Freestyle and the Rap Commodity
Griots
Deejay Toasting
Early MCs
• 1st known MC, 1974ish
– Kool Herc's Herculoids
• Cowboy
– GM Flash and 3 MCs / Furious Five
– First to really rhyme and rock a crowd, routines
• Melle Mel
– GM Flash and 3 MCs / Furious Five
– Writing rhymes...song writing credit/publishing
“Rapper's Delight”
• 1979, Sugarhill Gang (a “boy band”)
• Best-selling 12” single of all time
• NOT the first record with rapping (Fatback Band “King Tim III (Personality Jock)”)
• 14-minute record, played on many radio formats
• Made emceeing into “rapping”
• Made rap music global/glocal
• Mass commodification of music
• Sanitized, unauthentic, disco rap
Rap is...
• Commodified form of hip hop music
– Turns live performance art into a product
• Hip hop comes from streets; record companies made rap
• Written
• Displaces the DJ
– First musicians replicating DJ
– Then producers
• Not always culturally authentic (i.e. Sugarhill Gang)
• More industrial than cultural
• What we most commonly associate with hip hop
Blair (2004)
• Youth subcultural expression into pop culture
– Music that comes from socio-economic oppression
• Using rap to sell other goods
• Relates to rock and jazz; use of white appropriators to quell moral panics (i.e. Elvis)
– Run-DMC
• Marx's Alienation= something human is taken from us and returned as a commodity
Blair Cont'd
• Hegemony=ruling class ideas rule society as “normal”
• Gottdiener (1985): subcultural incorporation
– 1. Objects produced for exchange
– 2. User modifies object (bricolage); subcultural sign
– 3. Producers capitalize and turn subcultural trends in to mass culture; sanitization
• What does she say about rap in her study?
Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2000)
• Dir. Kevin Fitzgerald
• Art of improv rhyming, ephemeral
– The original form of MCing
• Written vs. Freestyle
– Written is business end, mass produceable
• Spiritual
• Outlet for anger, frustration, emotion...HEALING
• Battling and cypher...bboy, DJ, graff
Eminem v. Juice
• 1997 Scribble Jam Battle, Juice wins
• 1997 Rap Olympics, Otherwize wins
– Led to Eminem getting signed
• Considered to heavily influence 8 Mile (2002)
– Craig G wrote all the rhymes for Eminem's competitors in the film
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