RAP

Few styles of music have experienced an explosion in popularity as spectacular as that of rap. As late as 1979, rap was restricted to the African-American ghettos of New York, yet by the end of the following decade, the music formed the basis of a multi-million dollar industry, and was instantly recognisable across the globe.

The roots of rap lie in the sound systems of Jamaica, mobile discos that blasted reggae out across the slums of Kingston. Thousands of Jamaicans emigrated to New York in the 1970s and they brought their sound systems with them. These became extremely popular in the summertime, when jams in parks, housing projects, and on street corners quickly became a main source of entertainment for African-Americans and Latinos. Mobile DJs grew in popularity, yet it was not until the emergence of Kool Here, otherwise known as Clive Campbell, that the DJ became a celebrity in his own right. An immigrant from Kingston who had settled in the Bronx, Kool Here played rhythm and blues, funk, and other records at block parties in the mid-1970s, and during this time developed a highly idiosyncratic style of DJing. Noticing that certain “breaks” or snippets of songs would drive the crowds wild, Here would play these sections repeatedly, rewinding the records manually. In order to make the music flow, Here would often have identical records on each turntable, cutting from one to another. This style of DJing would form the basis of rap music, otherwise known as hip-hop.

THE FIRST RAPPER

While Here was the first hip-hop DJ, he wasn’t the first rapper. Like their Jamaican predecessors, the New York DJs would use microphones to urge the crowds to dance. These exhortations gradually became more and more elaborate, and eventually DJs started to compose rhymes to deliver over the beats. Legend has it that the first to do so was a young DJ by the name of Grandmaster Flash. So that he could concentrate on DJing, Flash persuaded a group of friends to share the vocal duties. These would form the basis of the Furious Five, with whom Flash would later record some of the genre’s best-loved records.

Initially, rap music circulated purely through unofficially recorded “bootleg” tapes of live sound systems, but that all changed with the phenomenal success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), which sold over 2 million copies worldwide. Soon, all of New York’s rap crews…from the Treacherous Three to the Funky Four Plus One…were laying down rap tracks. The most successful were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who scored huge hits with “The Message” (1981) and “White Lines” (1982).

Gradually, as the 1980s progressed, more and more rap acts reached superstar status. Among them were LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run-DMC, who crossed over to a white rock audience when they collaborated with the heavy metal band Aerosmith on “Walk This Way” (1987). The former two were signed to Russell Simmons’ Def Jam label, which was also home to Public Enemy. Led by the fiercely articulate Chuck D, Public Enemy fused radical black separatist politics with a thundering hip-hop soundtrack, and in so doing produced some of the genre’s most critically acclaimed music, most notably the album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1989).

Toward the end of the decade, rap plunged into controversy as “gangsta” rappers including Ice-T and NWA began to release tracks celebrating the macho exploits of ghetto criminals. The shadow of violence would continue to fall over the genre in the 1990s, when superstar rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG were both murdered. However, in the late 1990s, artists such as Puff Daddy, the Wu-Tang Clan and the Fugees were among the most successful musicians working in the U.S. Despite the controversy, rap continues to thrive.

Nick Grish