I decided to read Rap Attack to consider the history of hip-hop, rap and the culture surrounding it. How did it evolve, and what are some themes? This is to critically analyse and reflect on my own practice, and this current project. I hope this will give me insight towards my production, ideas and experiences and outcomes. As well as my rapping ideas. Here are a few quotes.
The first so-called rap records were in fact the tip of an iceberg – under the surface was a movement called hip hop, a Bronx-based subculture, and beneath that was a vast expanse of sources reaching back to West Africa.
I think it’s a good starting point to understand that hip hop is the culture, and rap is one of the key elements of it. It’s all a collective practice within it and extends to other art forms within the culture.
Where once they were relegated to the sidelines of language studies, the service industries of music like radio, or aspects of blues and soul lyricism, they were now centre stage and in the charts.
It’s the development of hip-hop and rap music as a whole which is an interesting rise historically. From the underdogs and not being represented to rising up towards now the largest artform commercially. What has been lost or gained from this practice?
The Dances featuring these off-the-wall mobile jocks, at first held in schools, community centres, house parties and parks, helped bring former rival gangs together. In the transition from outright war the hierarchical gang structure mutated into comparatively peaceful groups, called crews.
The parties and dances which featured disc jocks and rap crews started in these small venues, schools and community centres. This practice helped bridge between groups to make peace instead of gangs calling themselves crews. Work towards the artform, this way art took away for certain crowds the violence.
Rap’s forebears stretch back through disco, street funk, radio DJs, Bo Diddley, the bebop singers, Cab Calloway, Pigmeat Markham, the tap dancers and comics, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Muhammed Ali, Capella and doo-wop groups, ring games, skip-rope rhymes, prison and army songs, toasts, signifying and the dozens, all the way to the griots of Nigeria and the Gambia.
Sitting on the shoulder of giants is a great term. This practice of rap stretches back through disco, street funk, radio DJs etc. This culture grew from smaller practices that are all part of the bigger practice.
Hip hop is peculiarly New York phenomenon
I don’t agree, but I also agree. I agree it developed here. But like the previous quote, it does not come from thin air, influences from outside of New York are the key to this culture, as well as the African diaspora.
Scratching in its early form arose out of the normal technique of cueing a record: you move the record manually with the starting point on a headphone. One turn table is used for cueing while the other is playing a record through the main loudspeakers. Djs like Grandmaster Flash began experimenting by switching the sexier from the headphones to the speakers for isolated brass-section chords and drum slaps – augmenting the record that was already playing on the other turntable – and then learned how to use a record percussively by quickly moving it back and forth over the same chord or beat.
Something I’ve experienced myself when sampling, and once I hear something I like, I backspin to cue it back up. My needle does jump which is frustrating, but I did hear that there are other needles which are better for this practice. I want to attempt this, buy two of the same record and loop up the drums as an attempt. Perhaps sample myself doing it?
These kind of narrative poems are called toasts. They are rhyming stores, often lengthy, which are told mostly amongst men. Violent, scatalogical, obscene, misogynist, they have been used for decades to while away time in situations of enforced boredom, whether prison, armed service or street corner life.
Toasts were a great influence towards rap, before rap toasts were done by the community or in prisons when boredom would strike, either as a diss or statement or for other reasons. What interests me is that this was a sort of instinctive reaction, humans conversate and voice and language are important towards our development and our evolutionary experience. To think toasting and rapping have become an advanced form of communication and representation interests me highly.
If the hip-hop message and protest rappers had an ancestry in the savannah griots, the Bronx braggers, boasters and verbal abusers are children of the black American word games known as signifying and the dozens.
So this is the idea that all of these other cultures, artists and groups fed into this further design of rap, Hip hop message was a different style that focussed on what one was saying. Gil Scott Heron is thought to be one of the founders of this style.
One of the clearest links between present-day rappers and the rich vein of tall tales, tricksters, boasts and insults is Bo Diddley.
So this book is rather old, but Bo Diddley is the founder of the style in some ways, or to the style that was there and operating, that existed in the time frame of this book being released.
Describing the type of rapping he was doing when he starter out, Mr Biggs of Soul Sonic Force recollects that, ‘we used to call it a Bo Diddley syndrome when we used to brag amongst ourselves’. Bo is the bragger par excellence – his street talk boasts were originally combined with a unique Latin sound of maracas
Bo is known as the style of the braggadocio, taunting the enemy and opposition and saying how powerful one is. Bo Diddley syndrome, thinking how good one is.
Scat is a way of using the voice as a pure instrument, but there is another tradition of scatting which, like rap, took street slang and transformed it into a musical style.
Scat as a predecessor of rap, I never thought of this but I suppose Jazz and Blues are the music of African decent and influence which then influenced at the time contemporary young people I can see the connection with using the voice as a tool or instrument. Then translating that over beats, and beat boxing as well.
Lee was also important for suggesting raps a a means by which women could voice a new independence (or at lest the struggle to attain it). Songs like ‘Dirty Man’ and ‘Uptight Good Man’ suggested that the powerful female voices of black music were asking to be recognised as the voices of human beings with complex needs and qualities – not just as sets of vocal chords, lust objects or mother surrogates.
I thought that was interesting as women are not very prominent in this book at all, when this came up I was surprised. But also intrigued. I think it must have been difficult for a woman during these times, in the late ’70s 80’s domestic abuse was heavy, and even then and now women still struggle for equality word wide. To perform and rap amongst everyone else was a powerful statement. To be seen as more than just lust objects.
To me the gangs were educational-it got me to learn about the streets, and The Black Spades they had a unity that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I’ve been in a lot of different gang groups but The Black Spades had a unity among each other. The gang was like your family. You learned about how to travel around the New York Streets.
This switch from gangs being violent, but more of a policing group amongst the community, making music and releasing records alongside teaching lessons to the youth.
The lack of industry connections in the Bronx, the young age group involved in hip hop and the radical primitivism of the music itself conspired to produce an island of relatively undisturbed invention in a sea of go-getter commerce. Although hip hop was an idealistic movement it was based in self determination – a positive and realist attitude.
DIY came from this, the fact that there was no industry. Rap was something of an idealistic movement, perhaps I should read into this. What is idealistic? Or the movement at least.
Women associated with the scene, on the other hand, feel that men tend to disapprove of their standing in front of a crowd bragging and boasting.
Similar to the previous quotes but yes women and hip hop is not the most positive thing to read about. There are huge double standards.
It has always been debatable just how much listeners take in the lyrics of songs. Sung vocals have a tendency to blend into the instrumental music, so that often the only words that are remembered are those in the title. For obvious reasons this problem is even bigger in dance music. Rap vocals, on the the other hand, have a spereation from the music – it is possible to communicate in more detail and with a greater directness ‘ The Message’ managed to harness this potential. ‘Message Rap’
Message rap is where I find myself being as well when I speak and write lyrics, its where I associate myself with. Greater directedness and make sure my words are listened to. Not that they have to, but when I make music that is my focus.