Word: rapping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...greed in the '80s, found himself buying a stack of hip-hop records in order to understand Atlanta in the '90s for his best-selling book A Man in Full. In several sections of his novel, Wolfe offers his own sly parodies of today's rap styles: "How'm I spose a love her/ Catch her mackin' with the brothers," Wolfe writes in a passage. "Ram yo' booty! Ram yo' booty!" Most of the characters in A Man in Full are a bit frightened by rap's passion. It's Wolfe's view that "hip-hop music quite intentionally excludes...
...became Grandmaster Flash. He played his turntables as if he were Jimi Hendrix, cuing records with his elbow, his feet, behind his back. He invented "scratching"--spinning a record back and forth to create a scratchy sound. He tried rapping, but he couldn't do it, so he gathered a crew around him--the Furious Five, rap's first supergroup...
Things happened fast. This is the remix. There were start-up labels like Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy. Then in 1979 came Rapper's Delight--the first rap song most people remember. Grandmaster Flash warned, "Don't touch me 'cause I'm close to the edge." Then there was Run-D.M.C. rocking the house, and the Beastie Boys hollering, "You gotta fight for your right--to party!" and Public Enemy saying, "Don't believe the hype," and Hammer's harem-style balloon pants. Then gangsta rap: N.W.A. rapping "F____ tha police"; Snoop drawling "187 on an undercover...
...major modern musical forms with roots in the black community--jazz, rock, even gospel--faced criticism early on. Langston Hughes, in 1926, defended the blues and jazz from cultural critics. Hardcore rap has triumphed commercially, in part, because rap's aesthetic of sampling connects it closely to what is musically palatable. Some of the songs hard-core rappers sample are surprisingly mainstream. DMX raps about such subjects as having sex with bloody corpses. But one of his songs, I Can Feel It, is based on Phil Collins' easy-listening staple In the Air Tonight. Jay-Z's hit song Hard...
...underlying message is this: the violence and misogyny and lustful materialism that characterize some rap songs are as deeply American as the hokey music that rappers appropriate. The fact is, this country was in love with outlaws and crime and violence long before hip-hop--think of Jesse James, and Bonnie and Clyde--and then think of the movie Bonnie and Clyde, as well as Scarface and the Godfather saga. In the movie You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks even refers to the Godfather trilogy as the perfect guide to life, the I-Ching for guys. Rappers seem to agree...