Part 2. Roots of rap.
Keywords
hip-hop, rap, realism, truth.
Vocabulary
adjacent, unifying, MC, commentary, dub, lyrics, stereotype, hard core, term, detrimental, metaphorical, literal, slay, griot, orality,chain gang, gospel, spiritual, bebop, prerecorded, static, Troubleneck Brothers, StepSun Music Entertainment Company.
A. Listen to the program "Roots of rap", number the following main ideas according to the order in which you hear them.
Hip-hop or rap, was born in the street culture of New York City in the late seventies.
Today it's a multimillion-dollar industry controlled largely by people under the age of 30. But rap is also a music form centuries old.
The Troubleneck Brothers were still teenagers when they got together to record and distribute tapes of their own rap music about two years ago.
The group of seven grew up in New York City's adjacent communities of Harlem and the Bronx, neighborhoods where rap has a special meaning and is a unifying force for young, inner-city African-Americans.
In hip-hop slang, rappers such as the Troubleneck Brothers are called MCs.
MC prophet and MC natural one, from Troubleneck Brothers, see their music as cultural commentary.
We're talking about politics, we're talking about day-to-day street goings-on.
We're talking about parties, we're talking about history. We're talking about everything. Rap is just information.
That's what makes the music dangerous, because the realism and the truth that comes from your heart.
At first, the group did all its own production and distribution, recording, dubbing, even sticking labels on tapes.
The members paid for everything out of pocket, until they caught the attention of the StepSun Music Entertainment Company.
Tanya Sepeda is StepSun's label director in New York City.
StepSun is one of the several independent record companies that have sprung up around Ameica's hip-hop culture.
Sepeda says, even though the Troubleneck Brother's lyrics reflect the violence around them, their message, unlike the stereotype of rap music over the past decade, does not promote violence behavior.
We saw a group of brothers that were intelligent, they understood that, you know, the more that you put forward these images of, you know, the hard core, what has been termed the hard core, you know, the more detrimental it is to the society.
So they are trying to give a different flavor to those type of images and the typical hip-hop group that's currently profitable now.
And Troubleneck Brothers' MC natural one says the group's lyrics are meant to be metaphorical, not literal, as in the rhymes of the group's song "Troubleneck Wreck".
It goes, Be afraid, be very afraid. you pass out from the scent from the blood of rappers slayed.
Bedtime stories like this, used to scare you. Come if you feel it. My man, we dare you.
Old School, new school, nobody is protected. Troublenecks, catch'n wreck. nobody expected.
Seven brothers comin' like this on the download. I would tell you to run but there is nowhere to go.
The driving rhythms and complex rhyming style of rap that we hear in works such as this maybe a recent commerical phenomenon,
but according to Greg Tate, he's the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk, a collection of essays on African-American popular culture, rap's origins can be traced back as far as the ancient griots of West Africa.
...storytellers, poets, lyricists who were entrusted with maintaining the history and telling the story of their people, and who also made their living as entertainers.
So they also had to make these stories entertaining and captivating.
Tate says African-Americans still use languages this way.
You would also... had to look at something that's just, you know, it's called black orality, and the various ways that orality has evolved, changed the English language in this country.
It's really had a dynamic, long-standing impact on what we call American English, particularly to slang as it's developed in musical cultures, particularly work songs, chain gang songs, prison toasts, blues, gospel, spirituals and bebop.
You know, just jazz, like the slang and the kind of hip talk that developed out of jazz, you know. And hip-hop definitely draws upon all of it.
But what makes rap completely modern is its use of late 20th century technology.
Greg Tate says the best hip-hop composers use prerecorded sounds as if they were musical instruments.
They'll use anything in a musical kind of way, it could be a part of a speech, it could be static off the radio, it could be parts of various records, you know, it could be seagulls.
They'll do all kinds of things, too. Like they'll sample something, and they'll change the pitch on it.
They're always thinking the way that, you know, that artists and, you know, musicians are thinking when they're putting something together.
It's like you're definitely crafting it to have an emotional impact and it's just another form of creativity.
And a profitable one for some groups. According to Greg Tate, rap artists sold more than 30 million CDs last year alone.
And with 50 to 60 new rap singles being released every week, this industry and American cultural phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down.