The
history and flow of MCing is so important in the nature of hip hop because if
you have great flow and great interpretation that’s what draws us the audience
to the music. When you can draw your audience to the music then that’s when you
build that “rep” that musician’s long for. With the art of MCing comes with
braggadocio, improvisation, listening in a call and response manner, machismo,
and lastly battling. Throughout all these descriptive words you must know that
MCing/ rapping can be linked to the word “griot” which is a West African
tradition of storytelling. Griot; storytelling is very important because when
listening to the word play (the use of metaphorical, similes, and coded
language) because with songs like Common- I used to love H.E.R, Mos Def- Bonita
Applebaum, J.Cole- Nobody’s Perfect, The Fugees- Killin’ Me Softly just to name
a few are all songs with word play so deep that you think they are referring to
one thing when they are actually telling a story of something they may have
been through. The term MC means master of ceremony. This goes back to the art
of DJing in week 2 and 4 of learning about regional sounds and the art of DJ.
An MC is musical artist that “raps” lyrics over a beat to create narratives
about his/ her experience both lived and imagined. Some rappers write their
raps then read off like a script, and many others to prefer to completely “freestyle”
or improvise on the spot. Rappers such as Jay Z, Biggie, Tupac, Eminem, Nikki
Minaj all write their raps, revise to perfect their record. Lil Wayne is only
rapper I know to refer to because he publicly stated he no longer wrote his
raps. The history of MCing there comes battling which is competing with other
rappers to see which style and flow is best. There have been generations of rap
battles from the early 70s and 80s when it was just rapping back and forth on
the street corner to what is now being hosted on 106 & Park and other
television shows. One last element that goes into MCing is sampling. We all
know the term/phrase “No Swagga Jacking”, with this being said sampling is not
the form of stealing someone’s flow or different intricate parts of someone’s
style. Drake samples from Jay Z just as Jay Z samples from Biggie…. This could
be paying homage because they look up to them. All in all Robin D.G Kelley
wants new rappers to embrace the “reconstructed ghetto”. From what the urban
life was before with pimps, players, gangstas, perms, and all the antagonistic
relationships between what is and what isn’t and turn it into positive.
