the artistic movement that came to known as the Harlem Renaissance.
But this new multiculturalism is global and international and also refers obliquely to the vast numbers of white Americans who now participate in the culture. Hip hop, we are told, has gone universal. And yet, my references to this as a black art form are intentional. Seventy-eight years ago, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the sage W. E. B. Du Bois remarked that “As soon as true Negro art emerges, it is said ’That person did this because he is an American, not because he is a Negro; as a matter of fact there is no such thing as a Negro.” Such is the case with the ongoing perceptions of jazz and blues as quintessentially “American” artforms—decreasingly owing their existence to the social quarantine of Jim Crow and the aesthetic laboratories that generations of Negro artists created within it. By this logic, Rakim, Jay-Z, MC Lyte, KRS-One, Lauryn Hill, OutKast, Scarface, Ice Cube, Common, and Snoop Dogg are Americans, not Negroes—and Eminem must be the President.
The truth is that it is possible to be both specific and universal simultaneously. The legions of mic-grabbing rhyme spitters in Germany, Japan, France, and Amsterdam are no more contrary to the black roots of hip hop than Leontyne Price was a threat to the Italian roots of opera. Hip hop is literally a product of the African Diaspora—with breakdancing owing its existence to the Afro-Brazilian martial art form of Capoeira, deejaying growing from the genius of Caribbean migrants to the United States, and MCing evolving at the crossroads of a number of verbal traditions. I use the term black as an—admittedly awkward—reference to that body of Africa-derived cultures, specifically those of North America and the Caribbean, and the term African American to describe the group of Africa-descended peoples in the United States.
And now a confession: of the four pillars of hip hop—breaking, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping—I am focusing on the craft of the MC, the most widely recognized of hip hop participants. There are volumes to be spoken on the artistic skill of the turntablist; the re-made acrobatics of the b-boy, who fashioned a new form from the Capoeira martial art created by stolen Africans in Brazil; and the alphabetic abstraction of the graffiti tagger. But I’ll leave that for future writers.
I’m talking specifically about MCs in these pages, not the general category of rappers. Every MC raps, but not every rapper is an MC. Truth told, there are scores of successful rappers who have never met an actual MC. Like Madison-Avenued, focus-grouped novelties, rappers are created in accord with the reigning flavor of the nanosecond. Right about now, most rappers exist as living product placements, their gear, their rides, their whole set-up as deliberately schemed as that can of Coke downed by your favorite action hero before he splits to do battle with the special-effected forces of evil. Only the mad niche-marketers of American hypercapitalism could conceive of the modern rap video—basically a commercial in which products advertise other products. It would be easy to freestyle on the soul-nullifying effects of capitalism on art, but the point is that the music, the art of hip hop, has to be understood as distinct from the cellophane-shrouded rap products sitting in the music bin at Wal-Mart.
Flip on your TV, turn on the radio, open a magazine and there’s a good chance that there’s a rapper floating on your medium of choice. An MC, though, is a whole ’nother thing entirely. Microphone Controller, Mic Checker, Master of Ceremonies, Mover of Crowds, in hip hop, the letters MC are as undefined as the X that followed Malcolm’s name.
The genealogy of the MC runs all the way back to hip hop’s fetal days when the DJ was at the center of the culture and the Master of Ceremonies was essentially a sideman. The group was called Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five for a reason: Flash’s eye-blurring hand speed and slick scratches had made him a boulevard celebrity long before the heads on the boulevard got wise to the vocal talents of Cowboy, Melle Mel, Rakim, Mr. Ness, or Kid Creole. The DJ selected the array of sounds that the masses would move to, operated literally as the architect of a vibe. The DJ’s primacy—and the MC’s secondary status—had started to change by the time you got to groups identified by a single common name like the Cold Crush Brothers or the Fearless Four. The situation was clearly reversed when you got to Run DMC & Jam Master Jay—two rappers and a DJ who were more commonly referred to as just Run DMC.
The difference between a rapper and an MC is the difference between smooth jazz and John Coltrane, the difference between studio and unplugged. Or, to cop a line from Alice Walker, the difference between indigo and powder blue. Nelly is a rapper; KRS-One is an MC twenty-five hours a day. Lauryn Hill is, straight up and down, an MC’s MC; the Fresh Prince was an MC; Will Smith is a rapper. Nas has been an MC since he breathed his first; P. Diddy and Master P. are rappers down to their DNA.
The rapper is judged by his ability to move units; the measure of the MC is the ability to move crowds. The MC gets down to his task with only the barest elements of hip hop instrumentalization: two turntables and a microphone. On that level, the Miami basspreneur Luke, who didn’t even necessarily rhyme, was closer to being an MC than Hammer, who did rhyme—or at least attempted to. The MC writes his own material. The MC would still be writing his own material even if he didn’t have a record deal. A rapper without a record deal is a commercial without a timeslot. Regarding the difference between rapper and MC, KRS breaks it down like this:
A dope MC is a dope MC With or without a record deal, all can see And that’s what KRS is, son I’m not the run of the mill ‘cause for the mil’ I don’t run
Still, you can get yourself in trouble thinking that art is easily categorized. Jay-Z, Eminem, Notorious B.I.G., 50 Cent, Tupac Shakur, DMX, and LL Cool J are all MCs who are also rappers, meaning they have managed to exist within the commercial arena while maintaining their integrity as artists. To avoid confusion, I use the term rapper as a general reference to hip hop vocalists—and MC when I mean to connote that specific brand of verbal marksmen who were forged in the crucible of the street jam, the battle, and the off-the-top-of-the-dome freestyle.
There has emerged over the last ten years a body of hip hop music criticism from the pages of niche outlets like Source, XXL, Vibe, the now-defunct Blaze, hip hop websites, and mainstream music magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone—but the criticism most often deals with how well a particular rapper or group of rappers met commonly accepted standards for the form, not the exploration of those standards themselves. My intent here is to understand hip hop as an aesthetic, not necessarily a social movement. To deal, in other words, with the art on its own terms. The issues of sexism, violence, homophobia, and materialism have been raised and thoroughly treated by other writers. This is not a history of hip hop, though it necessarily contains historical elements. The history of the music has been chronicled in songs, magazines, books, and websites. The history and politics of the art form as well as the generation that created it have been chronicled in works such as Bakari Kitwana’s Hip Hop Generation, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists, Gwendolyn Pough’s Check It While I Wreck It, Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, and Mark Neal and Murray Foreman’s That’s the Joint, among others. There is always room for additional voices, but hip hop’s political and social elements can at last lay claim to a substantive body of literature.
So this book aims for a different kind of conversation. It is a treatment of themes in the music and culture—some of which have historical threads. To the Break of Dawn is an extended liner note on the artistic evolution of rap music and its relationship to earlier forms of black expression. It is also not meant to be exhaustive. There are plenty of rappers you won’t find discussed in these pages. Hip hop is diverse and subdividing by the minute. Still it is worthwhile to distill commonalities in the craft of rapping up to this particular point.
This book is divided into five sections: “The Roots” traces hip hop’s relationship to the ancestral forms of expression, particularly blues and the oral tradition. It takes direct issue with those mumble-mouthed and cliché
