Rap: The Genre

Origins of Rap

Rap proved innovative in featuring both new techniques of DJ-ing (especially sampling) and a new kind of vocal delivery (emceeing). The music's origins in the South Bronx, New York City, paired with that neighborhood's notorious media image after U.S. President Jimmy Carter's (1977) visit, immediately tagged it as quintessentially “urban” music—meaning, essentially, associated publicly with inner-city African Americans. Indeed, early hip-hop musical artists (as opposed to break-dancers and graffiti artists) were for some time almost uniformly African American (with rare and marked exceptions such as the Beastie Boys), though audiences were from the beginning more mixed.

Generally easy-going, upbeat entertainment that reflected its origins in outdoor block parties, early rap music drew samples largely from funk, Philly soul, and disco of the 1970s; rhyming styles for then-popular groups such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and Whodini, remained fairly regular (with mainly end rhymes), with lyrical topics addressing partying, socializing, and the foibles of everyday life. With Grandmaster Flash's 1982 hit “The Message,” however, semantic content turned toward specifically urban (i.e., Black ghetto) conditions, with profound influence on later artists. Starting in 1984, Run-DMC introduced sparser, more stripped-down beats, samples from heavy metal, and a more inflected, aggressive vocal delivery—establishing a new idea of “hardcore” style that henceforth divided itself from “softer,” or more pop-oriented, styles within rap's still-new genre system. With its crossover single “Walk This Way,” featuring Joe Perry and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, Run-DMC also helped to mainstream their hardcore style, establishing its first wave.

With the new sound, and correspondingly aggressive stage gestures, intact, the ground was prepared for rap music to absorb many of the hoary traditions of African American musical performance in the United States. The old stables of aggressiveness, hyper-sexuality, menace, and “cool”—familiar from blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and stage traditions like minstrelsy before them—attached themselves to rap music. The genre was also influenced by the social context: Historically segregated neighborhoods in U.S. cities were becoming full-fledged impacted ghet-toes, and the crack epidemic was about to descend on these same places with its spectacular violence.

With all these factors firmly in place, hardcore rap could be taken to project all these traditional representations of Black masculinity, along with the ghetto itself, while the smoother, more radio-friendly styles crossed over into pop charts, generally sidelining both the edgier notes of Black masculinity and the emphasis on “ghetto” realities. For rap purists, the latter styles betrayed the “authentic” spirit of hip-hop.

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