SAY WHAT?

YOU REALLY THINK IT’S NEW AND YOURS ALONE?

My friend and Queen of Blog (Saphyre Rose) and I were chatting this afternoon, and she put the idea in my head that I should write this. So, Rose, this one’s for the both of us!

RAP, HIP-HOP. The latest and greatest inventions of the “younger generation.” WRONG!!!!!! Game-show buzzer just went off. NO WAY!

First of all, it’s most definitely NOT new. More importantly, my young hip-hopping friends, it AIN’T yours.

Let’s go back several hundred years to early opera and oratorio (terms which you may look up in the dictionary – no free rides here). Between arias (songs, to the youth among us), the characters on stage carried on conversations to let the audience know what was happening. In the case of a long opera, it probably also clued in the cast member who had slipped back to the dressing room for a sip out of the flask! So, with just a few chords being played as background and maybe some rhythm, one or more characters are talking on pitch and in rhythm.

A typical scenario would be 2 women fighting over the same guy:

Look, he’s mine.
No, he’s mine.
What can we do?
He’s mine.
No, he’s MINE.
YO’ MOMMA! (loose translation from Italian)

Then the argument continues in song.

Let’s advance the clock now a few hundred years and check out JAZZ! Yup. J-A-Z-Z! Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, you know the sort. What do you think “scat-singing” really is? No real melody. Just a lot of cool syllables done rhythmically with a beat in the background.

Gee, how cool is that? So a number of 20th century classical composers decided to combine the two forms and come up with a German term “Sprechtstimmen,” literally “spoken singing.” It’s not true singing, but more speaking close to pitch and in rhythm, often to texts that actually rhyme.

Oh - and lest we forget the 50s and 60s! One of a number of very famous singers - JOHNNY CASH - did a wonderful song called "The Reverend Mister Black." He did not sing! He spoke in rhyme and rhythm: "He rode easy in the saddle. He was tall and mean...... Folks just called him The Reverend Mr. Black." Then there is the comedic country musician, Ray Stevens, who came out with a number of really funny songs that were not sung, but spoken in rhythm ("Mississippi Squirrel Revival," for one). How' bout that! Country music was rapping long before anyone else knew what it was!

Sigh….. just when a bunch of youngsters decided that they invented “their music,” I had to go and burst the bubble. Sorry, kids. It ain’t yours. And as a music teacher of mine used to say, “There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun.”

Now I’ve had my say,
Enough for today,
Mozart and Bach,
Those cats could rock.
No one holds a candle
To the composer named Handel.
Boom, chk, chk, chk, boom, boom……