Powerful song from Lupe Fiasco that pays tribute to Jonylah Watkins the 6 month old killed by bullets the other day in Chicago..This is a heartfelt beautiful song.. Nothing more needs to be said.. Listen to the words and let us all end violence in our community. Shout out to Lupe for doing the song.. Shout out to NBA star Derrick Rose for paying for the funeral..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsd0PXu3ZQM
Grandmaster Flash‘s Definition Of Hip Hop
As one of the pioneers of who was known for his ability to mix music I mixed anything from Billy Squire to Michael Jackson to Thin Lizzy to Sly And The Family Stone to Glen Miller to Tschochosky..
When I laid this foundation down.. the key was we could take almost anything musically just as long as it had a beat to it.. so that the rhymer who flowed over the top of it could syncopated.. For anybody to say that whatever they’re doing in Florida is not hip hop..or whatever they’re saying in LA is not hip hop.. Who are these people to say that?.. There were songs that Bambaataa played that to this day I still don’t know.. They were so funky.. Some of the ones I got the privilege to know..I was surprised…You take a song like ‘Apache‘ for example which was considered to be one of the hip hop main themes..Those were a bunch of white guys.. The Incredible Bongo Rock Band were white guys.. There was one person there who was Black.. He was King Erickson who was a percussionist…
For anybody to say ‘this is not hip hop’ or ‘that is not hip hop’ is wrong. That is not the way the formula was laid down.. It was for the people who were going to continue this to take anything…by all means necessary and string it along…
September 1996
Afrika Bambaataa’s Definition Of Hip Hop?
Hip Hop means the whole culture of the movement.. when you talk about rap..Rap is part of the hip hop culture..The emceeing..The djaying is part of the hip hop culture. The dressing the languages are all part of the hip hop culture.The break dancing the b-boys, b-girls ..how you act, walk, look, talk are all part of hip hop culture.. and the music is colorless.. Hip Hop music is made from Black, brown, yellow, red, white.. whatever music that gives you the grunt.. that funk.. that groove or that beat.. It’s all part of hip hop….
Are artist from the West Coast and Miami
considered Hip Hop?
Too Short, E-40 all the brothers and sisters that are making that hip hop and coming from the funk part of it are all hip hoppers.. The Electro Funk which is that Planet Rock sound which is now considered the Miami Bass sound is also hip hop.. The GoGo sound that you hear from Washington DC is also hip hop.. New Jack Swing that Teddy Riley is R&B and hip hop mixed together…So hip hop has progressed into different sounds and different avenues.. People also have to recognize from hip hop music..inparticular the electro funk came House music and Freestyle music with a lot of our Pueto Rican hip hoppers…
The freestyle music really comes from Planet Rock..If you look at all the freestyle records its based upon Planet Rock.. If you look at all the Miami Bass records it’s based upon Planet Rock.. It’s all based upon electro funk… which came from hip hop music…
Hip Hop has experimented with a lot of different styles of music and there’s a lot of people who have brought different changes over time with hip hop.. which have brought out all these funky records which everybody just started jumpin’ on like a catch phrase.. For example when ‘Planet Rock’ came out you had all of the electro funk records.. When you had Doug E Fresh with the show and ‘La Di Da Di’.. a lot of rappers went that way…When Eric B came out with ‘I Know U Got Soul’… all the way up to Run DMC and Wu-Tang. All these people brought changes within hip hop music… Unfortunately today a lot of the people who created hip hop..meaning the Black and Latinos do not control it no more…
Afrika Bambaataa
Sept 23 1996
Click HERE to listen to pt of our interview w/ Kool Herc
DJ Kool Herc‘s Definition Of Hip Hop?
Hip Hop.. the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica… I was born in Jamaica and I was listening to American music in Jamaica.. My favorite artist was James Brown. That’s who inspired me.. A lot of the records I played was by James Brown. When I came over here I just put it in the American style and a perspective for them to dance to it. In Jamaica all you needed was a drum and bass. So what I did here was go right to the ‘yoke’. I cut off all anticipation and played the beats. I’d find out where the break in the record was at and prolong it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion-wise.. cause my music is all about heavy bass…
How Did The early Hip Hop Scene of The ’70s Kick Off?
It started coming together as far as the gangs terrorizing a lot of known discotheques back in the days. I had respect from some of the gang members because they used to go to school with me.. There were the Savage Skulls, Glory Stompers, Blue Diamonds, Black Cats and Black Spades. Guys knew me because I carried myself with respect and I respected them. I respected everybody. I gave the women their respect. I never tried to use my charisma to be conceited or anything like that. I played what they liked and acknowledged their neighborhood when they came to my party….I would hail my friends that I knew. People liked that… I’d say things like..’There goes my mellow Coke La Roc in the house’, ‘There goes my mellow Clark Kent in the house’, ‘There goes my mellow Timmy Tim in the house’..’To my mellow Ricky D’, ‘To my mellow Bambaataa’.. People like that sort of acknowledgement when they heard it from a friend at a party.
What were the early rhymes like?
Well the rhyming came about..because I liked playing lyrics that were saying something. I figured people would pick it up by me playing those records, but at the same time I would say something myself with a meaninful message to it. I would say things like;
Ya rock and ya don’t stop
and this is the sounds of DJ Kool Herc and the Sound System and
you’re listening to the sounds of what we call the Herculoids.
He was born in an orphanage
he fought like a slave
fuckin’ up faggots all the Herculoids played
when it come to push come to shove
the Herculoids won’t budge
The bass is so low you can’t get under it
the high is so high you can’t get over it
So in other words be with it..
Who were the first modern-day rappers?
My man Coke La Rock.. He was the first original members of the Herculoids. He was first known as A-1 Coke and then he was Nasty Coke and finally he just liked the name Coke La Rock. There was Timmy Tim and there was Clark Kent.. We called him the Rock Machine…He was not the same Clark Kent who djs for Dana Dane… An imposter.. I repeat he’s an imposter. The real Clark Kent we called him Bo King and only he knows what that means. There was only one original Clark Kent in the music business. This guy carrying his name, I guess he respects Clark Kent…
June 1988
A Historical Definition Of The Term Rap pt1
What is rap? Depending on who you ask and from which generation the word ‘rap’ will take on different meanings. At one point in time ‘a rap’ was a set of excuses a con artist handed you in an effort to deceive you.
In the 70s rap were the words a person used when trying to persuade you. This particularly applied to the persuasive efforts of a young man trying to obtain sexual favors from a female..
Today rap means saying rhymes to the beat of music making it’s one of the four major elements within hip hop culture. Because the other elements which include deejaying, breakdancing and graffiti aren’t as widespread, the words Hip Hop and Rap have been used interchangeably over the years..
The truth of the matter is the word rap wasn’t always used to describe this activity. The act of rhyming to the beat of music was initially called emceeing. The term rap first became associated with Hip Hop around 1979 with release of two records in ’79. The first was called King Tim III [Personality Jock] which is considered Hip Hop’s first record. This was track put out by the Brooklyn based Fatback Band. This song was said to be inspired the old rhyme styles of popular Black radio disc jockeys of the 50s and 60s like Jocko Henderson, Jack The Rapper, Magnificent Montague and Daddy O to name a few. These Black radio deejays would eventually go on to influence pioneering club deejays like DJ Hollywood..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcTP4cvXSP0
The second song that popularized and associated the term Rap with Hip Hop was the landmark song ‘Rapper’s Delight‘ by Sugar Hill Gang. I’m not quite sure how Sugar Hill came up with the term ‘Rap’. Some say it was already being bantered about within the mainstream media who were then mystified by this new phenomenon.
Others say that the term was coined by older folks within the community, in this case, Sugar Hill record label owners Sylvia and Joey Robinson who saw similarities between young hip hoppers from the ’70s and the word manipulators of earlier generations where the term rap was used…
Rapper’s Delight
H Rap Brown
Ironically within the song Rapper’s Delight contains a well-known rhyme which appears to have been borrowed from the former Black Panther and SNCC chairman H.Rap Brown now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. The rhyme in question appears in Brown’s autobiography written in 1969 called ‘Die Nigger Die‘. It spoke about his militant approach toward solving some of the ills afflicting Black America. Within his book, he spoke about how he obtained his name ‘Rap’. He detailed that when he was growing up in Louisiana people used to play a variety of word games including one called The Dozens.
The purpose of the game was to totally destroy somebody else with words. He noted that in his neighborhood and bear in mind we are talking about the early 60s, there would be close to 50 guys standing around competing against one another in this rhyme game in which people talked about each other’s mothers. The winner was determined by crowd reaction… Rap Brown got his name his name because he was considered to be one of the most skilled…
In his book, H.Rap Brown gives some examples of his rhymes…
I fucked your mama
till she went blind.
Her breath smells bad,
But she sure can grind.I fucked your mama
for a solid hour.
Baby came out
screaming, Black Power.Elephant and Baboon
learning to screw.
Baby came out looking
like Spiro Agnew.
[Spiro Agnew was former Vice President under Richard Nixon]
Brown also explained another verbal game called Signifying. He noted that this was a verbal game which was more humane than The Dozens because instead of dissin’ someone’s mother you would dis your opponent. He also explained that a skilled signifier knew how to skillfully put words together so you could accurately express your feelings. He concluded that signifying could also be used to make someone feel good. He dropped a rhyme which was used in the movie ‘Five On The Black Hand Side‘ and later immortalized several years later by the Sugar Hill Gang.
Yes, I’m hemp the demp the women’s pimp
women fight for my delight.
I’m a bad motherfucker. Rap the rip-saw the
devil’s brother ‘n law.
I roam the world I’m known to wander and this .45
is where I get my thunder…
The fact that H.Rap referred to his .45 caliber gun may have inadvertently been a precursor to what we call gangsta rap. (This, of course, is being said with tongue in cheek)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkbKKnKg7dk
Isaac Hayes
As was mentioned earlier the term rap has changed from generation to generation. In the 70s the term not only meant the art of persuasion but it was also used to describe the monologue talking styles used by singing artists like Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls and Millie Jackson. Albums like Isaac Hayes’ ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ and Millie Jackson’s ‘Still Caught Up’ best personified these styles called ‘Love Raps’.
Below is an example of Isaac Hayes delivering a ‘love rap’
The art of rappin’ with respect to hip hop was characterized by one’s ability to syncopated to a beat. Ideally, an emcee rapped from the heart. His rhymes were spontaneous, not memorized or read aloud from a written document.
Of course, we now know that most of the great pioneering emcees like Mele-Mel, Grand Master Caz and Kurtis Blow to name a few, all rehearsed and pre-wrote their rhymes. But the approach was to present yourself as if the rhymes were coming off the top of the dome. ..
Ideally a rap is a group of rhymes that are thrown together so everything has meaning. Nothing said is frivolous. It reflects the here and now and ideally the lifestyle of the one rapping. Rap’s ideally projected the emotions and feelings experienced by the rapper. Ultimately and historically an artist rapped for no one but himself. His rap was a call for attention to himself.. He was ideally saying..’Hey look here I am world-Somebody hear my song!’.
And the beat goes on an on an on
It don’t stop rocking till the crack of dawn
when the people hear me rock the funky rap song
The whole damn world wants to hum along
Cause I’m e-lectricic..I’m bigger than life
An everyone calls me Jesus Christ
To The beat y’all check me out..
To the beat y’all check me out..
-Davey D-
Double D Crew..’78
c 1984.. The Power Of Rap..
By dave ‘Davey D’ Cook
