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Rap Artists: Music
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After plumbing the depths of the James Brown catalog in the late 1980s, many rap artists began looking for new beats and grooves over which to rhyme. Some dug into P-Funk, others mined old soul catalogues, but an inventive few -- Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers, among others -- turned to jazz. As Jazz Rap/Hip-hop evolved, so too did jazz musicians' interest in working with established rappers. Legendary bassist Ron Carter played on Tribe's Low End Theory album (1991), while Guru collaborated with Donald Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, and others to realize his Jazzmatazz project (1993). These alliances led to actual instrument-toting Rap bands, most notably the Roots, seamlessly fusing the genres together for an organic and unmistakably live sound.
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Rap music originated as a cross-cultural product. Most of its important early practitioners—including Kool Herc, D.J. Hollywood, and Afrika Bambaataa—were either immigrants or first-generation Americans of Caribbean ancestry. Herc and Hollywood are both credited with introducing the Jamaican style of cutting and mixing into the musical culture of the South Bronx. By most accounts Herc was the first DJ to buy two copies of the same record for just a 15-second break (rhythmic instrumental segment) in the middle. By mixing back and forth between the two copies he was able to double, triple, or indefinitely extend the break.
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Rap today cannot be pigeonholed. The genre has been unabashedly exported to international audiences and as a result artists in Japan, Australia and the UK poach the hip-hop style. Perhaps the most aggressive genre in the U.S., the contemporary melting pot of rap embraces both East and West Coast styles, Hispanic and African American among them. The genre ... runs the gamut from violent gangsta to more mainstream, even positive rap styles. In fact rap has even influenced artists in the contemporary Christian music scene. Leading rap artists today include Nelly, Fifty Cent, Ja Rule, Snoop Dogg, and Akon.
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Rap originated in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx area of New York City. The rise of rap in many ways parallels the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s (see Rock Music: Rock and Roll): Both originated within the African American community and both were initially recorded by small, independent record labels and marketed almost exclusively to a black audience. In both cases, the new style gradually attracted white musicians, a few of whom began performing it. For rock and roll it was a white singer from Mississippi, Elvis Presley, who broke into the Billboard magazine popular music charts. For rap it was a white group from New York, the Beastie Boys, and the hit song “Walk This Way” (1986), a collaboration of the black rap group Run-DMC and the white hard-rock band Aerosmith. Soon after 1986, the use of samples and declaimed vocal styles became widespread in the popular music of both black and white performers, significantly altering previous notions of what constitutes a legitimate song, composition, or musical instrument.
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Do most blacks support the rap artists who use sexist and racist words in their lyrics? The NAACP's Youth and College Division, along with the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, say that's not the case. The NAACP's STOP Campaign is denouncing denigrating lyrics and images in rap music and launched its effort the same day the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network released its plea asking that record companies bleep out offensive words. The STOP initiative is ... targeting the television industry and demanding it to stop defaming women and degrading the community and black history and start supporting diverse voices in hip hop, among other demands. Read more.
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If you don't think rap artists can write about issues that are politically relevant then check out "Alive" or "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys, "The Cool" by Lupe Fiasco, or "Fight The Power" by Public Enemy. Really any song by Public Enemy was political. Public Enemy can be considered revolutionary music both in the fact that they called for revolution, and in the fact that their music changed hip-hop. They were the first to solely focus on tackling political subjects.
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