The teenagers of the Bronx didn’t have the money to pay for admission to the expensive midtown or downtown clubs, so they had their own parties. Along the way, clubs, house parties and block parties sprang up all over New York ghettos, giving birth to the neighbourhood DJ and MC (Master of Ceremonies or Microphone Controller). Something of a mutation of disco, rap was also a rebellion against disco. This all happened after Clive Campbell’s wake as a DJ.
Clive Campbell’s popularity grew rapidly and inspired others to imitate his act. Soon a few popular DJs divided the Bronx into competing territories. Friendly rivalries arose between Clive Campbell in the West, Afrika Bambaataa in the East and Grandmaster Flash in the South and Central Bronx. Competition spawned innovation. Grandmaster Flash invented back spinning, in which he played one record while turning a second one backwards, repeating phrases and beats in a stuttering, rhythmic manner. Grandmaster Theodore invented scratching, a technique in which he shimmied a record back and forth beneath the turntable. Other DJs soon adopted these innovations, which became standards of the rap sound.
One such impressionable youth was Afrika Bambaataa, a student at Aldai Stevenson School, and a resident of the Bronx in the borough’s notorious south side. The South Bronx was tough turf, characterised by burned-out buildings, brutal street gangs and the scourge of drugs and poverty, and Bambaataa was hardly a saint. As a leader of the city’s biggest and toughest street gang, the Black Spades, he commanded the respect of his peers with intelligence, a sharp tongue and a bold vision, of what his black and Hispanic brothers and sisters could accomplish if they worked toward a common cause. As Bob Marley was a spokesperson for reggae, Bambaataa was an ambassador and spokesperson for the hip-hop culture.
Afrika Bambaataa took his role as a leader, in the hip-hop culture very seriously. In 1975 Bambaataa founded an organisation which main objective was to replace gang rumbles and drugs with rap, break dancing and graffiti, therefore causing the street gangs to die out. Bambaataa often engaged in sound system battles with Clive Campbell, similar to the cutting contests in jazz a generation earlier. Occasionally, he mixed sounds from rock music recordings and television shows into the standard funk and disco music that Clive Campbell and most of his followers relied upon. By using rock records, he revolutionised and transformed rap beyond the immediate reference points of contemporary black youth culture. This displayed the genre’s versatility and proved that rap music could appeal to not just the black, but the white community. This inaugurated the birth of the rap record.
In the summer of 1979 rap began to break through the mainstream barrier when Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Henry “Big Hank” Jackson, better known as the Sugarhill Gang, unleashed “Rapper’s Delight” on an unsuspecting public. Until then rap was primarily an art form of the streets and discos, rather than one of the recording studio. While “Rapper’s Delight” was not the first rap record, it was actually preceded by Fatback’s Band, who released “King Tim”. Many detractors, however, thought it was nothing more than a novelty record. Their view proved to be incorrect, as this song introduced the world to a brand new cultural movement emerging from the streets of New York. Hip Hop. A series of verses recited by the three members of The Sugarhill gang, “Rapper’s Delight” became a national hit, reaching number 36 on the American popular music charts. The spoken lyrics derived largely from a pool of material used by most of the early practitioners in rap. The backing track for “Rapper’s Delight” was supplied by hired studio musicians, who replicated the basic groove of the hit song “Good Times” by the American band Chic. Perceived as novel by many white Americans, it immediately inspired “Rapture” in 1980 by the new-wave band Blondie. In 1982 Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” became the first rap record to use synthesizers and an electronic drum machine. As a result of this recording, rap artists began to create their own backing tracks rather than using hired studio musicians. A year later Bambaataa introduced the sampling capabilities of synthesizers on “Looking for a Perfect Beat”, in 1983, and in the form of quick mixing, in which sound bites as short as one or two seconds are combined for a collage effect. Shortly after Grandmaster Melle Mel composed the first extended stories in rhymed rap. These were stories that were much more meaningful than before, as they usually were about particular issues or about the rapper’s life. Up to this point, the majority of the words heard over the work of disk jockeys, such as Clive Campbell and Afrika Bambaataa had been improvised phrases and expressions. Despite the fact that rap had been flourishing in black communities it had not crossed over into the mainstream since the seminal release of “Rapper’s Delight”.
When rap group Run-DMC fused rap and hard rock on their eponymous album in 1984, rap completed its break into the mainstream. Run-DMC put rap music through its first overhaul. In 1983 rhymes were predominantly bragging and boasting tales of partying. The backing tracks were still largely live renditions of obscure 1970’s funk songs.
Their first song, “Sucker MCs” upended that. The fact that the band was from Hollis, Queens made it even more remarkable. Rap, like the blues had been misplaced and then rediscovered miles away from its origin point, the Bronx. Rap had been reread, reinforced and made more it’s self, by “outsiders”. “My Adidas”, Run-DMC’s first top ten R&B single, paved the way for their innovative remake of “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith. This was the first rap single to reach the top ten; it peaked in 1986 at number four and stayed on the chart for sixteen weeks.
Perhaps their distance from ghetto aesthetics allowed Run-DMC to pull off something their less advantaged predecessors could not. Either way, rap was no longer folk music; it was now a cultural upheaval of dominance, and whoever could do it best would win. It was the beginning of rap’s reign as a supreme force.
