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| Rap music emerged out of a Hip-Hop culture of the 1960s and
1970s with its emphasis on political expression and resistance through
graffiti, modes of dress, language, and social practices. In a paper
on the evolution of rap, Henry
Rhodes describes how DJ’s and street performers created
a new forms of musical expression:
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Dick Hebdige, in his book “Cut ‘N’
Mix,” described Jamaican ‘toasting’ as when the
Jamaican disc jockies talked over the music they played. This style
developed at dances in Jamaica known as “blues dances”.
“Blues dances” were dances which took place in large
halls or out in the open in the slum yards. “Blues dances”
were a regular feature of ghetto life in Jamaica. At these dances
black America R&B records were played. Jamaicans were introduced
to these records by black American sailors stationed on the island
and by American radio stations in and around Miami which played
R&B records. Some favorite R&B artists were Fats Domino,
Amos Melburn, Louis Jordan, and Roy Brown. There was a great demand
for the R&B type of music, but unfortunately there were no local
Jamaican bands which could play this type of music as well as the
black American artists. As a result, ‘sound systems’
(comprised of DJs, roadies, engineers, bouncers) which were large
mobile discotheques were set up to meet this need. |
The record playing systems of ‘sound systems’
had to be large so people could hear the bass by which to dance
according to Hebdige. The major player in the ‘sound systems’
was the DJ. Some notable Jamaican DJs were Duke Reid, Sir Coxsone,
and Prince Buster. They were performers as well as DJs. For example,
Duke Reid dressed in a long ermine cloak with a pair of Colt 45s
in cowboy holsters with a cartridge belt strapped across his chest
and a loaded shotgun over his shoulder. This outfit was topped off
with a gilt crown on his head. Just as there were to be DJ battles
(competition) in the Bronx, they would occur first in Jamaica with
one DJ trying to out play another DJ. As in both ‘battles’,
here in the U.S. and Jamaica, the competition boiled down to who
had the loudest system and the most original records and technique.
It was not uncommon for things to get out of hand and for fighting
to erupt during these DJ battles at the Jamaican “blues dances”
once the crowds got caught up in this frenzy. It was said that Duke
Reid would bring the crowd under control by firing his shotgun in
the air. |
At first Jamaican toasting began when DJs would
‘toast’ over the music they played with simple slogans
to encourage the dancers. Some of these simple slogans were “Work
it, Work it” and “Move it up”. As ‘toasting’
became more popular so did the lengths of the toasts. One of the
first big “toasting” stars was a Jamaican named U Roy
(his real name was Ewart Beckford). Another technique which developed
along side ‘toasting’ was called ‘dubs’.
‘Dubbing’ was when the record engineers would cut back
and forth between the vocal and instrumental tracks while adjusting
the bass and the treble. This technique highlighted the Jamaican
‘toasting’ even more. |
There are four areas which Jamaican ‘toasting’
and American rap music have in common. First, both types of music
relied on pre-recorded sounds. Second, both types of music relied
on a strong beat by which they either rapped or toasted. American
rap music relied on the strong beat of hard funk and Jamaican “toasting”
relied on the beat from the Jamaican rhythms. Third, in both styles
the rapper or toaster spoke their lines in time with the rhythm
taken from the records. Fourth, the content of the raps and toasts
were similar in nature. For example, as there were boast raps, insult
raps, news raps, message raps, nonsense raps, and party raps there
also existed toasts that were similar in nature. |
| Rhodes notes that rap groups then emerged who had an appeal
to a larger audience: |
Run-D.M.C. was the first black rap group to break
through to a mass white audience with their albums, Run-D.M.C and
King of Rock. These albums led the way that rap would travel into
the musical mainstream. Even though Run-D.M.C. dressed as if they
came right off the street corner, this was not the case. Run and
D.M.C came from middle class families, they were never deprived
of anything and they never ran with a gang. One could never tell
this by their dress or from the raps they made. Run-D.M.C. records
were produced under the Def Jam label which had as one of its founders
a Jewish punk rocker named Rick Rubin. Russell Simmons, Run’s
brother, was to later take control of the Def Jam label in 1989,
however this can not take away from the fact that this so-called
militant rap group was at one time being produced by a white person.
What is even more startling is that one of the most militant rap
groups, Public Enemy, was also produced by Rick Rubin. Just as Run-D.M.C.
came from middle-class families so did Public Enemy. Members of
Public Enemy grew up in suburban Long Island towns with successful
middle-class professional parents. |
Hip Hop originated in the 1970s in the Bronx, when local neighborhood
artists began to play records on record players in new, original
ways, which led to the rise of early Hip Hop stars DJ Kool Herc
and Grandmaster Flash. Click here for an interactive
timeline exhibit at the EMI Seattle Music Museum. |
In an article in The Nation (January 13, 2003), “'Stakes
Is High': Conscious Rap, Neosoul and the Hip-Hop Generation,”
Jeff
Chang notes the shifts from the original Hip-Hop to more recent
commercialized versions: |
Fifteen years ago, rappers like Public Enemy, KRS-One
and Queen Latifah were received as heralds of a new movement. Musicians
- who, like all artists, always tend to handle the question "What's
going on?" much better than "What is to be done?" - had never been
called upon to do so much for their generation; Thelonious Monk,
Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were never asked to stand in for
Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer or Stokely Carmichael. But the
gains of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s
were being rolled back. Youths were as fed up with black leadership
as they were with white supremacy. Politics had failed. Culture
was to become the hip-hop generation's battlefield, and "political
rap" was to be its weapon. |
Today, the most cursory glance at the Billboard
charts or video shows on Viacom-owned MTV and BET suggests rap has
been given over to cocaine-cooking, cartoon-watching, Rakim-quoting,
gold-rims-coveting, death-worshiping young 'uns. One might even
ask whether rap has abandoned the revolution. |
Indeed, as the central marker of urban youth of
color style and authenticity, rap music has become the key to the
niching of youth culture. The "hip-hop lifestyle" is now available
for purchase in every suburban mall. "Political rap" has been repackaged
by record companies as merely "conscious," retooled for a smaller
niche as an alternative. Instead of drinking Alizé, you drink
Sprite. Instead of Versace, you wear Ecko. Instead of Jay-Z, you
listen to the Roots. Teen rap, party rap, gangsta rap, political
rap - tags that were once a mere music critic's game - are literally
serious business. |
"Once you put a prefix on an MC's name, that's a
death trap," says Talib Kweli, the gifted Brooklyn-born rapper who
disdains being called "conscious." Clearly his music expresses a
well-defined politics; his rhymes draw from the same well of protest
that nourished the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and the Black
Arts stalwarts he cites as influences. But he argues that marketing
labels close his audience's minds to the possibilities of his art.
When Kweli unveiled a song called “Gun Music,” some
fans grumbled. (No “conscious” rapper would stoop to
rapping about guns, they reasoned, closing their ears even as Kweli
delivered a complicated critique of street-arms fetishism.) At the
same time, Kweli worries that being pigeonholed as political will
prevent him from being promoted to mass audiences. Indeed, to be
a “political rapper” in the music industry these days
is to be condemned to preach to a very small choir. |
“Political rap” was actually something
of an invention. The Bronx community-center dances and block parties
where hip-hop began in the early 1970s were not demonstrations for
justice, they were celebrations of survival. Hip-hop culture simply
reflected what the people wanted and needed - escape. Rappers bragged
about living the brand-name high life because they didn't; they
boasted about getting headlines in the New York Post because
they couldn't. Then, during the burning summer of the first Reagan
recession, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released "The
Message," a dirge (by the standards of the day) that seethed
against the everyday violence of disinvestment. Flash was certain
the record, which was actually an A&R-pushed concoction by Duke
Bootee and Melle Mel, would flop; it was too slow and too depressing
to rock a party. But Sugar Hill Records released the song as a single
over his objections, and "The Message" struck the zeitgeist
like a bull's-eye. Liberal soul and rock critics, who had been waiting
for exactly this kind of statement from urban America, championed
it. Millions of listeners made it the third platinum rap single.
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Through the mid-1980s, Melle Mel, Afrika Bambaataa
and Soul Sonic Force, Run-DMC and others took up the role of the
young black lumpenrapper opposition, weighing in on topics like
racism, nuclear proliferation and apartheid. And just as the first
Bush stepped into office, a new generation began to articulate a
distinctly post-civil rights stance. Led by Public Enemy, rappers
like Paris, Ice-T, X-Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian
displayed the Black Panther Party's media savvy and the Minister
Louis Farrakhan's nationalist rage. Politics were as explicit as
Tipper Gore's advisory stickers. As the Gulf War progressed, Paris's
"Bush Killa" imagined a Black Power assassination of Bush
the Elder while rapping, "Iraq never called me 'nigger.'"
(Last year, he returned to cut an MP3-only critique of the war on
Afghanistan, "What Would You Do?") Rappers' growing confidence
with word, sound and power was reflected in more slippery and subtle
music, buttered with Afrodiasporic and polycultural flavor. |
Many of these artists had emerged from vibrant protest
movements - New York City's resurgent Black Power movement; the
swelling campus antiapartheid / multiculturalism / affirmative action
movement; local anti-police brutality movements. In each of these,
representation was the cry and the media were a target. Rap "edutainment"
came out of the convergence of two very different desires: the need
for political empowerment and the need to be empowered by images
of truth. On 1990's "Can I Kick It?," A Tribe Called Quest's
Phife Dawg captured the mood of his audience sweetly and precisely:
"Mr. Dinkins, will you please be our mayor?" But while
Mayor Dinkins's career quickly hit a tailspin, hip-hop rose by making
blackness - even radical blackness - the worldwide trading currency
of cultural cool. |
In the new global entertainment industry of the
1990s, rap became a hot commodity. But even as the marketing dollars
flowed into youth of color communities, major labels searched for
ways to capture the authenticity without the militancy. Stakes was
high, as De La Soul famously put it in 1996, and labels were loath
to accept such disruptions on their investments as those that greeted
Ice-T and Body Count's "Cop Killer" during the '92 election
season. Rhymers kicking sordid tales from the drug wars were no
longer journalists or fictionists, ironists or moralists. They were
purveyors of a new lifestyle, ghetto cool with all of the products
but none of the risk or rage. After Dr. Dre's pivotal 1992 album,
The Chronic, in which a millennial, ghettocentric Phil Spector stormed
the pop charts with a postrebellion gangsta party that brought together
Crip-walking with Tanqueray-sipping, the roughnecks, hustlers and
riders took the stage from the rap revolutionaries, backed by the
substantial capital of a quickly consolidating music industry. |
Rap music today reflects the paradoxical position
of the hip-hop generation. If measured by the volume of products
created by and sold to them, it may appear that youth of color have
never been more central to global popular culture. Rap is now a
$1.6 billion engine that drives the entire music industry and flexes
its muscle across all entertainment platforms. Along with its music,
Jay-Z's not-so-ironically named Roc-A-Fella company peddles branded
movies, clothing and vodka. Hip-hop, some academics assert, is hegemonic.
But as the social turmoil described by many contemporary rappers
demonstrates, this generation of youth of color is as alienated
and downpressed as any ever has been. And the act of tying music
to lifestyle - as synergy-seeking media companies have effectively
done - has distorted what marketers call the "aspirational"
aspects of hip-hop while marginalizing its powers of protest. |
Yet the politics have not disappeared from popular
rap. Some of the most stunning hits in recent years - DMX's "Who
We Be," Trick Daddy's "I'm a Thug," Scarface's "On
My Block" - have found large audiences by making whole the
hip-hop generation's cliché of "keeping it real,"
being true to one's roots of struggle. The video for Nappy Roots'
brilliant "Po' Folks" depicts an expansive vision of rural
Kentucky - black and white, young and old together, living like
"everything's gon' be OK." Scarface's ghettocentric "On
My Block" discards any pretense at apology. "We've probably
done it all, fa' sheezy," he raps. "I'll never leave my
block, my niggas need me." For some critics, usually older
and often black, such sentiments seem dangerously close to pathological,
hymns to debauchery and justifications for thuggery. But the hip-hop
generation recognizes them as anthems of purpose, manifestoes that
describe their time and place the same way that Public Enemy's did.
Most of all, these songs and their audiences say, we are survivors
and we will never forget that. |
In a readingonline.org
article, Ernest Morrell describes how he integrated teaching about
hip-hop culture into an English poetry unit. |
Given the social, cultural, and academic relevance
of hip-hop music, a colleague and I designed a classroom unit that
incorporated hip-hop music and culture into a traditional high school
senior English poetry unit. We began the unit with an overview of
poetry in general, attempting to redefine poetry and the poet's
role. We emphasized the importance of understanding the historical
period in which a poem was written in order to come to a deep interpretation.
In the introductory lecture, we laid out all of the historical and
literary periods that would be covered in the unit (e.g., the Elizabethan
age, the Puritan Revolution in England, the Civil War, and the Post-Industrial
Revolution in the United States). We placed hip-hop music and the
Post-Industrial Revolution right alongside other historical and
literary periods so that students could use a period and genre of
poetry they were familiar with as a lens to examine the other literary
works. We also wanted to encourage our students to re-evaluate how
they view elements of their popular culture. |
The second major portion of the unit was the group
presentation of a poem and a rap song. The groups were asked to
prepare a justifiable interpretation of their poem and song with
relation to their specific historical and literary periods and to
analyze the links between the two. After a week of preparation,
each group was given a class period to present its work and have
its arguments critiqued by peers. In addition to the group presentations,
students were asked to complete an anthology of 10 poems, 5 of which
would be presented at a poetry reading. Finally, students were asked
to write a five- to seven-page critical essay on a song of their
choice. |
The students generated quality interpretations and
made interesting connections between the canonical poems and the
rap songs. They were also inspired to create their own critical
poems to serve as celebration and social commentary. Their critical
investigations of popular texts brought about oral and written critiques
similar to those required by college preparatory English classrooms.
The students moved beyond critical reading of literary texts to
become cultural producers themselves, creating and presenting poems
that provided critical social commentary and encouraged action for
social justice. The unit adhered to critical pedagogy because it
was situated in the experiences of the students, called for critical
dialogue and a critical engagement of the text, and related the
texts to larger social and political issues. |
Jennifer
Hardison-Sims provides online resources for students to write
their own rap lyrics based on dictionaries and study of rap/hip-hop
music.
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Rhymerator:
assistance in creating rhymes
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| Hiphopbattle:
groups compete against each other
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A
Chum Television Study Guide: Hip-Hop Consciousness
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Lots of sites related to Hip-Hop culture:
Hiphop-directory.com
The
history of hip hop |
Vibe Magazine
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Hip-Hop/Rap Group sites:
hiphop-directory.com:
hip hop and rap groups
Rapmusic.com
about.com:
rap/hip-hop
b-boys.com
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Webquests:
Webquest
on Hip Hop culture
Is
Rap/Hip Hop Poetry?
Breakdancing
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For further reading: |
Chang, J. (2003). Can't stop, won't stop:
A history of the hip-hop generation. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
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Dimitriadis, G. (2001). Performing identity/performing
culture: Hip hop as text, pedagogy, and lived practice. New
York: Peter Lang.
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Green, J. (Ed.). (2002). Rap and hip hop.
New York: Greenhaven (essays for students grades 8 and up).
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Krims, A. (2003). Rap music and the poetics
of identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
|
Maxwell, I. (2003). Phat beats, dope rhymes:
Hip hop down under comin' upper. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
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Ramsey, G. (2003). Race music: Black cultures
from bebop to hip-hop. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press. |
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