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.
