How different musical elements of the African diaspora gave birth to Hip Hop - The Story of the How the Music of Africa Took Over the World, Part 4
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
New York City is one of the world’s great melting pots. One of the prime manifestations of that melting pot is music. In part one The Story of the How The Music of Africa Took Over the World I wrote on the The African Muslim origins of the Blues, in part two I wrote on Afro Latino Music, in part three I wrote about African origins of Caribbean music. So what happens when all three of these elements collided in the late 1970’s Bronx, New York? One result of this musical and cultural fusion is what we now know as Hip hop.
Hip hop is an artist culture that was created by African American, Caribbean American, and Afro-Latino Americans in the South Bronx (although there is still a small contingent arguing hip hop started in the West Bronx). Hip hop culture is a flexible, creative form of expression that innovates with whatever is around, making the old, raw and new. Ultimately, it was the blending of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino cultures, that lead to the creation of a genre that is extremely popular worldwide. One of the original, primary strengths of hip hop was that it allowed young, creative Black and Latino youth to create art that reflected the reality of their lives, of the neighborhoods around them, and of the wider social circumstances in which they found themselves.
As an 80’s kid I closely followed the rise of hip hop. After the culture shock of going from almost all black Jamaica to being the only black boy in my entire school in NH, music alongside sports became one of my escapes. Getting those first hip hop mix tapes and later watching videos on YO! MTV Raps, it felt at times like hip hop was the only anchor to my blackness. So I grew up on hip hop, both the music and dancing.
In the 1970’s an underground urban movement known as "hip hop" began to form in Bronx, New York. It focused on MC’ing over music at house parties and outdoor neighborhood block events. This movement became what is now known as hip hop culture. Hip hop music became a powerful medium for protesting the dispirit impact of institutions on minorities, particularly police and prisons. Hip hop culture arose out of the ruins of post-industrial South Bronx. It grew as a form of expression of urban Black and Afro-Latino youth, whom felt the public and politicians had written off their marginalized “ghetto” communities. The Bronx hip hop scene began to emerged in the mid-1970’s from two main innovators. One were the neighborhood block parties thrown by the Black Spades. the Black Spades were an African American group that has been described as being a gang, a club, and a music group. The other main innovators credited for the rise in the genre were the brother and sister Jamaican born duo of DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell, hosting DJ parties in the Bronx.
Since its early unheralded rise Hip hop culture has spread to both urban and suburban communities throughout the United States and subsequently the world. But part of this unheralded rise was from black and Afro-Latino immigration to New York city. This merging of different parts of the African diaspora was the leading influence on hip hop’s early beginnings. The blending of music from immigrant and African American cultures spread from the Bronx to other neighborhoods, like Harlem, Flatbush, East Elmhurst, and finally the Lower East Side. Without the influence of Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American culture, the genre would not be what it is today.
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Hip hop is simultaneously both a new and old phenomenon with the importance of sampling tracks, beats, and basslines from old records. The arch of the culture has revolved around the idea of updating classic recordings, attitudes, and experiences for modern audiences. Sampling older culture and reusing it in a new context or format or "flipping" is deeply ingrained in hip hop culture. Hip hop music follows in the footsteps of earlier African-American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latino musical genres such as blues, jazz, rag-time, reggae, funk, salsa, and disco.
Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has been credited with coining the term in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing the made-up words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into his stage performance. In 1990, Ronald "Bee-Stinger" Savage, a former member of the Zulu Nation, is credited for coining the term "Six elements of the Hip Hop Movement", inspired by Public Enemy's recordings. The "Six Elements of the Hip Hop Movement" are: Consciousness Awareness, Civil Rights Awareness, Activism Awareness, Justice, Political Awareness, and Community Awareness in music.
During the late 1960’s, as housing in Manhattan experienced rapid price inflation, many of the areas black and Latino immigrants moved from Manhattan to the Bronx. This population boom in the Bronx led to an artistic fusion of Latin, jazz, and R&B musical genres with with both English and Spanish lyrics. This fusion was not only between African America and Afro-Latino cultures, but also between African American and Black West Indian Caribbean culture. The melting pot of daily life in the New York pushed different elements of the African diaspora to live side by side in neighborhoods throughout the city, but in the Bronx this melting pot birthed something unique.
In the 1970s, African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and other Afro-Caribbean communities in the Bronx began to create the different threads of hip hop culture. In 1973, DJ Kool Herc from Jamaica played his “breakbeats” spinning with MC Coke La Rock, who rapped in the style of the Jamaican sound system “toasts,” a regional style of lyrical chanting. Grandmaster Flash (of Barbadian descent) was another pioneer with his group the Furious Five, with hits like “The Message” in 1982. Today, these groundbreaking musicians are known as the founding fathers of Hip Hop.
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Beginning in 1977, DJ Afrika Bambaataa began organizing block parties and breakdancing competitions around the Bronx. His admirable turntable techniques and knowledge of music led many to proclaim him the best DJ in the business (while some maintain that Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc were more innovative). His record debut as a producer came in 1980 with Soul Sonic Force’s “Zulu Nation Throwdown.” The single was a rallying cry for the Zulu Nation, a group of like-minded Afrocentric musicians who gained fame in the late 80’s but had been influencing the rise of hip hop crews since the late 70’s. The Jamaican born DJ Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell pioneered the use in America of DJing percussion "breaks" in hip hop music. Herc also pushed the development of break-beat deejaying, where the breaks of funk songs, the percussion-based parts most suited to dance, were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties.
Most of us are familiar with the technique called "scratching," which is when a DJ uses records on a turntable to cause friction and create a rhythmic, high-pitched noise. Though this method became popular in New York's South Bronx, it was actually created in Jamaica as "dubbing." Reggae records would have an A-side of fully composed songs; the B-side would contain chopped-up remixes of the original songs that allowed the record cutters (the original DJs) to manipulate different components of the track. On August 11, 1973 DJ Kool Herc was the DJ at his sister's back-to-school party. He extended the beat of a record by using two record players, isolating the percussion "breaks" by using a mixer to switch between the two records. Cindy Campbell and amazing DJ in her own rights, produced and funded the Back to School Party that became the "Birth of Hip Hop"..
The mastering of dubbing in reggae allowed an artist to "toast"—the predecessor to rapping or emceeing—over instrumental versions of songs. Jamaican DJs usually existed only to hype up songs, but dubbing pioneer King Tubby set a new standard with his emphasis on giving bass and rhythm a prominent spot on his remixes. Tubby commissioned DJ extraordinaire U-Roy to toast over his head-knocking mixes, which is recognized as the true creation of rapping. There is strong speculation that hip-hop's forefathers, Barbados-born Grandmaster Flash, Jamaica's Kool Herc, and Afrika Bambaataa, gained their inspiration directly by King Tubby and U-Roy.
The method of sampling music from outside of hip-hop, which became popularized by West Coast legend Dr. Dre in the 90’s, was actually birthed in Jamaica. Lee "Scratch" Perry was a Jamaican producer who invented "upsetter riddims" (rhythms). Upsetter rhythms were sound effects layered over, or in place of beats. We can credit Scratch for the signature police sirens and gunshots heard in songs by early legendary groups such as Public Enemy and NWA, as well as many artists today. Upsetter rhythms provided the skeleton for the idea of sampling vocals and instruments to create new beats entirely.
Twerking undoubtedly the most popular dance of this generation was brought to hip-hop culture from West Africans who had first introduced it to Jamaica and the larger Caribbean community. Twerking developed from the traditional West African dance "mapouka". Mapouka originated in the Ivory Coast. As a testament to the power of movement, free West African migrants brought the dance to the Caribbean in the 19th century, where it metastasized and blended with Soca and Dancehall to become a new dance form. Other Afro-Caribbean groups, especially Haitians migrating to New Orleans in the late 20th century also resulting in the creation of "bounce" music in the early 90’s. New Orleans’s based DJ Jubilee was the first artist to feature the word "twerk" in one of his songs.
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Although the basic elements of hip hop, boasting raps, rival "posses" (groups), uptown "throw-downs", and political and social commentary, were all long present in African American music, the influence of Jamaican and Caribbean musicians amplified this. MCing and rapping performers moved back and forth between the predominance of toasting songs packed with a mix of boasting, 'slackness' and sexual innuendo and a more topical, political, socially conscious style. The role of the MC originally was as a Master of Ceremonies for a DJ dance event. The MC would introduce the DJ and try to pump up the audience. The MC spoke between the DJ's songs, urging everyone to get up and dance. MCs would also tell jokes and use their energetic language and enthusiasm to rev up the crowd. Eventually, this introducing role developed into longer sessions of spoken, rhythmic wordplay, and rhyming, which became rapping.
These elements of spoken, rhythmic wordplay, and rhyming had a precedent in one of the seminal African American musical art forms — Jazz. Jazz like hip hop is one of America’s native black art forms. Both have had immeasurable impact on the cultural fabric of American culture by expressing the plight of African Americans. There are mountains lot of evidence that jazz provided precedents for hip hop in the form of “scat singing” in terms of the aspect of rhythmical speech patterns. In vocal jazz, scat singing is vocal improvisation with seemingly wordless vocals, nonsense syllables or without words at all just humming. In scat singing, the singer improvises melodies and rhythms using the voice as an instrument rather than a speaking medium.
Jazz originated in the black community in New Orleans, but jazz quickly spread its influence to other parts of the world. Due to its glitz and glamour, New York City became a mecca for jazz artists. By the 1920’s African American in Harlem began to recite their poetry to Jazz. In his book Digitopia Blues – Race, Technology and the American Voice, poet and saxophonist John Sobol argues that jazz was a transformative vehicle for African-American self-empowerment whose dominant characteristic and purpose was a search for mastery of a language of power, undertaken by a historically enslaved oral people denied access to words of power. Sobol believes that poets who have felt constrained by the hegemony of the literate tradition have grasped an essential kinship with jazz as a realm of masterful oral power and have sought to mimic or recreate jazz modalities in their poetry, thus earning the description 'jazz poetry'.
Poets such as Langston Hughes incorporated the syncopated rhythms and repetitive phrases of blues and jazz music into their writing. Many Harlem Renaissance writers were deeply concerned with racial pride and with the creation of purely African-American poetry. Since jazz music was an important part of African-American culture at the time, Hughes and others like him adapted the musical genre to create their own, singularly African-American voices that could easily be distinguished from the work of white poets.
But a closer pre cursor to hip hop would be pioneering jazz works such as “N***ers are Scared of Revolution” by The Last Poets (1970) Gil Scott Heron’s groundbreaking “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970) and the stream of consciousness lyrics found in many James Brown anthems of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Both hip hop and urban jazz tell the story of blacks in America. They both share similar DNA, with similar technique such as jazz’s “cutting contests”. Cutting contests were musical battles between piano players especially from the 1920s to the 1940s. But also improvisation contests on other jazz instruments during the swing era. Cutting contests were some of the seeds that helped lay the foundations for later emcee battles.
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Hip hop artists also used jazz as a foundation through the use of sampling. Hip hopper DJs were fascinated by the grooves, funky breaks, horn and bass lines from 1970’s jazz recordings. Jazz was a constant presence in the homes of rappers like Snoop Dogg and Q-Tip. Their exposure and and self reported appreciation for jazz came from their family record collections. Legendary free jazz saxophonist Luther Thomas delivered “Yo Mama”, the first jazz-rap recording in 1981. Jazz’s general tone and spirit can be seen in vibrancy of the early hip hop scene on classic tracks like Sugarhill gang’s “Rappers Delight” (1979). Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ For Jamaica” also captured the party vibe of early hip hop. Bebop pioneer Max Roach, always encouraging of new developments in black music also collaborated with MTV VJ Fab Five Freddy in 1982. But the “shot heard ‘round the world” was Herbie Hancock’s release of “Rockit” on his album Future Shock in 1983.
From NYC urban jazz poetry hip hop gained it lyricism. By the 1970’s urban jazz poetry had developed the harder edged social consciousness, tougher lyrics, and even militancy that would later be echoed in hip hop groups like Public Enemy and even NWA. When African Americans priced out of Manhattan began to move to the South Bronx they brought this Harlem style jazz poetry with them.
The JAzz video below MAY BE NSFW due to strong language
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While African Americans and West Indians concentrated on the DJ’ing and MC’ing aspects of early hip hop, Puerto Ricans and other Afro-Latino Caribbean people contributed heavily to formation of hip hop styles and culture through break dancing and artistic graffiti.
A large number of the early b-boys, or breakers were Latino (more often than not Puerto Rican). Pioneering breaking crews such as the Rock Steady Crew and the New York City Breakers had Latinx members and founders.
Puerto Rican Carlos Mendes, who professionally goes by the name DJ Charlie Chase, was a founding member of the Cold Crush Brothers. He was also a DJ for the Furious Five (in 1981), and DJed alongside Funkmaster Flex. Charlie Chase stepped on the musical scene in 1975, and has been a part of several Hip-hop and DJ firsts. The Cold Crush Brothers were the first rap group to be signed to CBS Records (through the label Tuff City), and the first to go to Japan. The pioneering group earned the name “the Rolling Stones of hip-hop,” and appeared in the first-ever Hip-hop movie, WildStyle. Mendes was one of the first Latino DJs in hip-hop, infusing his sets with Latin music, including salsa.
A pioneer of the hip-hop element of artistic graffiti was Lee Quiñones. The legendary Nuyorican artist was part of a group of artists who created art on New York subway trains, and is considered to be “the single most influential artist to emerge from the New York City subway art movement.” Lee’s first subway piece was created in 1974 and in late 1975, he was asked to join the graffiti crew The Fabulous Five. The crew painted the only running 10-car subway train that was painted on from top to bottom, and from end to end. Quiñones’ work appeared in the iconic 1983 graffiti documentary Style Wars, and since then, he was collaborated with several brands, including Adidas and Nike.
The Rock Steady crew is a breaking and hip-hop crew, which got its start in New York. Its legendary members include Puerto Rican Crazy Legs (born Richard Colon), Baby Love (Daisy Castro), Buck 4 (Gabriel Marcano), and Kuriaki (Lorenzo Soto). The Rock Steady Crew is still around, expanding to consist of several groups in different locations. The Rock Steady crew released four singles during the ’80’s (along with a 1984 album), including the 1983 hit song, “(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew.” Other Puerto Rican pioneers of hip-hop and rap are Devastating Tito and Master O.C of the Fearless Four, DJ Tony Touch, and Fat Joe.
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Hip hop music helped level the musical playing field for young poor people of color. The young people of the Bronx were able to create art forms that became a powerful message of defiance to those who wanted to silence them. Hip hop music inspired young people around the world who found themselves in similar circumstances. By using their own languages and musical traditions, drawing upon their own ways of dancing, and creating visual images. Jamaican DJ culture, mixed with African American urban spoken word Jazz, blended with Puerto Rican “nueyorican” dancing and graffiti artistry birthed the phenomenon that is hip hop.
Today, hip hop is one of the top grossing music genres in the world. Ultimately, it was the blending of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino cultures, that lead to the creation of the music and culture of hip hop. Thanks to the origins of hip hop in the Bronx and the work of DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Charlie Chase, and more, today we have multimillionaire and billionaire hip hop music moguls like Jay-Z and Cardi B. Hip hop is a reflection of the cultural diversity found in America’s cities resulting from immigration from throughout the African diaspora. Hip hop is a creation whose DNA comes from the larger African diaspora.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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On Monday, closing arguments began with Judge Peter Cahill reviewing a set of instructions on conduct with the jury. “It is your duty to decide the questions of fact in this case,” he stated. “It is my duty to give you the rules of law that you must apply in arriving at your verdict.” Judge Cahill followed with a reminder for the jury to only consider the evidence heard in the courtroom and to disregard what they have heard elsewhere.
The prosecution led with a snapshot of Floyd and his family. “George Floyd was surrounded by people he cared about and who cared about him,” said Steve Schleicher. The attorney reminded the jury that George Floyd is not on trial and maintained a strong focus on the inappropriate use of force exhibited by Chauvin.
For nearly three hours, defense attorney Eric Nelson argued that expert witness testimony and detailed transcripts show that former officer Chauvin followed proper protocol according to department standards and the actions of a reasonable officer.
On April 20th, the jury reached a verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial. After three weeks of expert testimony, remarks from witnesses, and the Floyd family, jurors reached a unanimous verdict of guilty in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. Former Hennepin County police officer, Derek Chauvin was found guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
The jury consisted of a diverse panel of 12 jurors, including two multi-race women, three Black men, a Black woman, four white women, and two white men.
Chauvin now faces up to 40 years in prison. Sentencing will take place next week.
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For many, changing your relationship to police and policing starts before there’s ever a problem. The first step is often getting to know your neighbors, Viets van Dyk said. It’s fine to maintain boundaries — “not everybody wants to be friends with each other,” Viets van Dyk said. But just having a basic familiarity with the people who live nearby can help prevent problems down the road.
For example, one recent analysis of 911 calls across eight cities in the country found that 23 to 39 percent were for low-priority or non-urgent issues like noise complaints. If neighbors know each other, they can talk a lot of these issues out together rather than bringing in outside authorities. If you’d like a neighbor to turn music down so children can sleep, for instance, “I’ve found that often people are more open to that kind of thing if we know each other already,” Viets van Dyk said.
And being involved in your community is about more than getting along with people. It can also mean making sure the people in your neighborhood have their needs met. “A community can prevent a lot of things like theft if people have what they need,” Viets van Dyk said. “Generally people steal things because they need things and can’t otherwise access them.”
Most communities already have grassroots groups working to help the most vulnerable residents get food, health care, housing, and other necessities. The mutual aid groups that exist in many places can be a good place to start understanding what community members need and how to help. Rather than thinking about alternatives to police only when something bad is happening, you can start by working to make your community a safer and healthier place for everyone.
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Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd is heaping more pressure than ever on the Senate to finally enact nationwide police reform, senators in both parties said Tuesday in the wake of the verdict.
And progress toward a bipartisan deal that addresses the fraught issue of police bias is currently at a standstill.
Though the House has passed police reform bills, the Senate has yet to approach a deal that can get 60 votes. And there’s been no real movement to speak of since last year's Democratic filibuster of Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) policing measure.
Scott said he was relieved by the guilty verdict reached against Chauvin but that more work needed to be done. His party and Democrats conceded one point on Tuesday night: The long-running gridlock on police reform has become untenable for both parties.
“It’s pretty awful to have the nation’s eyes on a courtroom. It’s up to us to try to stop this from happening as frequently as it does,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
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The Gambia has become the second country in Africa to eliminate trachoma, one of the leading causes of blindness.
The achievement, announced by the World Health Organization on Tuesday, came after decades of work on the disease, which has damaged the sight of about 1.9 million people worldwide. Ghana was the first country in Africa to eliminate the disease in 2018.
The Gambian government and aid organisations have spent years identifying and treating patients in rural areas, often going from door to door. It can cause a person’s eyelashes to turn inwards and scratch against the eyes, causing permanent damage.
Yaya Manney, 75, a community leader in the coastal village of Mariama Kunda, said treatment had transformed his life. “I was in pain for a long time because I didn’t know anywhere close to me where I could have surgery. It’s difficult to live with the misery of trachoma,” he said.
The symptoms start with itching and over the years it became so painful that Manney could no longer work, but he did not know there was a treatment for the condition until a health worker visited him.
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What’s the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore, other than to traumatize Black communities? Vox: We have enough proof
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George Floyd cried out for his mother in his final moments. Adam Toledo did not have time to.
Two deaths at the hands of police. One prolonged. The other sudden. Both tragic. These are the haunting bookends that modern footage of police brutality gave us in just the last week.
The historic trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who murdered George Floyd, has ended with a rare conviction. To make their respective cases, both the defense and the prosecution looped traumatic videos of Floyd’s 2020 death in Minneapolis, providing an extraordinary amount of photographic evidence of what happened. The fact that it took that much video documentation of the crime — from multiple angles, played over and over again — to produce such a rare moment of accountability says so much about how much our society values the police over Black lives.
The same week of testimony during this historic trial, national news outlets began to report on Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black motorist whom Brooklyn Center police shot fatally on April 11 — just 10 miles from where Floyd took his last breaths. By Wednesday, I watched in horror as police pepper-sprayed 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, in his military uniform during a Virginia traffic stop. His video played repeatedly on all of the major cable networks.
And by Thursday, 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who is Latino, appeared on my TV and smartphone screen, holding his hands up to surrender to a Chicago police officer who shot him fatally in less than two seconds on March 29, tuning the scales of trauma to an unbearable pitch for so many.
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