An overview of the genre

The history of rap music is somewhat clearer than the history of many of the other genres discussed in this book. The aim of this section is therefore to present a simple chronological description of the key moments and texts in the development of rap music from its inception to the present day. The following section on ‘roots and antecedents’ will examine the more complex ‘rhizome’ of the diasporic traditions that rap drew upon and subsequently expanded, while the current state of rap music will be examined in the section entitled ‘musical texts’.

Rap's story begins in the early 1970s with street parties in the Bronx and Harlem, inner-city areas of New York City. At these ‘block parties’, mobile soundsystems supplied the music, with DJs such as DJ Kool Here (Clive Campbell) beginning to employ two record decks in order to mix records together. Of relevance is the fact that Campbell was a Jamaican immigrant, well schooled in the tradition of the Jamaican soundsystem, reggae deejay and ‘selector’. Drawing upon the reggae soundsystem tradition, Campbell developed the use of two turntables and an audio mixer not merely to mix seamlessly two different records together, but also to cut between two copies of the same record. The manual dexterity of Here and other DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa meant that they could take a few seconds of a specific record and build several minutes of rhythm from it, playing and replaying the eight or sixteen-bar drum breaks found on specific soul or funk records. These drum breaks, subsequently termed breakbeats, formed the central musical component of rap music from this point until the present day, and have also come to dominate other genres such as jungle.

Some of the musical sources used by DJ Kool Here, and rap music more generally, are familiar and unsurprising, others are more esoteric. In the former category is the most sampled artist in rap, James Brown, with Here being particularly well known for his use of the drum break from Brown's track Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose. In the latter category is the influence of the early British beat combo The Shadows. The Shadows were an instrumental group whose first number one hit was Apache, the refrain from which can be heard on a number of rap tracks throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (generally sampled from the Incredible Bongo Band's cover version of the track). The hip-hop journalist and commentator Nelson George also cites other important early breakbeats, including Jimmy Castor's It's Only Just Begun, James Brown's Sex Machine, Baby Huey and the Babysitters’ Listen To Me, Mandrill's Fencewalk and the Average White Band's Pick Up The Pieces (George 1998: 17).