Rapping (also dropping, rhyming, flowing, spitting, emceeing, or MCing) is an artistic form of vocal delivery and emotive expression that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and [commonly] street vernacular". It is usually performed over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The components of rap include "content" (what is being said, e.g., lyrics), "flow" (rhythm, rhyme), and "delivery" (cadence, tone). Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that it is usually performed off-time to musical accompaniment. It also differs from singing, which varies in pitch and does not always include words. Because they do not rely on pitch inflection, some rap artists may play with timbre or other vocal qualities. Rap is a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, and so commonly associated with the genre that it is sometimes called "rap music".
Precursors to modern rap music include the West African griot tradition, certain vocal styles of blues and jazz, an African-American insult game called playing the dozens (see Battle rap and Diss), and 1960s African-American poetry. Stemming from the hip-hop cultural movement, rap music originated in the Bronx, New York City, in the early 1970s and became part of popular music later that decade. Rapping developed from the announcements made over the microphone at parties by DJs and MCs, evolving into more complex lyrical performances.
Rap is usually delivered over a beat, typically provided by a DJ, turntablist, or beatboxer when performing live. Much less commonly a rapper can decide to perform a cappella. When a rap or hip-hop artist is creating a song, "track", or record, done primarily in a production studio, most frequently a producer provides the beat(s) for the MC to flow over. Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. The word, which predates the musical form, originally meant "to lightly strike", and is now used to describe quick speech or repartee.Oxford English Dictionary The word has been used in the English language since the 16th century. In the 1960s the word became a slang term meaning "to converse" in African American vernacular, and very soon after that came to denote the musical style.Safire, William (1992), "On language; The rap on hip-hop", The New York Times Magazine.
Rap music has played a significant role in expressing social and political issues, addressing topics such as racism, poverty, and political oppression. By the 21st century, rap had become a global phenomenon, influencing music, fashion, and culture worldwide.
History
Etymology and usage The English verb rap has various meanings; these include "to strike, especially with a quick, smart, or light blow", as well "to utter sharply or vigorously: to rap out a command". The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives a date of 1541 for the first recorded use of the word with the meaning "to utter (esp. an oath) sharply, vigorously, or suddenly".Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, Revised, 1970, p. 1656. Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang gives the meaning "to speak to, recognize, or acknowledge acquaintance with someone", dated 1932,Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd supplemented edition, 1975, p. 419. and a later meaning of "to converse, esp. in an open and frank manner".Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd supplemented edition, 1975, p. 735. It is these meanings from which the musical form of rapping derives, and this definition may be from a shortening of repartee.rap [5, noun] Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. A rapper refers to a performer who "raps". By the late 1960s, when Hubert G. Brown changed his name to H. Rap Brown, rap was a slang term referring to an oration or speech, such as was common among the "hip" crowd in the protest movements, but it did not come to be associated with a musical style for another decade.
Rap was used to describe talking on records as early as 1970 on Isaac Hayes' album ...To Be Continued with the track name "Monologue: Ike's Rap I". Hayes' "husky-voiced sexy spoken 'raps' became key components in his signature sound". Del the Funky Homosapien similarly states that rap was used to refer to talking in a stylistic manner in the early 1970s: "I was born in '72 ... back then what rapping meant, basically, was you trying to convey something—you're trying to convince somebody. That's what rapping is, it's in the way you talk."Edwards, Paul; "Gift of Gab" (foreword) (September 2013). How to Rap 2: Advanced Flow and Delivery Techniques, Chicago Review Press, p. 98.
It is sometimes claimed that "rap" is an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry', but this does not reflect the history of the word and thus is best seen as a backronym.
Roots and origin Similarities to rapping can be observed in West African chanting folk traditions. Centuries before hip-hop music existed, the griots of West Africans were delivering stories rhythmically, over drums and sparse instrumentation. Such resemblances have been noted by many modern artists, modern day "griots", spoken word artists, mainstream news sources, and academics. Rap lyrics and music are part of the "Black rhetorical continuum", continuing past traditions of expanding upon them through "creative use of language and rhetorical styles and strategies".
Blues, rooted in the work songs and spirituals of slavery, was first played by black Americans around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. This way of preaching, unique to African-Americans, called the Black sermonic tradition influenced singers and musicians such as 1940s African-American gospel group The Jubalaires. The Jubalaire's songs "The Preacher and the Bear" (1941) and "Noah" (1946) are precursors to the genre of rap music. The Jubalaires and other African-American singing groups during the blues, jazz, and gospel era are examples of the origins and development of rap music. Grammy-winning blues musician/historian Elijah Wald and others have argued that the blues were being rapped as early as the 1920s. Wald went so far as to call hip-hop "the living blues". A notable recorded example of rapping in blues was the 1950 song "Gotta Let You Go" by Joe Hill Louis.
Jazz, which developed from the blues and other African-American and European musical traditions and originated around the beginning of the 20th century, has also influenced hip-hop and has been cited as a precursor of hip-hop. Not just jazz music and lyrics but also jazz poetry. According to John Sobol, the jazz musician and poet who wrote Digitopia Blues, rap "bears a striking resemblance to the evolution of jazz both stylistically and formally". Boxer Muhammad Ali anticipated elements of rap, often using rhyme schemes and spoken word poetry, both for when he was trash talking in boxing and as political poetry for his activism outside of boxing, paving the way for The Last Poets in 1968, Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, and the emergence of rap music in the 1970s. An editor of the newspaper, The Fayetteville Observer interviewed Bill Curtis of the disco-funk music group the Fatback Band in 2020. Curtis noted that when he moved to the Bronx in the 1970s he heard people rapping over scratched records throughout the neighborhoods and radio DJs were rapping before the genre was released on retail recordings. The Fatback Band released the first rap recording, "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", a few weeks before the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. In another interview Curtis said: "There was rapping in the Bronx and the cats there had been doing it for a while...Fatback certainly didn't invent rap or anything. I was just interested in it and I guess years later we were the first to record it. At the time you could already see cats rapping everywhere in the streets and doing stuff."
With the decline of disco in the early 1980s rap became a new form of expression. Rap arose from musical experimentation with rhyming, rhythmic speech. Rap was a departure from disco. Sherley Anne Williams refers to the development of rap as "anti-Disco" in style and means of reproduction. The early productions of Rap after Disco sought a more simplified manner of producing the tracks they were to sing over. Williams explains how Rap composers and DJ's opposed the heavily orchestrated and ritzy multi-tracks of Disco for "break beats" which were created from compiling different records from numerous genres and did not require the equipment from professional recording studios. Professional studios were not necessary therefore opening the production of rap to the youth who as Williams explains felt "locked out" because of the capital needed to produce Disco records.
More directly related to the African-American community were items like schoolyard chants and taunts, clapping games,K. D. Gaunt, The games black girls play: learning the ropes from Double-dutch to Hip-hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006) jump-rope rhymes, some with unwritten folk histories going back hundreds of years across many nationalities. Sometimes these items contain racially offensive lyrics.
Proto-rap In his narration between the tracks on George Russell's 1958 jazz album New York, N.Y., the singer Jon Hendricks recorded something close to modern rap, since it all rhymed and was delivered in a hip, rhythm-conscious manner. Art forms such as spoken word jazz poetry and comedy records had an influence on the first rappers. Coke La Rock, often credited as hip-hop's first MCJenkins, Sacha (December 3, 1999). Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists. St. Martin's Griffin, p. 20. . cites the Last Poets among his influences, as well as comedians such as Wild Man Steve and Richard Pryor. Comedian Rudy Ray Moore released under the counter albums in the 1960s and 1970s such as This Pussy Belongs to Me (1970), which contained "raunchy, sexually explicit rhymes that often had to do with pimps, prostitutes, players, and hustlers", and which later led to him being called "The Godfather of Rap".
Gil Scott-Heron, a jazz poet/musician, has been cited as an influence on rappers such as Chuck D and KRS-One.Jeff Chang; D.J. Kool Herc (December 2005). Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. Picador. p. 249. . Scott-Heron himself was influenced by Melvin Van Peebles, whose first album was 1968's Brer Soul. Van Peebles describes his vocal style as "the old Southern style", which was influenced by singers he had heard growing up in South Chicago. Van Peebles also said that he was influenced by older forms of African-American music: "... people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and the field hollers. I was also influenced by spoken word song styles from Germany that I encountered when I lived in France."
During the mid-20th century, the musical culture of the Caribbean was constantly influenced by the concurrent changes in American music. As early as 1956, deejays were toasting over dubbed Jamaican beats. It was called "rap", expanding the word's earlier meaning in the African-American community—"to discuss or debate informally."
The early rapping of hip-hop developed out of DJ and master of ceremonies' announcements made over the microphone at parties, and later into more complex raps. Grandmaster Caz stated: "The microphone was just used for making announcements, like when the next party was gonna be, or people's moms would come to the party looking for them, and you have to announce it on the mic. Different DJs started embellishing what they were saying. I would make an announcement this way, and somebody would hear that and they add a little bit to it. I'd hear it again and take it a little step further 'til it turned from lines to sentences to paragraphs to verses to rhymes."