II. The Development of Rap Music
For the very first time hip hop culture appears as a cultural form constituted by the four elements of rap, deejaying, graffiti and break dancing; hip hop rises to inherit myriad features from different cultures.10 Although each one of the elements counts in the development of hip hop culture, from Andy Bennett’s view, rap still remains the particular and most significant one as resisting and addressing the living condition of everyday life in Bronx. As Bennett argues,
In particular, the absence of a need for a musical skill, in the more conventional sense of being able to play a musical instrument, gave rap an essentially “hands-on” quality, making it an ideal medium through which young people could spontaneously express their views or simply vent frustration regarding issues such as interracial violence, poverty, and unemployment─issues that were all exacerbated due to the ghettoization of the Bronx district and its labelling as a “no-go” area. (89, my
italics)
Accordingly, rap as an oral art form contains the innate feature of arranging materials
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10. According to Ian Maxwell, hip hop culture has the standard narrative, which from his words would be the three key practices, “rapping, the historical precedents of which can be found in the singer-historian father/faith healer of sub-Saharan Africa, inflected through the forced orality of slavery and the more benign evangelism of southern Baptism, (re)united with the rhythms of Africa via the Caribbean, collided, in the late 1970s, in New York, with the Latino-American tradition of quasi-combative dance and (also) Latino urban idiographics, morphing into what Brewer (1992) calls ‘Hip Hop Graffiti’”
(Maxwell 41). See Phat Dope, Beats, Rhymes: Hip Hop Down Under Comin’ Upper (2003)
at hand for sounds and blending with rhythms and rhyming words, and using vinyl records on turntables to produce sound effects called “scratching.” The “hands-on”
quality makes rap accessible because instrumental devices can be replaced by human voice to produce the sound effects of music.
It is also considered that rap’s oral form has carried the African root from the historical slavery in America. Based on the storytellers in traditional African culture,
“griots” are believed as the root of rap music, by singing and reciting things to reserve knowledge. In Lommel’s words, “[T]hey entertained their audiences, and they educated their people. . . [t]hey required and inspired the participation of their people in events and by extension, in communities” (Lommel 10-11). Henry L. Gates has argued that rap is the cultural continuity and “an African-American oral tradition, traceable through the Middle Passage back to the sub-Saharan griot, elaborated by the experience of slavery” (Phat Dope, Beats, Rhymes 42). Griots had the similar structures as rap now possessed of its oral musicality which the “chanted rhymes punctuated by the rhythm of drums underlines modern rap music, as it does so much of 20th-centrury black poetry and musical expression, such as R&B11”(Lommel 11). Hip hop and R&B songs have had bonds between each other because hip hop songs often “sample a musical or vocal hook from a well-known R&B or pop song” (Hip Hop America 64) to acquire success in business.
Moreover, hip hop culture’s thriving specialties include the performance presented by the MC rapping on the stage, the DJ(s) working on musical collages and scratching sound effects, and sometimes the DJ samples/adapts beats or verses from old songs __________________
11. R&B sprang from the chord and beat of jump blues in the 1940s and it laid the groundwork for rock and roll. In recent development, R&B evolves into a more changeable facet, often associating with hip hop that “R&B began adding stylistic components of hip-hop until – by the end of the millennium—
there were hundreds of artists who featured both rapping and singing on their records.” More details of the relations between contemporary R&B and hip hop will be discussed in later chapters. (See the music genre definition http://www.allmusic.com/genre/r-b-ma0000002809)
seeking to create different styles for a new song. The sampling technique turns out to be the most adventurous invention in the development of hip hop music that ties the hip hop history from traditions to innovations (American Popular Music 386). Bennett adopts L. Back’s interpretation on the “mixing” with the term “bricolage” to illustrate the relations between rap music and the hip hop culture itself. According to Back’s definition, “[R]ap music is independent on the rearranging of musical fragments intermixed by the DJ. . .[t]he DJ is close to what Lévi-Strauss (1976) called a
‘bricoleur12’ or craftsperson who makes use— of musical fragments in order to create new music” (Cultures of Popular Music 90). Back indicates that rap music has the similar usage of musical fragments for which it extracts different music and lyrics from different pieces of music works, thus forming the same “bricoleurist cut and mix”
effects (Cultures of Popular Music 90). Thus, Bennett concludes Back’s notion to suggest that rap is postmodern music because it reassembles “songs and sound bites from different eras, genres and ‘cultures’ of music corresponds with the blurring of stylistic boundaries now occurring across a range of cultural and artistic concerns”
(Cultures of Pop Music 90). The idea of “bricolage” stands for a great part of hip hop’s spirit, especially in the making of its music; through the process of bricolage, hip hop music proves its capability of absorbing diverse elements across time and space and creating its own cultural production.
Apart from the technical features presenting rap music with cultural diversities, rap lyrics also possess an artistry of its poetic aesthetics. Lyrics, however, can be seen _________________
12. To define “bricolage” in youth or subculture, Hebdige takes British punk music to reveal how the subcultures are constructed: different materials with or without meaning borrowed or assembled into shaping the punk style, which “was defined principally through the violence of its ‘cut-ups’” (Hebidige 106, my italics). Hebidige then clarifies the idea by exemplifying the already “manufactured objects which qualified as art because [he] chose to call them such. . . a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon — could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion”
(Hebidige 107).
as rap’s most essential property, which functions to make the music works expressive and cultivated. Adam Bradley carefully examines the structure and the techniques of rap and classifies its poetic conditions in Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (2009) to six categories: rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, style, storytelling, and signifying.
He discreetly puts rap into a theoretical domain and explains it in an intellectual eye.
First, he claims that rap is public art and also an oral poetry; it cannot be separated from the rapper/MC or leave without the beat because the beat in rap is “poetic meter rendered audible” (Bradley xv). Rap has to be sung and performed:
The majority of rap beats are in 4/4 time, as Bradley indicates, and it means that “each musical measure (or bar) comprises four quarter-note beats. For the rapper, one beat in a bar is akin to the literary poet’s metrical foot. Just as the fifth metrical foot marks the end of a pentameter line, the fourth beat of a given bar marks the end of the MC’s line. (Bradley xix-xx)
In addition to beat, rhythm, another essential factor in poetry, is also significant to the creation of rap. Drawing on M. W. Croll’s theory, Andrew Walsh explains the importance of rhythm in Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (1987):
[T]he rhythmic form of verse is the same in its essential principles as that of the music of song, from which it is, in fact derived in the first
instance…meanwhile a great of poetry continues and will always to be made much like song as possible. Dancing and music are the arts of rhythm; they have nothing to learn their own business from poetry; poetry, on the other hand, has derived all it knows about rhythm from them.
(Walsh 192)
Therefore, rhythm proves to be one of rap’s fundamental elements, born with rapper/MC’s voice and the beat they produce to create the dual relationship. Besides, when rappers/MCs want to achieve the conformity with the syncopation and the stress,
they must try to connect their works with flows and rhythms that can best surprise the audience.
Along with the beat and rhythm, rhyme can also be regarded as the most creative and original artwork that rappers/MCs make from their mouth as well. In general, rap usually rhymes in the end of the line, falling on the last beat, as Bradley analyzes, and
“two lines in succession with end rhymes comprise a couplet” (Bradley 50). With every repetition of the last (or middle) stressed vowel, there comes the rhymes in the accordance with the sound. Yet, whether the rhymes lie in the end or in the middle of the lines, the function of the rhymes can always be the sparkle or the spotlight of rap.
Furthermore, the literary technique “wordplay” is another indispensable yet interesting element of rap. Wordplay may possibly be the “most revolutionary way that rap refashions the language. Wordplay creates surprising figures of speech and thoughts that bind words and ideas in unexpected ways (Bradley 91). Rap morphs when MCs have to use the inexplicit implications (similes or metaphors) to avoid the subject matter they actually refer to; in this regard, rap can transcend the language into another level, more playful and tactful. This technique not only presents the varieties of rap but also demonstrates rap as the poetic form and a cultural phenomenon as well.
As to storytelling, many believe that it is a credit to rap, but also a defect. Since rap is performed in public, the lyrics weigh much more than the written text, as it is usually attacked by some social critics (e.g. C. DeLores Tucker, the African-American activist, was deemed the most aggressive one in degrading the value of rap) for the excessive inclination toward violence, misogyny, drug, and commercialism. However, there are still intelligent storytellers who contribute themselves to writing their real life stories and personal opinions and perform them with skilled rhymes and rhythms. The lyrics can stand for an “attitude.” Tricia Rose once mentioned in Black Noise: Rap
Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) that to rappers, storytelling
means more than just sharing life experience:
Rappers tell long, involved, and sometimes abstract stories with catchy and memorable phrases and beats that lend themselves to black sound bite packaging, storing critical fragments in fast-paced electrified rhythms. Rap
tales are told in elaborate and ever-changing black slang and refer to black cultural figures and rituals, mainstream films, video and television
characters, and little-known black heroes. (Black Noise 3)
Rap has close relationship to urban black culture, carrying and voicing out the thoughts and attitudes of urban blacks. In a sense, storytelling communicates how the ethnicity live their life and how they would like to share their life with others via this slick language form.
Even though rap now can no longer be exclusive only to the “Blacks” or, to some extent, not as the medium of conveying the black consciousness for its highly commercialization, the performing style still reveals strong individual or local identity.
Moreover, when rap is appropriated into different languages other than English, its language structure will also be modified into a novel form with new metrical flows and new syncopated rhythms to meet the rhetoric device and thus to create unique lyrical aesthetics. For instance, French Rapper MC Solaar, whose rapping style is considered pure musicality that both the combination of the rhymes and syllables of French language of his works render with different flows, punch lines and stops. Signifying (aka battling) is a rather special facet of hip hop culture. Competitors stand face to face to deliver improvised rap, battling rap skills (including rhyme, puns, and other wordplay) with one another; whoever has better skills wins the battle. Such “freestyle battle” could have originated from the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.13
Because of its
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13. See Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk (2000) for a word definition on rap.
impromptu characteristic, some people may wonder its orthodoxy of being poetry instead of the finely revised composition. However, as Bradley seeks to defend that “no matter how we define the precise connection, the freestyle battle provides a way of understanding something as a whole. Most raps, whether freestyled or written, celebrates individual excellence” (Bradley 179).
In a word, youngsters channel their emotions, thoughts and life philosophy through rap, turning daily conversation into lyrical or poetical patterns and also communicating many of the personal ideas about political, social and racial issues for
“rap is a legitimate literacy tool with the added benefit that addresses the social, economic, and political position. . . It serves to facilitate cultural synchronization”
(Forell 30). Yet, no matter what political or social causes have ever influenced and reconstructed the transformation of hip hop culture, as young African-American (and other ethnicities that make the progress) people resort to rap music for the vent to dissatisfaction or anger toward the society thirty years ago, hip hop culture now is going beyond its original root and it has morphed into diverse looks concerning the popular culture worldwide. Since the serious issues discussed from the African-Americans such as racism, inequality and oppression have been loosened, the definition of hip hop has been reworked as well (Bennett 102). Nonetheless, music remains the core of hip hop as it progresses into the postmodern popular culture globally (George xiii).