to popular wisdom, history does not repeat itself—but it is prone to extended paraphrases. Early MCs made use of their aesthetic inheritance in the same way that the generation that created blues had fallen back upon the folklore and musical legacy bequeathed to them by the ancestors who had survived the ordeal of slavery. That said, the irony is that critics and writers generally recognized the influence of the Last Poets more than hip hop artists did themselves. This hazy connection to one's artistic genealogy is not specific to hip hop (try asking the average twenty-three-year-old rock musician about his artistic debt to Ike Turner) but the truth is that an entire generation of hip hop heads were introduced to the Last Poets classic “All Hail to the Late Great Black Man” via Notorious B.I.G.'s first single, “Party & Bullshit,” which had sampled a snippet from the track—for decidedly opposite political ends. (This wasn't the last time Big would hijack political anthems for his own boulevardian ends—he famously shackled a segment of Public Enemy's “Shut 'Em Down” to his own “Ten Crack Commandments.”) And truth told, the chanted syncopation of Stetsasonic's 1988 release “Freedom or Death,” was so deeply indebted to the Last Poets' stylings that the song could've passed as a lost studio session from the revolutionary bards.
A Tribe Called Quest's “Excursions” on The Low End Theory featured a rip from the Last Poets' “Time Is Running Out” as the hook. But it was not until Common's 2005 release “The Corner,” which featured the Last Poets chanting the hook, did you see major hip hop artists collaborating with their literal elder spokespersons. At the same time, the Last Poets occupied the ironic niche of being the most widely recognized of a whole array of artists who had been mining similar veins. While The Last Poets and This Is Madness pre-dated the beginnings of hip hop, Gil Scott-Heron's 1974 album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was released as the art form took its first breaths of South Bronx air. Primarily a jazz album, Revolution's claim to the hip hop pantheon was anchored in a title track that found Scott-Heron delivering verse over a hypnotic, funk-indebted bassline—an approach that was so distinct at that point as to warrant classic status. (That same bassline was later lifted and enlisted for Queen Latifah and KRS-One's collaboration “The Evil That Men Do.”) At the same time, the other poetic standard-bearers of that era, Amiri Baraka, the Watts Prophets among others, were working toward the creation of another verse form; specifically they sought ever blacker forms of self-expression—however that term could be defined.
The debt to that generation of artists was apparent as were the distinctions between the two. In their approach to poetry—maybe as part of their collective efforts to shake themselves free of the constraints of whiter poetics—rhyme was often de-emphasized in the work of the Last Poets, Baraka, and Scott-Heron. Hip hop took the elements of verbal expression and percussive accompaniment, but within this new culture rhyme became—and three decades later remained—the most valued element of hip hop lyricism.
It is an irony of history that the complex culture fermenting in the South Bronx and Upper Manhattan came to national attention via the Sugar Hill Gang, an artificially flavored composite group whose “Rapper's Delight” was the first commercially successful recording of the genre. (It was not, however, the first rap record—that distinction belonged to Fatback Band's “King Tim III.”) Sugar Hill Records, the indie label owned by Sylvia Robinson, a former R&B vocalist, had gotten in on the ground floor of the movement. That said, they went on to sign future legends Busy Bee, Crash Crew, and Sequence, the first all-female rap act. Rival Enjoy Records, headed by Bobby Robinson, who had discovered Gladys Knight and the Pips, was responsible for the careers of the Funky Four Plus One, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Spoonie Gee, the Disco Four, and the Fearless Four.
Between the 1979 release of “Rapper's Delight” and 1983, the music was perceived as a cute Negro niche market capable of producing free-spirited confections like Kurtis Blow's “The Breaks” in 1980 or the occasional noteworthy musing like Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's “The Message” in 1982. For the purist, though, the era yielded manifold musical blessings: Afrika Bambaataa's “Jazzy Sensation,” “Looking for the Perfect Beat,” and the heart-rate spiking “Planet Rock.” The Fearless Four released “Rockin' It” and “Problems of the World Today,” the Treacherous Three offered “Yes, We Can, Can” and “Action”—not to mention lesser-hailed contributions from Grand Master Flash and his five MCs like “Scorpio” and “Survival.”
To later ears, the toddler awkwardness of the early music is apparent in a way that it never could have been to the contemporary listener. That said, all artistic development begins with shots in the dark and for the artists of hip hop's embryonic stages, there was simply more dark to shoot at. That reality could be seen, for instance, in the awkward intonations and unruly variations in pitch that early MCs employed. Check the Fearless Four's “It's Magic,” a classic release whose supernatural boasts made it a thematic cousin to the Tempations' “Can't Get Next to You.” The most notable trait of Mike C and Peso's MCing is the wild alternation between false baritone and high-pitched excitement. That brand of unruly intonation had given way to more subtle vocal changes even before the Old School era expired, but their approach to verbal styling wasn't accidental. Just as the rhyme routines of early rappers bore the hallmarks of the soul groups they were imitating, their tonal adventurism was an inheritance from the fast-talking, pitch-varying pseudo-baritone couplets that radio deejays—another ancestor to the hip hop MC—had been practicing for decades.
The radio deejay was in fact a significant precursor to the rapper. That much was clear as early as 1979, when the Fatback Band's “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” appeared. The first recorded rap record featured King Tim throwing down his rap over funked guitar riff. And unlike the Poets, Baraka, or Heron, whose work, in retrospect, sounds raplike, King Tim was rapping. The recording is virtually identical in stylistic terms to the early work released by the Furious Five, Grandmaster Caz, and the Funky Four—artists who were the first to be assigned the label “rapper.” But the recording is also thoroughly reminiscent of the cadence, intonation, and pitch of the radio entertainers who, by the 1970s, were long-established media personalities.
Rap was delivered to that nebulously defined American deity the Market by the Sugar Hill Gang's “Rapper's Delight,” but the political birth of hip hop could arguably be traced to Melle Mel's 1982 rhyme manifesto “The Message.” While “Rapper's Delight” had remained true to the party spirit at the center of the newborn culture, “The Message” had taken aim at the decaying metropolis—and the decaying lives lived within it—that had made that desperate partying so essential to daily survival in the first place. Frantz Fanon famously pointed out in Wretched of the Earth that music and dance remained social safety valves that siphoned anger away and actually made life under inhuman conditions tolerable. Frederick Douglass informed readers of his autobiographical narrative that slavemasters encouraged black people to participate in all manner of recreational diversion in their few moments of respite so as to prevent them from hatching plans to seize their freedom. But with all due respect to Douglass and Fanon, Mel could've schooled them on the revolutionary potential of black joy.
Hip hop was that joy. And on that level, the distinctions between “The Message” and a contemporary party track like the Treacherous Three's “Put the Boogie in Your Body” were less clear than the conventional wisdom would have one believe. “The Message” succeeded—as did Public Enemy's later rhyme polemics like “Welcome to the Terror-dome”—primarily because the form was blazing. What Melle Mel put down on that record, backed by a cluster of ascending keys and a rotund bassline, was undeniable. Had a lesser MC taken aim at the ills of South Bronx living, no matter how desperately they needed a public exposé, crowds would've ignored it while jamming to apolitical bangers like “Put the Boogie in Your Body.” In Melle Mel, though, there was a brilliant combination of both talent and political insight.
Sugar Hill had gotten over with a market success that was, in terms of form, a series of verses strung together without pause. Kurtis Blow's “Christmas Rappin',” released that same year, contained a series of rhymes tied together by the holiday
