Re[2]: Origins of Rap

John Schauer (john_schauer@development.uchicago.edu)
Tue, 20 Feb 96 14:37:49 CST

My point was not to "claim ownership" of hip hop/rap music for NY,
just what I see as some history of the formation of an art form (not
that I pretend to claim authority, but based in part on what early
participants, like Bambattaa, Cool Herc say now and had to say back
then.)

It seems that in the discussion of music, statements like "it's all
music" or "it's about unity not division" are tolerated more than they
would be in other areas. Imagine people discussing painting saying
"Jean Michael Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, it's all
painting, it's universal" or "William Burroughs, Trey Ellis, Ngugi wa
Thiongo, it's all modern fiction."

Regardless of my "version", the history of popular musics is, I
believe, worth investigating (though probably not here.) The
romanticized idea of the pan-human uniting force of music is not; as
K-Ill said "It's not one nation under a groove."

Timothy G Wagner, 2/19/96, wrote

>On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, John Schauer wrote:
>> It's always silly to argue origins, but... This seems like a simple test to
>> see whether rap was brought whole-cloth from Jamaica.
>> 1) Are there any pre-1980 Jamaican recordings that most people today would
>> recognize as "rap"? No
>> 2) Are there any pre-1980 American recordings that most people today would
>> recognize as "rap"? There are dozens including Jimmy Spicer, the Sugarhill
>
>I won't flame you about the Jamaica-Rap connection. It's an established fact.
^^ I never said there was no connection
>But, the litmus test of "Are there any recordings...?" is silly.

>Hey, did John Coltrane really play Clarinet in High School before picking
>up the alto (even before the tenor!)? Nope, there were no recordings.

Ok, I should have said "If recordings of the Jamaican music/sound system
existed" and many probably do just like there are tapes of South Bronx MC's and
DJ's from the late 70's. The point is the same.