Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000

My Advanced Pop Transcription class has started our rap unit, where the students have to pick a verse and transcribe eight bars of it into notation. In preparation for that project, we are listening to and analyzing tracks from various styles and eras, and also talking about the larger social and political context of the music. I won’t be getting into any of that context here, but if you do want to read about it, you might enjoy this paper I wrote about the weirdest white rap cover ever.

Anyway, I chose these five songs because they represent some big trends in the music in the 80s and 90s, and because I like them. I’ll talk about more recent developments in hip-hop in a future post.

Run-DMC – “Peter Piper” (1986)

This is the sound of the mid-1980s: a Roland TR-808 drum machine, two turntables, and two guys joyfully yelling over them. Here’s a podcast episode about the Bob James record that forms the basis of the track. The lyrics sound like playground chants, and not just because they are referencing nursery rhymes. Dr. Kyra Gaunt argues that rap originates in part from musical games like double dutch, and that sounds right to me. Run-DMC’s rhythms are steady and predictable, and the rhymes come in pairs at the ends of the lines. If we’re comparing hip-hop to jazz, this is like Louis Armstrong in the 1920s: close to the folkloric origins of the music, innovative yet accessible.

De La Soul – “Eye Know” (1989)

The sound of the late 80s and early 90s: digital samples programmed on an MPC, none of which were cleared. Listen to a podcast episode about those samples. The flows are still playground-y and the rhymes are still falling predictably on beat four, but the vocabulary is expanding: “regardless”, “circumference”, “molecule”.

Eric B and Rakim – “Follow the Leader” (1988)

Even though this predates the De La Soul song by a year, it sounds much more contemporary. My students said that it reminds them of MF Doom. Rakim’s flow is rhythmically complex, with dense and unpredictable rhymes and literarily ambitious imagery:

Music mix, mellow maintains to make melodies for emcees, motivates the breaks

So follow me and while you’re thinking you were first, let’s travel at magnificent speeds around the universe

In this journey, you’re the journal, I’m the journalist

Here’s my notated transcription of the first sixteenth bars of verse one, showing approximate pitches, with the rhymes color-coded. The jazz analogy here would be to Charlie Parker.

Wu-Tang Clan – “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F*** Wit” (1993)

Only a few years have passed since the days of De La Soul but the music has changed substantially. The Wu-Tang guys have absorbed Rakim’s verbal innovations and added some new ideas of their own: samples of kung fu movies, loads of private mythology and in-jokes, lots of profanity, wilder and crazier energy. I remember all the profanity being shocking at the time, though it sounds pretty tame now. Underneath the confrontational surface, the flows are getting more intellectual, complex and unpredictable.

OutKast – “Ms Jackson” (2000)

A big jump in technical virtuosity, with off-the-grid rhythms and syllables densely packed into the fine subdivisions of the beat. There’s a narrative with semi-autobiographical characters, too. The jazz analogy would be John Coltrane. Here’s some comedy related to this song.

I am not attempting to tell a complete or coherent story about the history of rap with these examples. They are songs that I love, that sound extremely fresh many decades after their release. I spent a couple of hundred pages worth of my doctoral dissertation arguing that formal music education needs to stop neglecting hip-hop, since it’s the most culturally impactful development of my lifetime. I am very happy to have moved from advocating for teaching it to being able to actually just go ahead and teach it. I am not the right person to be teaching students how to write songs like this, but I can at least point them toward the many excellent qualities that this music possesses. Nobody is more creative with the musical aspects of language than rappers.