Hip Hop Headphones

A Scholar's Critical Playlist

James Braxton Peterson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501308277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Hip Hop Headphones is a crash course in Hip Hop culture. Featuring definitions, lectures, academic essays, and other scholarly discussions and resources, Hip Hop Headphones documents the scholarship of Dr. James B. Peterson, founder of Hip Hop Scholars-an organization devoted to developing the educational potential of Hip Hop. Defining Hip Hop from multi-disciplinary perspectives that embrace the elemental forms of Hip Hop Culture (b-boying, dj-ing, rapping, and graffiti art), Hip Hop Headphones is the definitive guide to how Hip Hop culture can be used in the classroom to engage and inspire students.

Part One

Definitions

1

Re: Definition

I Defining rap

In his 1976 book Roots, Alex Haley wrote about his extraordinary journey to excavate the narratives of his African ancestry, including his encounter with a griot (an African oral historian) in a West African village.¹ This seventy-three-year-old griot recited a protracted history of the tribe—recounting its origins and establishing direct connections between Alex Haley and his mythological ancestor, Kunta Kinte. The scene, as detailed by Haley, is as enigmatic and unforgettable as any of the episodes of the 1977 Roots television miniseries.² Haley was overcome with gratitude as the tribal community worked together to bring his long-lost African relatives to him, so that this momentous occasion could be captured through photography. Flash forward thirty-eight years to 2015 and Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunte,” a deceptively simple-sounding track on his critically acclaimed second studio album—To Pimp A Butterfly—and Haley’s ancestor inhabits the world of Hip Hop as a king of lyrical/verbal artistry and invention. King Kunte boasts of his success in the rap game, challenges other rappers who may not be writing their own lyrics, and celebrates his roots (via “the yams”) and the potential that Hip-Hop artists have to wrestle an ancestral history from obscurity, a history too often inaccessible to the Hip-Hop generation as an ongoing consequence of chattel slavery and various systematic attempts to erase the humanity and the history of Black folks in America.

Amid the powerful energy of ancestral reconnection and historical continuity in Haley’s roots-based recovery narrative, one might gloss over a key element in the retelling: How is it possible that the griot is able to retain centuries of genealogical information and perform it on demand? One part of the answer to this query is that griots perform history in verse. The griot is, in this instance, the ancestral progenitor of the modern-day rapper—hence Kendrick Lamar’s allusion to Haley’s Kunta Kinte. Griots preserve tremendous amounts of cultural information for spontaneous performances in verse for tribal communities. Of course, years of repetition help to instantiate these tribal histories in the collective memories of the griot as well as his audience, but Alex Haley’s experiences and the powerful narrative that emerged from these experiences suggest enduring connections between ancient African griots and prominent rappers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In no small way, the history and political economy of rap music is reflected in this Roots moment. First, the power and political potential of rhymed verse is readily apparent in Haley’s interaction with the West African griot. Second, rap music, notwithstanding its modern-day origins as entertainment, has always been challenged to shoulder the social responsibilities of the communities from which it emerged. In 1979, rap music exploded onto the popular landscape with the enormous success of a single by the Sugarhill Gang entitled “Rapper’s Delight.”³ Following its release in October 1979, “Rapper’s Delight,” with its complete sample of the group Chic’s disco hit “Good Times,” was a mainstay on the Billboard Pop charts for twelve weeks.⁴ Although it was not the first rap record to garner popular acclaim (i.e., Fatback Band’s “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” which was released earlier in 1979), “Rappers Delight” is still considered the popular point of departure for contemporary rap music.⁵

The griot is only one of several African or African American progenitors of the rapper. In fact, there is a continuous trajectory from griot to rapper that underscores the ever-present relationship between the oral poet and the community within the African and African American traditions. Other oratorical precedents to rappers and rap music that emerged after the griot but before “Rapper’s Delight,” include: Jamaican-style toasts (a form of poetic narrative performed to instrumental music); various blues songs (especially where conversational talking styles are dominant); prison toasts; playing the dozens (an endless repertoire of verbal insults); disc jockey announcer styles, such as that of Douglas “Jocko” Henderson; the Black Power poetry of Amiri Baraka; the street-inflected sermons of Malcolm X; and the rhetorical prowess of nearly all of the prominent Black poets of the early 1970s, including Gil Scott Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, the Watts Poets, and the Last Poets.

Rap music might not exist (at least in the way it does today) without the precedential, iconic influence of James Brown. The “Godfather of Soul” was also the preeminent forefather of rap music. James Brown’s celebrated call-and-response technique—coupled with his conversational vocal style, his incredible interaction with his band and audience, and his ear for the most contagious break-down arrangements in the history of Black music—positions him at the genesis of Hip-Hop culture from which rap music was derived. Listening to a James Brown classic, such as “Funky Drummer”⁶ or “Funky President,”⁷ will immediately render his impact on rap music apparent. Indeed, Brown was rapping before rap music became reified as a popular phenomenon. It is no mistake that James Brown’s music is still one of the most sampled and copied sounds in rap music.

When all of the historical and influential touchstones for rap music are considered, the fact that rap has become the premier element of Hip-Hop culture, a culture that has spread all over the world, should be fairly unremarkable. Since 1979, thousands of known and unknown rappers have produced records, and some of them have achieved commercial success. In order to develop a definitive sense of rap music, especially concerning its connections to race and African American culture, as well as its relationship to inner-city populations and American popular culture, various subcategories of the genre warrant some further explanation/definition. The following taxonomy divides rap music into four somewhat simplistic categories: mainstream, underground, conscious, and gangsta.

Mainstream rap music is the category most widely listened to by the majority population. It is a fairly fluid category. At one point (during the old school and golden age eras of Hip Hop, from about 1975 to 1990), mainstream rap was conscious and consistently political. For example, during their heyday (c. 1988 to 1989), Public Enemy—whose music was motivated by a sustained critique of white supremacy and their deep dislike/distrust of governmental politics and policies—was the most popular rap group on the most popular recording label, Def Jam Recordings. By the mid-1990s, mainstream rap’s content had completed a dramatic, paradigmatic shift toward more violent and misogynistic narratives allegedly designed to denounce the horrific conditions of American inner cities. By the late 1990s and through the first half of the first decade of 2000, the content of mainstream rap shifted yet again, this time toward the celebration of conspicuous consumption. Some scholars and fans refer to this current mainstream moment of rap as the “bling bling era” (the term “bling bling” was coined by the New Orleans rapper B.G., short for “Baby Gangsta,” in onomatopoeic allusion to the glistening radiance of his diamond-encrusted platinum jewelry).⁸

Underground rap music is even more difficult to define because it generally takes its cues from mainstream rap and often does not (and by some definitions cannot) enjoy the popular distribution, exposure, and financial attention and rewards of mainstream music. Underground rap tends to be predicated on regional or local development and support, although with the advent of the internet and the imminently transferable mp3 music files, underground networks have expanded across local, regional, and even international barriers. Underground rap must also, in both content and form, distinguish itself from popular mainstream rap. Thus, when mainstream rap is about being a gangster, underground rap tends to be more politically conscious, and vice versa. When mainstream rap production is sample-heavy with an explicit emphasis on beats per minute (BPM) hovering in the mid-1990s, underground rap will dispense with samples and sport BPMs well into the 100s. This symbiotic relationship between the mainstream and the underground is far too complex to fully explicate here, but inevitably, one defines itself against the other, sometime through reverse reciprocity. Most mainstream styles of rap were at one time or another considered underground. Some of the most talented underground rappers and rap groups are: Rebel Diaz, Invincible, The Living Legends, MF Doom, Immortal Technique, The VI-Kings, The Last Emperor, Medusa, Chillin Villain Empire (CVE), Aceyalone, and Murs.

Conscious rap music came into prominence in 1982 with the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.”⁹ The term “conscious,” as it is being employed here, refers to an artist’s lyrical realization of the various social forces at play in the poor and working-class environments from which many rappers hail and from where the music and culture of Hip Hop originated. “The Message” was a powerful response to/commentary on postindustrial inner-city conditions in America. Since then, the subgenre of conscious rap music has continued to produce some of the most inspired songs for the enlightenment and uplift of Black and brown people. Run–D.M.C.’s “Proud to Be Black”¹⁰; KRS-One’s “Self-Destruction,”¹¹ “Why Is That?,”¹² and “Black Cop”¹³; and Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It,”¹⁴ “Shut ‘Em Down,”¹⁵ and “911 Is a Joke,”¹⁶ all come to mind. Conscious rap thrives in the shadows of both underground rap and mainstream rap, even as it innovates and informs a genre that most people associate with violence and consumerism.

Gangsta rap is a subgenre that stems from a complex set of cultural and sociological circumstances. Gangsta rap is a media term partially borrowed from the African American vernacular form of the word gangster. African American Vernacular English [AAVE] employs many systemic rules and features. One of these features is “r-lessness,” meaning that speakers drop or significantly reduce the “r” in certain linguistic situations. When the popularity of rap music shifted from New York City and the East Coast to Los Angeles and the West Coast (between 1988 and 1992), this geographic reorientation was accompanied by distinct stylistic shifts and striking differences in the contents and sounds of the music. This paradigmatic shift took place in the late 1980s through the early 1990s and is most readily represented in the career peak of the late 1980s conscious group Public Enemy (PE), as well as the subsequent, meteoric rise of N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude), a group from Compton, California. Just as the marketing and retail potential of rap music was gaining prominence (both PE and N.W.A. were early beneficiaries of rap music’s now legendary platinum-selling potential), the music industry media clamored to find acceptable terminology with which to report on this new, powerful, and vulgar phenomenon. Since the challenges of gang warfare in Los Angeles were already journalistic and cinematic in legend (consider gangster narratives such as The Godfather Saga, Goodfellas, and Scarface), the term “gangsta rap” was aptly coined in response.

Yet even at its inception, gangsta rap compelled scholars, journalists, and critics to confront the cruel realities of inner-city living (initially in the South Bronx and Philadelphia with KRS-One and Schoolly D, and almost simultaneously with Ice-T and N.W.A. on the West Coast). Still, only the rudimentary realities of poverty, police brutality, gang violence, and severely truncated opportunity have been subject to any real investigation or comprehension. The whole point of a rapper rapping is to exaggerate, through oratorical narration and hyperbole, in order to represent one’s community and culture in the face of violent social invisibility (e.g., consider the collective shock at the rampant poverty in New Orleans revealed only after the media reported on the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina). It is not surprising, then, that gangsta rap was a radical wake-up call illuminating the aforementioned social ills. Its popularity, however, is more an indication of mainstream audience’s insatiable appetite for violent narratives than it is a reflection of any one individual’s particular reality. That is to say, in all genres of rap music, the relationships between author and narrative are not necessarily autobiographical. However, these narratives, in their most authentic forms, tend to be representative of certain postindustrial, inner-city African American realities.

II The elements and eras of Hip-Hop culture

Although rap music, especially the lyrical content of the music, will be foregrounded throughout Hip-Hop Headphones, it is important to rehearse the fact that rap is but one element of what scholars, artisans, cultural critics, and journalists refer to as Hip-Hop culture. Over the last forty years, Hip-Hop culture has progressed from a relatively unknown and largely ignored inner-city culture into a global phenomenon. Throughout these pages, you will find that I use the term “Hip-Hop music” more often than rap music. This choice in terminology signals an attempt to foreground the elemental nature of Hip-Hop culture in contexts where the music is the central subject. The foundational elements of Hip-Hop culture (DJ-ing, MC-ing, Breakdancing, and Graffiti/Graf) are manifest in youth culture around the globe, including Ghana, India, Japan, France, Germany, South Africa, Cuba, and the UK. Considering its humble beginnings in the South and West Bronx, the global expansion and recognition of Hip Hop is an amazing cultural feat. Its global popularity suggests and reflects its culturally diverse origins. Moreover, the presence of rap music and other elements of the culture in marketing and advertising signals mainstream acceptance. In fact, its dominance in popular culture almost completely obscures the negative, and at times malicious, treatment of Hip Hop in the public sphere. With all of its attendant complexities and apparent contradictions, Hip Hop is one of the most difficult cultural phenomena to define.¹⁷

By the mid-1970s DJ Kool Herc’s parties were becoming well-known in New York City. In fact, Hip-Hop jams were the affordable alternatives to overpriced disco clubs. As early Hip-Hop DJs began to hone the various techniques of premature DJ-ing, the potential of the culture emerged in anxious excitement among young b-boys and b-girls. The early Hip-Hop DJs invented the concept of scratching, or skillfully manipulating vinyl records to sonically rupture recorded music and play fragments of it back at will. Even before the concept of scratching was developed, DJs isolated and looped break beats from popular records. Early b-boys would battle with one another, and through battling, the various technical aspects of breakdancing were honed and developed. There were several crews of young folk who participated in the development of break dancing. One of the earliest and now most legendary breaking crews is the Rock Steady Crew. Bronx b-boys Jimmy D. and Jojo established the legendary Rock Steady Crew and were later joined by Crazy Legs and Lenny Len in 1979.

In addition to DJs and break-dancers, there were also MCs present during these early Hip-Hop jams. As a point of clarification, all MCs rap, but not all rappers are MCs. The crucial distinction is as follows: a rapper is an entertainer, while an MC is an artist who is committed to perfecting the crafts of lyrical mastery and call-response audience interaction. MCs were not initially (as they are now) the front men and women of Hip-Hop culture. KRS-One, a well-known MC, once remarked that as an MC he was happy to just carry his DJs crates. These days, Hip-Hop culture and rap music especially tend to marginalize most of the foundational elements of the culture and overemphasize the role of the MC. According to Rakim, an MC who is widely referred to as “the god”: MC means “move the crowd” or “Mic Control.” MCs improve their skills through freestyling and battling as well. Freestyle rhyming is when an MC raps without aid of previous rhymes committed to paper or memory. Much like their jazz-improvising counterparts, a freestyling MC performs lyrical rifts and cadences from an ever-evolving repertoire in order to deliver extemporaneous rhymes that reflect their immediate environment and/or address the present opponent. Conversely, battling is when MCs engage in lyrical combat in a series of discursive, alternating turns. In fact, verbal battles between MCs have become legendary, and at times, notoriously violent on and off record.

The final foundational element of Hip-Hop culture is graffiti art. For many people, this designation is an oxymoron. After all, graffiti, in its most rudimentary form, is an act of vandalism. It is against the law to spray paint names and/or images onto public property. Somewhat unlike the other elements of Hip-Hop culture, graffiti completely predates the developments of DJ-ing, MC-ing, and breaking. However, there are some distinct qualities to how and why graffiti has developed in Hip-Hop culture. This moment is distinct for several reasons: (1) Considering Hip Hop’s global prominence in the new millennium, the multicultural origins of Hip Hop certainly explain some of its universal appeal. A Greek graf writer fit in perfectly with the diverse array of cultural constituents, including African Americans, Jamaicans, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Dominicans, and Cubans (2) Several scholars¹⁸ have referred to some of the activity of early adopters of Hip-Hop culture as a process of reclaiming public spaces.¹⁹ Sometimes this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Critical Listening in Critical Times
• Part 1   Definitions
• Part 2   Speech and Beats
• Part 3   Scholarly Reviews
• Part 4   Rap Around the Table
• Part 5   Rapademics
• Conclusions: Resisting Prescriptions
• Epilogue: B-Boy Rules for Hip-Hop Scholars
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright