Hip Hop Culture and Rap Music
A Reflection of African American
History in the United States
Rap Music’s Beginning
• “Rap music emerged out of a Hip-Hop culture
of the 1960’s and 1970’s with its emphasis on
political expression and resistance through
graffiti, modes of dress, language and social
practices” (Beach)
Grandmaster Flash photo by Stuart
Sevastes
DJ Kool Herc
• Rap music was influenced by Jamaican
“toasting” especially by a Jamaican immigrant
in 1967 Clive Campbell who became know as
DJ Kool Herc” (Rhodes)
DJ Kool Herc
• “Kool Herc seldom played an entire song. He knew which part of
the record sent his audience into a frenzy. It was usually a 30
second “break” section in which the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar
stripped the beat to its barest essence. Herc would buy two copies
of the same record and play it over and over emphasizing the break
section. Herc used two turntables to accomplish this feat. This
technique became known as “beats” or “break-beats”. .. What was
odd about Herc’s style was that he did not use headphones to
locate the breaks on the other turntable as other DJs would do who
would later use his style. As with the onset of Jamaican ‘toasting’,
Kool Herc also used simple phrases to encourage his dancers. But as
the mixing in the “breaks” between the two turntables required
more concentration, Herc became the first DJ to create MC-Dance
team. (While Kool Herc performed at a club named the Hevalo,
dancers to his music became known as ‘break dancers’) “(Rhodes)
Grandmaster Flash
Growing Unrest
• Leon Litwack in his article on
the civil rights movement for
The Journal of Southern History
notes, “it became increasingly
difficult towage the kind of
campaign [Martin Luther] King
preached.
• New voices—Stokely
Carmichael, Malcolm X, the
Black Panthers—suggested new
moods in black America
Malcolm X
Growing Unrest
• “The more black Americans found themselves
excluded from the mainstream, the greater
the possibilities for violent confrontation with
the more visible symbols of white society.
Civil Rights
“Even as the civil rights movement struck down
legal barriers…it failed to diminish economic
inequalities” (Litwack)
Rap and Hip-Hop in the Bronx
• “The Bronx community-center dances and block
parties where hip-hop began in the early 1970’s
were not demonstrations for justice, they were
celebrations of survival”(Chang)
• The seeds of later political rap were being sown
• “Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five…[created] the classic song “The Message”
[which] resonated with an explosive terrifying
mix of desperation and anger”(Litwack)
Political Rap
• Through the mid-1980’s rappers like Run-DMC
and Soul Sonic Force “weighed in on topics
like racism, nuclear proliferation, and
apartheid”(Chang)
• Run-DMC Finds a much larger audience than
early rap (including white “rockers”)
Run DMC on fashion
Late 80’s early 90’s
• Increasing frustration and
antagonism a “post-civil rights
stance”
• Led by Public Enemy rappers
“displayed the Black Panthers
media savvy and the Minister Louis
Farrakhan’s nationalist
rage”(Chang)
• In 1988 NWA entered the Top-20
charts with its album Straight Out
of Compton which included the
song “F—k tha Police”(Litwack)
“Street Poets”
• “African Americans who articulated growing
despair at being caged in deteriorating
postindustrial cities” (Litwack)
Ice T album Body Count which
included the single “Cop Killer”
Dr Dre—”The Chronic”
Current State of Rap music
Kanye West
• “One might ask whether rap
has abandoned the
revolution”
• “The hip-hop lifestyle is now
available for purchase in every
suburban mall”
• Hip-hop rose by making
blackness—even radical
blackness—the worldwide
trading currency of cultural
cool”(Chang)