Rapping

• 1. Introduction

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  Rapping begins with a simple act: a voice, a beat, and the choice to speak in time. Long before studio albums or streaming charts, a man named Grandmaster Caz stood at a microphone at a party in the Bronx, announcing when the next party would be, or letting someone know their mother was looking for them. He described what happened next: one DJ would embroider an announcement, another would hear it and add a little more, then Caz would take it further still. Lines became sentences. Sentences became paragraphs. Paragraphs became verses. Verses became rhymes. That accretion, observed at parties across New York City in the early 1970s, is how a vocal tradition was born. What makes rapping distinct from singing, from poetry, from speech? Why does it draw on griots from West Africa and blues singers from the American South and comedians releasing records under the counter? And how did a microphone announcement at a Bronx house party become one of the most far-reaching artistic forces of the 20th century? The answers reach back centuries and forward to the present day.

• 2. A Word With Many Lives

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  The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary traces the English verb "rap" to 1541, where it meant "to utter an oath sharply, vigorously, or suddenly". Four centuries later, Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang recorded the word in 1932 meaning "to speak to, recognize, or acknowledge acquaintance with someone". By the late 1960s, when Hubert G. Brown changed his name to H. Rap Brown, the word had evolved again into slang for an oration or speech, common among the protest movements of the era. Del the Funky Homosapien, born in 1972, remembered what the word meant in his childhood in the early 1970s: "What rapping meant, basically, was you trying to convey something, you're trying to convince somebody. That's what rapping is, it's in the way you talk." Isaac Hayes used the word in a musical context as early as 1970, on his album "...To Be Continued", with a track titled "Monologue: Ike's Rap I". His "husky-voiced sexy spoken raps" were already being called exactly that. The idea that "rap" stands for Rhythm And Poetry is widely repeated but does not hold up to this etymology. Scholars consider it a backronym, invented after the fact to fit a word that had already found its meaning through centuries of use.

• 3. Deep Roots

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  Centuries before the Bronx, the griots of West Africa were delivering stories rhythmically over drums and sparse instrumentation. Academics and artists alike have noted how these chanting folk traditions anticipate what hip-hop would later become. Rap lyrics and music sit within what scholars call the "Black rhetorical continuum", a through-line of creative language and rhetorical strategy that runs from the griot tradition forward. Blues, which grew from the work songs and spirituals of enslaved people, was first played by Black Americans around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grammy-winning blues musician and historian Elijah Wald argued that the blues were being rapped as early as the 1920s. He went so far as to call hip-hop "the living blues". The 1950 song "Gotta Let You Go" by Joe Hill Louis stands as a notable recorded example of rapping in blues. African-American gospel groups of the 1940s also contributed: the Jubalaires, whose songs "The Preacher and the Bear" from 1941 and "Noah" from 1946 are considered precursors to rap. Jazz, which developed from the blues and from other African-American and European traditions at the start of the 20th century, brought its own thread. John Sobol, who wrote "Digitopia Blues", observed that rap "bears a striking resemblance to the evolution of jazz both stylistically and formally". Muhammad Ali added another thread still: his rhyming trash talk and political spoken-word poetry, deployed in both boxing and activism, paved the way for The Last Poets in 1968 and Gil Scott-Heron in 1970.

• 4. The Founding Figures

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  In his narration between tracks on George Russell's 1958 jazz album "New York, N.Y.", the singer Jon Hendricks recorded something close to modern rap: rhyming, delivered in a hip, rhythm-conscious manner. Comedian Rudy Ray Moore released records in the 1960s and 1970s containing, in the words of one description, "raunchy, sexually explicit rhymes that often had to do with pimps, prostitutes, players, and hustlers". This earned him the title "The Godfather of Rap". Melvin Van Peebles, whose first album appeared in 1968 under the title "Brer Soul", described his vocal style as "the old Southern style", shaped by "people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and the field hollers" and by spoken-word song styles from Germany that he encountered while living in France. Gil Scott-Heron, who emerged in 1970, later influenced rappers including Chuck D and KRS-One. Coke La Rock, often credited as hip-hop's first MC, cited the Last Poets among his influences alongside comedians Wild Man Steve and Richard Pryor. The Fatback Band's Bill Curtis, who moved to the Bronx in the 1970s, recalled hearing people rap over scratched records throughout the neighborhoods before the genre appeared on retail recordings. His band released "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", the first rap recording to reach stores, a few weeks before the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. Curtis was clear about what this meant: "Fatback certainly didn't invent rap or anything. I was just interested in it and I guess years later we were the first to record it."

• 5. The Shape of Flow

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  Melle Mel transformed the rhythmic foundation of rapping in 1978. Kool Moe Dee described the shift: "From 1970 to 1978 we rhymed one way, then Melle Mel gave us the new cadence we would use from 1978 to 1986." His downbeat on the two-four kick-to-snare cadence became, in Kool Moe Dee's words, "the rhyme foundation all emcees are building on." Rakim then shifted the entire practice again in 1986. Before Rakim, the term "flow" was not widely used in hip-hop circles. The vocabulary ran to words like "rhyming" or "cadence". Rakim's influence was so complete that, as Kool Moe Dee put it, "any emcee that came after 1986 had to study Rakim just to know what to be able to do." What Rakim did technically was to push rhymes inside the line rather than saving them for the final word. Masta Ace described the revelation: "Up until Rakim, everybody who you heard rhyme, the last word in the sentence was the rhyming word, the connection word. Then Rakim showed us that you could put rhymes within a rhyme." Music scholar Adam Bradley has argued that rap's use of rhyme is now "the largest and richest contemporary archive of rhymed words" in any art form. Biggie's style, which Kool Moe Dee says dominated from 1994 to 2002, brought yet another shift. Kool Moe Dee credited Method Man, Craig Mack, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, and Kool G Rap as the artists who expanded what Rakim had invented and what Biggie and Method Man then made "the single most important aspect of an emcee's game". In 2014, the Atlanta collective Migos popularized a triplet-heavy style, commonly called the "Migos Flow", though the term remains contentious within the hip-hop community.

• 6. What Gets Said

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  Party rhymes designed to excite a crowd were nearly the exclusive focus of old school hip-hop, and they remain a staple of the form. Love raps were first popularized by Spoonie Gee of the Treacherous Three, and later carried forward by Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D, and LL Cool J during the golden age. KRS-One's trajectory illustrates how the subject matter of rap can shift within a single career. He was accused early on of celebrating crime and a hedonistic lifestyle, but after his DJ, Scott La Rock, died, KRS-One spent the majority of his career condemning violence and writing on issues of race and class. Gangsta rap, made popular largely through N.W.A, brought crime and the gangster lifestyle into the musical mainstream. Schoolly D was the first notable MC to rap about crime as a central subject. Ice-T was among the first rappers to call himself a "playa" and discuss guns on record, yet his theme for the 1988 film "Colors" contained warnings against joining gangs. Materialist subject matter has been prominent since at least the early 1990s, with specific brand names appearing regularly across the genre. On the other end of the spectrum, Christian hip-hop has produced artists like Lecrae, Thi'sl, and Hostyle Gospel, who have won national awards and made regular television appearances. The Five Percent Nation, an Islamic esotericist group, has been represented more than any other religious group in popular hip-hop, with artists including Rakim, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, Brand Nubian, X-Clan, and Busta Rhymes.

• 7. Language Carrying Forward

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  Roland Barthes argued that a word carries both its literal meaning and a second-order mythical meaning shaped by its socio-cultural context. Scholars have applied this framework to rap's effect on language, observing how words used in lyrics become culturally bound to the song and are then disseminated through everyday conversation. The mechanism is what researchers call neosemanticism: a forgotten or marginal word given new meaning by an influential voice, then carried into wider circulation. Drake popularized the acronym YOLO in 2012 through his song "The Motto". That year the term appeared on t-shirts and became a trending hashtag. Yet the underlying sentiment, as one scholar notes, appears as far back as 1896 in the English translation of Honore de Balzac's "La Comedie Humaine", where a free-spirited character declares, "You Only Live Once!" Rapper E-40 used the word "broccoli" to mean marijuana on his 1993 track of the same name. The regional dimension of hip-hop vocabulary runs through cities: the Bay Area contributed through Mac Dre and E-40, Houston through Chamillionaire and Paul Wall, Atlanta through Ludacris, Lil Jon, and T.I., Kentucky through Cunninlynguists and Nappy Roots. The Nation of Gods and Earths introduced phrases into mainstream hip-hop slang, including "word is bond", phrases that have since lost much of their original spiritual weight through broad circulation. The Spanish rapper Domingo Edjang Moreno, known as Chojin, holds the record for fastest rapping: 921 syllables in one minute, set on the 23rd of December 2008.