As a lifelong listener and nearly life-long fan of hip-hop or rap music, it has become increasingly concerning in recent years to see the emergence of a negative trope or stereotype surrounding everyday perceptions of the typical “rap fan.”
Namely, that fans of rap music are intrinsically limited in their knowledge of other genres of music, and furthermore that they can become quite discriminatory towards these other musical forms they are supposedly unaware of.
There are various reaction videos you can find on YouTube that have titles in the same vein of “Rap fan reacts to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen – WTF who are these guys?!,” or “Hardcore rap heads react to Alone Again (Naturally) by Gilbert O’Sullivan – OMG this is so sad):”.
Oh, the music you'll hear in hip-hop
Usually, the thumbnails of such videos will feature a dumbfounded reactor wearing an exaggerated expression of shock, as if they have literally never heard of Queen, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Diana Ross, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, B. B. King, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera, Billy Idol, Grace Jones, or any other number of non-rap artists in their entire lives.
While I am sure that in reality many of these reactors are indeed aware of the existence of these artists and are simply utilizing their thumbnails and video titles to attract the viewing public, the implication of this strategy of creating video engagement is that people do truly expect fans of rap music to be unversed or limited in their knowledge of music, which I personally believe could not be further from the truth.
While I think much is wrong with this perception of rap music and it's fandom as devoid of musical knowledge, my primary issue is that from my perspective, hip-hop, as a musical genre and larger cultural form, was blatantly created in large part based on an undying love and craving for music.
Through the 1970s, before rap records and in the beginnings of what became rap music, it was clear that the musical source for the art form emanating from within the black community and through the mobile DJ culture and club scene of New York City was funk, disco, R&B/soul, and the go-go music of Washington, D.C.
There were also clear parallels and influence coming from the sound system culture in Jamaica and early dub music, while the genre of dancehall would become even more influential and infused in rap as the two genres basically evolved alongside one another in the 1980s.
With all of this being said however, rap, being based around the power of the disc jockey in rocking a party, was certainly not strictly limited to these, or any “expected” genre parameters.
One of the most influential groups on hip-hop was Kraftwerk, the experimental electronic band from Germany. The title track from their 1977 album “Trans-Europe Express” was famously sampled by Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force in their 1982 song “Planet Rock,” a record viewed by many as a pioneering single in ushering in the era of electro or electro hip-hop that dominated the first half of the 1980s and continues to be an influence on dance music today.
Electro is also seen as inspiring other sub-genres such as freestyle, sometimes referred to as Latin hip-hop due to the prominence of Latin artists within the field such as Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam.
To give another example of the expansive taste for music in hip-hop, one of the classic break beats utilized in the genre is 1972’s “Black Grass” by bassist and jazz funk artist Bad Bascomb. As I believe the title is referencing, “Black Grass” is basically a funk song done in a bluegrass style, most evident in the prominent use of the banjo and what sounds like a fiddle.
Fusing these distinct musical forms together seems to have been the overall theme behind the 1973 album “Black Grass” would be featured on, Black Grass Music, while Bad Bascomb’s own moniker is to my knowledge likely in reference to the 1946 western of the same name, directed by S. Sylvan Simon and starring Wallace Beery as the outlaw Zeb “Bad” Bascomb.
"Black Grass" has been sampled by everyone from J.J. Fad to Tyler, The Creator, with perhaps the earliest example being when it's music and lyrics were interpolated by the Disco Four on their 1982 classic “Country Rock and Rap,” with the music provided by Pumpkin & Friends, a group of musicians led by Pumpkin, or Errol Eduardo Bedward, the legendary drummer and multi-instrumentalist producer.
According to the short overview of Pumpkin’s career by JayQuan The Hip-Hop Historian, “Pumpkin & Friends” essentially meant that Pumpkin was playing with an assembly of other musicians he gathered to play with him, as he often stuck to the drums on the rap records he provided instrumentation for on Enjoy Records, of which “Country Rock and Rap” was only one of many.
To my knowledge, the Disco Four’s “Country Rock and Rap” is one of if not the first combination of rap and country, a fusion which as of today is very common within popular music, as evidenced in the work of artists like Lil Nas X, Jelly Roll, and Morgan Wallen, among others.
In short, I point to these examples to say that if you start from anywhere in rap music, you can potentially start a musical journey in various directions. Simply put, the impetus for my issue with the fact that rap can be cast as a genre of limited musical taste is that hip-hop sampling, arguably its core musical component, is something that has had a profound impact on my understanding of music on a personal level.
While you don’t necessarily have to dig deeper into the samples you hear in a rap song, I know that was certainly the case in my own childhood. Case in point, some weeks back I wrote multiple articles about the connections between hip-hop and doo-wop as genres based around urban communities of black youth.
In particular, one article highlighted the many references within rap music to doo-wop, paying much attention to 1987’s “The Do Wop” by LL Cool J, which features a looped sample of the vocals in the opening of 1956’s “Over and Over Again” by The Moonglows. “The Do Wop” is not only one of my favorite rap songs, but also a foundational piece for my understanding of hip-hop sampling, and of the genre of doo-wop.
When I first heard "The Do Wop," around the age of eight, I certainly enjoyed it, but my ear for rap had not yet developed to fully understand what exactly I was hearing.
I liked the beat from the moment I heard it, but it was only probably after a year of listening that I first realized that what I was hearing was a group of men harmonizing. Once I realized this, I became very intrigued and eventually tried to track down more music that sounded like the beat LL was rapping over.
I began to do my own research with the help of my father, and through taking CD collections from the library, acclimated myself to the doo-wop and rock & roll music of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, learning about artists like the Flamingos, The Five Keys, The Bobbettes, The Nutmegs, The Teen Queens, The Earls, The Clickettes, Nino and the Ebb Tides, and many more.
Like hip-hop, doo-wop became an important aspect of how I understood and contextualized music history. I subsequently grew more enamored with the doo-wop era through watching films like Grease (1978) and Back to the Future (1985), as well as shows like Happy Days (1974-1984), but before any of those, there was LL Cool J and the L.A. Posse sampling The Moonglows on “The Do Wop.”
Now, as I said before, there is no necessity that someone listen to “The Do Wop” and try to find out more about the music that was sampled to create it. However, I do believe that in hip-hop, this is very easily the potential outcome because of how blatant the sampling is, which in turn points to a larger musical history beyond just hip-hop artists.
Of course, all music styles are infused with history and have long pasts, whether you focus on classical, songs from the height of Tin Pan Alley or jazz standards which both occupy much space in the Great American Songbook, and certainly the work of someone like Stephen Collins Foster in the 19th century, all of which are influential on American music to this day.
However, I differentiate hip-hop from these former examples because in hip-hop, the musical focus began on the DJ, and therefore, on vinyl records. By often times focusing on audible recordings rather than other formats of recording music, such as sheet music, I would argue that hip-hop more blatantly connects itself to the past, and many times a specific piece of the past.
Hearing a direct sample in hip-hop explicitly tells you that the song has been fashioned through a connection to another specifically recorded work, not just a written composition. The closest parallel to hip-hop’s intense focus on recordings would probably be the extensive use and reuse of riddims in Jamaican genres like dancehall.
Based on its attachment to recordings, the nature of hip-hop is one, in my opinion, of constant expansion, not limitedness as some have tried to argue. If you hear a sample in hip-hop, it usually comes with the implication that you can search for what it is, which was an activity I undertook regularly as a child.
My behavior, in terms of looking up songs, and going to the library to learn more about doo-wop, in my opinion mirrored the behavior of a hip-hop DJ, namely the act of crate digging. The archetypal hip-hop DJ in my mind is one who digs through crates in record stores, as well as searching in garage sales, swap meets, attics, potentially any place they may find a record that just might tip their DJ set or their production over the edge of the competition.
Based on how they crafted their music, I believe that this crate digging mentality exists as an integral part of hip-hop, not just in how to be a producer, but also in how to be an audience member and listener. In my life, I feel that hip-hop has constantly pushed me to try to learn more or make connections where I didn’t know they existed.
To give another example, for the past two weeks I have gone on a binge of ‘70s and ‘80s funk, giving another listen or discovering new music from artists I love such as the go-go pioneers Chuck Brown and The Soul Searchers, as well as Captain Sky, Slave, Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame, Roger Troutman, and Parliament Funkadelic.
I went on this listening binge during the process of writing my previous article, which in part talked about Parliament Funkadelic and how their usage of the Mothership took influence from the black radio disc jockey Douglas “Jocko” Henderson and his “Rocket Ship” show.
At another point in said article, I also mentioned how early sampling could be heard in the break-in records created by Buchanan & Goodman, paying particular attention to 1956’s “The Flying Saucer.”
While my mention of Parliament Funkadelic was specifically connected to Jocko Henderson, as I was doing research, I was also listening to their classic live album from 1977, Live: P. Funk Earth Tour. Apart from the amazing live recordings of the group, the album also featured some original songs, such as “The Landing (Of The Holy Mothership),” which as I was listening realized was done in the style of break-in records such as “The Flying Saucer.”
Like “The Flying Saucer,” the song takes on the form of a news report on the radio, possibly on Parliament's famed W-E-F-U-N-K station, and is focused on a reporter, played by George Clinton, who interviews the various P-Funk characters, such as Star Child, as they land on Earth for the concert, as well as getting them to take questions from their adoring fans, or “funkateers.”
Outside of Bootsy Collins and I believe a few other members, all of the characters interviewed by Clinton are voiced either through him changing and modulating his voice or through splicing together audio from various P-Funk songs, the exact same style used by Buchanan & Goodman, and based around the same concept of a space craft coming to Earth.
I was deeply intrigued when I made this connection between P-Funk and Buchanan & Goodman, which to be clear, is not a confirmed connection, more so just a striking similarity that I believe is probably accurate.
For the sake of the topic at hand, what is more important to me than being completely sure that I'm correct is showing that my urge to not only listen to more funk music but also to find the sources that inspired Parliament Funkadelic is not something that starts with funk in my personal experience, but hip-hop.
The practice I'm describing of going on a "listening binge" is something that I began doing in high school while trying to amass my own collection of potential samples, listening to large swaths of the musical catalogues of artists like Larry Coryell or The Manhattans, or eventually the entire catalogue of someone like Rick James.
If I go even further back, inevitably I arrive at the earlier example of me searching for doo-wop based on LL Cool J's "The Do Wop," which once again points to how influential hip-hop has been on my listening habits and my desire to hear more music.
This article has certainly been very much focused on myself as an individual, though I believe this does show an important point, that hip-hop always lays a pathway for a listener to discover more, or to continue on a musical journey if they wish.
So, in terms of the title, I do not know exactly if hip-hop is literally the most musically adventurous genre; it's not like the others do not have expansive histories as well. However, I do know that being musically adventurous is intrinsically linked to the heart of hip-hop music, and that is something that I hope we never lose sight of.