A History Of Rap Music - Where It All Began

A history of rap can be concise because the musical style has only been around for about four decades

. Rap music began in the 70's heavily influenced by African American and Latino rhythms as well as Jamaican folk tales whose stories were related in rhyming patterns. Its hip hop roots cannot be overlooked either when New York City DJs put an emphasis on the rhythmic drum breaks in funk and disco music so popular in the 70's increasingly trendy club scene. Clubs grew to be highly recognizable and very influential with big name DJs who were great at attracting many of the top members of the in-crowd. This veneration of DJs and the rise of rap music went hand in hand to create the phenomenal rise of rap as we knew it then and today.

The growing popularity of rap music brought with it an expansion of the Master of Ceremonies' (MC) role. Actually, the most gifted MCs and their charisma had much to do with the importance of the expansion of hip hop music and the rap artist. The star MCs were great at entertaining audiences before, during and after the rap and hip hop artists' performances. Rap music was also known as MCing in its early days as rap artists speak poetically in rhyme and verse.

Break dancers, rap artists and graffiti artists all spread the rap message throughout New York City in the early years of 1970. By the late 70's, rap music started to exhibit its potent commercial attractiveness and began its soaring ride to become a legitimate alternative popular music style in America and then around the globe. Rap music is performed both a cappella and backed by instrumentals or synthesizers. Some rap lyrics are written out and memorized by the artist prior to a performance and some are improvised on the fly during a performance.

The Sugar Hill Gang gave rap its commercial impetus in 1979 with their recording of "Rapper Delight." The Sugar Hill Gang captured the attention of the major record labels causing the rap audience to expand greatly.

By the 1990's, a sub-class of rap called gangsta rap sprang up and flourished in the United States. It consisted of controversial lyrics with a focus on street violence, sex and drugs, which of course added significantly to rap music's appeal to American youth and rapidly spread to all levels of socio-economic groups.

Rap continued its notoriety and gained more and more audiences with the likes of Public Enemy, NWA and Ice-T. Now more than 20 years have elapsed since these original artists and rap still enjoys a huge and eclectic following.

Probably due to its controversial lyrics and new ways of dealing with musicality as a whole, rap continued its astronomic expansion into the new century. It is today the fastest growing and most popular segment of the music industry in America as well as the rest of the world.

Currently, rap and its close cousin hip hop are in the very midst of their greatest popularity due to the mainstream acceptance largely brought on by such artists as Kid Rock and Eminem who may have served to reach a "whiter" rap audience, not to mention women of rap like Salt N' Pepa, Li'l Kim and the most versatile of all, Queen Latifah who bring more females into rap's folds.

The term "rap" made it's debut in The Village Voice and was coined by Steven Hagar who later wrote a book on the history of rap and hip hop entitled The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti. Don't go searching Amazon.com for this book, however, as it is now out of print, sorry to report.

by: Joe Villanvera

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