Hip Hop

Modern mainstream pop derived from the blues has sidelined jazz. But the tradition of African rhythm in pop continues like a golden thread.

On the west coast the griots were wandering poets and musicians, educators and custodians of oral traditions, they spun stories with rhythm. Drums and the kora, spoken word music! The ring shouts, field hollers, and spirituals and blues of early slaves drew on common elements of African music, the drum beat, vocal call and response and improvisation. 'Speech-song has been part of black culture for a long, long time'. The embryonic blues, for song and dance, intensified the excitement with a repetitive 4 bars looped over and over. 

It seems obvious that rap music has its roots in the 'talking blues' of the Delta.

In the mid-1970s, New York City was nearly broke. The Bronx became a music magnet for Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, and black Americans from the surrounding areas. A melting pot just as New Orleans was 70 years before.

This is how it worked: One guy, the DJ, played records on two turntables. One guy served as MC. The DJs learned to move the record back and forth under the needle to create a 'scratch' or to drop the needle on the record where the beat was the hottest, playing "the break" over and over to keep the folks dancing. The MCs 'rapped' over the music to keep the party going, using rhyme and rhythm as one MC sought to outchat another. New dance styles were created —'locking' and 'popping' and 'breaking'. A new culture spin, rap, dance, graffiti and crime were integral parts of it.What attracts white kids to this music is the same thing that prompted outraged congressmen to decry jazz during the 1920s, parents disapproved of the violent and sexually explicit lyrics. This was rebellious adolescence again, hip-hop was 'cool', illicit, black America and the infectious rhythms swung. A revolt against imposition of culture.

 

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