RAP

RAP. An informal term associated with inner-city neighbourhoods and popular radio and television, especially among blacks in the US: (1) To talk rapidly, rhythmically, vividly, and boastfully, so as to compete for prestige among one's peers and impress one's listeners. The verse of the American boxer Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) is an early form of rapping: ‘Only last week / Ah murdered a rock / Injured a stone / Hospitalized a brick / Ah'm so mean / Ah made medicine sick’. (2) The ritualized repartee of (especially young male) blacks, associated with the hip or cool street talk also known as sounding, capping, and playing the dozens, which includes assertions, taunts, and insults. Currently, rapping is closely associated with hip hop, a flamboyant youth style originating in the streets of the South Bronx in New York City in the early 1970s and including graffiti art, break-dancing, and Afrocentric ways of dressing. (3) To perform a rhyming, usually improvised monologue against a back-ground of music with a strong beat: in a street, the music is usually from a portable radio/cassette-player (a ghetto-blaster or boom box); in a broadcasting studio, it is from a background of recorded music or is reduced to a heavy bass beat produced by a drum machine or synthesizer. (4) A song or poem performed in this way, the performer being a rapper and the overall effect being rap music. On television, the background may be a series of fragments of music or video scenes. Jon Pareles observes:
To say that rap reflects television doesn't discount its deep roots in black culture; the networks didn't invent rap, ghetto disk jockeys did. Rap comes out of the story telling and braggadocio of the blues, the cadences of gospel preachers and comedians, the percussive improvisations of jazz drummers and tap dancers. It also looks to Jamaican ‘toasting’ (improvising rhymes over records), to troubadour traditions of social comment and historical remembrance, and to a game called ‘the dozens,’ a ritual exchange of cleverly phrased insults. (‘The Etymology of Rap Music’, The New York Times, Jan. 1990)
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Pareles considers that rap's chopped-up style reflects the impact of television, in which programmes are accompanied and interrupted by commercials, previews, snippets of news, and the like, as well as by using a remote control to ‘zap’ from channel to channel. See AFRICAN-AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH, BLARNEY, DUB, JIVE, PATTER, REGGAE.