Rap Music

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Rap Music

In his 1976 book Roots, Alex Haley wrote about his extraordinary journey to excavate the narratives of his African ancestry, including his encounter with a griot (an oral historian) in a West African village. This seventy-three-year-old griot recited an extensive history of the tribe, recounting its origins and establishing connections between Alex Haley and his mythological ancestor, Kunta Kinte. Haley was overcome with weeping as members of the tribal community worked together to bring his long-lost African relatives to him.

Amid the powerful energy of ancestral reconnection and historical continuity, one might gloss over a key element in this story: How is it that the griot is able to retain centuries of genealogical information, and perform it basically on demand? He can do this because he performs history in verse. The griot is, in this instance, the ancestral progenitor of the modern-day rapper. Griots retain tremendous amounts of cultural information for spontaneous performances in verse for tribal communities. Of course, years of repetition help to instantiate these tribal histories in the collective memories of the griot as well as his audience, but Alex Haley’s experiences, and the powerful narrative that emerged from these experiences, suggest tremendous connections between ancient African griots and rappers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In no small way, the history and political economy of rap music is reflected in this Roots moment. First, the power and political potential of rhymed verse is readily apparent in Haley’s interaction with the West African griot. Second, rap music, notwithstanding its modern–day origins as pure entertainment, has always been challenged to shoulder the social responsibilities of the communities from which it emerged. In 1979, rap music exploded onto the popular music landscape with the enormous success of a single by the Sugarhill Gang entitled Rapper’s Delight. After its release in October 1979, Rapper’s Delight, with its complete sample of the group CHIC’s disco hit Good Times, was a mainstay on the Billboard Pop charts for twelve weeks. Although it was not the first rap record—Fatback Band’s King Tim III (Personality Jock), released earlier in 1979, is considered to be the first “modern” rap record—Rapper’s Delight is still considered the popular point of departure for rap music.

RAP INFLUENCES

The griot is only one of several African or African American progenitors of the rapper. In fact, there is a continuous trajectory from griot to rapper that underscores the ever-present relationship between the oral poet and the community within the African and African-American traditions. Other oratorical precedents to rappers and rap music that emerge after the griot but before Rapper’s Delight, include Jamaican-style “toasts” (a form of poetic narrative performed to instrumental music); various Blues songs (especially where conversational talking styles are present); prison toasts; “playing the dozens” (a game of verbal insults); disc-jockey announcer styles, such as that of Douglas “Jocko” Henderson; the Black Power poetry of Amiri Baraka; the street-inflected sermons of Malcolm X; and the oratorical prowess of nearly all of the prominent black poets of the early 70s, such as Gil Scott Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, the Watts Poets, and the Last Poets.

In addition, rap music might not exist without the powerful influence of James Brown. Known as the “Godfather of Soul,” Brown was also the preeminent forefather of rap music. His call-and-response, conversational vocal style; his incredible interaction with his band and audience; and his ear for the most contagious break-down arrangements in the history of black music position him at the genesis of hip-hop culture, from which rap music was derived. Listening to a Brown classic, such as “Funky Drummer” or “Funky President,” will immediately make his impact on rap music apparent. Indeed, Brown was rapping before rap music became reified as a popular phenomenon. It is no mistake that Brown’s music is still the most sampled and copied sound in rap music.

TYPES OF RAP MUSIC

When all of the historical and influential touchstones for rap music are considered, the fact that rap has become the premier element of hip-hop culture, a culture that has spread all over the world, should be fairly clear. Since 1979, hundreds of rappers have made thousands of records, and many of these have found a wide audience. In order to develop a definitive sense of rap music—especially its connections to race and African-American culture and its relationship to inner-city populations and American popular culture—various subcategories of the genre bear elucidation. The following taxonomy divides rap music into four categories: mainstream, underground, conscious, and gangsta.

Mainstream rap music is the category most widely listened to by the majority population. It is a fairly fluid category. At one point (during the “old school” and “golden age” eras of hip-hop, from about 1975 to 1990), mainstream rap was consciously and consistently political. For example, during their heyday (c. 1988–1989), Public Enemy, whose music was very political, was the most popular rap group on the most popular recording label, Def Jam. By the mid-1990s, mainstream rap’s content had completed a dramatic shift toward more violent and misogynistic narratives, allegedly designed to report on the horrific conditions of American inner cities. By the late 1990s and through the first half of the first decade of the 2000s, the content of mainstream rap shifted yet again, this time toward the celebration of conspicuous consumption. Some scholars and fans refer to this current mainstream moment of rap as the “bling bling era” (the term “bling bling” was coined by the New Orleans rapper B.G., short for “Baby Gangsta,” in reference to the glistening radiance of his diamond-encrusted platinum jewelry).

Underground rap music is even more difficult to define because it generally takes its cues from mainstream rap and often does not (and by definition cannot) enjoy the popular distribution, exposure, and financial attention and rewards of mainstream music. Underground rap tends to be predicated on regional or local development and support, although with the advent of the Internet

and imminently transferable mp3 music files, underground networks have developed across local, regional, and even international barriers. Underground rap must also, in both content and form, distinguish itself from popular mainstream rap. Thus, when mainstream rap is about being a gangster, underground rap tends to be more politically conscious, and vice versa. When mainstream rap production is sample-heavy with beats per minute (BPM) hovering in the mid-90s, underground rap will dispense with samples and sport BPM well into the 100s. This symbiotic relationship between the mainstream and the underground is far too complex to fully detail, but inevitably one defines itself against the other in various ways. All mainstream styles of rap were at one time or another considered underground. Some of the most talented underground rappers and rap groups are: The Living Legends, MF Doom, Immortal Technique, The V. I. Kings, The Last Emperor, Medusa, Chillin Villain Empire, Aceyalone, and Murs.

Conscious rap music came into popular prominence in 1982 with the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message. Conscious, in this case, refers to an artist’s lyrical realization of the social forces at play in the poor and working-class environments from which many rappers hail, and in which the music and culture of hip-hop originally developed. The Message was a powerful response to postindustrial inner-city conditions in America. Since then, the subgenre of conscious rap music has continued to produce some of the most important songs for the enlightenment and uplift of black and brown people. Run-DMC’s “Proud to Be Black,” KRS-One’s “Self-Destruction,” “Why Is That?” and “Black Cop,” and Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It,” “Shut Em Down,” and “9-1-1 Is a Joke” are examples. Conscious rap thrives in the shadows of both underground rap and mainstream rap, even as it innovates and informs a genre that most people associate with violence and consumerism.

Gangsta rap is a subgenre that originates from a complex set of cultural and sociological circumstances. Gangsta rap is a media term partially borrowed from the African-American vernacular form of the word gangster. (African American Vernacular English [AAVE], sometimes referred to as Ebonics, employs many systemic rules and features. One of these features is “r-lessness,” meaning that speakers drop or significantly reduce the “r” in various linguistic situations.) When the popularity of rap music shifted from New York City and the East Coast to Los Angeles and the West Coast (between 1988 and 1992), this geographic reorientation was accompanied by distinct stylistic shifts and striking differences in the contents and sound of the music. This shift took place in the late 1980s through the early 1990s and is most readily represented in the career peak of the late-1980s conscious group Public Enemy (PE), as well as the subsequent, meteoric rise of NWA (Niggaz With Attitude), a group from Compton, California. Just as the marketing and retail potential of rap music was coming into prominence (both PE and NWA were early beneficiaries of rap music’s now legendary platinum-selling potential), the music-industry media clamored to find terminology with which to report on this new, powerful, and vulgar phenomenon. Since the challenges of gang warfare in Los Angeles (and gangster narratives in general—consider The Godfather Saga, Goodfellas, and Scarface, in particular) were already journalistic (and cinematic) legend, the term “gangsta rap” was coined, and it stuck.

Yet even at its inception, gangsta rap forced scholars, journalists, and critics to deal with the cruel realities of inner-city living (initially in the South Bronx and Philadelphia with KRS-One and Schoolly D, and almost simultaneously with Ice-T and NWA on the West Coast). Still, only the very general realities of poverty, police brutality, gang violence, and brutally truncated opportunity have been subject to any real investigation or comprehension. The whole point of a rapper rapping is to exaggerate, through narrative, in order to “represent” one’s community and one’s culture in the face of violent social invisibility (consider the collective shock at the rampant poverty in New Orleans unveiled after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina). It is not surprising then that gangsta rap was a radical wake-up call, highlighting the aforementioned social ills. Its popularity, however, is more a reflection of mainstream audience’s insatiable appetite for violent narratives than it is a reflection of any one individual’s particular reality. That is to say, in all forms of rap music, the relationships between author and narrative are not necessarily autobiographical. However, these narratives, in their most authentic forms, tend to be representative of certain post-industrial, inner-city African-American realities.

SEE ALSO Black Popular Culture; Hip-Hop Culture.