06 Track 6

Unit 12

Global Beats

Chapter 2

Hip-Hop Planet

Page 209

Hip-Hop Planet

I remember when I first heard rap. I was at a party in Harlem in 1980. Somebody put a record on the turntable, which drew people out onto the dance floor. It made me, a jazz lover, cringe.

The same four bars looped over and over. On top of this loop, a kid rhymed about how he was the best disc jockey in the world. It was called “Rapper’s Delight” by a rap group called the Sugarhill Gang.

I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.

For the next 26 years, I avoided that music. I heard it pounding out of cars and alleys from Paris to Abidjan, yet I never listened. It came out of boomboxes from Johannesburg to Osaka, yet I pretended not to hear.

In doing so, I missed the most important cultural event of my lifetime. Not since the arrival of jazz in the 1930s has American music exploded across the world with such force.

Not since the Beatles invaded America has a music crashed against the world with such impact. This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has permeated every society it is touched.

In Brazil, rap is nearly as popular as samba. In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall.

Its structure is unique, complex, and at times bewildering. Whatever music it eats becomes part of its vocabulary. It is a music that defies definition, yet defines our society.

To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, classify it, and analyze it, hip-hop remains an enigma.

It is the music of race and class, and for that reason it is full of people who claim to know the facts, when the reality of race is dependent on time, place, circumstance, and who’s telling the history.

Here’s the real story: In the mid-1970s, New York City was nearly broke. The public school system was forced to cut arts funding. Gone were the days when you could walk into the band room, rent an instrument for a small fee, and go home to play it.

The kids of the South Bronx and Harlem, used to making do with what they had, improvised.

In the summer of 1973, a black teenager named Africa Bambaataa set up a speaker in his mother’s living room window, ran a wire to the turntable in his bedroom, and set the neighborhood alight with party music.

At the same time, a Jamaican teenager named Kool DJ Herc was starting up the scene in the East Bronx, while a technical whiz named Grandmaster Flash was doing the same a couple of miles south.

The Bronx became a music center for Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, and black Americans.

These early pioneers would get together to do battle dance trade rhymes check out each other’s records and equipment not knowing that they were writing musical history. Among them was a man named Lovebug Starski, who was said to use the phrase “hip-hop” between breaks to keep time.

This is how it worked: A DJ played records on two turntables. Someone else served as master of ceremonies, or MC. DJs moved the record back and forth under the needle to create a “scratch,” or to drop the needle on the record where the beat was the hottest, playing “the brake” over and over.

MCs “rapped” over the music to keep the party going. Dance styles were created; In fact, the focus initially was not on the MCs, but on the dancers. Radio stations ignored it, so DJs sold mix tapes out of their cars. “Rapper’s Delight” made its way onto the radio in 1979.

That is the short history. Here is the long history. Spoken-word music made its way to the U.S. on slave ships centuries ago.

Hip-hop’s roots can be traced to the dance, drum, and song of these West African storytellers, the painful journey of slaves manifested in its pairing of word and music.

The spiritual music of early slaves drew on common elements of African music, such as call and response. The verbal duels, rhymes, and stories of blacks outsmarting whites were defensive, empowering strategies.

After 26 years, I have come to embrace this music. Hip-hop culture is not mine, yet I own it. Much of it I hate, and yet I love it, the good of it.

To confess a love for a music that, at least in part, embraces violence isn’t an easy thing to do.

At its best, hip-hop speaks to a lost and angry youth, a youth living in a world where two percent of the Earth’s adult population owns more than 50 percent of its household wealth.

This music that first expose the inner culture of America’s greatest social problem, its legacy of slavery, has taken its message and its dream to the world.