Rap/Hip-Hop

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Kembrew McLeod

Salt-n-Pepa were not the first female rappers, but they were the first to become extremely popular. Women's participation in Hip-Hop has largely been obscured, primarily because there were few female MCs who were able to release albums during the early 1980s, when Hip-Hop was getting underway. Despite this shortage of female artists, women did participate in the scene. Grandmaster Flash recounted in David Toop's Rap Attack 2 that there was a greater female presence during the early days, with crews like the Bronx-based Mercedes Ladies playing to large crowds. Other artists like the Funky Four Plus One's Sha-Rock, Dimples D, and the Sequence were among the only recorded female rapper role models that Salt-n-Pepa could look to during the early 1980s.

By the late 1980s, Hip-Hop music was proving itself a big money maker. In 1988, Hip-Hop's annual record sales reached $100 million, which accounted for two percent of the total music industry's sales. The next year Billboard added "Rap" charts to its magazine and MTV debuted Yo! MTV Raps, which quickly became the network's highest-rated show. By 1992, it was estimated that Hip-Hop was generating $400 million annually, roughly five percent of the music industry's yearly income. These estimates nearly doubled to $700 million in 1993. In 1995 CNN reported that Hip-Hop's annual sales had risen to eight percent of the music industry's annual income. After a brief slump mid-decade, by the late 1990s, Hip-Hop was still going strong, with the majority of gold and platinum albums being awarded not to new pop and rock acts, but to new R&B and Hip-Hop artists. During the first half of 1998, Hip-Hop sales were up twenty-eight percent over 1997.

With the financial success of Hip-Hop came a proliferation of lawsuits involving copyright infringements, owing to the genre's established style of borrowing from previously existing music--a key practice since Hip-Hop's inception, whether by DJs playing fragments of records at Bronx block parties or via the technologically savvy method of collaging found sounds with digital samplers. This method of creation became extremely influential, becoming an accepted and legitimate form of music making by the late-1990s, with many mainstream Pop acts incorporating sampling into their recordings. But for a time during the mid-to-late 1980s, the practice of sampling appeared to be in danger. The deluge of lawsuits began in 1986 when funk artist Jimmy Castor, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, sued Def Jam and the Beastie Boys for their appropriation of the phrase "Yo, Leroy" from Castor's 1977 recording "The Return of Leroy (Part I)." Even though the legal atmosphere surrounding sampling became highly charged, the practice continued. By the early-1990s, businesses called "sample clearing houses" had been established, allowing labels and artists to use them in order to avoid any legal problems that may arise from sampling.

Hip-Hop continued to grow more diverse after its late-1980s golden age, though the mainstream media representations of Hip-Hop were dominated by coverage of gangsta rap during the first half of the 1990s. During this time, artists such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Tupac Shakur sold millions of albums, many to white suburban teens. The violent and sometimes misogynist imagery contained in gangsta rap lyrics, and the fact that white teenagers were listening to it, drew protests from many conservative groups, prompting Time-Warner to drop "original gangsta" Ice T from its roster after a much publicized controversy surrounding the lyrics of his song, "Cop Killer." Under pressure, Time-Warner also sold off its investment in Interscope, the distributor of Death Row Records, which was the preeminent gangsta rap label during the first half of the decade. Although gangsta rap sales had been in decline for a year, the violent deaths of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. in 1996 and 1997, respectively, marked the symbolic death of that genre.