Word: bebop
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...Check the Rhime" A Tribe Called Quest My all-time favorite - breathtaking rhyming skills, tricky abstract poetics creating mental aerobics for the listener, and a profound musical commentary on the MC as bebop inheritor...
...Black music in America over the past century, there's nothing surprising about hip-hop "crossing over." Blues and jazz crossed over in the 1920s, when whites rushed to Harlem to hear the music. In the 1930s, jazz became - for whites - "swing." When Black musicians created something called bebop (a clear antecedent for hip-hop) in the 1940s, that too crossed over as whites gravitated toward the language, fashion, attitude and music of hip cats like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. And I think most people today are clear that it was artists like Louis Jordan and Big Mama Thornton...
...talk about American music without talking about Black people and Black musical forms. And you cannot discuss Black music without taking it account its edginess (think of bluesman Robert Johnson, bebop innovator Charlie Parker, rocker Little Richard, soulman Otis Redding, et al.), its rebelliousness (anyone from Big Mama Thornton to Jimi Hendrix) and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people. That and "white music" suffering slumps from time to time made the white embrace of hip-hop inevitable - has there really been anything interesting happening...
...criticism and a revival of the nationalist politics of Malcolm X. De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest were among the leaders of an imaginative school of abstract poetics that stretched the envelope of the hip-hop form and sought to connect it with earlier musical traditions such as bebop, but elsewhere 2 Live Crew were appropriating the frenetic Miami drum-and-bass sound to weave lascivious sexual fantasies that got local authorities screaming to shut them down...
...thing separating the album from the books-on-tape racks. Few poets know how to truly interact with the music the way Sekou Sundiata does. Sundiata calls his work "Rythym and News," an apt term for the thick, soul-stirring verse he lays down over hip-hop, tribal and bebop grooves. His words are as deeply rooted in African-American culture as the beats that back them; the verse explores Sundiata's own experiences as a native son of Harlem, as well as the stories of black icons like Malcolm X, John Coltrane and Nelson Mandela. In addition...