Theoretically Speaking

S3 | E14: What Makes Hip Hop, Hip Hop ? – Part 2

Bill Bois’ Music Theory For Non-Musicians™

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…if there was ever an art where breaking the rules is one of the rules, it’s music.

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S3:E14 – What Makes Hip Hop, Hip Hop? – Part 2

I’ve been using the terms “hip hop” and “rap” interchangeably, as a lot of folks do.

However, there’s a distinction.

In Part 1, we went over how DJ Kool Herc invented the merry go round turntable technique and that people started rapping over it.

Rapping didn’t just happen out of the blue.

Improvised rhyming goes way back. We know it was done in the West African countries, to pass history and news to other communities and generations.

The griot’s role was respected and necessary in cultures that didn’t have the written word. Though most read and write today, the griot’s importance in each tribe continues. Without them, centuries of tribal history and culture would have been lost.

In the West Indies, improvised rhyming in the form of insults became popular.

Picong duels were rarely recorded. But in 1957, an album was released in Trinidad and Tobago, capturing “Lord Melody” battling “The Mighty Sparrow.” The album it comes from, Calypso Kings and Pink Gin, is a classic in Caribbean music.

In the United States, African American kids would play “the dozens.” This is a game of two people humorously insulting each other in front of an audience.

Often done for fun in parks or on front stoops, the topics open for insult include the opponents’ appearance or physical characteristics, economic status, clothing choices, and family members. This is where “your mama” jokes come from.

“Your mama’s so skinny you could blindfold her with dental floss.”

That is, when everyone plays nice.

It wasn’t long after hip hop’s inception that insults made their way into rap.

Remember, some early rap songs were braggadocious, with the rapper telling the world how great he was.

For some reason, celebrity host Kool Moe Dee thought this crossed the line. So he entered himself in the contest and went on last.

An entire subgenre of rap was born that night. Now known as the diss track, it’s a song based entirely on talking smack about someone else in the scene. We’ll get there momentarily.

Kool Moe Dee’s rap became the stuff of legend. In no time, the dozens were replaced by rap battles. The good natured party vibe of the dozens made way for more aggressive, grittier, nastier insults. Battles would happen on street corners, parks, anywhere that could hold a crowd.

In 2002, an editor known as Smack White started a quarterly video magazine called Smack DVD. Each issue included freestyle performances and interviews with top tier rappers, but by far its most popular feature was footage of rap battles. White heard from subscribers that they would skip over everything to watch the battles first.

Eventually, he made rap battles into a professional sport.

No, really:

He started the Ultimate Rap League or URL. Competitors often participate in the sport, but don’t necessarily release music. Rap battles are now a separate entity from rap music.

Insulting rival MCs in songs, however, continues. Rappers disrespect someone else in song, which brings a response known as an answer song. Usually that’s the end of it, with just one diss song answering another.

But in 1984, a diss song brought at least 30, and possibly 100 depending on who’s counting, answer songs.

A group called U.T.F.O. released a song called Roxanne, Roxanne and it became pretty popular. It’s about an imaginary woman named, of course, Roxanne who turns down all the rappers’ advances. 

U.T.F.O. backed out of a promotion deal with Marley Marl, a producer and manager.

They took the instrumental version of Roxanne, Roxanne and, as legend has it, Gooden improvised a rap over it in one take. She used the name Roxanne Shanté and they called the song Roxanne’s Revenge. In a flash, it was all over New York City.

U.T.F.O. recognized how clever Shanté was to pretend their song was about her. They responded with an answer song they wrote in which they claimed someone else was the real Roxanne.

By doing so, U.T.F.O. managed to pull the narrative back into their control, and gain some popularity in the process. However, they didn’t credit Elease on the track and she soon had a falling out with them. U.T.F.O. replaced her with Adelaida Martinez who took on the Roxanne persona for years, despite having nothing to do with the making of The Real Roxanne.

By that point, everyone wanted in on the action.

Some people claimed to be Roxanne’s parents, siblings, and friends. One claimed to be her doctor. Both U.T.F.O. and Shanté released more songs that perpetuated the beef.

A beef, in rap terminology, is a grudge, argument, or disagreement between two people. It can be in the form of diss tracks, or it can be far more serious than a simple rap battle.

Some famous rap beefs were between Dr. Dre and Uncle Luke, Ice Cube and Common, 50 Cent and Kanye West or 50 Cent and Ja Rule, and Jay-Z and Nas.

But the most famous beef was between Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls.

By 1993, Tupac was one of the biggest rappers in the world. Biggie was still working his way up, but Tupac liked and respected him and his material. They became close friends.

On November 30, 1994, Tupac was on his way to meet Biggie, Puffy, and a rapper they were going to work with called Little Shawn. In the lobby of the building, three men mugged him and tried to take his gold chains. He fought back and one of the men shot him five times. 

He survived, but came to believe that Biggie and Puffy set him up. While recovering, he was sentenced to four years in prison on a sexual abuse charge. Shortly after he went to prison, Biggie released a song called Who Shot Ya. He said it was about a beef between drug dealers and had, in fact, recorded it before Tupac’s shooting.

However, it can very easily be read as dissing Tupac, which is what most people assumed, including Tupac himself.

While in prison, Tupac agreed to sign with Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, at least in part because Knight said he would pay Tupac’s bail. It was $1.4 million. 

Tupac left prison eight months into his four year sentence.

People noticed a change in Tupac after signing with Death Row. He portrayed himself as tougher than anyone else, and released the diss track Hit Em Up in which he tells Biggie and Puffy to watch their backs. He calls them out by name. He even said he had slept with Biggie’s wife, singer Faith Evans.

With the attention Who Shot Ya and Hit Em Up brought to each other, it was no longer just a feud amongst Tupac and Biggie.

Everyone involved — Knight, Puffy, and their crews — and people who weren’t involved at all took sides.

Publicly.

It’s possible they did so following the lead of the Roxanne wars, to get publicity for themselves.

It went from a beef between two rappers to a beef between the East Coast and the West Coast.

Biggie chose to not respond to Hit Em Up. He still considered Tupac to be a friend even though they were having a beef. He thought it best to let things cool down so they could work it out later.

Before that could happen, Tupac was murdered in a drive by shooting outside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Faith Evans said Biggie cried when he heard the news. He had really wanted to patch things up, but rumors quickly spread that he was behind the hit.

Within six months of Tupac’s death, Biggie Smalls was killed in a similar shooting in Los Angeles.

No one has ever been arrested but police believe Knight hired a gang member named Poochie to kill Biggie. Poochie was killed by another gang member before police could question him.

In 2018, Knight pleaded guilty to a 2015 fatal hit and run and is serving a 28 year sentence. Due to prior convictions, he won’t be eligible for parole until 2034.

This is a simplified version of a very complicated story that includes other relationships, other songs, and other murders that I didn’t go into here. Rappers, body guards, and gang members lost their lives in the East Coast vs. West Coast beef.

None of these people, with the possible exception of Biggie, learned one of the basic lessons of the dozens: how to take insults in stride.

Diss tracks are nothing new:

Yankee Doodle was sung by British troops mocking the colonist army’s poor appearance.

How it went from the good humored banter of picong to gangland style murders is complicated, pointless, and nearly incomprehensible.

While some rapped about the killing of minorities by police, here were rappers killing each other. 

Rapper on rapper violence watered down hip hop’s demands for justice. It gave systemic racism all the cover it needed to continue.

Yet rap continued to grow both artistically and commercially. It influenced other genres and evolved into several distinct and interesting subgenres.

And while the east coast and west coast were feuding, the south and midwest developed their own scenes.

More soon.

Suggested Listening – Full YouTube Playlist

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