More and more frequently, I find myself in a position where, despite my better judgement, I feel obligated to defend or explain some aspect of hip hop. With breaking in particular, I am powerfully motivated from within to clear up confusion and see credit assigned where it is due. This makes sense, since it’s something I practice and study and, *cough*, wrote a novel about.
When it comes to emceeing, my knowledge has more to do with my prolonged co-habitation with The Rapper, a human encyclopedia of hip-hop. Truth be known, many questions I hear about the rapping end of the hip-hop spectrum are questions I might have had once myself, but which, now deeply engrained in my subconscious, trigger a rash-like personal reaction if I suspect they contain even a hint of disrespect for the genre. Like KRS-1, I then feel compelled to educate the people whether they’re interested or not. Potentially innocent, off-handed remarks, in particular, get me orating.
Last week, Shaun asked:
“That Will Smith song is a complete rip off of an old 70s funk tune. Why can’t hip hop hipsters write any of their own material, damn![sic]”
I suggest:
Because that whole aspect of production originated in the DJ culture of the late sixties and early seventies. DJing predates breaking and breaking predates MCing, ergo the phenomenon has existed since before people started rapping over it, and before it was ever available in a commercial format to purchase and take home. (As Michael Holman suggests in The Freshest Kids, you can get a b-boy to come home with you but it’s a lot clumsier than buying a CD.) At the club, if you wanted people to get up and react, you MCed over music they identified with already, not some obscure thing no one ever heard of. You weren’t making complete songs or releasing singles, you were adding rhymes and commentary to a party-party dance-dance situation.
Now people make songs and emceeing is the focus, but the origins remain the same.
Will Smith is a bad example since he often doesn’t even write his own lyrics. He’s an entertainer and a rapper, but in the minds of some, not a proper emcee, so all of Will Smith is kind of a commercial bite of hip hop culture. But then again, so were pretty much all of whole first wave of rappers to be heard on commercial radio, without which hip-hop never could have developed into the mainstream cultural phenomenon it is today, so what are you going to do? One hand washes the other. It’s complicated.
Comments
Comment from lauralyn
Time: March 29, 2007, 9:26 am
It isn’t like all of pop music in general is constantly cannibalizing itself. There are unbelievable rip-offs, my favourite being the chorus of the song ‘One’ by the backstreet boys which is totally the theme of the movie “the neverending story”.
How uncool is that?
Comment from Jill
Time: March 29, 2007, 10:06 am
Yeah. There’s that too. Or all the “rock” bands with leanings towards the Beatles, or Trent Reznor’s whole deal, or the practice in classical music to compose a “variation on a theme by…” or all the songs from the 50s and 60s that use themes from obvious classical pieces as their hook.
And then literature, theatre, dance… reinterpretations galore.
There’s a broader thesis in here somewhere about using the familiar to communicate and relate to one another.
I haven’t seen Neverending Story, but that sounds hilarious.
All I have to compare to that is that I’m 99.999% certain there’s a sample of Tchaicovsky’s Waltz of The Sugar Plum Fairy in a track from The Herbaliser. But it sounds really cool. I don’t think it’s dorky, except in the most positive possible sense.
Comment from Anita
Time: April 5, 2007, 5:33 pm
Jill, thank you for your excellent clarification of the fundamentals of hip-hop history. It always gets me when people make ignorant comments; implying that this genre is the only one guilty of ‘plagiarising’.
Comment from risa
Time: April 14, 2007, 6:01 pm
Nice! I’m so happy to find this conversation, Jill: you’re awesome! and so is ‘the neverending story’ by the way.. at least it was when I was 9.
Rappers appropriate sounds and write new words over old melodies, and they also use tons of brand names and make really specific personal and political references- in all kinds of ways the whole genre takes a freakin groundbreaking stance on the question of who owns what.
ps - to make that excellent thesis about using the familiar to relate and build community, you have to include hip hop karaoke!
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