HIP-HOP: FROM THE UNDER BELLY TO AIRWAVES - Page 3
© Grandmaster Jay
King Tim ruled the summer of “79 until another more incredible rap song hit the airwaves and altered history forever. The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper's Delight not only blew King Tim III into obscurity but was also picked up by many White rock stations as the first Hip Hop crossover. The flow of multiple word play fascinated America and the fuse was lit. The very first words. Spoken by emcee Wonder Mike” I said a Hip Hop..” have become the name of this culture and its music. But the emcee had come into existence long before the summer of 1979. Emcees were the mouthpieces of the Hip-Hop world. Gifted street poets with unique deliveries that both moved and fascinated the crowds. The power of Rap has been virtually destroyed today by the record companies. This power lay in the content of the word. Words can motivate and educate. The power of Rap as the voice of the Hip-Hop Nation has been replaced by a steady stream of negative stereotypical content. The emcees that rose in Hip-Hop’s infancy were as diverse with their lyrical content as they were with their styles and voices. As occupants of the underbelly of America, they thrived on the fame and respect that their rapping garnered them in their world. It should be noted that fame and respect were the ultimate goals and accolades of any serious emcee in those days. Many tried but only the best got those props. The success of Sugarhill changed all that. Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire and where there was a rapper there was money. It would seem logical the next evolution of Hip-Hop should’ve been the mass exposure of those gifted emcees. However the music industry was too segregated and ignorant to this fact. The next few years saw a slew of small labels putting the rap crews they could find on wax and trying to make some of that Sugarhill loot.
I close this session by saying that the common denominator that bound the elements of Hip-Hop together was the street itself. Street people doing street poetry, street dancing, street art, and street music.
Street people who expressed all of their hopes, fantasies, desires, anger, joy, and pain into the artforms that comprised the Hip Hop culture. From nothing they created a something so powerful that it has impacted the world. A something that is being exploited and misrepresented by the very one making the most money from it: The record conglomerates. Yet the blame also rests on original surviving members of The Hip-Hop Nation. Why? Because nobody is going to tell your story better than you. So tell it. The next time around I will drop knowledge on the erasing of the DeeJay from the musical performance of Hip-Hop music.
