Rap before hip-hop

For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap when you sing rhythmically on one pitch, or on a narrow range of pitches? Rap more often uses wider pitch contours. Are we counting any spoken word with musical accompaniment, or does the speaking have to be rhythmically structured in a specific way? Does it have to rhyme? We will be discussing all that in class.

Blues

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” (1948)

Hooker raps a couple of short verses amid a mostly sung tune, and they are haunting. He is not exactly following the rhythm of the guitar part, but he’s also not using natural speech rhythm; it’s somewhere in between.

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“Work Song” and blues harmony

It’s a cliché to say that jazz is European harmony plus African rhythm. For example, this lesson plan from Jazz in America says that jazz got its rhythm and “feel” from African music, and its harmony and instruments from European classical. This is not untrue, but it’s an oversimplification. A substantial amount of jazz harmony is African-derived too. Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” is a case in point. It’s one of the funkiest and most soulful jazz standards, inspired by the singing of chain gangs in Adderley’s native Florida.

The head is an archetypal example of the blues scale, and it is mostly played without chords. You need chords for the solos, though, so which ones should you use? Is the tune major, or minor, or modal, or what? There is no consensus in the jazz world. This is a surprise, given that “Work Song” is such a standard. In this post, I’ll talk through a couple of possible interpretations, before giving my preferred explanation (spoiler: it’s in blues tonality.)

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The Mad Men theme and Autumn Leaves

Mad Men’s obsessive devotion to period accuracy has one conspicuous exception: its hip-hop theme song by RJD2. The track plays under one of television’s all-time great opening title sequences, which I can’t embed because AMC doesn’t understand how internet marketing works. Click this collage I made to watch on YouTube.

The theme song is an edited-down version of RJD2’s backing track for Aceyalone’s “A Beautiful Mine.”

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