The Rap Music Essay, Research Paper

The rap music

Rap music as a musical form began among the youth of South Bronx,

New York in the mid 1970 s. Individuals such Kool Herc and

Grandmaster Flash were some of the early pioneers of this art form.

Through their performances at clubs and promotion of the music, rap

consistently gained in popularity throughout the rest of the 1970 s.

The first commercial success of the rap song Rapper’s Delight by the

Sugar Hill Gang in 1979 helped bring rap music into the national

spotlight. The 1980 s saw the continued success of rap music with many

artists such as Run DMC (who had the first rap album to go gold in

1984), L.L. Cool J, Fat Boys, and west coast rappers Ice-T and N.W.A

becoming popular. Today, in the late 1990 s rap music continues to be

a prominent and important aspect of African- American culture.

Rap music was a way for youths in black inner city neighborhoods

to express what they were feeling, seeing, and living and it became a

form of entertainment. Hanging out with friends and rapping or

listening to others rap kept black youths out of trouble in the

dangerous neighborhoods in which they lived. The dominant culture did

not have a type of music that filled the needs of these youth, so they

created their own. So, rap music originally emerged as a way “for

[black] inner city youth to express their everyday life and struggles”

(Rapper’s , 1995, 17). Rap is now seen as a subculture that, includes

a large number of middle to upper white class youths, has grown to

support and appreciate rap music.

Many youth in America today are considered part of the rap

subculture because they share a common love for a type of music that

combines catchy beats with rhythmic music and thoughtful lyrics to

create songs with a distinct political stance. Rap lyrics are about

the problems rappers have seen, such as poverty, crime, violence,

racism, poor living conditions, drugs, alcoholism, corruption, and

prostitution. These are serious problems that many within the rap

subculture believe are being ignored by mainstream America. Those

within the rap subculture recognize and acknowledge that these

problems exist. Those within this subculture consider “the other

group” to be those people who do not understand rap music and the

message rap artists are trying to send. The suppresser, or opposition,

is the dominant culture, because it ignores these problems and perhaps

even acts as a catalyst for some of them.

The beats of rap music has people bopping and the words have

them thinking, from the tenement-lined streets of Harlem, New York, to

the mansion parties of Beverly Hills, California (Shomari, 1995, 45).

Rap music, once only popular with blacks in New York City,

Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, has grown to become America’s

freshest form of music, giving off energy found nowhere else. While

the vocalist(s) tell a story, the sic jockey provides the rhythm,

operating the drum machine and “scratching”. Scratching is defined as

rapidly moving the record back and forth under the needle to create

rap’s famous swishing sound (Small, 1992, 12). The beat can be

traditional funk or heavy metal, anything goes. The most important

part of rap is “rapping,” fans want to hear the lyrics.

During every generation, some old-fashioned, ill-humored people

have become frightened by the sight of kids having a good time and

have attacked the source of their pleasure. In the 1950s, the target

was rock ‘n’ roll. Some claimed that the new type of music encouraged

wild behavior and evil thoughts. Today, rap faces the same charges.

Those who condemn this exciting entertainment have never closely

examined it. If they had, they would have discovered that rap permits

kids to appreciate the English language by producing comical and

meaningful poems set to music. Rappers don’t just walk on stage and

talk off the top of their heads. They write their songs, and they put

a lot of though into them. Part of rapping is quick wit. Rappers

like L.L. Cool J grew up rapping in their neighborhood, and they

learned to throw down a quick rhyme when they were challenged

(Nelson,Gonzales, 1991, 135). But part of it is thoughtful work over

many hours, getting the words to sound just right so that the ideas

come across with style. As L.L. Cool J describes it, “I write all my

songs down by hand. Each song starts with a word, like any other

sentence, and becomes a manuscript.” (Nelson, Gonzales, 1991, 137).

Many performers set a positive example for their followers.

Kurtis Blow rapped in a video for the March of Dimes’ fundraising

drive to battle birth defects and he has campaigned against teenage

drinking as a spokesperson for the National Council on Alcoholism. On

the television show “Reading Rainbow,” Run-D.M.C. told viewers how

books enabled them to become “kings of rock.” On another occasion,

group member Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels said, “Little kids like to

follow me around the neighborhood. I tell them to stay in school. Then

I give them money to get something in the deli.” Run-D.M.C. is one of

the numerous rap combos advising kids to keep off drugs. Doug E. Fresh

and Grandmaster Flash have each made records telling of the horrors of

cocaine. On Grandmaster Flash’s hit “White Lines,” he details how the

drug can ruin a life, and shouts, “Don’t do it!”

From it’s inception, rap indured a lot of hostility from

listeners–many, but not all, White–who found the music too harsh,

monotonous, and lacking in traditional melodic values. However,

millions of others – often, though not always, young African-Americans

from underprivileged inner city backgrounds – found an immediate

connection with the style. Here was poetry of the street, directly

reflecting and addressing the day to day reality of the ghetto in a

confrontational fashion not found in any other music or medium. You

could dance to it, rhyme to it, bring it most anywhere on portable

cassette players, and, in the best rock ‘n’ roll tradition, form your

own band without much in the way of formal training (Small, 1992,

177). The basic workouts of early rappers like Kurtis Blow and the

Fat Boys can sound a bit tame today.

Many were still expecting the music to peter out before Run

D.M.C. came along. Rap was, and to a large degree still is, a singles

oriented medium, but these men from Queens proved that rappers could

maintain interest and diversity over the course of entire full-length

albums. Combining hard beats and innovative production with material

that emphasized positive social activism without ignoring the cruel

realities of urban life, they found as much favor with the critics as

the street. Among the first rap groups to climb the pop charts in a

big way, they also were among the first to make big inroads into the

White and Middle-American audiences when they teamed up with

Aerosmiths’s Stephen Tyler and Joe Perry for the hit single “Walk This

Way.” The mid- and late ’80s saw rap continue to explode in

popularity, with the birth of superstars like LL Cool J and Hammer

(the latter is often accused of providing a safe rap- pop

alternative). Although most early rap productions originated in New

York City and its environs, the music took hold as a national

phenomenon, with strong scenes developing in other East Coast cities

like Philadelphia, as well as West Coast strongholds in Los Angeles

and Oakland. Production techniques became increasingly sophisticated;

electronics, stop-on-a-dime-editing, and sampling from previously

recorded sources became prominent. The increased emphasis on

electronic beats led to the popularization of the term “hip-hop,” a

designation which is by now used more or less interchangeably with

rap. The Beastie Boys, obnoxious white ex-punks from New York, brought

rap further into the Middle American mainstream with their vastly

popular hybrids of hip-hop, hard rock, and in your face braggadocio

(Nelson, Gonzales, 1991, 12).

While rap had always forthrightly dealt with urban struggle, the

late ’80s saw the emergence of a more militant strain of the music.

Sometimes advantaged neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles,

although performers like Philadelphia’s Schoolly D probed that the

genre was not specific to the area. Boogie Down Productions laid down

a prototype that was taken to more extreme measures by N.W.A., who

reported on the crime, sex and violence of the ghetto with an explicit

verve that some viewed as verging on celebration rather than

journalism. Enormously controversial, and enormously popular with

record buyers, several N.W.A. members went on to stardom as solo acts,

including Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and Dr. Dre. The most popular and

controversial of the militant rappers, the New York based Public

Enemy, were perhaps the most political as well. Their brand of

activism, like that of Malcolm X’s two decades earlier, made a lot of

people, including liberals, pretty uncomfortable, with their emphasis

upon Black Nationalism and careless anti-Sematic, homophobic, and

sexist references. Groups such as Public Enemy ignited an ongoing

debate in the media. Activist-oriented critics and audiences found a

lot to praise in their music. At the same time, they could not let the

xenophobic tendencies of these acts pass unnoticed, or ignore the

frequent quasi-celebration in much rap music of misogyny, drugs, and

violence, and the status to be gained in the urban community by the

practice thereof. Passionate advocates of civil liberties and free

speech wondered, sometimes aloud, whether rappers were taking those

privileges too far.

Newly emerging gangsta rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Slick Rick,

and 2Pac not only take the violent subject matter of their lyrics to

new extremes (and to the top of the charts), but have been accused of

enacting their scenarios in real life, landing in jail for

manslaughter or fighting similarly grave charges. These performers

often unrepentantly contend they are only reporting things as they

happen in the ‘hood, of a culture that not only shoots people, but is

being shot at. Many critics find their line between art and reality

too thin, and hate to see them spreading their gospel from the top of

the charts (2Pac’s 1995 album “Me Against the World” debuted at No. 1

even as he was serving a prison sentence), or serve as role models for

international youth. Gangsta rap may have gotten a lot of the

headlines in recent years, but the field of rap as a whole remains

diverse and not as dominated by the shoot-’em-out minidramas of

gangsta rap, as many would have you believe. De La Soul took rap and

hip-hop productions to new heights with their 1989 debut Three Feet

High & Rising, an almost psychedelic sampling and editing of a wildly

eclectic pool of sources that would do Frank Zappa proud. Their

humorous and cheerful vibe inspired a mini-school of “Afrocentric”

acts most notably the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest.

Arrested Development, Digable Planets, and Digital Underground also

pursued playful, heavily jazz- and funk-oriented paths to immense

success and high critical praise. The work of rap is a highly macho

(some would say sexist) environment, but some female performers arose

to provide a much needed counterpoint from various perspectives: the

saucy (the various Roxannes), the pop (Salt-N-Pepa), and the feminist

(Queen Latifah). It is a measure of rap’s huge influence that the

style has infiltrated mainstream soul and rock as well. Producer Teddy

Riley gave urban-contemporary performers like Bobby Brown a vaguely

hip edge with his brand of “New Jack Swing,” White alternative rockers

like G. Love and most notably Beck devised a strange hybrid of rap,

blues, and rock. Vanilla Ice probed that Whitbread pop-rap could top

the charts, though he was unable to sustain his success.

More than most genres’ rap/hip-hop has become a culture with its own

sub-genres and buzzwords what can seem almost impenetrable to the

novice. Despite this proliferation of schools of production and

performance, many rap records can appear virtually indistinguishable

from each other to a new listener. And there’s no getting around the

fact that a lot of them are. The market is saturated with repetitive

beats and monotonously uncompromising slices of urban street life, to

the point that they’ve lost a lot of both their musical novelty and

shock value (Rose, 1994, 56). Rap music has lost none of its momentum

as we head into the last half of the 1990’s. Scenes continue to

proliferate, not just on the coasts, but in Atlanta, Houston, and such

unlikely locales as Paris. It may appeal more to inner-city

adolescents than anyone else may, but gangsta rap may be bigger than

anything else in R&B music may commercially, and there are more

multiplatinum rap/hip-hip acts than you can count. Shinehead, Shabba

Ranks, and less heralded performers like Sister Carol have fused

reggae and rap. And the jazz and rap worlds are being brought closer

together than ever through the efforts of Gang Starr and their lead

Guru, US3, and the landmark Stolen Moments: Red, Hot + Cool

compilation, which united many of the top names of hip-hop and jazz

(Rose, 1994, 67).

Rap is still a new music form. It is expanding every day, and the

sound has grown wide enough to include scores of future stars. Some

rap is rock-based, some is funk, and some is very close to the

original “street” sound. A few of the present stars will definitely

have a noticeable impact on the future of rap. Themes that are found

more and more in rap lyrics are: pride in an African heritage and the

call for harmony between men and women. Queen Latifah and MC Lyte are

working hard to open doors to women in the music business. Rap fans

are also starting to accept more white artists. 3rd Bass and Vanilla

Ice are new white rap acts with promise.

The time is near when all of America will be bopping to rap. Rap

has already shown signs of crossing over to a new audience. A Grammy

category was added for rap music in 1989. D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the

Fresh Prince were the first winners for their single, “Parents Just

Don’t Understand.” In 1990 Young MC took home the prize for “Bust a

Move.” And with real proof that rap is reaching more people, Tone Loc

became the first rapper ever to reach number one on the pop charts. He

did it with his hit single “Wild Thing” in 1989. Of course, there are

still plenty who are afraid of rap and won’t listen to it’s message.

Along with the birth and growth of rap comes censorship. This has

become a big issue within the music industry, and rap music is at the

center of the controversy. Some people want to put warning labels on

certain rappers’ albums and newspapers and magazines have been

printing articles about the bad influence that some rappers have on

kids. What is it about the music that people find so troubling? Some

rappers use strong language. Others are accused of writing racist

lyrics, or lyrics that are insulting to women. As with all kinds of

music, the more popular it becomes, the more likely you are to find

both good and bad sides. But the positive side of rap greatly

outweighs the negative. And its positive messages seem to be

spreading. The number of new rappers that grows everyday will bring

about new forms of rap and constant changes on the old school

versions of the music. With these new versions and variations comes

new fans and renewed faith from old fans. Regardless of how many rap

artists land in jail or end up dead, this music will live on. The

fans will make sure of it.