Origins of hip-hop

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The origins of hip-hop music lie in the musical culture of the Americans in the 1970s . But there are also roots that go back to Africa .

In general, King Tim III of the Fatback Band and then Rapper's Delight (1979) of the Sugarhill Gang are considered the first hip-hop records. What came before that is described below.

Influences

Hip-hop music draws on many older musical and cultural practices. The oldest of these are the griots , West African hikers and storytellers who already used a kind of spoken chant. They often provided their lectures with comments - for the audience it was considered impolite, not commenting or intervening in the lecture with expressions of approval or rallies of rejection. The sequence of interaction between the speaker / interpreter and the audience began here.

The tradition continued when the Africans were abducted to America. Since it was impossible to fall back on traveling preachers due to the changed circumstances, the toasts , meetings of men, at which it was about politics, society, culture, women etc., developed. The verbal contests , which would later develop into battle rap in hip-hop , as well as the practice of toasting , arose from them .

Scat singing, in which a singer tries to imitate an instrument with his voice, and the conduct of church services, especially in Afro-American churches, where there is also intense interaction between the preacher and the preacher, come from the US music tradition As is often the case, the congregation came to a kind of chanting of the preacher during his lectures. The line of development over blues , jazz and rhythm and blues led to soul and funk , both of which had a strong influence on old-school hip-hop.

Other possible influences are voice instrumentals , a common way of replacing instruments with voices in many of the world's music, dirty dozens , stylized forms of throwing insults at one another, the talking blues , made popular by Woody Guthrie , John Lee Hooker and others, in which the music was talked about, often with ironic aside comments to the audience. Individual "proto-rappers" of the 1960s and early 1970s such as Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets , counting rhymes and certain styles of jazz and doo wop in which voices were used to imitate an entire band.

The strongest direct influence, however, probably had the Jamaican sound systems , which already mapped out much of what makes hip-hop today.

Social background

Rap began to develop on the one hand before the decline of the American civil rights movement , on the other hand before the social and economic decline of the American city centers. Industrial companies have been leaving US city centers since the 1970s, either to move to the suburbs, where the land was cheaper, or to go abroad. The unemployment rate among black youth rose to up to 40% during this period. The medium-sized workers followed them. At the same time, both developments reduced the municipalities' income, and they could spend less money on public infrastructure. The conservative governments that were elected cut the welfare state's budgets, not only for financial but also for ideological reasons, so that even less money was available for the residents of the neighborhoods.

The youth in the neighborhoods began to turn increasingly to crime, and drug trafficking in particular, as other opportunities to gain social and material status continued to decline. The situation worsened when the Cali cartel began developing and commercializing crack in the 1980s , which was cheap enough to find customers in the impoverished inner cities. As the drug trade flourished, the drug disrupted vital communities in the neighborhoods.

The South Bronx in which hip-hop developed was a particular emergency area. From 1970 to 1980, the population in the three core districts of the quarter decreased from 383,000 to 166,000 inhabitants. Since the 1960s, the New York City Council has also targeted welfare recipients in the neighborhood. Drugs began to spread rapidly from the late 1960s.

The South Bronx has seen an extremely high number of fires since the early 1970s. On a hot summer day in June 1975, 40 arson attacks were carried out in three hours. According to some reports, there were over 68,000 fires in the Bronx from 1970 to 1975, more than 33 a day, most of them in the South Bronx. Partly because the electrical systems in the houses were falling into disrepair, but also partly because homeowners no longer saw a future there and wanted at least to collect the insurance money. As can be shown today from papers published in the meantime, the city tolerated this practice. At the same time, it reduced the number of fire stations in the district with a six-digit population to one for reasons of cost.

The area became a symbol of urban decay in the USA, and many observers compared the state of the district to Berlin in 1945. Gangs began to see themselves as police in the district in the late 1960s, as the actual public order had almost collapsed. The number of physical injuries rose within nine years from 998 (1960) to 4,256 (1969), the number of thefts in the same period from 1,765 to 29,276. Police estimated that 70% of the county's criminal cases were drug-related.

Musical development

Hip-hop, including rap and turntablism , grew out of the block parties that were popular in New York City, and the Bronx in particular , in the 1970s . At that time, more than a fifth of the population there was from the Caribbean and the block parties of the 1970s and 1980s were very similar to the Jamaican sound systems. They were big street parties, started by the owners of big and noisy stereos who started with them in a form of musical competition. They began to toast about it or to speak simple rhymes.

A first pioneer of the development was Kool DJ Herc , who immigrated to the Bronx directly from Kingston , Jamaica , and who saw the development of dub . Since reggae was unpopular in New York, he began to talk about the instrumental parts of pieces that were popular at the time. Since the spots were relatively short, he began to lengthen them by using two identical platters on two turntables so that he could theoretically lengthen the intervals indefinitely. Kool DJ Herc also created the breakbeats ; he used more unusual beats, which were otherwise only heard briefly in pieces, for long-lasting sections. The beats, which were otherwise often used by radio DJs to break off the pieces, sounded particularly fat on the sound systems. Kool DJ Herc quickly realized that the crowd at the block parties was especially waiting for these beats. He himself described it:

I would give people what I know they wanted to hear. And I'm watching the crowd and I was seeing everybody on the sidelines waiting for particular breaks in the records […] I said, let me put a couple of these records together, that got breaks in them. I did it. Boom! bom bom bom. I try to make it sound like a record. Place went berserk. Loved it.

The style he created in this way continued and led to the fact that hip-hop and its offshoots rarely have the straightforward, continuous beats that are otherwise typical for pop music. Kool DJ Herc finally began to specialize in DJing, which was also developed, and left the language part to his friends Coke La Rock and Clark Kent. Together they performed as Kool DJ Herc and the Herculoids.

By around 1975 the style had prevailed at the block parties in New York. Rap began to develop when the competition over the DJs led them to speak longer and more elaborate texts over the music. They began to rhyme to increase their recognizability and resorted to familiar rhymes, often counting rhymes, which they changed slightly and adapted to their own needs. The aim of the competition among the early rappers was to be recognized as original and good, or rather Def , as possible . Other early and important DJs who were influential on the scene include Grandmaster Flash , Afrika Bambaata, and Disco King Mario .

Grandmaster Flash was the first to connect headphones to his system. Until then, DJs used adhesive tape to mark the identical spots on the records or had to memorize them, which led to small inaccuracies and hops in the music. If Herc's success resulted from his original idea, his audience reports for an exceptionally fat and high-quality sound system and his safe selection of records, the Time magazine Grandmaster Flash later referred to as Toscanini of the turntables . He not only succeeded in mixing the pieces into one another without an audible transition, he was also the first to superimpose the vocals or instrumental passages of one track on the breakbeats of another, creating a new piece on the turntable. He refined the method by developing the technique of backspinning , in which he could repeat a certain sound by quickly pulling back the plate. With simple technical means but extremely precise body control, he was able to achieve sampling effects that were previously only possible with very expensive technology. If you heard the sound of pulling back the plate, you could also incorporate this into the music as a sound that could only be achieved through turntablism . At about the same time as Grandmaster Flash, Grandwizard Theodore developed the technology .

Afrika Bambaata enriched the musical repertoire significantly. He owned an extensive record collection across all styles and listened to everything to see if it could be used for his performances. He had hardly any restrictions on genres, but was a particular fan of the band Kraftwerk . Due to his enormous knowledge of music and his large selection, he was soon nicknamed Master of Records . For Kool Herc he is the only DJ he had great respect for, "because he always played records that I didn't know."

Dub music was developing similarly in Jamaica at the same time . Most New Yorkers of the time had little interest in reggae or did not think much of music, so that rap developed mainly from disco and funk pieces.

Development of the scene

Rap became popular because it is an easy and artistic way of expressing your own opinions and expressing yourself. The special style of rapeseed gives an artist the opportunity to express their personality. In addition, it is a technique for which you hardly need any material preconditions, which can be trained almost at any time in almost any location. And at least in the beginning there were hardly any rules about what “real rap” was and an almost unlimited freedom, except for the requirement to be original and to hit the rhythm of the music.

In addition to the spontaneous development that arose in the poor neighborhoods of New York, there was also an attempt to organize the scene better and to create greater self-confidence. Afrika Bambaataa was in his youth in the South Bronx's first and largest gang, the Black Spades . Since the late 1960s, however, the mood in the neighborhood changed and the clashes between the gangs became increasingly brutal. When one of his friends was killed in a gang fight, he decided to leave. First he joined the Nation of Islam . Since the strict organization did not appeal to him, he founded the Zulu Nation himself in late 1975 or 1976 , in which rappers, b-boys and graffiti sprayers would come together to form a collective and carry out their rivalry artistically and not with violence.

Graffiti writing had already developed in the 1960s, when young people in Philadelphia and shortly afterwards in New York began to leave their names with felt-tip pens on subways, house walls, etc. Breakdance only developed together with hip-hop music, as new dance forms had to be found for the new, breakbeat-heavy style of music.

First successes in the mainstream

From the streets of the South Bronx, hip-hop first made its way into the small studios in Manhattan and Harlem in particular . Grandmaster Flash played in front of 3,000 people in the Harlem's Ballroom in 1977. Kurtis Blow and Russell Simmons gave the first concerts in Manhattan, so that for the first time people outside of New York's hot spots could hear the music.

The first recordings of the music on vinyl were made in small studios in Harlem.

Many of the then small and well-known scene tried to release records. They were shocked when King Tim III's record took on the simple style of radio DJs and the Sugarhill Gang released a rap version of Chic's Good Times . The music producer Sylvia Robinson put together her own band, the Sugarhill Gang, probably on the advice of her children who knew the music. The rappers themselves were completely unknown in the scene, the music was not created by turntablism, but was recorded by a band.

After the recording was surprisingly successful in the international charts and sold around 2 million pieces, more major labels began to take an interest in the music.

The early rap records were such a mix of good material from party veterans and bad recordings trying to take advantage of the first hip hop boom on short notice. Notable are Blondie's recording Rapture and Grandmaster Flash's The Message . Blondie had nothing to do with the scene, but in their song they mentioned Fab 5 Freddy and the Bronx scene in general, and they managed to capture the spirit of the scene so well that the shot is held in high regard to this day. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five released the first track in 1982, which came straight from the South Bronx and was a huge success. In it, the social situation in which the style was created was also addressed for the first time: Broken glass everywhere // People pissing on the stairs, you know they just // Don't care // I can't take the smell, I can ' t take the noise Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice // Rats in the front room, roaches in the back // Junkie's in the alley with a baseball bat ... It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder // How I keep from going under.

Afrika Bambaataa also released Planet Rock and Looking for the perfect Beat in 1982 , which became national successes and featured a beatbox for the first time .

The first hip-hop long player on a major label was released in 1980 by Kurtis Blow. It also includes the title The Breaks , the first rap song to be awarded a gold record .

literature

  • David Toop (1984/1991). Rap Attack II: African Rap To Global Hip-Hop . New York. New York: Serpent's Tail, ISBN 1-85242-243-2 .
  • Robert J. Brym Hip-Hop from Dissent to Commodity - A Note on Consumer Culture. In: Robert Brym et al. (Ed.): Sociology: Your Compass for a New World , Chapter 34. PDF
  • Johan Kugelberg (Ed.): Born in the Bronx - The Beginnings of Hip Hop , Edel: Rockbuch 2010, ISBN 978-3-941376-16-8

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 18, 2005 .