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April 30, 2013

THE SOCIOLOGY OF AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC (SOAP)

UNIT 5 NOTES

HIP HOP & RAP April 30, 2013

OVERVIEW OF HIP-HOP AND RAP MUSIC TRADITIONS Defining Hip-Hop and Rap - Hip-Hop Culture: - HIP-HOP is the name for the culture of which rap is simply a part - hip-hop culture initially had four main elements: 1. emceeing (rapping), 2. break dancing, 3. graffiti art, and 4. DJ'ing - eventually, it included the new styles of language and fashion that were popular among rappers and their fans RAP is a vocal style of rhythmic speaking in rhyme - the voice is used as a percussive instrument while delivering messages in a complicated verbal rhythm - the actual speaking is called "rapping" or "MC'ing" - early rap artists wanted their lyrics to be clearly understood, and the patter format seemed to achieve this clarity - initially, rapping was simply chants and call-and-response rhymes over a DJ's manipulations of records - it became one aspect of a cultural phenomenon called "hip-hop," apparently from early rap lyrics such as "Say hip, hop, you don't stop." Hip-Hop as a Distinct Musical Style - hip-hop has also been used to refer to the musical style in which a kind of patter-song vocal technique is used that is somewhere in between, or combines elements of, rapping and singing a melodic melody - singers in this style also use an electronic-generated and highly rhythmic music texture as backup - as rap became more associated with social and political messages, hip-hop tended to maintain the earlier party atmosphere associated with reggae and the funk DJs who had initiated the style RAP AND HIP-HOP IN A SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT - Roots of Rap in African and African-American Oral Traditions - rhymed and rhythmic speaking has always been an integral part of African-American cultures April 30, 2013

- James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul" and the originator of funk, had used a speaking style on message songs of the 1960s ("Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud") - Louis Jordan had used rhythmic speech in songs such as "Saturday Night Fish Fry" in the 1940s - rhythmic and rhymed speech can be traced in a steady line from musicians of all genres of African-American music back through rhymed "signifying," storytelling preaching, and eventually back to the griots (traveling poets) of traditional cultures of West Africa The Syndetic Approach - rap and hip-hop's compositional technique of sampling is also seen as having African roots - in West African cultures, the interaction between youth, elders, and ancestors was grounded in a process called syndesis, in which descendants were encouraged to respond to previous works of art by taking elements of those works and incorporating them into their new creations - this process is seen in instrumental "quotations" in both the blues and jazz, and it is on some level also the basis of sampling - although rhythmic speech and syndesis can be seen in many forms of African-American culture, it has found its strongest and most sustained expression in hip-hop and rap The Earliest Hip-Hop and Rap - KOOL HERC - born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica - moved to the Bronx area of New York City as a teenager and became a successful DJ in the early 1970s - Herc began concentrating on the "break" segment of the song, which was the section in between vocal choruses and verses where just the instruments, especially the percussion, took over April 30, 2013

- knowing the popularity of this part of the song with partiers, he decided to use two copies of the same record on two different turntables and cut back and forth between them in order to make the break last longer - this produced the "breakbeat," the sound that became the starting point for much hip-hop and later techno - the people who became his most serious devotees were the dancers who saved their best moves for the break section in the song, and it was through this that they became known as "break boys," or simply "b-boys," and the style became known as break dancing GRANDMASTER FLASH - (Joseph Sadler) grew up in the Bronx, idolized Kool Herc - became a successful DJ who began using a cue monitor, allowing him to hear one record through headphones while the other was playing for the audience - he soon surpassed Kool Herc in popularity - he also introduced a technique of working the needle back and forth rhythmically that became known as "scratching" - he also began using multiple MCs simultaneously to engage the crowd - Afrika Bambaataa, another early important Bronx DJ, released a record called "Planet Rock," a seminal presentation of scratching, electronic additions, high-tech beats, cutting rhythms, and highly processed vocals SUGARHILL GANG - in 1979, this early hip-hop group rapped over the rhythm track taken from a recent #1 disco record called "Good Times" by the R&B group Chic - the song, "Rapper's Delight," became an immediate, commercial catalyst for subsequent recordings of hip-hop and rap - by the late 1970s, rap was becoming a response to disco, the music style that dominated popular radio, and that to many many young urban blacks was a watered down and insipid version of the soul and funk music that had been popular in the 1960s April 30, 2013

Shift in Rap from Party Music to Social Commentary - in 1982, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five released the song "The Message," which shifted rap to more social commentary - the record described the desperation and rage felt in the black community, where hopes and dreams were reduced to efforts to survive ("It's like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder, how I keep from going under.") - the words also describe someone being sent to prison for 8 years, who is "used and abused" by his cellmates until he commits suicide by hanging himself - the song did not make it on to Billboard's Top Forty, but it was honored as "single of the year" in critics' polls for both magazine and Village Voice newspaper - being "real" and "hard" became the new values in rap music, and one such group, RUN D.M.C., was extremely successful (1st rap group to have a gold record and be nominated for a Grammy Award) - Def Jam Records, founded in 1984 by Rick Rubin and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, began to find great success with new artists like LL Cool J - he had 4 platinum by 1991 and became the 1st superstar of rap Hip-Hop and Rap Become More Mainstream - in the early 1980s, break dancing became a national fad and was shown in everything from TV commercials to fashion magazines - however, rap music remained out of the mainstream until the late 1980s - RUN D.M.C. was largely responsible for rap's crossing over when they collaborated with rock group Aerosmith on the remake of the band's 1977 song "Walk This Way" - The Beastie Boys' hit "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)" (1986) was the 1st rap to hit the top of the Billboard charts - 's album (1989) sampled recordings by and April 30, 2013

- Queen Latifah's album All Hail the Queen (1989) brought a woman's perspective into the genre - in August 1989, MTV debuted Yo! MTV Raps, which quickly became the station's most popular program (aired rap music videos and live in-studio performances and interviews with rap artists) The Growth of Hard-Core Rap - rap music with a more social and political tone was evident in the success of Public Enemy, a New York group who released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), and emphasized black nationalist pride - 1989 - L.A. rap group N.W.A. released their debut album Straight Outta Compton, an influential recording that contributed to the development of the sub- genre known as "gangsta" rap The Obscenity Trial of 2 Live Crew - in 1989, Miami's 2 Live Crew released Nasty as They Wanna Be - a federal court judge in Florida declared the album "obscene," and Florida record store owner Charles Freeman was arrested for selling it in his store - this was the in the history of the U.S. that a federal court had set down such a ruling about a recording - the album was banned in Florida as well as other states - Freeman was found guilty in trial, but the rap group was acquitted - sales of the album skyrocketed Becomes Mainstream - in the early 1990s, albums by N.W.A., Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Snoop Doggy Dogg jumped to the top of the charts - critics became alarmed, stressing that not only was this type of rap focusing almost exclusively on pathologies within American culture, particularly black ghetto communities, but also that it was glorifying ghetto life and inciting violence April 30, 2013

- albums with sexually explicit or violent lyrics were required to post a "Parental Warning" logo on CD covers - 1996 - "West Coast" superstar Tupac Shakur was murdered in Las Vegas - 1997 - "East Coast" rapper Notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed - 1998 - rap became America's top-selling musical format - 81 million CDs, tapes, and albums were sold that year - in 1999, whites purchased 70% of hip-hop albums - in 2001, hip-hop music executive Russell Simmons announced a "Hip-Hop Summit" - he invited major artists, recording executives, members of Congress, academics, and civil rights groups to meet in New York to discuss a variety of issues - people talked about getting artists in the entertainment industry "to take responsibility for themselves," to establish mechanisms for conflict resolution among artists, and to closely examine artist development and marketing in order to identify strategies to "elevate the art form"