How Old Is Rap Music?

Outline of a Slightly Revisionist History

1.

The answer to our title’s question, or one very close to it, is in at least one sense straightforward: hip-hop is, like me, 51 years old. It was born at a house party in the Bronx, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, on August 11, 1973. But “hip-hop” as a designation is generally understood to include more than just rap music, which is not even identified by name among hip-hop’s five “pillars”, as articulated by Afrika Bambaataa, alongside other necessary components such as graffiti, breakdancing, and “knowledge”. The more narrowly musical pillars, MC’ing and DJ’ing, seem indeed to have fallen into place around ‘73. But proper historians still often point to key proto-rap formations, such as the Black nationalist spoken-word artists The Last Poets, who formed in 1968, and Gil Scott-Heron, who was active as a spoken-word artist from 1969 and whose milestone work “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” appeared the following year.

Yet one problem with identifying these particular figures as among the most important ancestors to rap music is that it sustains a version of rap’s history informed by an unexamined presumption that the greater part of this music’s DNA is bound up in what would come to be called, by the time KRS-One arrived in the 1980s, “conscious rap”, in which the “knowledge” pillar is held to be at the very least primus inter pares. But this presumption appears somewhat strained when we consider what was likely going on at that Bronx house party and others like it. Those in attendance were probably not terribly concerned with displaying their “knowledge”, and indeed on the contrary were mostly likely dead set on doing the opposite: “getting stupid”, in the words of Humpty Hump. Rigorous consideration of the available archival evidence from those early years strongly suggests that rap’s ancestry is much more bound up with nonsense party chants and with boastful competition than with politically awakened consciousness-raising. And once we acknowledge this, we are in turn able to discover a vast treasury of proto-rap gestures, extending from vaudeville through mid-century “novelty” recordings and 1960s variety shows: multiracial, lighthearted, silly, and very plainly contributory to what we now call rap.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering: yes, I’m well aware that I’m a white Welsh girl, whose only credentials for writing on this topic are that I was active in the Cardiff indie scene in the 1990s, where my band, The Shoo-Fly Complex, once shared a stage with Ranking Roger —a scheduling mix-up at the concert venue— as he did a “Jamaican toast” rendition of an “acid ska” number while I hummed incongruously along in my dulcet neo-folk monotone. But look, I happen to know that at this very moment there is a team of American archaeologists snooping around in the exact same Welsh grove where my Druid ancestors once enjoyed transmigrating from tree to tree. So I’ll agree to a swap. If those Americans are prepared to leave Wales and to stop speculating about the religion of the Neolithic Celts, then I will agree to quit my New Mexico donkey sanctuary, return to Cardiff, and stop writing about American musical forms. Otherwise we can all just keep going about our business, which, for me, when I’m not tending to the psychic wounds of PTSD-afflicted equids, means digging down to the deepest chthon of my adoptive country’s several ingenious folk-cultural expressions. Deal?

We have identified “the three C’s” of rap music —celebration, competition, and consciousness-raising—, and I have suggested that too much emphasis has been placed on the last of these, to the detriment of the first two. Of course, the three strands are often intertwined to such an extent that separating them would be impossible. Boastful competition, in particular, often proceeds through humor and joy, and ends up looking a lot like celebration, even if, in the first instance, it is mostly celebration of oneself. Another difficulty is that as competition, formalized over the years into the institution of the “rap battle”, rap differs little from numerous other folk-musical traditions around the world, notably Inuit throat-singing, that have more in common with athletic contests like tug-of-war or wrestling than with concert performance or, more primordially, with the invocation of spirits through chant. Inuit throat-singing, in fact, like breakdancing at the Paris Olympics, is one of the official events at the biennial Arctic Winter Games. High modern culture takes it for granted that singing is an “art” and not a “sport”, but it is not clear that the boundary between these has much anthropological salience. Even within a single culture a practice can evolve from an art into a sport, or vice versa, as, say, kayfabe wrestling develops from ancient agonistic contests of strength into something more like dance, and as the Harlem Globetrotters appear only 35 years after the invention of the sport their act crystallizes into acrobatic comedy.

There are some signs in recent rap music that the musical component of it may be withering away altogether, leaving only comedy in its place. My 20-year-old son Clive has recently been showing me videos of what he describes as “alternative rap”, mostly on TikTok and Instagram (yes, I named him after Clive James; so far, I’m sorry to say, the boy’s not living up to the high expectations implied in this christening). I confess I end up feeling somewhat like Gilbert Ryle’s mythical rube, who gets shown all the colleges and dining halls of Oxford, but continues cluelessly to ask: “Yes, but where is the university?” … except that for me “university” is traded out for “rap scene”. You see, when Clive shows me what he takes to be accurate and adequate representations of said scene, all I see are Jackass-like snippets of boys with face tattoos and fluorescent dreadlocks getting their trunks stolen as they’re sitting in a jacuzzi somewhere in a field of snow, who then dart out in fake panic as their mates laugh at the sight of their butt-crack. I ask Clive if this is preliminary to the performance of something bearing at least some connection to music, and of course he says: “Mom you don’t get it!” I confess I don’t. I have never been one to apply the “That’s not music!” judgment lightly, and have defended against it everyone from John Cage to Masami Akita to, yes, the laziest mumble-rappers on Soundcloud up to around 2019. But I’m sorry, you have to draw a line somewhere, and the comical sighting of Takeshi 6ix9ine’s gluteal fissure, and similar such chienlit as this, cannot alone constitute a music scene.

So let us pretend, as I almost always do anyway, that it is 1996: a world with old-school rap, conscious rap, concept-album rap, a certain amount of globalized rap in the UK and France and so on, but not much yet, as there is now, in, say, Mongolia or Papua New Guinea; no Ghanaian drill, no Auto-Tune, no adolescent mumblers, no horseplay on Snapchat. What sense might one make, at that point in history, of the genre’s deep origins?