Rap/Hip-Hop

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Kembrew McLeod

Hip-Hop music, or to use the more popular marketing term, Rap music, was the most popular, influential, and controversial form of black and Latino urban popular music throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It emerged in the early to mid-1970s in the Bronx, though in later years, distinctive East Coast and West Coast styles would emerge and clash, sometimes with fatal results for its performers. Rap and Hip-Hop culture entered mainstream America's collective consciousness as a novelty, resulting from the massive success of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." "Rapper's Delight" contained all the elements that would characterize Hip-Hop's essence: spare instrumentation, rhythmically spoken rhymes, and the borrowing of previously existing musical elements to construct a new song ("Rapper's Delight" borrowed heavily from Chic's then-current hit, "Good Times").

Music is only one part of Hip-Hop culture, which encompasses four major elements: rapping, deejaying, breakdancing, and graffiti-writing. Beyond the rhyming style known as rapping or MC-ing, deejaying uses the turntable as an instrument that the MC raps over while listeners engage in the quasi-acrobatic gyrations of breakdancing. Rapping can take many forms--from the rhythmic vocal delivery of blues artists and the artsy jazz-influenced delivery of the Last Poets to the almost spoken-word delivery of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Graffiti ranges from the illegal stylized form of public art often spray-painted on walls to the signature design motifs on clothing, album covers, and posters. As an extension of graffiti, the creative spellings used by many "aerosol artists" ("Str8" for "straight" or "boyz" for "boys," for example) has constituted a unique vocabulary that has itself become a stylistic signature of the Hip-Hop movement and has spilled over as a shorthand in computer chat rooms.

Hip-Hop's deceivingly simplistic nature and appropriation of other music drew early criticisms about its merits as a musical form, and its graphic and often controversial lyrics delivered mostly from the perspective of African-American urban youth fanned the flames of criticism concerning its social merits. The practice of borrowing fragments from other songs, often with a digital sampler, greatly influenced other forms of music to the point that, by the late 1990s, sampling-based sound collage became recognized as a legitimate musical art form. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hip-Hop music remained one of the only outlets where an inner-city youth's opinion could be heard unfiltered by mass media censors, prompting artist Chuck D to proclaim that form of music "Black America's CNN." By the late-1990s, Hip-Hop has become virtually synonymous with youth culture (black or white), and its music and associated styles have been appropriated for TV ads, music videos, Pop and R&B songs, fashion magazines, and in malls throughout the United States.

The significance of breakdancing and graffiti should not be downplayed, but it is obvious that the music has become Hip-Hop culture's most noticeable and persistent component. The key figure in the development of Hip-Hop music was the DJ (disc jockey). The role of the DJ during the earliest phases of the style was to spin popular records that kept the party alive and people dancing. In the early 1970s a number of DJs had strong followings in their respective areas. Few of them ever had access to large clubs, so their primary venues were block parties, schools, and parks (where, during the summer, they would plug their sound systems into lampposts and play until the police broke up the gathering).

The most popular of these early DJs was Jamaican immigrant Kool DJ Herc, who is credited with two innovations that, Tricia Rose argues in Black Noise, "separated rap music from other popular musics and set the stage for further innovation." The first was Herc's habit of isolating the fragments of songs that were the most popular with dancers and segueing them into one long musical collage. These song fragments were composed of the percussion breaks within the songs and came to be known as "breakbeats." In David Toop's book Rap Attack 2, early DJ pioneer Afrika Bambaataa recalls Kool DJ Herc's DJ style: "Now he took the music of Mandrill like 'Fencewalk,' certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like The Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with 'Apache' and he just kept that beat going."

Other DJs took this concept and began expanding on the possibilities that two turntables could offer. The endless collages of breakbeats that were an integral part of breakdancing required DJs to draw from massive libraries of obscure records, giving the most popular DJs the title of "masters of records." One of the first DJs to pick up on the breakbeat technique was Grandmaster Flash, who went further than Kool DJ Herc in his turntable wizardry. With two turntables Flash was able to, as told to David Toop, "take small parts of records and, at first, keep it on time, no tricks, keep it on time. I'm talking about very short beats, maybe 40 seconds, keeping it going for about five minutes, depending on how popular that particular record was." Flash continued "After that, I mastered punch phasing--taking certain parts of a record where there's a vocal or drum slap or a horn. I would throw it out and bring it back, keeping the other turntable playing. If this record had a horn in it before the break came down I would go--BAM, BAM, BAM-BAM--just to try this on the crowd." Another technique that is credited to Grandmaster Flash is "scratching." Scratching consists of moving a record back and forth with one's hand while the needle rests in the groove to produce a rhythmic noise that is completely divorced from the sound the record makes when played at a normal speed. This sound is often used to accent parts of another record playing on the second turntable. These basic Hip-Hop DJ techniques laid the foundation for all Hip-Hop music to come.

Kool DJ Herc is credited with a second important innovation--the development of rapping, or MC-ing. During the parties he began "dropping rhymes" or shouting simple phrases that were popular in the streets like "rock on my mellow," "to the beat y'all," or "you don't stop" on top of the break beats he played. Herc borrowed this rhythmic form of talking (called "toasting") from the microphone personalities who deejayed in his native Jamaica, and he is recognized as the person who brought this style to New York. Early on, when he began concentrating more on mixing break beats, he enlisted the help of his friend Coke La Rock to take over MC duties. The MC was responsible for exciting the dancers and giving the party a live feel; the MC also functioned as a type of crowd control--diffusing tensions that might arise from rival groups in the audience.

Grandmaster Flash, an acrobatic DJ whose showmanship resembled a circus act, saw the importance of having a live MC to keep the crowd dancing and not looking at the DJ. Together with Melle Mel, Scorpio, Kidd Creole, and Raheem and Cowboy, Flash formed Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. This trend-setting group inspired numerous rhyme battles throughout the South Bronx, and many "crews" such as Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five, the Funky Four Plus One, the Cold Crush Brothers, and the Treacherous Three fought for microphone supremacy.

In the early days of rap, since other venues were unavailable, DJs like Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa often played for free in outdoor parks, abandoned buildings, and community centers. Soon Grandmaster Flash's popularity surpassed Kool DJ Herc's and Flash began to play for paying customers at numerous high schools and clubs. By 1977 Flash's following had grown to the point where he was playing in clubs to crowds numbering more than 3,000. Until July, 1979, when the Sugarhill Gang released "Rapper's Delight," Hip-Hop was strictly an underground phenomenon that had not been documented beyond the numerous bootleg tapes of live performances that circulated throughout New York City, played on portable radios called "ghetto blasters." The Sugarhill Gang was not a part of the South Bronx Hip-Hop scene that had been developing in the late 1970s; the group was instead put together by Sugarhill Records owners Sylvia and Joe Robinson. They had no street credibility and were not known to anyone involved in the Hip-Hop scene, but this did not stop them from having a huge hit in "Rapper's Delight," which sold more than two million records worldwide.