At a certain level, it can be argued that music is completely reliant upon the people who consume it. This does not simply mean in a business sense, as in needing a consumer base to listen to and review your music, attend shows, and anticipate your return. It also means that music needs people to be born from, as well as those who care about it to the point that they will continue to cultivate it.
This is clearly a key component of hip-hop, itself being a much larger assortment of communal activities rather than just the musical aspects of rapping or being a DJ. In the end, it should probably be understood that a reliance on helping one another is likely what is at the heart of hip-hop.
While "biting," or stealing someone's lyrics or style, is viewed very negatively within hip-hop culture, simultaneously I think it's pretty clear that hip-hop would not have lasted for 52 years if it wasn't for people taking inspiration or literally sampling from the lyrical and musical work of others in the genre.
Anyone who innovated hip-hop was in some way reliant on its past, and at the core of hip-hop's past was a reliance on the audience, or people, who were the source of its lyrical and musical voices.
Live or on wax (the chicken or the egg)
Rapping became an element of hip-hop. The gospel quartet, the Jubalaires, specifically asks why they get so much more recognition as predecessors to rap music than other gospel groups. One important reason for the Jubalaires that I left out was that there is visual footage of them performing in the 1940s. The same cannot be said for many other acts of that era.
Hip-hop, like other art forms such as the blues, did not begin with the intention of being a musical genre intended to be put on record. This creates an interesting dilemma in terms of trying to find the source of certain elements of the music.
Hip-hop is not very old, but if one goes back far enough, it becomes much more difficult to trace, as there is a constant possibility that something originated off record, a reality you only know if you witnessed it live or on the radio, or heard a tape.
For example, legendary Philadelphia-based rapper Schoolly D is known for a style of rap very much connected to the same black toasts that inspired Hustlers Convention, made clear with songs such as "The Signifying Rapper." Outside of this, Schoolly D will often utilize nursery rhymes or rhymes from children's games, sometimes making them more raunchy.
One example of Schoolly D's use of children's rhymes comes around two and a half minutes into his 1985 song "C.I.A.... (Crime in Action)," when he used the "Uh, ah, I wanna piece of pie. Pie too sweet, wanna piece of meat," rhyme scheme.
Now, while Schoolly D is certainly one rapper who is known for using children's rhymes, it would be incorrect to simply stop the conversation there and give him sole credit for this style. As JayQuan
The Hip-Hop Historian explains in his video on the "Golden Era" of hip-hop, nursery rhymes and well-known folksongs were utilized by the earliest hip-hop MCs. Evidence of this can be found within the tapes from New York in the '70s.
In the classic "Flash to the Beat" recording of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five from December 1979, I believe performing at the Bronx River Community Center, Melle Mel can be heard using the same "Uh, ah, I wanna piece of pie" rhyme around seven minutes and 40 seconds into the recording.
To be clear, my purpose in showing Melle Mel use the same rhyme Schoolly D used years later is not to say that Schoolly D directly heard this tape and took inspiration from it, though I wouldn't be surprised.
Instead, I'm using the tape from New York in conjunction with the song from Schoolly D, who lived in the nearby city of Philadelphia, to say that these artists exist within the same or at least connected musical communities, and that their approaches to rapping are tied together.
Schoolly D is only about a year younger than Melle Mel. As much as I know, he must have been influenced by Mel as a rapper; it's equally relevant that both were probably familiar with the same children's rhymes and black toasts within their upbringings in the '60s and '70s.
While New York may have started hip-hop, the sources of these rhymes were certainly not limited to its borders. This is likely another factor in how parallel styles could develop in different places.
Whether or not the source of this connection between different artists and locations is based on tape, record, or outside influence is a complicated question to approach, though I'd assume it's a combination.
To give another similar example focused solely on New York City, Busy Bee Starski uses the "This Old Man" nursery rhyme in his performance with Grand Wizzard Theodore on Live Convention '82 (1982).
As the title of the recording suggests, this performance is from 1982. Around two years prior to this Busy Bee performance, Jimmy Spicer's 1980 classic "Adventures of Super Rhyme" was released, in which he infamously used the "This Old Man" rhyme in the intro to the song, following the reference to the intro of the Superman radio show and Max Fleischer cartoon shorts from the 1940s.
Similar to the connection between The Furious Five and Schoolly D, I am unsure if Busy Bee was directly inspired by Jimmy Spicer to use "This Old Man."
Seeing as multiple MCs utilized nursery rhymes in this era, it is entirely possible that Busy Bee used that rhyme before "Adventures of Super Rhyme" was released, though at the moment, the earliest I have heard his use of it is on Live Convention '82.
Importantly, these early rap records not only occurred at the same time as these performances that are put on tape, but in many ways, the live performances are influencing the structure of the rap records being made.
Instead of being purely focused on the rhyming ability of the artist, a number of early rap records were supposed to capture the essence of a jam, with rappers going through various call-and-response routines with an audience, which was sometimes directly replicated on wax.
In 1980, Zoot II had a song released entitled "Dr. Ice Rap," in which the rapper, I believe Dr. Ice or Kalvin Washington, performs a rhyme around four minutes and 14 seconds into the track that basically uses the color of the women's clothes in the audience to make raunchy lyrics. Essentially, he would say something like "to the lady in blue, I want to dance with you," though it was a bit more suggestive than I'm making it.
While I am unsure, I am almost positive that this rhyme scheme used by Dr. Ice was inspired by "The Breaks," Kurtis Blow's famous hit rap song, also from 1980. He utilizes a similar rhyme scheme around two minutes and 45 seconds into the track, this time with much more family-friendly content, and an audible vocal track of an audience responding to his rhymes with "Break it up! Break it up!"
To complicate things even more and go outside the realm of early rap records, I have heard this same rhyme scheme years before either of these songs was released in a song by Blowfly, the comically explicit stage persona of singer-songwriter Clarence Reid.
The song, I believe first released in 1974, was "I'm a Freak and I'm Proud," a parody of James Brown's "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud." Blowfly does the routine, in a very dirty format, around a minute into the song.
I truly do not know where to begin in terms of researching where this routine of rhyming off the color of clothes actually started. What I am sure of is that artists had been using it for some time before rap records were ever made, and this background has to be the source in some way.
On a broader level, I imagine that much of the lyricism that defined early hip-hop exists within the same framework, as there are many instances like these of MCs using the same styles or approaches on the microphone.