I gave a talk to a music appreciation class at a nearby university the other day and I titled the talk “Rap histories and their consequences.” The talk helped break a log jam in what I was trying to articulate in one of the chapters of my forthcoming book on rap, whiteness, and post-racial America. I went home and hastily drafted this up (I know there are some holes—I’ll come back and plug ‘em later). Your feedback is much appreciated.
August 11, 1973 is considered by many to be hip hop’s birthday. On that date, DJ Kool Herc (born Clive Campbell) and his sister Cindy held a party in the rec room of their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx. During the party, Herc observed that the dancers reserved their best moves for certain parts of the song, usually when the pitched instruments dropped out and only the percussion remained: we know these fragments as “the breaks.” Herc realized that if he could use his two turntables to segue from the break one record to the break on another record, he could keep the dancers hyped over the course of the night. He called this the “merry-go-round” technique and it laid the foundation not only for rap music but for much of the loop-based popular music that would follow. Grandmaster Flash (born Joseph Saddler) used his skill as an electrical engineer to improve upon the equipment that Herc and other DJs were using. And although scratching was developed by Grand Wizzard [sic] Theodore, it was Flash who developed and refined the technique and brought it to a wider audience. Afrika Bambaataa, the third of the so-called “Founding Fathers” of rap, is credited with diversifying the kinds of records that DJs would sample during their sets.
The broader story of hip hop culture includes graffiti artists painting whole subway cars, as captured by on film by Tony Silver in Style Wars (1983) and Charlie Ahearn in Wild Style (1983) and photographers like Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant in their book Subway Art (1984). It also includes the New York Times’ 1971 profile of TAKI 183, which brought tagging into public consciousness [fix that—sounds stupid]. Groups like the Rock Steady Crew and the New York City Breakers fused myriad global dance styles into what became commonly known as breakdancing.
By the end of the decade, rap music and hip hop culture were starting to spread beyond the confines of New York City, as the Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” the first real rap record. As rap music became commodified, it began to distance itself from the other elements of hip hop culture. During the 1980s, rap became more popular as a result of its being heavily marketed to white audiences.
This story—or one pretty close to it—has been told and retold over the years, and documented in countless print media, documentaries, and songs. The version that I recount here owes considerably to Jeff Chang’s chronicle in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (2005), one of the first attempts at a comprehensive account of rap’s early days; in fact, Kool Herc wrote the foreword to the book. In an effort to set the historical record straight, rapper KRS-One released the song “South Bronx” in 1986 in response to MC Shan’s chronicle of hip hop’s origins in Queens. Legendary hip hop journalist Nelson George sat down with the Founding Fathers for a 1992 article in The Source, and a story very similar to the one recounted above emerged. The article was titled “Hip Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth” and the implication is that these three are the authorities on the history of rap and their collective memory represents an authoritative account of the genre’s origins. The article was reprinted in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, a widely used anthology that is now in its third edition.
Shanté Paradigm Smalls points to George’s article as a very particular framing of one of many possible histories of rap music. Smalls observes that there are many other truths to be told: many have been silenced over the course of the last five decades in order to let one or two chosen stories dominate how we talk about rap. There are two fundamental issues that arise from the suppression of these stories. First, as is often the case with history-writing, those who are the most vulnerable and subject to systemic oppression are most likely to be silenced. Second, the story that did rise to the top—the origins of rap in the South Bronx, the impacts of a changing media landscape, and the genre’s identification as Black music—has created a dangerous climate in which conversations about rap are used as cover for conversations about race. Both issues highlight the need for considering the histories of hip hop from an intersectional perspective. In a supposedly post-racial society, we are assumed to have moved past explicit conversations about race, but the utility of race as a concept is necessary for the survival of our political and economic systems. Rappers and rap music thus become a proxy for talking about race, an instance of what Omi and Winant call a racial code word, a “subtextual signifier of race,” like “welfare queen” was in the 1980s, or “superpredator” was in the 1990s, or “illegal alien” or “thug” in the more recent past.[1] Rap allows us to talk about race without appearing to talk about race, and thus absolves us of having to engage in race-based decision-making. The intersectional lens is important here, too, because as Smalls observes, “authentic” Blackness in rap is masculine, heteropatriarchal, and homophobic.[2] In the first part of this chapter I will survey alternative histories of rap. In the second part, I will trace the paths that led to rap music becoming so deeply intertwined with Blackness. In the final part, I look at the consequences of this particular history of rap as manifest in how rap music is used to criminalize and otherwise systematically oppress young people of color.
As mentioned earlier, many people point to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” as the “first” rap record, but there are quite a few other contenders for that honor. “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by the Fatback Band is often mentioned in the same breath by those who have more than a passing knowledge of hip hop. In his book Sounding Race in Rap Songs, Loren Kajikawa mentions a song by Steve Gordon and the Kosher Five called “Take My Rap… Please!” which Kajikawa suggests might be not only the first recorded rap by white artists, but also the first real rap parody.[3]
If we widen our lens to look outside of the New York City metropolitan area, we find [???] This is not surprising, given the relative proximity of the two cities, and the multiple means available for traveling back and forth between them. Two significant rap records were released in Philadelphia in 1979. Douglas “Jocko” Henderson was a well-known DJ on Black radio stations, predominantly in Philadelphia but also in Baltimore and New York City, who was known for his rhythmic on-air rhyming. He released “Rhythm Talk” and “Rocketship” on the legendary soul label Philadelphia International in at the age of 61. Lady B (born Wendy Clark) became involved in Philadelphia radio right out of high school and she released what many consider to be the first rap record by a woman, “To the Beat Y’all.” Philadelphia also played an important role in the history of graffiti as well. While the TAKI 183 profile is widely discussed, less well known is an article that appeared in the New York Times a week later that proclaimed Philadelphia the “graffiti capital of the world” [CHECK; CITE]. Part of the reason that Philadelphia earned that honor is because by most accounts, graffiti got its start there thanks to a writer who called himself Cornbread. [MORE?]
Whether or not it was actually the first rap record, there is no question that “Rapper’s Delight” was the song that helped rap music spread around the country. While on tour with the Sugarhill Gang in Columbia, South Carolina, Sylvia Robinson (head of Sugar Hill Records) auditioned and signed a trio of young women—cheerleaders—who became The Sequence. The women were one of the first acts signed to Sugar Hill Records, one of the first major groups from outside New York City—from the South—and, perhaps most importantly, they were the first group of women rappers to have a hit song with “Funk You Up.” [talk more about this Rolling Stone article and how the Sequence has bee left out of history https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-sequence-the-funked-up-legacy-of-hip-hops-first-ladies-118369/]
Latinos—Puerto Ricans in particular—played important roles in the early days of hip hop culture. In most accounts, they are well represented as graffiti artists and break dancers but their contributions to the musical elements of the culture often go unremarked. DJ Disco Wiz, both of and Grandmaster Caz formed The Mighty Force Crew and helped to introduce Whipper Whip, one of the earliest Latino rappers.[4] Whipper Whip joined with DJ Charlie Chase and a few others to form the Cold Crush Brothers. Chase remembers feeling unwelcome because even in its early days, rap was seen as Black music.[5] The Sugarhill Gang was formed after Joey Robinson heard Big Bank Hank rapping along to a tape of the Cold Crush Brothers, and Sugar Hill Records would end up being responsible for signing Mean Machine, the first group to release a bilingual rap record. Their 1981 song “Disco Dream” includes a verse in Spanish. [more]
Early rap was heavily influenced by disco. Technology, beats, etc. Disco started off as music of marginalized subcultures, especially queer people of color. By the late 1970s the music had been coopted by white America, chiefly on the heels of the movie Saturday Night Fever’s success. The genre’s associations with queer people of color was the foundation for “Disco Demolition Night,” a stunt performed by a. Chicago radio DJ in 1979. [need to substantiate; cite]. Given the overlap between disco and rap in terms of music and technology, it should not be surprising that performers and audiences overlapped as well. Because rap’s Blackness is largely masculine, heteronormative, and homophobic (see lyrics from “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Message”), artists who did not embody those identities were erased from the genre’s history. Smalls notes that many queer artists in the early days of rap were white, which further marks them as outsiders to the genre. Smalls talks about Man (Manuel) Parrish, a white gay DJ who was one of the regular visitors to Studio 54. Called “the godfather of hip hop” in the New York Times, Parrish released a song called “Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” in 1982. [MORE]
One element of the “Founding Fathers” narrative needs to be addressed before moving on to the second main section of this chapter. Beginning in 2016, a steady stream of reports began to appear accusing Afrika Bambaataa of sexually abusing minors. His organization, the Universal Zulu Nation, cut their ties with him. Dozens of people have come forth with stories, and many names who figure prominently in the early days of rap claim that it was a well-known and well-kept secret. Some people are able to separate the music from the musician, the art from the artist. Some people might argue that he deserves a spot in the history books because he did play an important role in the early days of hip hop: maybe we keep the story but put an asterisk next to his name. A stronger argument, I think, is to excise him from these histories on the fact that he caused significant harm to others, especially given the fact that his organization was supposed to lift people up. Instead he harmed a generation of kids from the South Bronx who no doubt idolized him for the same reasons his name appears alongside Herc’s and Flash’s in the history books. If one of the main arguments of this section is that certain stories that have been silenced over time deserve to be heard, then we need to consider how Bambaataa’s actions have silenced some of these stories.
It was around the time that I had submitted the manuscript for the first edition of Listening to Rap that the stories began to surface. At that point in the process it was too late to make any substantive changes, although I remember recoiling and strongly opposing the idea of using a photo of him in concert on the cover of the book. In preparing the second edition I have minimized his role in the book, choosing instead to elevate some of the stories that I presented above—stories that are less widely known and well documented, stories that have been pushed aside for one reason or another. Writing about music—or any art, for that matter—is complicated because we need to reconcile the music with the musician. Artists like R. Kelly, Kanye West, and Diddy have exhibited personal and professional behavior that is harmful and dangerous, and to me, the harm caused far outweighs whatever contribution they have made to the genre.
In the fifty years since since the “birth” of hip hop, our interpretations of the genre’s history has been hamstrung by our consideration of rap as solely Black music. The “authentic” Blackness that rap music evinces is also masculine, heteronormative, and homophobic. If we ask “who (or what) is missing?” from the stories we tell about the early days of rap, we can decenter some problematic narratives and elevate the stories of those who have been marginalized over time. If we look beyond the bounds of New York City, we may find new answers to the questions of who or what is missing.
[1] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation [CITE] On “thug,” see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5004736/
[2] Smalls 131.
[3] Loren Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs. University of California Press, 2015, 19-22. The label, Reflection Records, released a handful of other rap songs that year that used the same backing track.
[4] https://www.willcallplusone.com/words/from-the-bronx-to-the-world; need more to substantiate this.
[5] Juan Flores in That’s the Joint! p. 81.