Hip-Hop enthusiasts: Scholarly work inside! Please look.

[dope_runner]

God I feel retarded maybe I am but does anyone know what MC stands for?

MC stands 4 master ceremonies

[Caro]

thats what the dictionary said but I wasnt sure

thanks

[Caro]

Well I am almost done with my scolarly paper on how orality and literacy theory applied to hip-hop and freestyle rap. I will post it on thursday! But as for right now, I have no sources for a particular point I am trying to make - could someone please let me know if I am off here, or do I need different wording, or if you have something to add? (the part that is underlined esp) Thanks.

"Freestyle lyricists, like bards, do not distance themselves very far from the human lifeworld. This is not because they can’t – most if not all rappers are literate and do include complex abstractions in their songs. Even when utilizing the capability of abstraction, it is usually to express a metaphor that relates back to the tangible world of the rapper. The spontaneous oral poet living in the electronic age is also exposed to a far greater range of realities and concepts via the media than a bard in a primary oral culture would have been, so that the lifeworld of the rapper does not limit the content of his song. Even so, most rap is devoted to telling it how it is from the rapper’s perspective. The most common subjects for rap lyrics and narratives are taken directly from the hip-hop lifestyle.

[GodHand Kronix]

Exactly Caro...I'm working on a song, it's not a freestyle but once it is totally finished and all the little tweaks are made then I'll put it up here and see what you guys think of it.

[Weedguru Sensei]

http://www.angrynakedpat.com/network/icf/index.php

Hahaha

[Caro]

http://www.angrynakedpat.com/network/icf/index.php

Hahaha

...9.5? Um, are you making fun of me?

[Weedguru Sensei]

No, that kid...is so wack, its hilarious.

Personally, I only listen to (underground) hip hop.

im blazed.

[InFaMoUz]

wanna learn sum shit about hip hop/freestyle?

www.soundclick.com/infamouz58 that's my page

and my website is www.helpussavehiphop.com



holla atcha boi



-InFa

[Sammy]

Caro i worship your writing, very articulate.

[Caro]

I tried to post it last night but had a problem. Anyway if you can't tell I'm incredibly stoked that it's done. This is insanely long and of a high quality, no?


Application of Orality Theory to Freestyle Hip-Hop

The theory of orality and literacy as developed by Walter J. Ong changed the way we view human cognition. This paper will discuss the way in which Ongian theory applies to the contemporary art form that is rap poetry. It will consider secondary orality, the emergence of hip-hop as a residually oral culture, and finally prove the thesis on an examination of points which link the ancient bard to the modern-day freestyle lyricist.
Orality theory may be described as the study of methodologies used to present information orally. The focus of orality theory is on pre-literate cultures, that is, those people who have no suspicion of writing. Walter Ong set the foundation for scholarly work on orality and literacy, and how the paradigm shift changed human consciousness and methods of narrative composition. As he points out in his book Orality and Literacy, we are now in the age of “secondary orality”. This is a new era – one shaped by and dependant on new technologies that are themselves dependant on literacy. Our understanding of contemporary forms of non-literary expressions can be furthered by studying them within the context of orality and literacy.
Professor Robert Fowler describes how media has brought us from literacy back to orality in his essay How the Secondary Orality of the Electronic Age Can Awaken Us to the Primary Orality of Antiquity. “Secondary oral cultures are literate cultures, such as our own, that have been rendered significantly oral/aural once again by the appearance of dominant new electronic communication media, such as television, telephone, video and audio recording ” (Fowler). The emergence of audio technology in particular has allowed for the publication of poetry as a spontaneous oral art form once again, after being dominated by literacy for centuries.
The bards of ancient Greece and first millennium Europe served their culture in multi-dimensional ways. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes a bard as a tribal poet gifted in composing and reciting verses on heroes and their deeds. Not only were they lyric poets, capable of spontaneously creating spoken works of art, they were living historians who conveyed a sense of cultural identity to their audiences. How might these figures be represented in modern-day literate society, a society where our histories are kept on paper?
The bard is alive, and he is in the hip-hop clubs downtown. Hip-hop as an oral art form has striking similarities to the performances delivered in pre-literate times. Many of the methodologies employed by ancient bards are still in use by modern freestyle rappers. This paper will show how Walter Ong’s theory of orality applies to hip-hop, a poetic art form entrenched in and shaped by orality and literacy. Furthermore, this paper will make a distinction between spontaneous, orally composed rap lyrics and rap composed with aids of permanence, and prove that the emergence of freestyle hip-hop as an oral poetry performance genre is dependant on oral composition methods developed thousands of years ago by purely oral cultures.
The freestyle rap lyricist is easily numbered among the modern-day bards. By the term “bard” Robert Foley expands the conventional image of an ancient, oral poet/storyteller/historian and designates “not only the highly romanticized epic poet in oral performance… but a much larger and more heterogeneous cadré of artists. Included are performers of epic among present-day cultures but also their fellow wordsmiths around the world who work in a myriad of other genres” (Foley 93).
Foley gives particular insight into the issue of secondary orality in discussing his idea of the present-day bard. “…the reality of the situation, as derived from evidence submitted from societies worldwide, is that oral traditions are often practiced by functionally literate people who somehow can manage a variety of verbal activities, and that the idioms that constitute oral traditions are in fact ‘carried over’ to transcriptions and to authored text” (Foley 96). The idioms that constitute oral tradition are very much present in permanent (recorded or transcripted) hip-hop. Although invented in the age of high literacy, hip-hop has oral origins and even in evolution and permanence, it is an art form with strong oral residue.
Rap was born in 1974 in the South Bronx. Eric Perkins alludes to the technological vehicles of secondary orality concerning hip-hop – the record (beats) and the microphone (lyrics) in his introductory essay, “The Rap Attack”. He quotes Bambaata, one of the earliest rap DJs. “You could take a 30-second portion of a record and keep it going…then came the rappers who just talked regularly over the music…when the rhyming started, that’s when everybody started boasting about themselves, the flyest girls, and how many girls you could get in one night” (Perkins 10). This essentially describes the birth of spontaneous spoken lyrics in the rap style. With the element of rhyme and competition, we see our first connections to the oral bards. “The MC developed a basic lyrical style, mixing elements of street jargon and slang, personal experience, and an occasional dose of humor to create a potpourri of simple verses that could function both as a match and a counterpoint to the DJ…” (Perkins 10). While oral bards didn’t have accompanying audio support, the use of gesture, rhythm and narrative are common ground between bards and lyricists.
As hip-hop developed into a unique musical genre, with its own audience, the drive to market it necessitated audio recording of the tracks MCs and DJs created. With this shift in the desired outcome came a shift in the production methods. Rapping was no longer just spontaneous entertainment but recorded, permanent entertainment.
There are two technologies that changed methods of rap composition: audio recording and writing. Both transform the poetry into an art form that while still oral/aural is fundamentally altered and expanded by the advantages of permanence. The act of capturing rap lyrics, via recording, mirrors the paradigm shift from orality to literacy. Here we have an art form that is primarily oral/aural, an event situated in time. Lyrics spoken over a beat virtually disappear after they are uttered. Recording and writing rap lyrics ultimately changes the way rappers create, because making lyrics permanent allows for analyzation and re-working.
There is an important distinction between rap lyrics that are composed with the aid of writing and/or recording versus rap produced in the original composition method, known as freestyling. In the tradition of the original rappers who pioneered hip hop, freestylers compose their rap poetry orally and spontaneously, without the aid of pre-written lyrics. Like the ancient bards, freestylers posses the unique ability of entertaining by fitting their words into tight metrical schemes on the spot. It is not a talent that anyone can possess. One must be an acute speaker with rhetorical and poetic skills that surpass the average literate person by far.
How do they do it? Oral bards of ancient times relied on many mnemonic devices and internal composition aids to stitch together their narratives and information. Many of these methods are still employed by freestylers today. First we must attend to an understanding of what it is that rappers (freestyle or otherwise) do.
Rap lyrics are based on dialectical signifying (Potter 91). Signifying in the context of rap composition means to make clever plays on words. Dialectical refers to the philosophic nature of creating poetry: poetry attends to questions that are important to the human existence. Rap poetry is no different. It addresses issues that are important to the composers and the audience while offering an often advanced use of poetic language. There are definable, characteristic rhetorical strategies of signifying in hip-hop lyrics.
The most often used, indeed, a staple for poets of any kind, is the metaphor. As much as 50% of rap lyrics can be composed of metaphors. Often different metaphors are strung together to make the same point. As in all poetry, the skill with which the vehicle is related to the tenor determines the overall aesthetic quality of what is being put forth. Rap lyricists make wide use of metaphors. In an example by the MC Slug in the track “God Loves Ugly”, the MC develops a metaphor to be re-visited later in the song. This type of re-summoning of a metaphor suggests written composition.
I live life like the captain of a sinking ship…I held on to the sacred ways of how to play the game/ When the soldiers started runnin’ short on rations / I began tappin’ the egg, to spark the hatchin’, make it happen / And take this captain to the gallows / I keep steerin’ us into an area that is shallow / Talkin’ to my shadow, he advised me not to worry.

In his book Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Post-Modernism, Russell Potter states that “signifying accounts for and sets into play the mistaking of meaning” (Potter 83). Another rhetorical strategy often used for signifying which supports this claim is the use of what he calls “homophonic slippage”. This is a strategy often used to move or ‘flow’ from one idea to the next, and involves making a trope on words that sound alike. A type of near rhyming from the end of one lyric to the next, usually involving words that don’t perfectly rhyme, it advances the narrative or thesis. This is a purely oral rhetorical strategy – near-rhymes are not embedded within perfect rhymes in the poetry of high literacy. Homophonic slippage is demonstrated here in the Grouch and Eligh lyrics: “I eat, breathe and sleep the shit to keep fit / Didn't really like to study but the music brought wit”. Additional rhetorical strategies for composing rap lyrics include metonymy, alliteration, assonance, rhyme scheme, and other poetic devices.
These strategies have been put to use by literate poets for centuries. A literate poet rapper who puts down the pen and creates spontaneous oral poetry is recalling to action an outdated and evolved method of cognition. Potter describes with clarity the linguistic genius with which oral rappers operate in quick succession.
If the unfolding of language over time is thought of as a horizontal strip, at each syntactical moment a vast range of possibilities is vertically “stacked”. One can spin the wheel of grammatically and logically possible terms (e.g. “the cat sat on the: mat, car, tree, grass, chair”) and/or the wheel of sounds (“the cat sat on the mat, the rat, the hat,” etc); the trick of signifying is to do both at once, to find homonymic connections that serve either to undermine, parody, or connect in a surprising way the underlying connotations of [vernacular] language. (Potter 83).

He reminds us of the importance of considering African-American culture and the unique vernacular that frames hip-hop. Vernacular is not literature, it is the spoken language, it is the colloquialisms, slang, vocabulary and patterns of speech specific to a people, like a dialect. The black way of speaking influenced and continues to influence hip-hop even as its practitioners have transcended racial [and language] boundaries. “There remains an element of the accidental, the unknown with hip-hop that situates it as a singularly vernacular art form. Hip-hop, like jazz, is fundamentally improvisatory” (Potter 72).
The distinction, then, between freestyle rapping and composing written lyrics beforehand is as significant as the difference between orality and literacy itself. Writing takes the oral poet out of the restraint of time, which is perhaps the greatest aid to a literate mind trying to function on an oral level. When asked what differences sixteen-year old amateur rapper Tyson Hedges noticed between his own spontaneous freestyle lyrics and written, pre-composed lyrics, he said that “writing unlocks my vocabulary. If I’m sitting there, writing things out, I have a lot more time to search for words, and I am able to combine words in more complex ways. I can even look at what I’ve written and change it, which is something I can never do when I’m just rapping off the top of my head. Once it’s said, it’s said”.
The freestyle rapper faces a difficulty – the same difficulty, no doubt, that ancient bards faced – in composing any length of stream of consciousness poetry or narrative in an immediate, time-restricted setting. One can imagine the poet bards internally composing their thoughts, structuring what they were going to say well before the actual performance. In primarily oral cultures as well as in the secondary oral culture as it applies to this subject, the mind is the mnemonic device. An anonymous freestyler describes the internal/oral composition process for him: “I usually try and freestyle at the top of my voice in my car on the way there. I just mumble rubbish until I get one sentence that rhymes. Once I have that one sentence, I make another which relates to the first sentence. After that, I sort of have the foundations for the rest of the freestyle and it becomes a lot easier after the first few lines”.
The bards who performed the Iliad worked from a supply of pre-fabricated phrases. As opposed to creating something original and new in the literate sense, they were rather creating a new way of stitching the phrases together when telling an oral story. While the freestyle rapper is doing something a little different, both use phrases that they have developed (either internally or borrowed from another source) beforehand in their performances.
“Redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech” (Ong 40). Ongian theory asserts that there are several reasons why an oral poet or speaker would be prone to repeating themselves. Written words are “time-obviating” – that is, by making the words permanent, they can be recalled by visually scanning for them on the page. “Thought requires some sort of continuity. Writing establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the mind…in oral discourse, there is nothing to [refer] to outside the mind…hence the mind must move ahead more slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with” (Ong 40).
Freestyle rappers, like ancient bards, use repetition as an aid to continual thought. In observing Tyson Hedges freestyle, it was noticed that between composing new information, he would often repeat the same “base” rhymes. This served him in the same way that it would serve an oral bard; to work out in his mind what he was going to say next without causing a stop or hesitation in the flow of words. “In oral delivery, although a pause may be effective, hesitation is always disabling. Hence it is better to repeat something, artfully if possible, rather than to stop speaking while fishing for the next idea” (Ong 40). Josh Niva, a news editor, comments on the consequences of hesitation: “Even worse, when an MC loses track of his thoughts or falls silent, the crowd reacts with chants of ‘CHOKE’!” (Niva E1).
Just as ancient bards were always concerned with their audience (and neither is freestyling a solo activity), hip-hop is a communal art. The role of the audience is crucial to “maintaining a continuity of reception” (Foley 102). The medium of sound instantly puts the audience in a situation restricted by time: listening to the lyrics of a rapper together unifies the listeners. In response to Ong’s essay “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”, Foley writes: “It is of course the bard that must achieve that level of fluency in the traditional idiom, but it is also equally his or her audience, who is always more than a fiction” (Foley 98). A bad rapper would no more be accepted by his audience than an untalented bard would!
Hip-hop and freestyle in particular attends to a specific audience that the rappers are always aware of. Hip-hop is an attitude. “…It’s not a matter of the scales, beats, or words one is singing, but of their delivery, their attack, their movement from and back into the material life and cultures of [the listeners]. The best raps are ‘rhymes that can blare out of a jeep, rhymes that drop knowledge that is relevant to kids in the hood’” (Potter 71).
Freestyle lyricists, like bards, do not distance themselves very far from the human lifeworld. This is not because they can’t – most if not all rappers are literate and do include complex abstractions in their songs. Even when utilizing the capability of abstraction, it is usually to express a metaphor that relates back to the tangible world of the rapper. The spontaneous oral poet living in the electronic age is also exposed to a far greater range of realities and concepts via the media than a bard in a primary oral culture would have been, so that the lifeworld of the rapper does not limit the content of his song. Even so, most rap is devoted to telling it how it is from the rapper’s perspective. The most common subjects for rap lyrics and narratives are taken directly from the hip-hop lifestyle.
Perhaps the most compelling justification for presenting the freestyle lyricist as a modern-day bard lies within the tone with which both bards and lyricists present their work. “Many oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle” (Ong 43). Professor Fowler discusses Ong’s position on the agonistic tone in secondary orality and how it specifically applies to hip-hop:
Ong observes that primary oral cultures often evidence wars of words, such as riddle or song contests, name-calling, and bragging…Curiously, Ong claims that in secondary orality, the agonistic tendency of oral speech remains subdued, a carry-over from print culture: ‘Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism’ (Ong, 137). However, I do not think Ong's claim holds for many other forms of electronic communication. Think of the contemporary, urban, oral tradition of ‘hip-hop’ or ‘rap,’ in which we witness a revival of an oral, formulaic, bardic tradition, with a sharp, sometimes vicious verbal edge (Fowler).

Editor Josh Niva summarizes the agonistic tone that informs the hip-hop style, as freestyling is most commonly performed in a battle-like setting.
Freestyle rap battles are lyrical boxing matches pitting MCs in a one-on-one duel to the death. In competitions, the battle starts when a DJ plays a random instrumental. MCs take turns rhyming to the beat, flexing their versatility and rhyming skill while taking shots at one another in an attempt to win the favor of judges or a crowd. The battles are pressurized, and the competition is heated and vicious. The rules are typically no-holds-barred, so MCs jab with personal attacks that range from rude to offensive. No topic is out of line: style, physical attributes, sexual orientation or race. Bold MCs add physical intimidation, rapping loudly in the face of their opponent (Niva E1).


This is the true form of hip-hop as an oral poetry performance genre. It is an impermanent, oral/aural activity performed by talented lyricists. In its raw form, hip-hop is performed in houses, on street corners, and in the clubs downtown. Making rap lyrics permanent changes the composition methods and outcomes. The effects of permanence (audio recording and writing) take our modern-day bard and put him squarely back in the world of literacy; but for Tyson Hedges, the flows will continue to be produced internally, rapped over a beat.

[weedguru tom]

i couldnt read it caro im sorry, some one write it in less then 10 words for me pls =]
its so hard to read it when your baked

[Caro]

Lol I realise that it would be incredibly difficult to read when baked. In that case you can admire it for its unreasonable length and obvious quality of scholarship

[weedguru tom]

your makin` fun of my posts again arent you