The History of Rap Music
Rap music originated as a cross-cultural product. Most of its important early practitioners-including Kool
Herc, D.J. Hollywood, and Afrika Bambaataa-were either first- or second-generation Americans of
Caribbean ancestry. Herc and Hollywood are both credited with introducing the Jamaican style of cutting
and mixing into the musical culture of the South Bronx. By most accounts Herc was the first DJ to buy two
copies of the same record for just a 15-second break (rhythmic instrumental segment) in the middle. By
mixing back and forth between the two copies he was able to double, triple, or indefinitely extend the
break. In so doing, Herc effectively deconstructed and reconstructed so-called found sound, using the
turntable as a musical instrument.
While he was cutting with two turntables, Herc would also perform with the microphone in Jamaican
toasting style-joking, boasting, and using myriad in-group references. Herc's musical parties eventually
gained notoriety and were often documented on cassette tapes that were recorded with the relatively new
boombox, or blaster, technology. Taped duplicates of these parties rapidly made their way through the
Bronx, Brooklyn, and uptown Manhattan, spawning a number of similar DJ acts. Among the new breed of
DJs was Afrika Bambaataa, the first important Black Muslim in rap. (The Muslim presence would become
very influential in the late 1980s.) Bambaataa often engaged in sound-system battles with Herc, similar to
the so-called cutting contests in jazz a generation earlier. The sound system competitions were held at
city parks, where hot-wired street lamps supplied electricity, or at local clubs. Bambaataa sometimes
mixed sounds from rock-music recordings and television shows into the standard funk and disco fare that
Herc and most of his followers relied upon. By using rock records, Bambaataa extended rap beyond the
immediate reference points of contemporary black youth culture. By the 1990s any sound source was
considered fair game and rap artists borrowed sounds from such disparate sources as Israeli folk music,
bebop jazz records, and television news broadcasts.
In 1976 Grandmaster Flash introduced the technique In 1979 the first two rap records appeared: "King
Tim III (Personality Jock)," recorded by the Fatback Band, and "Rapper's Delight," by Sugarhill Gang. A
series of verses recited by the three members of Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight" became a national
hit, reaching number 36 on the Billboard magazine popular music charts. The spoken content, mostly
braggadocio spiced with fantasy, was derived largely from a pool of material used by most of the earlier
rappers. The backing track for "Rapper's Delight" was supplied by hired studio musicians, who replicated
African-American music is a vibrant art form that describes the difficult lives of African American people. This can be proven by examining slave music, which shows its listeners how the slaves felt when they were working, and gives us insight into the problems of slavery; the blues, which expresses the significant connection with American history, discusses what the American spirit looks like and teaches a great deal from the stories it tells; and hip-hop, which started on the streets and includes topics such as misogyny, sex, and black-on-black violence to reveal the reactions to the circumstances faced by modern African Americans.
This is shown in the single ‘Rock Hard’ which combined rock and hip hop. This was shown even more so in the album ‘Licensed to Ill’ by the Beastie Boys. Def Jam also created hybrids of heavy metal and hip hop which was another method of enticing a young audience.
the voice was used as the main source of an instrument for both rap and chant.
Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc, Herbie Hancock, and John Cage are a few of the most influential people of hip-hop culture. Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa are one of the first artists to make music in relation to hip-hop culture. A...
Hip-hop started out in the Bronx in New York City with DJ Clive “Cool Herc” Campbell. A man of Jamaica, he essentially birthed the new genre of music by carrying over the Jamaican tradition of Toasting, which “is boastful poetry or over a melody provided by a deejay.” (ROOTS ‘n’ RAP, rice.edu) Its creation can be accredited to the record spinning DJ’s of the clubs of the 1970s. From this, the Master of Ceremonies (MC) was created. He would come up with creative rhymed phrases that could be delivered over a beat or acapella at dance clubs. They consisted of boasts, insults, “uptown throw downs”, and political commentary. From there, hip-hop only grew more and more popular. Being that it was created in a dominantly African American neighborhood, it became a tool for blacks to express their problems with society and be heard by the rest of the country. Though it was a microphone for African Americans to express themselves to the rest of the country, there were some other things that happened within the black community through hip-hop as well. One of these things was a diss track.
Rap music became popularized in Atlanta and the rest of the South in the early to mid-1980s. The first rap to come out of the city of Atlanta was uptempo party music with heavy bass and very obvious Florida influence. Hits like “Whoomp! (There It Is)” by Tag Team, and “Jump” by Kriss Kross defined the pre-Outkast era of Atlanta hip-hop. While these songs were immensely popular (“Whoomp!” is ranked by Billboard as one of the greatest songs of all time (“Greatest of All Time”) while “Jump” was one of the top 3 selling songs of 1992 (“Week Ending May”), groups from the city, for the most part, were commonly seen as “novelty” and “kiddie crews” (“Kriss Kross: Da Bomb”). While the emergence of relatively simple but enjoyable music was going on in Atlanta, rap as a whole began to truly explode. The newest major music genre entered its golden era; “Ready to Die” by Biggie Smalls, “Illmatic” by Nas, and “Me Against The World” by 2Pac were all albums that were rated “five mics” by The Source (“5 Mics?”) The “five mic” rating from The Source indicated an exceptional and rare hip-hop album. In this time of growth in hip-hop culture Atlanta, and the South as a whole was in large part left out. People were enthralled by cross country feuds between rap superstars; but just when it seemed like there was no space at the time for rap from anywhere but New York or California, the duo of Andre “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, better known as Outkast single-handedly redefined rap music. Andre 3000 played an instrumental role in defining not just rap, but music as a whole in the 1990s and 2000s. His presence transitioned Southern rap from being viewed as nothing more than exciting, throw away party music to music that could be timeless an...
If you go to a hip hop concert nowadays you will almost always see a mixture of races. Groups such as A Tribe Called Quest, and The Roots welcome this ethnic mixing in their music. On the contrary, most “gangster rappers” do not promote this mixture. Th
Rap is about giving voice to a black community otherwise underrepresented, if not silent, in the mass media. It has always been and remains … directly connected to the streets from which it came. (144)
Even when one becomes an artist in the industry, there are many troubles that go along with the tag of being a recording artist in the urban division. One example is seen in the article, “The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite” by Keith Negus, where columnist, J.R. Reynolds, mentions the closing of the urban division at Capitol Records in 1996, calling it “the systematic extermination of black music at Capitol Records”, saying that it did not make any sense because the genre was doing well in the market (528). The black music division is often subject to this kind of cutting compared to others. Negus also states that “despite the influence of rap and hip hop on the aesthetics of music, video, television, film, sport, fashion, dancing and advertising, the potential of this broader cultural formation to make a contribution to music industry business practices is not encouraged” (534). The sad fact of the matter is that this is true. It is almost like the larger companies take from the smaller urban divisions in order to make themselves look better without giving credit where it is due and in turn, because those companies are not seen to be doing well in the market, they are dropped from the label. Ted Swedenburg explains this in the article “Homies in The ‘Hood: Rap’s Commodification of Insubordination”, when he states that “while the major academic rock critics usually acknowledge black musicians’ essential contributions to pop and occasionally write sympathetic a...
Rhodes, Henry A. “The Evolution of Rap Music in the United States.” Yale. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Through the progression of the last several decades, Hip Hop has transformed into a culture and artistic phenomenon that has impacted youth culture throughout society. Hip Hop and the academia surrounding the culture reflects the social, cultural, political, and historic truths of the hip hop generation, speaking to these young individuals in a dialect that they understand. The studies of the hip hop culture influence society to understand the perspectives that are not necessarily considered to be traditional within a standard curriculum.
Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and contents. It will also identify the history of Hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them. This will then open up the discussion for the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music.
They would tell stories what would involve mass use of repetition. In their situation they used it as a method for memorization, but in hip hop, repetition was used as a key element to get a message across. Also in the past African Americans practiced communal authorship, in which the original author of a story would be unknown, the stories would be passed orally from generation to generation combined with others stories in one. Such communal authorship is also an element in hip hop, otherwise known as sampling. Sampling involves one artist using another’s work in order create a new song. In years’ past this did create many copyright problems but it also helped create a new form of art that still has ties to black tradition. Also in the past loud sounds where used as a form of “coded communication [which] inspired fear in slaveholders” (Rose 62), there is a slight similarity with this and how loud car speakers driving playing rap music can alert the people that something may occur
Rap music was first a cross-cultural product. Most of its important early practitioners, Kool Herc, DJ Hollywood, and Afrika Bambaataa, were either first- or second-generation Americans of Caribbean background. Kool Herc and DJ Hollywood are given credit for introducing the Jamaican style of cutting and mixing into the musical culture of the South Bronx. Herc was the first DJ to buy two copies of the same record for just a 15-second break (instrumental segment) in the middle. By mixing back and forth between the two copies he was able to double, triple, or endlessly extend the break.
Despite having absolutely nothing to do with the four elements of Hip-Hop as defined by Afrika Bambaataa, the most influential person in the creati...