Rap music

Rap music (or simply rap), is a musical genre distinguished by the vocal style known as "rapping," which relies on rhythm, rhyme, cadence, tone, and lyrical content more than on pitch or melody. Rapping is typically accompanied by a beat or other instrumentation, but it may also be performed solo. Rap emerged as a significant form of African American music and political protest in the late 1970s and went on to become a major force in the music industry and culture in general. As a performance-based musical form popular in clubs and at parties, rap was initially associated with hip-hop culture made popular by African American youths on city streets and in urban nightclubs in the early 1980s. Although the division between hip-hop and rap is blurred, the vocal music style of rapping is generally considered one of the key elements of the broader cultural term "hip-hop," along with break dancing, disc jockeying (DJing), and graffiti. Others consider hip-hop music its own category as the instrumental style often used to accompany vocal raps.

Like many earlier forms of Black music, rap often articulates responses to prejudice, institutionalized racism, and oppression experienced by African Americans, although the style has been embraced by performers of other ethnicities as well. Earlier musical forms that influenced rap include ragtime, jazz, blues, gospel, rock and roll, funk, disco, and reggae and dub. Another important influence was the rise of reliable and relatively low-cost consumer electronics, including turntables, boomboxes, and tape recorders.

Although a number of popular artists were making rap or proto-rap music in the 1970s, including Gil Scott-Heron and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the genre did not become widely popular and visible until the 1980s, when rap songs moved to the top of the musical charts. Rap artists such as N.W.A., Public Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, Sister Souljah, Queen Latifah, and 2 Live Crew gained both fame and notoriety for their electric performance styles, their shocking lyrics, and their sometimes intentionally provocative actions.

The rise in popularity of rap during the politically conservative 1980s has been attributed in part to the anger and discontent felt by urban dwellers who faced cuts in welfare benefits and programs, deterioration of inner-city neighborhoods, loss of job opportunities, and a rise in drug use, crime, and violence. Disfranchised people used rap to express their feelings and viewpoints. Rappers were often compared to ministers in African American churches who exhort their congregations to see and act in a particular fashion. Rap was also called the “CNN (Cable News Network) of the Black community” because it served as a source of information on what was happening in Black communities. Rap music, for example, often made reference to and comments on significant cultural and political events such as the 1991 beating of African American Rodney King by four white Los Angeles Police Department officers and the 1992 Los Angeles riot that erupted after the officers were found not guilty of using excessive force.

Rap, as a musical genre, is known for its intertextuality (references to other rap songs and art forms), its sampling (use of sound bites from radio, television, popular records, and the street), and its styling (use of rhythm, rhyme, and a constant, hard-driving beat). Rap music, however, is as diverse as any musical genre. As such, it is a mistake to generalize about the artists, their purposes, techniques, popularity, and impact. For example, although it is true that some rap music, gangsta rap in particular, has been criticized for glorifying a gangster lifestyle of crime, drugs, and misogyny, other rap artists have been applauded for their empowering messages for and about Black youth, Black women, and American youth generally.

From its beginnings rap was often categorized into subgenres, most notably the West Coast and East Coast styles (exemplified in the 1990s by 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., respectively). By the late 1990s and early 2000s rap had become one of the best-selling music genres in the United States, with superstars such as Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Diddy, and Kanye West. As it grew it became increasingly diversified, with hybrid forms generated between virtually every other music style, including jazz, soul, and even country music. Rap also significantly influenced music in other countries, with regional scenes appearing in many cultures. By the mid-2000s rap and its elements had profoundly influenced popular music and the music industry and become a mainstream phenomenon.

Rap, and hip-hop more broadly, continued to evolve and influence other genres through the 2010s and into the 2020s. Major artists who emerged in this period included Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion. In August 2015, Hamilton, a hip-hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, opened on Broadway. The musical, with its rap lyrics, won a Pulitzer Prize for drama and eleven Tony Awards, showcasing just how integrated into popular culture rap music had become. Meanwhile, by this time the music industry was shifting toward online streaming services; audio-oriented websites such as SoundCloud became an important platform for many aspiring rappers, while popular platforms like Spotify made the work of superstar rappers even more accessible. Another major trend was the rise of so-called mumble rap, which abandons the typical emphasis on crisp vocal delivery in favor of an unclear, heavily processed sound often inspired by the Southern rap subgenre known as trap music.

While mumble rap and other new styles were sometimes criticized by traditional rap stars, rap as a whole continued to grow in popularity. In 2017, the media analysis company Nielsen reported that hip-hop/R&B, a broad category including rap, had surpassed rock music as the best-selling genre in the United States for the first time. In early 2022, the Super Bowl halftime show notably featured only hip-hop artists for the first time, and the performance was widely critically acclaimed. Many commentators suggested that it provided another marker of how influential rap had become.

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