Hip Hop Culture and Rap Music

A Reflection of African American History in the United States

Rap Music’s Beginning

• “Rap music emerged out of a Hip-Hop culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s with its emphasis on political expression and resistance through graffiti, modes of dress, language and social practices” (Beach)

Grandmaster Flash photo by Stuart Sevastes

DJ Kool Herc

• Rap music was influenced by Jamaican “toasting” especially by a Jamaican immigrant in 1967 Clive Campbell who became know as DJ Kool Herc” (Rhodes)

DJ Kool Herc• “Kool Herc seldom played an entire song. He knew which part of

the record sent his audience into a frenzy. It was usually a 30 second “break” section in which the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar stripped the beat to its barest essence. Herc would buy two copies of the same record and play it over and over emphasizing the break section. Herc used two turntables to accomplish this feat. This technique became known as “beats” or “break-beats”. .. What was odd about Herc’s style was that he did not use headphones to locate the breaks on the other turntable as other DJs would do who would later use his style. As with the onset of Jamaican ‘toasting’, Kool Herc also used simple phrases to encourage his dancers. But as the mixing in the “breaks” between the two turntables required more concentration, Herc became the first DJ to create MC-Dance team. (While Kool Herc performed at a club named the Hevalo, dancers to his music became known as ‘break dancers’) “(Rhodes)

Grandmaster Flash

Growing Unrest

• Leon Litwack in his article on the civil rights movement for The Journal of Southern History notes, “it became increasingly difficult towage the kind of campaign [Martin Luther] King preached.

• New voices—Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers—suggested new moods in black America

Malcolm X

Growing Unrest

• “The more black Americans found themselves excluded from the mainstream, the greater the possibilities for violent confrontation with the more visible symbols of white society.

Civil Rights

“Even as the civil rights movement struck down legal barriers…it failed to diminish economic inequalities” (Litwack)

Rap and Hip-Hop in the Bronx

• “The Bronx community-center dances and block parties where hip-hop began in the early 1970’s were not demonstrations for justice, they were celebrations of survival”(Chang)

• The seeds of later political rap were being sown• “Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five…

[created] the classic song “The Message” [which] resonated with an explosive terrifying mix of desperation and anger”(Litwack)

Political Rap

• Through the mid-1980’s rappers like Run-DMC and Soul Sonic Force “weighed in on topics like racism, nuclear proliferation, and apartheid”(Chang)

• Run-DMC Finds a much larger audience than early rap (including white “rockers”)

Run DMC on fashion

Late 80’s early 90’s• Increasing frustration and

antagonism a “post-civil rights stance”

• Led by Public Enemy rappers “displayed the Black Panthers media savvy and the Minister Louis Farrakhan’s nationalist rage”(Chang)

• In 1988 NWA entered the Top-20 charts with its album Straight Out of Compton which included the song “F—k tha Police”(Litwack)

“Street Poets”

• “African Americans who articulated growing despair at being caged in deteriorating postindustrial cities” (Litwack)

Ice T album Body Count which included the single “Cop Killer”

Dr Dre—”The Chronic”

Current State of Rap music• “One might ask whether rap

has abandoned the revolution”

• “The hip-hop lifestyle is now available for purchase in every suburban mall”

• Hip-hop rose by making blackness—even radical blackness—the worldwide trading currency of cultural cool”(Chang)Kanye West