Freestyle and the Rap Commodity

Griots

Deejay Toasting

MC/Emcee

• Master of Ceremonies

• Microphone Controller

• Early MCs just kept the party moving

• By late 1970s, MCs brought in a lot of bragging and boasting and party lyrics

• By early 1980s we see “message” rap

Early MCs

• 1st known MC, 1974ish, Coke La Rock

– Kool Herc's Herculoids

• Cowboy

– GM Flash and 3 MCs / Furious Five

– First to really rhyme and rock a crowd, routines

• Melle Mel

– GM Flash and 3 MCs / Furious Five

– Writing rhymes...song writing credit/publishing

“Rapper's Delight”

• 1979, Sugarhill Gang (a “boy band”)

• Best-selling 12” single of all time

• NOT the first record with rapping (Fatback Band “King Tim III (Personality Jock)”)

• 14-minute record, played on many radio formats

• Made emceeing into “rapping”

• Made rap music global/glocal

• Mass commodification of music

• Sanitized, unauthentic, disco rap

• Hank stole Caz's raps; copyright infringement

Rap is...

• Commodified form of hip hop music

– Turns live performance art into a sellable product

• Hip hop comes from streets; record companies made rap

• Written...rapper is an “author”

• Displaces the DJ...started with “Rapper's Delight”

– First musicians replicating DJ

– Then producers

• Not always culturally authentic (i.e. Sugarhill Gang)

• More industrial than cultural

• What we most commonly associate with hip hop

Blair (2004)

• Youth subcultural expression into pop culture

– Music that comes from socio-economic oppression

• Using rap to sell other goods

• Relates to rock and jazz; use of white appropriators to quell moral panics (i.e. Elvis)

– Run-DMC “Walk This Way”

• Marx's Alienation= something human is taken from us and returned as a commodity

Blair Cont'd

• Hegemony=ruling class ideas rule society as “normal”

• Gottdiener (1985): subcultural incorporation

– 1. Objects produced for exchange

– 2. User modifies object (bricolage); subcultural sign

– 3. Producers capitalize and turn subcultural trends in to mass culture; sanitization

• Once incorporated, the subculture ceases to exist

• What does she say about rap in her study?

– Sanitization of the subculture

Eminem v. Juice

• 1997 Scribble Jam Battle, Juice wins

• 1997 Rap Olympics, Otherwize wins

– Led to Eminem getting signed

• Considered to heavily influence 8 Mile (2002)

– Craig G wrote all the rhymes for Eminem's competitors in the film

NOTORIOUS (2009)

• Infamous battle when he was 17

Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2000)

• Dir. Kevin Fitzgerald

• Art of improv rhyming, ephemeral

– The original form of MCing

• Written vs. Freestyle

– Written is business end, mass produceable

• Spiritual

• Outlet for anger, frustration, emotion...HEALING

• Battling and cypher...bboy, DJ, graff