Diego Cibien 26-10-2010

Rhyme And Poetry

Commercialised in the USA and development inside as well as outside the hip hop culture,
Rap music started with parties on the streets of Kingston by Jamaicans ,in the Seventies. They
started introducing their parties on big balconies where the MC (master of ceremony) and the
DJ had the intention to cheer up people from lower classes (the ones who needed it), using
uplifting words. They way the MC's did this was to use energetic behaviour and rhymes as
much as possible to express their feelings and pain. At these parties there were also the
“toasters” (a sort of MC's) who intervened during the events, talking about the violence in the
slums of their society , drugs and political matters of the island. At the beginning of the
Seventies , due to a serious economic and social crisis in Jamaica , a significant number of
young Jamaicans were constrained to emigrate from Jamaica to the United States of America
to seek better living conditions.In this period , the configuration of Rap music started to get
the attention from other cultures, mostly north American culture , wich had a large number of
black people living in the conditions relatively equal to those people from poor countries.The
economy of the USA was already developted and there is no doubt that social also affected
the upper classes, who had to struggle with violence in big cities, such as New York and Los
Angeles.The Jamaican, DJ Kool Herc, introduced a new style of sound that involved rapping ,
a form of poetry that fits the beat of the song, rather than singing , to the city of New
York.Rapping is a rare style in which the lyrics are more important than the melody, being
one of the unique styles in the history of western music in which lyrics have more value. The
approach of Rap music with themes such as murder, how black people see police as a social
corporation, racism and so on makes Rap look like a polemic expression of Art and this
constitutes an affront to the whole society(the white one). Rap is an affront when they talk
about ghetto , when they talk about police , and this is important because when time passed
by this kind of expression became the voice of the minority which needed something to
convey the problems they lived in that society in order to relief pain caused by death of
friends , daily conditions , hopelessness. But it talks also about fraternity , joy and peace.An
important message comes often from lyrics of that poets, crime and the price that criminals
will have someday to pay for commiting homicides and for being robbers. Usually Rappers
try to give the best examples for children wich see and live problems since they are too young
so they might get wrong examples from the streets and older people that live in conditions
like that for a long time and think that in a society wich they live the only way to get rich or
even have a minimum of wealth is “ stealing “ back from the society what should be their
rights but in reality it seems just a dream that will never come true, for instance, good
schools , good social insertion and so on.The examples Rappers use mostly are “tales
songs” describing how criminals started their underworld life and how at the beginning it
could seem a good business , bringing money , clothes , rings , apparentely a good life
condition, but also how it is a big risk because at the most of cases black criminals finish in
jail, without a lawer who is really intersted in defend his rights as well as they can get shoted
anytime putting in serious not only their own lifes but also their families. The moral of those
tales are always that crime does not pay so good as it seems at the very beggining.Children
started to use the same kind of language and the same kind of thoughs to expresse themselfs
and this probably could been seen as a bad influence by educators and also parents, kids were
using “bad words” and this maybe was not good at all for the image of Rap music in USA as
well as in the whole world. But the main message and idea Rap wanted to bring came out in
many different ways, in form of real poems , therefore black children were starting really to
appreciate this sort of cultural movement.Jonathon Cott's Rolling Stone feature , “The last
Poets and Apocalypse” , makes a similar point :
 “But what The Last Poets do onstage is nothing more than heighten the form of a new Black
urban street poetry.At a New York high school assembly commemorating Malcom X death's
two months ago , the 'predominantly Black' students hooted the principal down, and kids got
up on stante and read their poems-charged statements like those of The Poets , rhythmically
asserting black consciousness while revealing the break-down and proving unworkable the
New York City school system.”.In this interview Jonathon Cott explains how direct was the
influence of Rap in this part of the society where kids since very young were starting to fell
that being black in american society could mean having many difficults that a white american
would never have in the childhood and either they would get older (go to the university and
find a good work). That was going to be the line of behavior of black kids who were smarts
and did not have the opportunity to develop abilities because the school was not prepared for
this kind of psychological issues. Some of them as growing up brought a sort of “black soul”
to sports and Rap started to be present in basket , usually. In “Die Nigger Die” , H Rap Brown
, ex-minister of justice in the Black Planthers and chairman of the SNCC (Student National
Co-ordinating Committee), wrote : “ The street is where young bloods get their education. I
learned how to talk in the street , not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and
all that simple shit. The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the
vocabulary we needed. They ' d give us arithmetic to exercise our minds . Hell , we exercised
our minds by playing the dozens.” Dozens are an element of rap tradition wich two persons
go head-to-head of often good-natured insults. This means , in my opinion that somehow they
could develop their verbal and mental skills just trying to think fast, however would be very
important to differentiate this from subjects at the school , such as English and mathematics.
Kids in that period ( Seventies) were starting to open their minds for a new prospective of
country they would like to be part of. As time passed by great rappers came up , bringing new
ideas for the rap , the art (grafitti) and they slowly started to get attention from other classes
and cultures. So the value of Rap was not just to relief pain and show everyone how they were
unhappy with that situation but also to help themselfs to find a personal identification
between every single person and differents viewpoints of the society they were living, not
every black people was subjected to like the Rap music ,for instance , but they could find out
other ways to make arts. This could be through theater, dance or just by the act of painting on
the streets. Today , fortunately american rappers do not focus only on issues that were the
main feature of rap(it is not just about crimes and negatives issues but also life , parties , joy
and happiness). Many of the rappers that used to sing about gangsters and violence discovered
a new style , the Hip Hop , wich has been dominating the media for at least 10 years and
bringing songs that everyone can enjoy and dance with a pleasurable flow of cadence as well
as relaxing lyrics without any judgements , usually , poor of real meaning and without a real
message to the people but wich still seels more Cd's around the world. A clear example of this
is the singer Snoop Doggy Dogg who started singing on the guettos in Los Angeles but today
is composing music with pop singers and so on.

references : www.wikipedia.com
www.associatedcontent.com
“Rap Attack” David Toop – African Rap to global Hip Hop