Rap - A Beginner's Masterclass

Guider

Foreword

With great pleasure and pride I bring you Rap - A Beginner's Masterclass. The world has hitherto lacked a professionally written manual deciphering slang-ridden rap tunes into readily understandable English. But no more!

During the 1990s, my youth consisted of law studies and a subsequent descent into the legal profession. At times friends, observing my ethnicity, would request wisdom upon matters concerning rap music. Tyrone! Why does that rapper you are listening to wish to put fifteen farming implements upon the tip of something in his possession? a friend might ask.

Well, I'd reply. "The gentleman is actually relaying a pure and unfettered truth: in the not-too-distant past fifteen presumably female prostitutes - aka 'hoes' - sampled the joys of his phallic shaft. That is to say the tip - of his gargantuan penis!"

Gosh! Why would this man want to advertise such a crass fact over so public a medium as a chart topping greatest hit? Was the flavor of many a taken aback reply.

This is what gives rap its meaning, fool! I'd cry, defensive and incensed. "Much of it is informing the listener of the true gangster life, framed in egoistic boasts that render unique and beautiful artistic value. Imagine how impressed visiting aliens would be when discovering our musicians could engage in sex with no fewer than fifteen females in a single orgy!"

This revelation so pleased my friends that they took to laughing and making double entendres at men turning soil with hoes on campus grounds. Asking a tutor to describe his biggest tip for penetrating difficult clients was a favorite joke as we obtained law doctorates in precursor to our figurative fucking of folks as full-time vocation. Yea, we became untouchable briefcase-toting gangsters!

I'm a soul given to thinking on my feet but still had to study reams of slang and street wisdom to translate rap properly for my friends. I lived a double life: by day I was a straight-laced Ivy League law student, but by night I was T-Humph - a small-time narcotics imbiber and message boy for a local gang branch.

Although my activities granted me accuracy and enlightenment, as years went by my written compendium became as disregarded as a saliva dampened marijuana cigarette. Disillusioned with my midlife and the legal injustices I personally wrought, I realized the time had come to return to my roots. Thus this guide is now in your hands, expanded and published for the great wide world!

Introduction

The contents in this book are a decipherment of popular rap (aka hip hop) music. The genre comprises an assemblage of styles replete in slang and colloquialisms. Popular songs are converted into a form which ordinary English speakers worldwide can understand. Regardless of your vocation, be it doctor, teacher, lawyer, retiree or professionally debt-saddled coffee shop haunting graduate, you'll emerge from this book bursting with street wisdom.

This manual intends that your future discoveries in hip hop become spectacular and revelatory. Tailored to flow impeccably, I've aimed to make each new musical confrontation enlightening. For best results, use this guide in accompaniment to the music. Thus you'll come to understand the differing terms, descriptors, wordplay and linguistic quirks comprising hip hop.

You will also be able to passably navigate deprived neighborhoods without appearing to be anything worse than an undercover narcotics agent or perhaps an elderly (age 25+) former OG (Original Gangster) echoing old school mannerisms as if newly thawed from a cryonic freeze.

The first section of the book is mainly preoccupied with the West Coast gangster rap which for several years dominated much of the market. Artists such as Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube serve to present this initial example of a distinct hip hop method.

In the second section, we begin to embrace the contrasting styles pioneered by East Coast artists and producers, albeit with one eye still on the criminally-inspired. As such, we examine the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z whilst also covering such nuanced and humorous artists as De La Soul and the Wu-Tang Clan.

The final section sees an examination of various unique artists from the Midwestern and Southern USA together with the wider international scene. Our purpose here is to establish that rappers outside the traditional East/West mould have long been responsible for rap's linguistic and stylistic growth. Thus we cover music by British band The Streets, Dutchman Pete Philly and American artists such as Bone Thugs N' Harmony, OutKast and Eminem.

This book excludes rap short on street slang or vocal nuance. Tunes rich in comic relief and pop cultural asides together with those with serious, gritty or pensive topics find thorough treatment.

There is prejudice for anecdotal, storytelling rap alongside cerebral and legendary anthems. My reasoning is that these are richest in relaying the word from the street as well as the mores and atmosphere of the urban cultures which largely birthed and spurred hip hop on. The reader can thus enjoy maximum comprehension and received wisdom.

My written accounts of each song require only an inquiring mind, an attentive ear, and an open-minded respect for hip hop music and culture. Legal reasons concerning copyright law's propensity for smacking my ass down mean no lyrics are directly written. So again I strongly recommend listening to the corresponding songs as your eyes comb the manual. Pauses and rewinds may be necessary in order to comprehend the more rapid of lyrical deliveries.

It is time to free yourself of your deprivation to a streetwise upbringing! Shed a tear and laugh a laugh as you realize the linguistic poverty you suffered! But most of all - don't trip.

Tyrone Humphreys L.D., Spring 2015

This Book As Hip Hop

Allow me to emerge with a prosaic splurge

Of clarifications where street anecdotes converge

A feature length pamphlet if you will, a terminology overfill

Whose capacity will enlighten ye like flaming chicken on a grill

I discard conceited claims to genius - that's spurious

What matters is true fandom, not a bullshit IQ sounding glorious

Are we not we all merely human beings in the chaotic soup of the universe?

Struggling to compose our life's verse as we head certainly to a hearse?

Examples: a shadowy figure cries, shot in the thigh with a 45'

Death valley bound amidst foreboding sounds

A hoodie wearing drug slinger at a corner, the passive ironic mourner

Of gangsters stood there prior to their entering Lucifer's sauna

We all competed for women like a pack of salivating hounds

Navy uniforms holler cruelly: please maneuver hind quarters to the ground

Up in a homestead, chewing my mother's best hash browns and eggs

Emerging later to my concrete office: street parties with cannabis and kegs

So be you sitting in an oak-flanked study sipping lattes

Or perched upon a street corner strapped with stainless steel gat-tes

Or bound to a black leather seated cafe your Kindle with a finish of matte

Or hefting a Nook...wait! I don't give a fuck!

Just listen to me is all that I am asking

As I translate these songs to an educated vernacular eternally lasting

Understand whether waves blare out of a 2.1 or 5.1 system behind -

Or dangling headphones, should discretion or shame accost your mind

Regardless, all that T-Humph wants is for you to relax and absorb

Never bored as you instinctively dissect and horde

Spot on hip hop insights sourced inspired packaged straight in these pages

Audiences spellbound like a flank of heavily buttressed medieval mages

A Brief History Lesson

With the advent of improved and portable audio equipment in the 1970s, disk jockeys were able to traverse civic areas hitherto largely untouched by contemporary music. Boom boxes, turntables and speaker systems proliferated. Communal parties occurred where modern genres and beats were demonstrated. Youths desired to enter upon music as a creative and innovative venture, their interest sometimes flowering into a full-blown career.

The advancement of synthesizers in the 1980s reduced the barriers to entry. As such, hip hop music grew out of a fertile cornucopia of new technology. Such gadgetry conveyed the ability to layer a heavy bass and a melody paired with quickly uttered but discernible lyrics: rapping. Electronically archived studio samples further aided budding rappers in musical assemblage.

It took until the mid-1980s for the genre to achieve sustained popularity and charting. At this time the more popular acts tended towards lighthearted or tongue-in-cheek manners of performance. The notion that rap was nothing more than humorous, faddish whimsy persisted for a time in the popular consciousness. The chart-friendly antics of such popular acts as Run DMC enforced this impression.  For a time, it appeared rap would be largely constrained to good natured light entertainment. A sort of musical counterpart to the Cosby Show.

Through the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s rap underwent a rapid, sustained evolution. These years are commonly referred to as rap's 'Golden Age' owing to the regularity of stylistic invention. Though lighthearted novelties persisted amidst the growth, this era birthed contrasting artists such as MC Hammer and NWA, Will Smith and Public Enemy, Slick Rick and Ice-T, De La Soul and Dr. Dre. Hip hop was no longer something to pigeonhole: on the contrary, rap could never again be credibly reduced to a single overarching stereotype.

The most distinct offshoot forged in this time was from those who wished to harness the genre as an outlet for anger at social strife whilst simultaneously glorifying and celebrating a life of crime. Emerging from a culture of violence and impoverishment, gangster rap - aka G funk - would become extremely popular, especially in the West Coast region which bore its genesis.

Owing to the rap group NWA, torrents of depiction of the life of young and impoverished blacks in urban neighborhoods were unleashed. Numerous groups sprang up inside of just a couple of years: by 1992, the new style of hip hop was in full commercial flourish, charting consistently across the United States and in the wider world.

Meanwhile the East Coast, where rap was chiefly situated in New York City and New Jersey, began to develop distinct variations on the gangster theme. Groups such as the Wu-Tang Clan humorously chided the popular gangster guise much hip hop had taken on, preferring nuanced, offbeat and humorous forms of composition.

The high value of the maturing genre was successfully harnessed by two labels specifically created for the genre by two of its most popular artists: Jay-Z's Roc-a-Fella and Puff Daddy's Bad Boy Records. In spite of success enjoyed in common, a bitter feud between East and West coast rap artists ensued.

In 1996 and 1997 two of hip hop's biggest names, 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G, were brutally gunned down in drive-by shootings. Such violent demises led those producing rap music to draw a line under the violence and East/West rivalry which had dominated media coverage of rap music through the mid-1990s. The explicit criminality-themed bravado was toned down both in songs and in the public images cultivated by the more popular artists.

Yet hip hop's development was never confined simply to gangster rap. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the qualities of hip hop migrated into numerous new branches and subgenres. Artists within genres such as gospel, R&B, pop, electronic and even rock would incorporate rapping in numerous popular hits. Simply put, rap had become a crucial part of the fabric of popular musicianship worldwide.

In more recent years, popular hip hop has faced criticisms and accusations of a general decay in quality. The decreasing frequency of sample use, poorer variation of lyrics together with a perceived generic dullness and a neglect of profundity within many songs remain common complaints in contemporary times.

Nevertheless rap has continued to be enduringly popular, with longtime artists such as Eminem, Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z continuing to consistently chart. In comparison to other genres, higher proportions of rap fans remain aware of the genre's rich and qualitatively strong history, continuing to listen to, appreciate and share classic material.

In the present day hip hop music is so interwoven with the fabric of charting hits that artists traditionally part of differing genres are commonly praised by established rappers.