comparison almost always refers strictly to musical composition, not the presence of orality. Rap artists, when producing lyrics to be reco...

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...t that hip-hop is not about one artist sitting at a desk composing lyrics, or a couple of producers sitting in studio chairs putting a loop together. Rap is about the resonation of an overall sound--a sound that conveys the texture of the black, urban life that creates it. Hip-hop thrives in its tradition and cu lture through its sonic expression, and the creation of the sound is not necessa rily dependent upon the postliterate concept of the "word." Rap has existed and will always exist in a postliterate world, but making connections outside of ra p's technological realm allows us to reveal the music as more than just a by-pro duct of the environment from whence it came.

Bibliography:

SOURCES CITED

1) Rose, Tricia. Black Noise; Wesleyan University Press; Hanover, NH; 1994 .

2) Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy; Methuen; New York; 1982.