And now, a Toast...

I'm pretty much an all-around music fan. I'm of the school that there are only two kinds of music - good and bad. I am not, however, of the school that lumps entire genres into one category or the other. Sure, I have my tastes, and some genres just tend to not hit me in the gut the way others do, but I'm getting more than a little tired of world and folk music fans trying to tell me that "that rap stuff just isn't music". The people who usually run their mouths about the invalidity of hip-hop will be happy to spend hours detailing the history of jeli kora music or the similarities of desert blues and Delta blues. When it comes to hip-hop, though, the fact that chanting over rhythms is a tradition that goes back thousands of years is a moot point, apparently. Also, the social contexts that actually define hip-hop as a genre of folk music are null and void, as it turns out. Hip-hop is (from what I am led to understand) loud, violent and requires no talent to participate in. It is not music. Evidently.

But I disagree. I think that hip-hop is only the latest link in a chain that ties us back to our earliest musical beginnings, before strings and woodwinds were even invented, before my ancestors left Africa for the chilly caves of Eurasia, and our human musical expression was as simple and as beautiful as a single person chanting over the beat of a single drum. It gives me shivers to think about it, actually, and makes me want to blast a CD of either a Ghanaian drum master or The Roots, or any of the other chanting-based music that came in between. The direct predecessor to hip-hop is, of course, dancehall music, something that's been on my mind a lot lately. It was a dancehall deejay named DJ Kool Herc who brought the style of toasting (chanting over riddims) to Queens in the early 1970s, subsequently setting off the entire history of hip-hop. And the music is not finished with its evolution - who knows what will come next? So, my dear world music listening friend, what are your personal feelings about hip-hop, and its relation to world music? Leave us a comment and let us know!