Michelle*s_Farm
08-14-2009, 02:31 AM
Simon Sweetman's article below:
How hip-hop got its various starts
Allegedly the term hip-hop came from a little-known rapper, Cowboy, simply because it was one of his favourite lines...the line itself has been ripped off countless times. Most notably, in the early days of rap, with the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight.
The antecedents of hip-hop can be traced to many different forms of musical expression. Certainly the wildly individual vocal style of Little Richard could be deemed an example of early influence. Also, the dinky rhythms and singalong rhymes of a great deal of 40s/50s doo-wop and rhythm'n'blues (from The Coasters to Louis Jordan and Lee Dorsey) would hold an interest. You could go back to early 20th century jazz and look at the pioneers of showmanship - such as Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie - you should certainly consider the talkin' blues genre and the likes of Leadbelly and John Lee Hooker with their first-person tales of hardship, race and lack of social standing.
And - as DJs would later show, with their cut'n'paste ideas; literally taking from any seemingly incongruous musical genre and then placing it within the open hip-hop field to recontextualise it - hip-hop could have come from many places.
But the easiest rap-precursors to identify are Soul and Funk. The works of James Brown and George Clinton (with his separate Parliament and Funkadelic bands) were a huge influence on the first wave of hip-hop. And their sound and vibe has been carried on over the past two decades. As soul gave birth to funk in the late 1960s and became synonymous with the Civil Rights movement - think of crucial songs like James Brown's Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud - this launched a platform for singers to say even more with their words.
Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder pursued social-conscience statements within their funk tunes. But then, The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron showed that words could stand out as the dominant feature in a funk tune.
The Last Poets were a collective formed around Jalal Mansur Nuriddin; a US army paratrooper who had been jailed for opposing the Vietnam War. In jail he learned to "spiel" - a freeform style of poetry and direct ancestor of rapping - and on the symbolic date of May 16, 1969 (Malcolm X's birthday), he formed The Last Poets; the name comes from a South African writer who dubbed that age the last era for poets before guns took over completely.
Gil Scott-Heron was a writer first and foremost. He had published a novel (The Vulture) in 1968 - and had written stories, poems and journalism. Gil Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he met Brian Jackson. The two formed an incredible - lasting - musical partnership. Gil was not just a writer, he was a singer and piano player; and Brian was, in essence, his musical director and arranger. They took the poems from Small Talk at 125 and Lennox, Gil's first published collection of poetry, and with the help of some well-known jazz and funk studio musicians, created an album of spoken-word political poems over simmering funk and soul grooves.
But there is one more crucial antecedent to rap music. Something slightly removed from jazz, funk, soul, blues and rock'n'roll - and yet it encompasses all of those styles. And that is reggae - or Jamaican dancehall and dub styles. Dub music of the 1950s and 60s featured the DJ or Selecta providing the tune - with an MC "toasting" over it. Toasting is another early form of rap - a half-sung/half-spoken drawled delivery; often semi - if not totally - improvised; and also often very political.
Antecedents in place, we jump forward from the 1960s to the mid 1970s; New York - the birthplace of hip-hop. Graffiti artists were already torturing the subways and parks; breakdancing was developing as a result of teenagers listening to funk, soul and rock'n'roll on tape-decks. These improvised, random party-in-the-street atmospheres took shape - and were given the name Block-Parties.
Some of the influential DJs at this time were DJ Jazzy Jay, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa.
Next came The Sugarhill Gang with their Rapper's Delight single. The Sugarhill Gang were rap music's first stars. But they were also - it was later discovered - rap's first manufactured group. Sylvia Robinson (a label owner and producer) had heard about the block-parties going on in the neighbourhood and, inspired by her kids' interest in the music, and thinking that rap was a passing fad, cooked up The Sugarhill Gang. She plucked three obscure rappers, and using the hook from the disco-funk track Good Times by Chic, she crafted Rapper's Delight by Sugarhill Gang on Sugarhill Records. The first ever rap single. It was 1979.
Sugarhill Records went on to release important works by Grandmaster Flash Melle Mel & The Furious Five - whose songs The Message and White Lines were full of social commentary; anti-drugs with positive messages for street-kids.
To move forward from there, the very early 1980s didn't see rap leaping forward to take over; rather it was treading water. The most significant thing that happened in 1980 was the arrival of Kurtis Blow. Blow would be a footnote now, nothing more, if it weren't for the fact that he holds three towering achievements aloft. He was the first commercially successful rapper, meaning he was: the first to be signed to a major label; the first to release an album on a major; and the first to have a single (These Are the Breaks) to go gold in the charts.
From there, hip-hop culture evolved with the help of three very unlikely artists: Malcolm McLaren, Herbie Hancock and Blondie.
McLaren - the notorious manager of The Sex Pistols - featured a DJ scratching on his 1983 hit Buffalo Gals from his Duck Rock album. The album was not a hip-hop release, but the success of Buffalo Girls prompted people to wonder what that sound was - the record scratching -generating an interest in hip-hop.
McLaren's manipulative masterstroke was superseded by jazz musician Herbie Hancock. Rockit was a song from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song featured the DJ Grand Mixer D.ST - he performed scratches on the track - and was the first DJ to be seen on MTV, in live appearances and with the groundbreaking video. All of a sudden people had a picture to go with the sound - and the people that had this image were record-buyers.
But the most intriguing hop up from someone hip that rap received in the early 1980s was from the new-wave punk group Blondie, fronted by Debbie Harry. Blondie's fifth album, Autoamerican, featured the track Rapture, which offered a rap. The single charted and interest in the sound in the middle of the song (the rap), meant that hip-hop's audience was growing...
Run DMC would continue to improve hip-hop's audience - and become the first bona fide stars of the rap movement in the process. The New York trio comprising Run (Joseph Simmons) and his childhood friend Daryl McDaniels (DMC) along with DJ Jason Mizell (Jam Master Jay) released two solid rap albums - their self-titled debut in 1984 and King of Rock in 1985. But it was 1986's Raising Hell that launched the group into the stratosphere, thanks to their cover of Aerosmith's Walk This Way, which wasn't so much a cover as a re-imagining. The classic guitar riff was pumped out and Run DMC rapped over it, the DJ scratched but what really made it was that Steven Tyler and Joe Perry appeared on the track and in the video.
Hip-hop culture now had white rock validation.
The Fat Boys were another interesting mid-80s rap group. It wasn't just a clever name - these three dudes were massive - but most important they featured the art of beatbox thanks to Darren Robinson or "Buff the Human Beatbox". The Fat Boys remade the sixties classic The Twist with a cameo by its original singer, Chubby Checker. But they could never escape being a mere novelty act.
The Beastie Boys were significant, early on, for two reasons. Most important: they were white. Rap was almost entirely a black genre until The Beasties came on the scene. And like The Fat Boys and Run DMC, they used rock samples. The Beastie Boys' debut, Licensed To Ill, featured samples from Led Zeppelin; Black Sabbath records were scratched and fresh guitar riffs were provided by Kerry King. So what's interesting there is the hark back to Afrika Bambaataa's eclecticism (and within that the idea that a good piece of music is a good piece of music, regardless of its genre).
So rap music had an audience now - and a white audience too.
But the next group would ensure that the party atmosphere would go on the back-burner and the message would come out, loud and proud, again. Public Enemy released Yo! Bum Rush the Show in 1987 - and the firebrand political lyrics, delivered in Chuck D's booming baritone, were hard to ignore. Chuck D's comic foil was Flava Flav, whose quirky style (funky cartoon clothes, big black glasses and oversize clock hanging from his neck) gave the audience a breather from Chuck D's fierce polemic.
But as the 1980s drew to a close and a radio-audience for rap wanted more, the harder stuff came out. And the likes of Ice-T and 2 Live Crew spat filthy rhymes over fractured beats. And the first real movement against rap started to gain momentum. Rap records' constant need for Parental Advisory stickers and warnings helped politicians in the war over censorship of rock records. Rap was the bad guy. And there was a backlash from many rock music stations too.
N.W.A were perhaps rap's first supergroup, originally featuring Eazy-E, Ice Cube and Dr Dre. They took Public Enemy's sonic blueprint to the next level of success, but they not only ignored Public Enemy's message, they went the other way entirely, celebrating the hedonism of the culture: drugs, violence, and sex.
There are of course two sides to every coin - and the flipside to gangsta rap was taking place in the late 1980s/early 1990s with mature, groove-oriented party-hip-hop that was not a total throwback to the block-party mood, but certainly had more in common with that than anything offered by Snoop Dogg or N.W.A.
De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest paved the way for Arrested Development - there are hints of Gil Scott Heron's work in all of these groups. The Last Poets were of course still being kept alive by Public Enemy and Mobb Deep.
By this time, hip-hop and rap had actually spawned several sub-genres and sideline movements, and this has continued to the present day. The 1990s served up a lot of soft, radio-ready rap; essentially rap had become pop music - or was heading that way at any rate - and the likes of P.M. Dawn, Snap!, Young MC and The Fresh Prince began to take over the airwaves.
But as the 1990s ploughed on, rap was as big - business-wise - as ever and gangster rap was subdued enough to appear on radio with the likes of Notorious B.I.G and his apparent nemesis 2Pac. Personalities were dominating the game and it was turning ever more into a game. Rappers released albums with cameos on every track. Statements were being made before musical statements were being created.
Towering above all of this came the collective known as The Wu-Tang Clan. A larger than life crew of nine individuals who all made solo records between Clan projects, The Wus promoted themselves over anything else; they launched a hugely successful clothing label. Their albums, both band and solo, were all produced by one of their lead members, The RZA. His stamp was on everything they did sonically, as were their external influences: kung-fu and gangsta films. They made hip-hop icons out of Bruce Lee and Al Pacino's Scarface character, Tony Montana. And their solipsistic standing as the Kings of Hip-Hop was firmly in place after the release of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) released in 1993; it has gone on to be (arguably) the most important hip-hop work of the 1990s. Only Dr Dre's work - as an artist and producer - rivals it. The Wu-Tang influence was pervasive, a new standard within hip-hop. Empires were built.
And this continued with the introduction of Jay-Z and Nas and their rivalry to replace 2Pac and Biggie. And then the arrival of Eminem, a white rapper who would dominate the late 1990s and on into this decade...
The rise of Dr Dre as an uber-producer created a situation where producers were overtaking MCs. It was the first hint of a return to the late 1970s when DJs ruled the roost, but only in terms of mechanics: the sound was not similar at all. And producers like Timbaland (Missy Elliot) and Kanye West became as famous as the people they were producing.
This in turn spawned a second wave of friendlier, alternative hip-hop. Bands like Jurassic 5, Foreign Legion, Ugly Duckling and Black Eyed Peas (their first albums) arrived on the scene; a second-generation version of bands like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. The DJ and MCs were given equal footing (and equal billing).
The mid-90s also, in line with this underground movement, saw the interest in DJing rekindled. And since other forms of dance music were big, drum'n'bass, house, techno, it was time for the hip-hop DJ to shine again.
DJ Babu - who spins for both The Beat Junkies and The Dilated Peoples, is said to have coined the term "turntablism", purely because, as Babu has released solo records, he regards himself a "turntablist" - that is the instrument he plays. Turntablism spawned, if not a genre, then certainly a craze and eventually a movement. Names like DJ Shadow, Q-bert, The X-ecutioners and Mix Master Mike appeared, releasing their own mix albums (and production albums) featuring dazzlingly quick hand-tricks and genuinely innovative sounds. And so, hip-hop culture heads back to how it started. This is fitting, really, when you think of the shape of a record and the turntable that it's played on - to realise that hip-hop as a postmodern art form really has come full circle.
SOURCE:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/2746782/How-hip-hop-got-its-various-starts
How hip-hop got its various starts
Allegedly the term hip-hop came from a little-known rapper, Cowboy, simply because it was one of his favourite lines...the line itself has been ripped off countless times. Most notably, in the early days of rap, with the Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight.
The antecedents of hip-hop can be traced to many different forms of musical expression. Certainly the wildly individual vocal style of Little Richard could be deemed an example of early influence. Also, the dinky rhythms and singalong rhymes of a great deal of 40s/50s doo-wop and rhythm'n'blues (from The Coasters to Louis Jordan and Lee Dorsey) would hold an interest. You could go back to early 20th century jazz and look at the pioneers of showmanship - such as Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie - you should certainly consider the talkin' blues genre and the likes of Leadbelly and John Lee Hooker with their first-person tales of hardship, race and lack of social standing.
And - as DJs would later show, with their cut'n'paste ideas; literally taking from any seemingly incongruous musical genre and then placing it within the open hip-hop field to recontextualise it - hip-hop could have come from many places.
But the easiest rap-precursors to identify are Soul and Funk. The works of James Brown and George Clinton (with his separate Parliament and Funkadelic bands) were a huge influence on the first wave of hip-hop. And their sound and vibe has been carried on over the past two decades. As soul gave birth to funk in the late 1960s and became synonymous with the Civil Rights movement - think of crucial songs like James Brown's Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud - this launched a platform for singers to say even more with their words.
Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder pursued social-conscience statements within their funk tunes. But then, The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron showed that words could stand out as the dominant feature in a funk tune.
The Last Poets were a collective formed around Jalal Mansur Nuriddin; a US army paratrooper who had been jailed for opposing the Vietnam War. In jail he learned to "spiel" - a freeform style of poetry and direct ancestor of rapping - and on the symbolic date of May 16, 1969 (Malcolm X's birthday), he formed The Last Poets; the name comes from a South African writer who dubbed that age the last era for poets before guns took over completely.
Gil Scott-Heron was a writer first and foremost. He had published a novel (The Vulture) in 1968 - and had written stories, poems and journalism. Gil Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he met Brian Jackson. The two formed an incredible - lasting - musical partnership. Gil was not just a writer, he was a singer and piano player; and Brian was, in essence, his musical director and arranger. They took the poems from Small Talk at 125 and Lennox, Gil's first published collection of poetry, and with the help of some well-known jazz and funk studio musicians, created an album of spoken-word political poems over simmering funk and soul grooves.
But there is one more crucial antecedent to rap music. Something slightly removed from jazz, funk, soul, blues and rock'n'roll - and yet it encompasses all of those styles. And that is reggae - or Jamaican dancehall and dub styles. Dub music of the 1950s and 60s featured the DJ or Selecta providing the tune - with an MC "toasting" over it. Toasting is another early form of rap - a half-sung/half-spoken drawled delivery; often semi - if not totally - improvised; and also often very political.
Antecedents in place, we jump forward from the 1960s to the mid 1970s; New York - the birthplace of hip-hop. Graffiti artists were already torturing the subways and parks; breakdancing was developing as a result of teenagers listening to funk, soul and rock'n'roll on tape-decks. These improvised, random party-in-the-street atmospheres took shape - and were given the name Block-Parties.
Some of the influential DJs at this time were DJ Jazzy Jay, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa.
Next came The Sugarhill Gang with their Rapper's Delight single. The Sugarhill Gang were rap music's first stars. But they were also - it was later discovered - rap's first manufactured group. Sylvia Robinson (a label owner and producer) had heard about the block-parties going on in the neighbourhood and, inspired by her kids' interest in the music, and thinking that rap was a passing fad, cooked up The Sugarhill Gang. She plucked three obscure rappers, and using the hook from the disco-funk track Good Times by Chic, she crafted Rapper's Delight by Sugarhill Gang on Sugarhill Records. The first ever rap single. It was 1979.
Sugarhill Records went on to release important works by Grandmaster Flash Melle Mel & The Furious Five - whose songs The Message and White Lines were full of social commentary; anti-drugs with positive messages for street-kids.
To move forward from there, the very early 1980s didn't see rap leaping forward to take over; rather it was treading water. The most significant thing that happened in 1980 was the arrival of Kurtis Blow. Blow would be a footnote now, nothing more, if it weren't for the fact that he holds three towering achievements aloft. He was the first commercially successful rapper, meaning he was: the first to be signed to a major label; the first to release an album on a major; and the first to have a single (These Are the Breaks) to go gold in the charts.
From there, hip-hop culture evolved with the help of three very unlikely artists: Malcolm McLaren, Herbie Hancock and Blondie.
McLaren - the notorious manager of The Sex Pistols - featured a DJ scratching on his 1983 hit Buffalo Gals from his Duck Rock album. The album was not a hip-hop release, but the success of Buffalo Girls prompted people to wonder what that sound was - the record scratching -generating an interest in hip-hop.
McLaren's manipulative masterstroke was superseded by jazz musician Herbie Hancock. Rockit was a song from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song featured the DJ Grand Mixer D.ST - he performed scratches on the track - and was the first DJ to be seen on MTV, in live appearances and with the groundbreaking video. All of a sudden people had a picture to go with the sound - and the people that had this image were record-buyers.
But the most intriguing hop up from someone hip that rap received in the early 1980s was from the new-wave punk group Blondie, fronted by Debbie Harry. Blondie's fifth album, Autoamerican, featured the track Rapture, which offered a rap. The single charted and interest in the sound in the middle of the song (the rap), meant that hip-hop's audience was growing...
Run DMC would continue to improve hip-hop's audience - and become the first bona fide stars of the rap movement in the process. The New York trio comprising Run (Joseph Simmons) and his childhood friend Daryl McDaniels (DMC) along with DJ Jason Mizell (Jam Master Jay) released two solid rap albums - their self-titled debut in 1984 and King of Rock in 1985. But it was 1986's Raising Hell that launched the group into the stratosphere, thanks to their cover of Aerosmith's Walk This Way, which wasn't so much a cover as a re-imagining. The classic guitar riff was pumped out and Run DMC rapped over it, the DJ scratched but what really made it was that Steven Tyler and Joe Perry appeared on the track and in the video.
Hip-hop culture now had white rock validation.
The Fat Boys were another interesting mid-80s rap group. It wasn't just a clever name - these three dudes were massive - but most important they featured the art of beatbox thanks to Darren Robinson or "Buff the Human Beatbox". The Fat Boys remade the sixties classic The Twist with a cameo by its original singer, Chubby Checker. But they could never escape being a mere novelty act.
The Beastie Boys were significant, early on, for two reasons. Most important: they were white. Rap was almost entirely a black genre until The Beasties came on the scene. And like The Fat Boys and Run DMC, they used rock samples. The Beastie Boys' debut, Licensed To Ill, featured samples from Led Zeppelin; Black Sabbath records were scratched and fresh guitar riffs were provided by Kerry King. So what's interesting there is the hark back to Afrika Bambaataa's eclecticism (and within that the idea that a good piece of music is a good piece of music, regardless of its genre).
So rap music had an audience now - and a white audience too.
But the next group would ensure that the party atmosphere would go on the back-burner and the message would come out, loud and proud, again. Public Enemy released Yo! Bum Rush the Show in 1987 - and the firebrand political lyrics, delivered in Chuck D's booming baritone, were hard to ignore. Chuck D's comic foil was Flava Flav, whose quirky style (funky cartoon clothes, big black glasses and oversize clock hanging from his neck) gave the audience a breather from Chuck D's fierce polemic.
But as the 1980s drew to a close and a radio-audience for rap wanted more, the harder stuff came out. And the likes of Ice-T and 2 Live Crew spat filthy rhymes over fractured beats. And the first real movement against rap started to gain momentum. Rap records' constant need for Parental Advisory stickers and warnings helped politicians in the war over censorship of rock records. Rap was the bad guy. And there was a backlash from many rock music stations too.
N.W.A were perhaps rap's first supergroup, originally featuring Eazy-E, Ice Cube and Dr Dre. They took Public Enemy's sonic blueprint to the next level of success, but they not only ignored Public Enemy's message, they went the other way entirely, celebrating the hedonism of the culture: drugs, violence, and sex.
There are of course two sides to every coin - and the flipside to gangsta rap was taking place in the late 1980s/early 1990s with mature, groove-oriented party-hip-hop that was not a total throwback to the block-party mood, but certainly had more in common with that than anything offered by Snoop Dogg or N.W.A.
De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest paved the way for Arrested Development - there are hints of Gil Scott Heron's work in all of these groups. The Last Poets were of course still being kept alive by Public Enemy and Mobb Deep.
By this time, hip-hop and rap had actually spawned several sub-genres and sideline movements, and this has continued to the present day. The 1990s served up a lot of soft, radio-ready rap; essentially rap had become pop music - or was heading that way at any rate - and the likes of P.M. Dawn, Snap!, Young MC and The Fresh Prince began to take over the airwaves.
But as the 1990s ploughed on, rap was as big - business-wise - as ever and gangster rap was subdued enough to appear on radio with the likes of Notorious B.I.G and his apparent nemesis 2Pac. Personalities were dominating the game and it was turning ever more into a game. Rappers released albums with cameos on every track. Statements were being made before musical statements were being created.
Towering above all of this came the collective known as The Wu-Tang Clan. A larger than life crew of nine individuals who all made solo records between Clan projects, The Wus promoted themselves over anything else; they launched a hugely successful clothing label. Their albums, both band and solo, were all produced by one of their lead members, The RZA. His stamp was on everything they did sonically, as were their external influences: kung-fu and gangsta films. They made hip-hop icons out of Bruce Lee and Al Pacino's Scarface character, Tony Montana. And their solipsistic standing as the Kings of Hip-Hop was firmly in place after the release of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) released in 1993; it has gone on to be (arguably) the most important hip-hop work of the 1990s. Only Dr Dre's work - as an artist and producer - rivals it. The Wu-Tang influence was pervasive, a new standard within hip-hop. Empires were built.
And this continued with the introduction of Jay-Z and Nas and their rivalry to replace 2Pac and Biggie. And then the arrival of Eminem, a white rapper who would dominate the late 1990s and on into this decade...
The rise of Dr Dre as an uber-producer created a situation where producers were overtaking MCs. It was the first hint of a return to the late 1970s when DJs ruled the roost, but only in terms of mechanics: the sound was not similar at all. And producers like Timbaland (Missy Elliot) and Kanye West became as famous as the people they were producing.
This in turn spawned a second wave of friendlier, alternative hip-hop. Bands like Jurassic 5, Foreign Legion, Ugly Duckling and Black Eyed Peas (their first albums) arrived on the scene; a second-generation version of bands like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. The DJ and MCs were given equal footing (and equal billing).
The mid-90s also, in line with this underground movement, saw the interest in DJing rekindled. And since other forms of dance music were big, drum'n'bass, house, techno, it was time for the hip-hop DJ to shine again.
DJ Babu - who spins for both The Beat Junkies and The Dilated Peoples, is said to have coined the term "turntablism", purely because, as Babu has released solo records, he regards himself a "turntablist" - that is the instrument he plays. Turntablism spawned, if not a genre, then certainly a craze and eventually a movement. Names like DJ Shadow, Q-bert, The X-ecutioners and Mix Master Mike appeared, releasing their own mix albums (and production albums) featuring dazzlingly quick hand-tricks and genuinely innovative sounds. And so, hip-hop culture heads back to how it started. This is fitting, really, when you think of the shape of a record and the turntable that it's played on - to realise that hip-hop as a postmodern art form really has come full circle.
SOURCE:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/2746782/How-hip-hop-got-its-various-starts