The African, enslaved in a land of strange deeds and customs and shackled into a new language, made speech into a metaphor for identity. If English vocabulary was mandatory, its grammatical roots were to remain West African and the lexicon spiced with the unforgotten words from home. The evolution of that creole may chart the evolving new world identity, but the issue at hand is how that ebonic fusion came to be used. The well-spoken word, in ways both subtle and vast, undermined the decree that the African was to possess nothing and thus preceded physical freedom. So, straight up: the preacher’s central task was to open his mouth and rip it the best way he saw fit as a confirmation of the collective existence. The verbal strategy, the specific catalog of trade trickery employed by the preacher, laid down the parameters for his vocal heirs four hundred years down the line.
Listen for a minute and it becomes clear that the rapper is evaluated by many of the same criteria as the preacher: use of voice, timbre, timing, reference, and sub-reference. The preacher uses amen as a verbal stopgap the same way the old-school rapper used catch-phrases like “Yes, yes, y’all” or “It don’t stop,” etc. The preacher earns his or her keep by the call and the response; the rapper lives and dies by his skill at getting the crowd open. Generations of black secular singers have claimed the church as their first training ground, but what has gone unrecognized is that the rapper is their counterpart—the secular preacher, the sanctified exhorter whose skills have passed by cultural osmosis from the pulpit to the boulevard.
This is not to say that early MCs copped their styles directly from the local South Bronx preacher in the way that soul singers fell back on what they learned in choir practice. A host of verbal intermediaries exist between the preacher and the MC. But when you cut through all the begats, the preacher and the MC retain their family resemblance. Example: Melle Mel’s percussive rah at the end of his verses is only degrees removed from the preacher’s percussive huh—employed as an oral semicolon or period in the sermon. Or check Nelly’s flow on the confectionery “Hot in Herre,” Snoop Dogg’s trademark drawled-out vowels, or Bone Thugs’ fluid mic vocalism and their common, deliberately sing-songy cadences, which immediately recall the Baptist tradition of hooping—tap dancing on the perimeter between speech and song in a sermon.
The Reverend C.L. Franklin pointed out that the best hoopers were preachers who could also sing well—this from a man whose daughter Aretha would become the greatest soul singer of all time. The best MCs do not necessarily sing well, but absolutely possess a singer’s understanding of time, nuance, and interpretation. Hooping—accompanied often by fragmentary organ riffs, or samples—is essentially a form of unrhymed rapping. Utilizing timing, meter, and inflection, it’s the sermonic equivalent of the blank verse in Shakespeare’s plays—rhymeless poetry presented in a prose format.
History is like viewing of a movie for the second time and gaining a vast new world of insights into the plot. Those who make history may or may not be wise to the full dimensions of their accomplishments because their lifetime is only the first screening. From the gate, the ancestral b-boys created a new musical history—even as they drew upon art that was already in existence as a resource for the art that they would create. In short, this “new” musical history was not and could not have been a clean break from the old one. MCing may have begun as a musical ad campaign for the deejay who ran the show, but the fundamental concept of pairing the rhymed verse with the hypnotism of bared percussion had been laid down way before that.
Of those multiple millions of Africans snatched from their indigenous contexts by the transatlantic slave trade, only some 6 percent arrived on the shores that would become the United States. Meaning that 94 percent of that displaced humanity found themselves immersed in the agricultural brutalities of Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, Trinidad, Barbados, Surinam, Columbia, Haiti—the scattered localities of common bondage. Those same language dynamics played themselves out in each of these places, creating a network of African-derived patois and political implications for the spoken word—which explains in extreme shorthand how dancehall and hip hop could come into existence as cousin cultures.
The African American and Caribbean American teenagers who found themselves building a new culture up in the South Bronx in 1974 shared four centuries of collective history that gave context to the art they created. They had come from the same boat, having merely departed at different stops. Nor was the fact that so many of the early b-boys were of Caribbean descent coincidental. The cornerstone deejays Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa are both of Jamaican descent and Grandmaster Flash is of Barbadian ancestry. Nor is it coincidental that the Caribbean had long established its parallel tradition of “dub poetry” or syncopated rhyme verse accompanied by percussion. Listen to the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson or Mutubaruka and the imprint of this tradition on hip hop becomes undeniable.
You could trace hip hop’s roots back to scat, which gave literal expression to the concept that a sound could carry meaning irrespective of its relationship to formal language. You find hip hop in the poetry of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, the black bards who went from the Negritude literary movement they founded to formal leadership of their people in Senegal and Martinique. Hip hop’s ancestry is James Weldon Johnson, the first black president of the NAACP, writing the lyrics for the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” It is Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, the two colossal opponents of colonialism in Africa, both articulating the cause of the dispossessed in poetic verse. And Amiri Baraka’s leadership in the Black Power political campaigns of Newark in 1972. The point is this: the art is the politic.
The relationship between the preacher and the rapper is one of both form and content. Think about that for a minute and you can damn-near write a sermon based on Mos Def’s jewel “New World Water.” It’s impossible to ignore the prominence of water as a primary motif in black spiritual culture—from the debilitated Gospel pleas to be “washed white as snow” to the rebellion-coded double entendre “wade in the water,” which referenced both baptism and escape routes from slavery. En route to issuing an injunction against the waste of natural resources, Mos Def drops the observation that “Fools done upset/the old man river/made him carry slave ships/and fed him dead niggers”—a line that echoes Amiri Baraka’s reminder that “there is a railroad made from human bones at the bottom of the Atlantic.” The water of the alleged new world was precisely what divided Jamestown from Benin, Santo Domingo from Oyo, Sao Paolo from Kannem Borno. And that same water is the eternal resting ground of black millions lost to the middle passage. Waters being fed dead Africans—cruel irony for descendants of cultures who understood that all life derived from and began in water, centuries before Western empirical intellect was made wise to that fact. Black folklore tells us of people who could walk on water—Africans who surveyed the new world real estate and opted to take the long haul back home by foot.
To the enslaved, though, to the African landlocked into American servitude, the waters rippled differently. For them, the spirituals’ reference to “Crossing the River Jordan” functioned as a triple entendre: biblical allusion, figurative expression of crossing the meridian between North and South, and as literal direction toward an escape route. Forbidden to seek communion and connection with water-associated Orisha, Yemoja, Olucun, or Oshun, baptism was left to function as spiritual substitute—and became a factor in the Baptists’ early success in recruiting black congregants.
Public Enemy made this link explicit with the preamble to the sonic anarchy of “Rebel without a Pause” by sampling Jesse Jackson preaching Brothers and Sisters, I don’t know what this world is coming to … then comes an explosion of baritone and brimstone. And by the time you hear Chuck-D’s “Up you mighty race” lyrical polemics, the point has been made: the rapper is finishing Jesse’s sentence, literally picking up where the preacher left off. You could riff on the line of reasoning with the explicit biblical reference that Lauryn Hill brought to the table with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or the rough-hewn, avenue Christianity