05 August 2008
Hip-Hop: The “Rapper’s Delight”
Urban Americans draw on African traditions to fashion an authentic voice
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Of all genres of popular music, none has spurred more vigorous public debate than rap music. Rap has been characterized as a vital link in the centuries-old chain of cultural and musical connections between Africa and the Americas; as the authentic voice of an oppressed urban underclass; and as a form that exploits long-standing stereotypes of black people. In fact, each of these perspectives tells us something about the history and significance of rap music.
Rap draws on African musical and verbal traditions. Its deep continuities with African-American music include an emphasis on rhythmic momentum and creativity; a preference for complex tone colors and dense textures; a keen appreciation of improvisational skill (in words and music); and an incorporative, innovative approach to musical technologies.
Much rap music does constitute a cultural response to historic oppression and racism, a system for communication among black communities throughout the United States (“black America’s CNN,” as rapper Chuck D once put it), and a source of insight into the values, perceptions, and conditions of people living in America’s beleaguered urban communities. And finally, although rap music’s origins and inspirations flow from black culture, the genre’s audience has become decidedly multiracial, multicultural, and transnational. As rap has been transformed from a local phenomenon located in a few neighborhoods in New York City, to a multimillion-dollar industry and a global cultural phenomenon, it has grown ever more complex and multifaceted.
Rap initially emerged during the 1970s as one part of a cultural complex called hip-hop. Hip-hop culture, forged by African-American and Caribbean-American youth in New York City, included distinctive styles of visual art (graffiti), dance (an acrobatic solo style called break-dancing and an energetic couple dance called the freak), music, dress, and speech. Hip-hop was at first a local phenomenon, centered in certain neighborhoods in the Bronx, the most economically disadvantaged area of New York City.
The young adults who pioneered hip-hop styles such as break-dancing and rap music at nightclubs, block parties, and in city parks often belonged to informal social groups called “crews” or “posses,” each associated with a particular neighborhood or block. It is important to understand that hip-hop culture began as an expression of local identities. Even today’s multiplatinum rap recordings, marketed worldwide, are filled with inside references to particular neighborhoods, features of the urban landscape, and social groups and networks.
If hip-hop music was a rejection of mainstream dance music by young black and Puerto Rican listeners, it was also profoundly shaped by the techniques of disco DJs. The first hip-hop celebrities – Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler), and Afrika Bambaataa (Kevin Donovan) – were DJs who began their careers in the mid-1970s, spinning records at neighborhood block parties, gym dances, and dance clubs, and in public spaces such as community centers and parks. These three young men – and dozens of lesser-known DJs scattered throughout the Bronx, Harlem, and other areas of New York City and New Jersey – developed their personal styles within a grid of fierce competition for celebrity and neighborhood pride.
The disco DJ’s technique of “mixing” between two turntables to create smooth transitions between records was first adapted to the hip- hop aesthetic by Kool Herc, who had migrated from Kingston, Jamaica, to New York City at the age of 12. Herc noticed that the young dancers in his audiences responded most energetically during the so-called breaks on funk and salsa records, brief sections where the melody was stripped away to feature the rhythm section. Herc responded by isolating the breaks of certain popular records – such as James Brown’s “Get on the Good Foot” – and mixing them into the middle of other dance records. These rhythmic sound collages came to be known as “breakbeat” music, a term subsequently transferred to “breakdancing,” acrobatic solo performances improvised by the young “B-boys” who attended hip-hop dances.
Another innovation helped to shape the sound and sensibility of early hip-hop: the transformation of the turntable from a medium for playing back recorded sound into a playable musical instrument. Sometime in the mid-1970s Kool Herc began to put two copies of the same record on his turntables. Switching back and forth between the turntables, Herc found that he could “backspin” one disc (i.e., turn it backward, or counterclockwise, with his hand) while the other continued to play over the loudspeakers. This allowed him to repeat a given break over and over, by switching back and forth between the two discs and backspinning to the beginning of the break. This technique was refined by Grandmaster Flash, who adopted the mixing techniques of disco DJs, particularly their use of headphones to synchronize the tempos of recordings and to create smooth transitions from one dance groove to the next. Using headphones, Flash could more precisely pinpoint the beginning of a break by listening to the sound of the disc being turned backward on the turntable. Flash spent many hours practicing this technique and gained local fame for his ability to “punch in” brief, machine gun-like segments of sound.
A new technique called “scratching” was developed by Flash’s young protégé, Theodore, who broke away and formed his own hip-hop crew at the tender age of 13. In 1978 Theodore debuted a new technique that quickly spread through the community of DJs. While practicing backspinning in his room, Theodore began to pay closer attention to the sounds created in his headphones as he turned the disc counterclockwise. He soon discovered that this technique yielded scratchy, percussive sound effects, which could be punched in to the dance groove. At first Theodore wasn’t sure how people would react:
The Third Avenue Ballroom was packed, and I figured I might as well give it a try. So, I put on two copies of [James Brown’s] “Sex Machine” and started scratching up one. The crowd loved it… they went wild.
The distinctive sound of scratching became an important part of the sonic palette of hip-hop music – even in the 1990s, after digital sampling had largely displaced turntables as a means of creating the musical textures and grooves on rap records, producers frequently used these sounds as a way of signaling a connection to the “old school” origins of hip-hop.
Although all DJs used microphones to make announcements, Kool Herc was also one of the first DJs to recite rhyming phrases over the “breakbeats” produced on his turntables. Some of Herc’s “raps” were based on a tradition of verbal performance called “toasting,” a form of poetic storytelling with roots in the trickster tales of West Africa. The trickster – a sly character whose main goal in life is to defy authority and upset the normal order of things – became a common figure in the storytelling traditions of black slaves in the United States, where he took on additional significance as a symbol of cultural survival and covert resistance. After the Civil War the figure of the trickster was in part supplanted by more aggressive male figures, the focus of long, semi-improvised poetic stories called “toasts.” The toasting tradition frequently focused on “bad men,” hard, merciless bandits and spurned lovers who vanquished their enemies, sometimes by virtue of their wits, but more often through physical violence.
Although the toasting tradition had largely disappeared from black communities by the 1970s, it took root in prisons, where black inmates found that the old narrative form suited their life experiences and present circumstances. One of the main sources for the rhymes composed by early hip-hop DJs in the Bronx was the album Hustler’s Convention (1973) by Jala Uridin, leader of a group of militant ex- convicts known as the Last Poets. Hustler’s Convention was a compelling portrait of “the life” – the urban underworld of gamblers, pimps, and hustlers – through prison toasts with titles like “Sentenced to the Chair.” The record, featuring musical accompaniment by an all-star lineup of funk, soul, and jazz musicians, became enormously popular in the Bronx and inspired Kool Herc and other DJs to compose their own rhymes. Soon DJs were recruiting members of their posses to serve as verbal performers, or “MCs” (an abbreviation of the term “master of ceremonies”). MCs played an important role in controlling crowd behavior at the increasingly large dances where DJs performed and soon became more important celebrities than the DJs themselves. If DJs are the predecessors of today’s rap producers – responsible for shaping musical texture and groove – MCs are the ancestors of contemporary rappers.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
