How A Hip Hop Artist Commonly Starts
// February 1st, 2012 // No Comments » // Music
Hip Hop Artist Tony Tone, a member of the pioneering rap group the Cold Crush Brothers, observed that gangster rap preserved a lot of lives. Hip hop culture grew to become a means of working with the challenges of life as unprivileged within America, and an outlet to manage violence and gang culture. MC Kid Lucky mentions that people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting. Inspired by DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa created a street organization called Universal Zulu Nation, centered around rap, as a way to attract teens out of gang life and violence.
The musical content of numerous early rap teams concentrated on social issues, most notably in the seminal track “The Message”, which discussed the realities of life in the housing projects. Young black Americans coming from the civil rights movement used hip hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s to demonstrate the restrictions of the movement. Hip hop gave young African Americans a voice to let their concerns be heard. Like rock-and-roll, rap is strenuously opposed by conservatives because it romanticises violence, law-breaking, and gangs. It also gave young blacks an opportunity for financial gain by reducing the rest of the world to customers of its social issues.
The 1980s also saw many performers make social claims through hip hop. In 1982, Melle Mel and Duke Bootee recorded “The Message” officially attributed to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, a song that foreshadowed the socially self-conscious statements of Run-DMC’s “It’s like That” and Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”.
During the 1980s, gangster rap also embraced the creation of rhythm by using the human body, via the vocal percussion technique of beatboxing. Pioneers such as Doug E. Fresh, Biz Markie and Buffy from the Fat Boys made beats, rhythm, and audio sounds using their mouth, lips, tongue, voice, and other areas of the body. “Human Beatbox” musicians would also sing or imitate turntablism scratching or other instrument sounds.
With the commercial success of gangsta rap in the early 1990s, however, hip hop artist emphasis shifted from social issues to drugs, violence, and misogyny. Early proponents of gangsta hip hop included groups and artists such as Ice-T, who recorded what some consider to be the first gangsta rap record, 6 in the Mornin’, and N.W.A. whose second album Efil4zaggin grew to become the first gangsta rap album to penetrate the charts at number one. Gangsta rap also played an important part in hip hop being a mainstream commodity. The fact that albums such as N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It, and Ice Cube’s America’s Most Wanted were promoting in such high numbers meant that black teens were no more hip hop’s sole buying audience. As a result, gangsta rap became a platform for New Hip Hop Artist who chose to use their music to spread politic and social messages to areas that were formerly not aware of what went on in the ghettos of place like Los Angeles and New York. While hip hop music today attracts a broader demographic, media critics debate that socially and politically conscious hip hop has been largely disregarded by mainstream America.




