The very beginning
“It is at the level of interpersonal relationships and expressive behavior that the black American proletariat has preserved a large part of (its) African character: it is in this area, therefore, that we should expect the survival of African linguistic features.”
David Dalby, linguist, 1972
Hip-hop and its relation to identity has hugely shifted since it was born. What I have observed is that hip-hop globalization has affected the very essence of its purpose. Many groups of people feel connected to hip-hop craft style, though I feel it is important to understand where it comes from and how it has taken such an expansion.Initially, hip-hop partly originated from ragtime music style, which reached its peak in the first two decades of the 20th century in New York City. It often was confounded with jazz even though it actually preceded jazz style. In Ragtime: its History, Composers, and Music, edited by John Edward Hasse, Guy Water explains that ragtime is a “body of written compositions” (43) principally printed for piano and banjo musicians, whereas jazz is an improvisatory music style.In Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, William Perkins explains how rap and hip hop culture essentially recall African roots. He introduces Afrika Bambaataa who is “one of rap music’s founders” (2), presenting his following statement:
Summoning the ancestors
Rap in general dates all the way back to the motherland, where tribes would use call-and-response chants. In the 1930s and 1940s, you had Cab Calloway pioneering his style of jazz rhyming, The sixties you had the love of rapping, with Isaac Hayes, Barry White, and the poetry style of rapping with the Last Poets, the Watts poets and the militant style of rapping with brothers like Malcolm X and Minister Louis Farrakhan. In the 60s you also had the “The Name Game”, a funny rap by Shirley Ellis, and radio dj’s who would rhyme and rap before a song came on.
Afrika Bambaataa, 1993
When and how did it start?Nevertheless, the big question “when did it start?” cannot be adequately answered. According to old-school masters like Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, rap music was born in 1974 in the South Bronx, though hip-hop was a more progressive phenomenon that has indeed existed before rap itself.Bambaataa explained that, “when rhyming started, that’s when everybody started boasting about themselves, the flyest girls, and how many girls you could get in one night” (5-6). Hence, hip-hop started to become eminent in1975 in the Bronx, New York City, Connecticut and New Jersey.Another old-school master, Grandmaster Caz, brought an alternative approach about hip-hop history. He said that early hip-hop had a “distinct Jamaican lineage” (Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, p.6). He argued that the hip-hop movement started with DJ Kool Herc, before the actual rap.From underground to commercialHip-hop movements began with deejaying and breaking and remained underground until 1979, when “dissin’” rap went commercial. Perkins utters:
“Rapping then resembled some of the singing styles of 1940s and 1950s black dance music synthesized with the technology of the 1970s. The MC, as the rapper was known, developed a basic lyrical style, mixing elements of street jargon and slang, personal experience, and an occasional dose of humor to create a pot-pourri of simple verses that could function as both match and counterpoint to the DJ. (…) Dissin’ (insulting or putting down) the competition became the cornerstone of early rap’s style” (10).
Run DMC’s lyrics (extract) of Sucker MCs:
You’re a five-dollar boy and I’m a million dollar man
You’re a sucker MC and you’re my fan
You try to bite lines from friends of mine,
But you’re very banal, you’re just a sucker MC
You sad-faced clown.
The first rap’s successful group were GrandMaster Flash and the Furious Five in the 1970s first wave. The second wave took place in the 1980s in which rap music truly emerged in American popular culture, including personalities such as Run DMC, L.L. Cool J., as well as Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane. They all mixed up street style music with musical minimalism.The second wave is the era where the traditional call-and-response routines stopped to leave space for the black urban street combined with some pop flavor. In Performing Identity/Performing Culture, Greg Dimitriadis states: “Rap became a popular American music with the ascent of Run-D.M.C., one that circulated widely in self-contained commodity form” (19).Run DMC partly owed their success to Def Jam Recordings, which hugely contributed to the expansion of rap music and its arrival at the mainstream culture, founded at the beginning of the1980s by Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons. Run DMC was particularly successful in 1986 with their album entitled Raising Hell. Their success has lead them to win the first MTV hit with the song Walk This Way, an extract that was performed with the heavy-metal rocker group Aerosmith. Therefore, the convergence of diverse musical styles had necessarily created a new genre in the world of hip-hop and a new sense of music in the Occident.A controversy of the Black imageHip-hop has started up from the ghetto to land up in the middle-class society. L.L. Cool J appropriated himself the middle-class image, as he came from the black middle-class haven of Hollis in Queens. Perkins sates that he “developed a new style that made him the king of the genre lovers’ rap (and) he carefully crafted an image of a cool and elegant ladies’ man armed with raps that would make women swoon” (15). He also believed that “this cultivated image directly challenged the political rappers whose intimidating styles and lyrics allegedly sent rap in an anti-white direction” (15). In effect, rap’s second wave was not about the denunciation of white oppression against black but about beauty and power.Originally, hip-hop was stories about blacks told by blacks for blacks. Over the years, its emergence has delivered progressing values and got closer to the middle-class model standards. Hip-hop has come to emphasize values of consumption such as capitalism, power, and lust, at the point of linking it to violence.It became – I would say – accessible to the the whites, until the white mainstream aimed at performing rap as well. For this reason, Perkins explains how hard they struggled to find their place in the hip-hop universe: “(…) white rappers have struggled to earn the acceptance and respect of their African american and Latino counterparts” (35). Whites were not recognized to be “authentic” and they were thought to make fun of the blacks rather than supporting and praising the art. The white rap groups who proved to be “real” were House of Pain’s 1992 with the video Jump Around (they hoped they could help solving the Irish-American identity crisis), and Blood of Abraham’s 1993 with the single and video Scaffold on the Chapel (a clip turned in Jerusalem).
