Rap Operas

Rapping (also rhyming, spitting, emceeing or MCing) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular". It is performed or chanted, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The components of rap include "content" (what is being said), "flow" (rhythm, rhyme), and "delivery" (cadence, tone). Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that it is usually performed off-time to musical accompaniment. Rap is a primary ingredient of hip hop music commonly associated with that genre; however, the origins of rap predate hip-hop culture by many years.

Precursors to modern rap include the West African griot tradition, Cockney rhyming slang, certain vocal styles of blues, jazz, 1960s African-American poetry and ''Sprechgesang''. The use of rap in popular music originated in the Bronx, New York City in the 1970s, alongside the hip hop genre and cultural movement. Rapping developed from the role of master of ceremonies (MC) at parties within the scene, who would encourage and entertain guests between DJ sets, which evolved into longer performances.

Rap is usually delivered over a beat, typically provided by a DJ, turntablist, beatboxer, or performed a cappella without accompaniment. 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. The word had been used in British English since the 16th century. It was part of the African American dialect of English in the 1960s meaning "to converse", and very soon after that came to denote the musical style. The word "rap" is so closely associated with hip-hop music that many writers use the terms interchangeably.

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". Wentworth and Flexner's ''Dictionary of American Slang'' gives the meaning "to speak to, recognize, or acknowledge acquaintance with someone", dated 1932, and a later meaning of "to converse, esp. in an open and frank manner". It is these meanings from which the musical form of ''rapping'' derives, and this definition may be from a shortening of repartee. 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."

Sometimes said to be an acronym for 'rhythm and poetry', this is not the origin of the word.

Roots

Similarities to rapping can be observed in West African folk traditions. Centuries before hip-hop music existed, the griots of West Africa 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. 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.Jay Ruttenberg
"The Roots of Hip Hop: From Church to Gangsta"
''Time Out New York'', December 22, 2008. An African-American 1940s gospel musical group The Jubalaire's songs ''The Preacher and the Bear'' 1941 and ''Noah'' 1946 are precursors to the genre of rap music. The Jubalaires singing grouped formed in 1936 and their rhyming during their singing sounds similar to rapping. 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.

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".Sobol, John. (2002). ''Digitopia Blues''. Banff Centre Press. 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. Bill Curtis said when he moved to Bronx, New York in the 1970s he heard people rapping over scratched records throughout Bronx neighborhoods and disc jockeys on radios were rapping before the genre was released to the public on sales records. Fatback band released the first rap music ''King Tim III (Personality Jock)'' a few weeks before the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. "Preceding Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight by a mere few weeks, King Tim III was essentially a disco/funk tune with vocal cadences that resembled sonic aesthetics and deliveries heard in later rap songs. It was actually a B-side to Fatback’s You’re My Candy Sweet." In another interview with Bill Curtis, Curtis said: “There was rapping in the Bronx and the cats there had been doing it for a while,” he says. “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.”

Precursors also exist in non-African/African-American traditions, especially vaudeville and musical theater. The 1956 novelty song " Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus contains rapping over sparse instrumentation and sound effects. The song eventually reached #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 "Rock Island" from Meridith Wilson's ''The Music Man'' is wholly spoken by an ensemble of travelling salesmen, as are most of the numbers for British actor Rex Harrison in the 1964 Lerner and Loewe musical ''My Fair Lady''. Glenn Miller's "The Lady's in Love with You" and " The Little Man Who Wasn't There" (both 1939), each contain distinctly rap-like sequences set to a driving beat as does the 1937 song "Doin' the Jive". In musical theater, the term "vamp" is identical to its meaning in jazz, gospel, and funk, and it fulfills the same function. Semi-spoken music has long been especially popular in British entertainment, and such examples as David Croft's theme to the 1970s sitcom ''Are You Being Served?'' have elements indistinguishable from modern rap.

Cockney rhyming slang is a form of slang word construction in the English language. It is especially prevalent among Cockneys in England, and was first used in the early 19th century in the East End of London; hence its alternative name, Cockney rhyming slang. In the US, especially the criminal underworld of the West Coast between 1880 and 1920, rhyming slang has sometimes been known as Australian slang. Rhyming slang is believed to have originated in the mid-19th century in the East End of London, with several sources suggesting some time in the 1840s. It remains a matter of speculation exactly how rhyming slang originated, for example, as a linguistic game among friends or as a cryptolect developed intentionally to confuse non-locals. If deliberate, it may also have been used to maintain a sense of community, or to allow traders to talk amongst themselves in marketplaces to facilitate collusion, without customers knowing what they were saying, or by criminals to confuse the police.

In classical music, semi-spoken music was made popular by composer Arnold Schoenberg as Sprechstimme, which he used in such pieces as Gurre-Lieder and Pierrot lunaire. In the French chanson field, irrigated by a strong poetry tradition, such singer-songwriters as Léo Ferré or Serge Gainsbourg made their own use of spoken word over rock or symphonic music from the very beginning of the 1970s. Although these probably did not have a direct influence on rap's development in the African-American cultural sphere, they paved the way for acceptance of spoken word music in the media market, as well as providing a broader backdrop, in a range of cultural contexts distinct from that of the African American experience, upon which rapping could later be grafted.

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, jump-rope rhymes, some with unwritten folk histories going back hundreds of years across many nationalities. Sometimes these items contain racially offensive lyrics. A related area that is not strictly folklore is rhythmical cheering and cheerleading for military and sports.

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 MC cites the Last Poets among his influences, as well as comedians such as Wild Man Steve and Richard Pryor. Comedian Rudy Ray Moore

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