Rap: Urban Music Going Suburban
Whether you perceive rap as a musical art form or fad you wish would just fade away, there's no denying the impact it's had on the American musical scene. With its explosive lyrics and supercharged rhythms, rap burst onto the musical radar in the late 1970's and early 1980's. As it grew, combining deejaying with emceeing and break dancing, rap evolved into an entirely new genre known as hip hop. However, at its heart, rap music was essentially the work of inner city youths addressing the troubles and concerns associated with urban life.
Rap can be traced back to West African singers/storytellers called the Griots. However, in the United Sates, the genre got its start in the Bronx, New York, when the exiting middle class immigrants and their businesses were replaced by poor black and Hispanic families. Accompanying these poor people were crime, drug addiction, and unemployment. It seemed like overnight street gangs appeared on every corner of the Bronx. At the same time, "Times were changing," according to Henry A. Rhodes of the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, "with the advent of the seventies people were getting into music and dancing and going to clubs." The first person to bring rap to the clubs was Cool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant whose style of spinning records led to the development of break dancing. Other American DJ's contributed to the rap scene. These included Theodor, who developed the technique known as "scratching," which involved the DJ spinning a record backwards and forwards very fast while the needle was in the groove, and George Saddler, known as Grandmaster Flash, who was an expert at "punch phasing." Another American deejay, Afrika Bambaataa, tried to replace gang rumbles and drugs with rap, dance, and the 'Hip Hop' style.
Today, says Rhodes: "Even though rap is proportionally more popular among blacks, its primary audience is white and lives in the suburbs." He notes that the more rappers are packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger the white audiences become. "I do not think anyone can account for the popularity of rap to a white audience no more than one could account for the popularity of the black entertainment in the 'speakeasies' to the white audiences of the late 1920s and 1930s," says Rhodes, "other than the attraction which exists for something that is taboo or forbidden by one's social group." According to Rhodes, Run-D.M.C. was the first black rap group to break through to a mass white audience with their albums, Run-D.M.C and King of Rock, both produced by a white, Jewish punk rocker named Rick Rubin. Some critics have argued that with the influence of whites on the rap music scene, it is only a matter of time before rap starts to lose its popularity in the black community goes out of style. Rhodes disagrees. "I believe that rap music can withstand the influence of other (ethnic/social) groups and still remain popular and flourish." Some consider that a blessing, others a curse.
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