Hip Hop's Urban Griots

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.