Many wonder how hip hop music and culture connect with the tradition of Black music practice that has been discussed so far. Hip hop or rap music, as it first was titled, began commercially in 1979 with the release of Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight and the now famous line, “I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hipidipit, hiphop hopit, you don’t stop.” While Rappers Delight was the first rap record of marked success, rap music/culture was a movement that emerged in the consciousness of communities long before this record was released. Through the sharing of experiences across the African diaspora, from Jamaica to the Bronx, there emerged a new Black artistic impulse. This expressive form grew from neighborhood parties in the early 1970s, where DJs would spin records and talk with the audience between songs. DJs would also challenge each other with “capping” on their opponents, thereby creating a contemporary urban debate session, couched in slang word battles, rhyme schemes, and humorous ways of telling a story.
In rap, young street poets expressed themselves artistically by claiming to project the most authentic Black style and music. The street corner and the neighborhood party, just as in the past, became the Black performance stage on which community artists reflected their identity and projected their image. The DJ performers had to have “skills” to keep the party going. What made one better than another was his or her ability “to mix it up” between breaks, while changing the record.
The roots of hip hop can be seen in comic narratives, r&b, and gospel—all the way back to the slave preacher and the West African griot. In fact, musicologists and historians have identified African spoken word traditions as some of the world’s great early performance practices. We can trace the love of word play and rhymes up to the present, from Muhammad Ali and Gil Scott-Heron, the last poets of the civil rights and Black Arts movements, to little Black girls rhyming to their jump-rope games on urban sidewalks. In one sense, rapping in the Black community is nothing new. But rap music is a unique form that grew from a Jamaican DJ tradition. In 1971, an enterprising and gifted recent Jamaican immigrant named Kool Herc, and nicknamed Hercules because of his really loud sound system, began spinning records for parties, and he did something that had not been done before. Kool Herc’s innovations were twofold. First, instead of using the disco tunes that were current, he played funky r&b from the 1960s, like the James Brown songs he favored from his days in Jamaica, working as a DJ. Second, in many of those records, there was “the break”—the place in the record where the singing stopped, and just the drum beat was left. Kool Herc used the break to “rap” to the crowd. And he used two turntables, playing the same record back and forth to prolong the break. The two together would drive the audience into a frenzy, and the break became a marked moment in music history.
Enter the B-boys, a dance crew who specialized in steps, moves, and flips that became known as “break dancing.” As break dancing and rapping grew in popularity, there were needs for DJs, dancers, and emcees. Other early rappers introduced new techniques, such as the innovation of high school DJ Joseph Sandler, nicknamed Grandmaster Flash. He was an electronic whizkid. Flash created a special switch-box/mixer that allowed him to cue up a record in his headphones so that he could accurately switch between multiple records and select specific breaks. He turned this into great skill long before CDs and digital technology were common. With this, a ritual was born—a ritual with the multiple roles of the DJ, the emcee, and the dancers. This ritual flowered into a self-contained culture that included visual art, clothes, and a very rich vocabulary in addition to the music, hip hop.
By the early 1980s, hip hop had become the next big youth entertainment movement, following the folk, rock, and social protest songs of the 1960s and 1970s. And, as usual, this new music, along with its language and visual symbols, was quickly absorbed into the international marketplace. Today, the number one youth music in most parts of the world is hip hop. But what’s interesting about the rise of rappers as central cultural figures is the attention that has been paid to what they are saying, not simply to their skills as party-meisters. With all the hype, it’s easy to forget a very important aspect of the hip hop movement: the community of activism. The groups of DJs, rappers, and dancers were “gang size,” literally, the size of a gang. In some cases, they were actual gangs.
But many hip hop groups used their messages to promote collective activism. Groups like Afrika Bambaataa and his Zulu Nation created manifestos that strove for “unity in our community,” and wove themes into their works such as knowledge, wisdom, freedom, peace, unity, love, and respect. Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 hit, aptly titled “The Message,” describes the despair that afflicts people living in poverty in America’s cities: “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.” This important element of rap, that it contains a social message within popular form, is often overlooked. Coming right out of the civil rights and war protest eras, hip hop has roots powerfully planted in social consciousness.
Still, since its beginnings, rap has seen the same kind of commodification—watering down and homogenization—that blues music experienced in the 1920s, and r&b experienced in the 1940s. The formula, or process, is very similar. Recall that blues began as a music of poor, rural people. It was recorded. Small New York club bands of Black musicians began to play it. Then along came F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who wrote about it. The jazz age was born as a commercial product, or series of products. Irving Berlin, Paul Whiteman, and Benny Goodman became the kings of ragtime, jazz, and swing. What began as an authentic Black music and art conception became big, big business, dominated really by Whites. Likewise, r&b race records of the 1940s began as urban street-corner music. But the music was recorded and played by DJs. Rock and roll was born. Elvis and others became superstars. Big business overpowered the more authentic roots of the musical form.
As we consider rap music, we see a form that began as Black neighborhood party music. It was recorded and became a national craze. Enter Eminem, and by the late 1990s, we have yet another American music idol.
One of the power tricks that is played in cultural criticism involves reducing the relevance of a particular movement, thing, or person by claiming in print that the form has no history, shows no craft or invention, lacks refinement, and carries no intellectual weight. Many kinds of popular music have experienced such critical dismissals. Jazz was first dismissed as “jungle music” that would destroy the values of young Americans. There was similar outrage over r&b and rock and roll. Hip hop has also been plagued, wrongly, with the same type of dismissals. In fact, there are many musical/performance style aspects in hip hop that should be noted and considered as we seek to understand Black music and culture:
Hip hop also looks to past musical traditions for its message. Hip hop covers, samples, quotes, and speaks with other older texts and musical grooves. Hip hop narratives are mostly urban stories of poetic reaction to the decimation of the Black community. Themes include poverty, crime, jail culture, drug/gang culture, police brutality, jobs and unemployment, sexism, urban identity after the civil rights era, the Black male urban image, male/female relationships, and community uplift and empowerment. The narratives provide a critique of America and seek to hold people accountable.
Below, I summarize different periods of hip hop music from 1979 to 2005 and beyond. Note that this is a “sound sampling” and not an exhaustive nor complete overview, but it provides space for some reflection on hip hop’s variations.
Kool Herc, Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa were all DJs whose music grew out of the Jamaican tradition of rapping over the beat breaks of old James Brown and other 1960s–1970s r&b records. This music grew into a cultural expression among disgruntled urban youth in the 1980s at the height of Reaganism. Hip hop at this time featured four elements: music, rapping, graffiti, and dance. This was the start of hearing words, a narrative, that drew in the audience. This drawing in was known as “the rap effect,” with the most persuasive and important aspect of this music up front, the message direct, rapped straight at the issues and at the listener.
Run DMC, the Beastie Boys, and Will Smith were among the dominant artists of hip hop’s mainstream period. Rap and hip hop were now categories in the record bins and a major force in the national music scene. With examples like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” hip hop was now accepted as popular commercial music. Musicians and producers were not just sampling other music. They were conceptualizing rhythms, harmonies, riffs, turnarounds, and hooks, aided by some of the hottest production technology in the business.
Musical initiative became an equal creative partner to “the rap” in hip hop music. These artists had now morphed from being a part of an underground movement to being mainstream celebrities. Will Smith and the Hammer will definitely go down in history as two of the biggest rapper-entertainers in American musical culture. They were rappers first. Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit,” well, that says it all, doesn’t it! Hip hop had legitimized itself, using its own rhetorical form. The music had created its own rules, and it challenged the rest of the music business to keep up.
NWA (Niggaz with Attitude), Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Snoop Dogg, 50Cent, Eminem, and Master P. represent another variety of rap and hip hop that emerged in the late 1980s and continues today. This music caused and continues to cause controversy. “Gangsta rap” seemed to glorify violence. “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge,” was the epochal manifesto in NWA’s 1988 “Straight Outta Compton.” In Chuck D’s words, Rap was now a kind of “CNN for the urban community.”
A rude, crude, direct, and alarming music/speech had become, for the first time in American mainstream history, a commercially available way to engage the public. Gangsta rap was quickly commodified. No longer “keeping it real,” it became a poison. In addition to setting a performance standard, it also set a standard for the use of abusive language and degrading imagery. Parental Advisory stickers were placed on CDs but these do little to stop the damage. And I think it’s fair to blame the industry that profits from these records. At the same time, we have to keep gangsta rap in perspective. Its narratives clearly demonstrate the poignancy and relevance of the community activist nature of popular music in America. For this reason, we can’t dismiss this part of the hip hop phenomenon.
“Express Yourself” by NWA is an example of the delicate balance between the music as expression and as mindless product for consumers: “it gets funky when you got a subject and a predicate, add it on a dope beat and it will make you think.” The powerful style cannot be ignored. Nor can the connection to the r&b tradition, the centrality of the idea of self-expression. The concept of authenticity and originality is a big part of art, and the concept of the power of reality giving voice to the concerns of the community is important. There is much to salvage.
In the 1990s, a new movement grew within hip hop, one that promoted a positive social/political response to the damage caused by gangsta rap. This movement within rap history includes Public Enemy, Chuck D, Queen Latifah, Eric B and Rakim, KRS-One, En Vogue, Salt-N-Pepa, and Arrested Development. As the latter rap, “Take me to another place, take me to another land. Make me forget all that hurts me, let me understand your plan.” What happens when you take the hottest r&b female singing group, En Vogue, and couple them with the number one female hip hop group, Salt-N-Pepa? Well, you’ve created the greatest sexual liberation banner song since Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” But here we have the women proclaiming respect for men. It is a big tune and huge cultural statement!
Coolio’s 1995 “Gangsta’s Paradise” is another example of socially conscious hip hop. Coolio’s work was the soundtrack feature of the movie Dangerous Minds. Hip hop continued to clean up its act, and it became more legitimate. In 2001, MTV produced Carmen: A Hip Hop Opera, adapted from the great masterpiece by Bizet. All of these cultural stuffings and crisscrossings now defined the music. D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar,” in 1995, and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm, in 1997, were examples of the emergence of the mix between hip hop and urban contemporary r&b. Rock artists, including the Beastie Boys, weren’t far behind in partnering with hip hop. The music is all meshed together: r&b artists don’t just want to sing—they’re “flowing,” using hip hop styles, the two inextricably bound.
Hip hop further expanded in 1992 when Miles Davis, one the greatest jazz masters of all time, embraced hip hop in his album Doo Bop. Likewise, in 2003, Roy Hargrove, one of the leading young lions of jazz, released the hip hop/jazz CD Hard Groove. Hip hop artistry has made a mark on jazz culture, as the two styles blend to redefine the Black music tradition.
Kanye West views and comments on the world within hip hop through his songs “Addiction,” “Gold Diggers,” and “Diamonds.” He raps about the travesty of blood diamonds. “Over here we die from drugs . . . over there they die from what we buy from drugs.”
With the impact of the positive messages in Talib Kweli’s “Get By” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” and with the emergence of gospel and Christian rap, we can see that hip hop has diversified, grown up, and become an industry player in the music world, as well as a force of social change. In a Minnesota Public Radio interview, hip hop mogul Russell Simmons touches on this aspect of the music:
Rap is about disenfranchised poor people. And these people have become leaders in mainstream American culture, and relevant to all those voiceless people. And 80 percent of those who buy this music are not Black. And that’s what makes it so relevant, because people who are driving in their cars in Beverly Hills are understanding the plight of people in Compton. People who live in trailer parks are connecting to the same energy and know that they have the same issues and poverty conditions of people who are living in the urban area, in the projects. Now the connection is made between all young people in America and they are listening and understanding the plight of the poor, and that is a big deal that will change America to be more sensitive to the suffering people in our country.
As Simmons explains,
Jay Z has a scholarship fund, he’s registering voters. Hip Hop Summit registered 11,000 voters. . . . Hip Hop Summit people came out with paper and pen in hand to empower their community. They are doing a lot of good. The Hip Hop community is responsible and powerful. . . . They are thinking about higher elevation and consciousness. It’s the truth if you listen to it. Hip Hop poetry is truth because people connect to truth. Truth always sells. Hip Hop is the most honest, with most integrity of any commercial art form being distributed today.
There’s no doubt about it. Despite all the talk, criticism, and commercial hype, hip hop music is a huge global force from New York to Tokyo, from Brazil to Africa. There are estimates that, at its height, it made $5 billion a year—from the music, the advertising, the clothes, and the merchandise. This is one sure way to measure its cultural force and power in the West. And hip hop culture has become one of America’s leading exports, changing the way businesses across the planet are selling their products.
Again, entertainment and cash flow can never be the determining factor for the value and worth of music and art. No art that is based on materialism can survive. But hip hop today is big business. It’s gained street like-ability and branding in the marketplace, and it has become an incredible power in contemporary culture. Considering hip hop’s pervasive presence, there’s no way to escape its meaning and impact in the world today. As Queen Latifah states in her Black Reign album, “Cause hip-hop is for real . . . I’m dealing with the truth, cause all over the world, it’s aggravated youth.”
As Albert Murray states, “Artists use their work to recall human living, and this provides us with the most adequate frame of reference for coming to terms with contemporary experience.” Some days, I still cling to my old “trained” musician’s ways and feel that too much of hip hop is derivative and is not true art. But hip hop culture is powering so many of our contemporary music impulses that to miss this is to be walking around with one’s head in the sand. Hip hop culture, love it or hate it, is a pervasive force that has significantly marked our society.
Jazz urbane is a new musical movement developing in the early years of the twenty-first century. We see jazz urbane in the Jazz at Lincoln Center project, a monumental accomplishment led by Wynton Marsalis and others. The project seeks to ensure the legacy of jazz as a publicly performed art form. Jazz urbane gives hope and promise to the possibility of new breakthrough creative and aesthetic visions.
Let’s think back to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz and the prophetic line “The Shape of Things to Come” that pointed to Oliver Lake, Steve Coleman, Gregg Osby, Jazzmatazz, Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Geri Allen, and Regina Carter. Branford Marsalis’s Buckshot LeFonque from 1997 also suggested all this mixing and merging, bringing together everything from hip hop, rap, synth-driven techno effects, blistering tempoed swing, with edge, rock, acid jazz, and more. All this is largely driven by urban jazz musicians who are positioned to shift jazz back to the public, back to its audience.
Even as the traditional music industry collapsed in the early 2000s, we have seen the continued rise and visibility of thriving independent label efforts. The results have brought forth creative fusions as evidenced in hip hop jazz groups such as Soul-Live, the sounds of neo-soul in Erykah Badu and Mint Condition, and the label Hidden Beach’s work with Jill Scott. Newer jazz faces such as Esperanza Spalding, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Jason Moran, Christian Scott, Stefon Harris, Robert Glasper, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and others suggest that a modern hip jazz aesthetic is at work today. This all-encompassing movement is a new jazz urbane.
Due to the accessibility and ease of Internet music sharing, the rise of more independent companies, the inextricable bonding of mass and electronic media with musical identity and image promotions, there are actually more sophisticated music movements today outside of mainstream hip hop and youth pop culture than in years past. And yet, hip hop’s phrase conception and its “feel” have mightily shaped this new music. The artistry that is emerging helps to define and push a new aesthetic as it critiques and challenges the everyday practice ears of the industry and the jazz status quo, just as jazz has always done.
Jazz urbane is jazz music culture seen in contemporary urban progressive artistic environments, where the audiences are drawn to music performed by creative musicians. This musical movement is an outgrowth of artists’ ideas in conjunction with independent labels, clubs, lofts, galleries, festivals, and foundation initiatives, all working together to counter the smooth jazz radio marketing and advertising and the traditional pop culture, while staying committed to creative jazz artistry.