The word rap has been in English since at least 1541
Rapping, also called flowing, spitting or MCing, is vocal delivery built on rhyme, rhythmic speech and often street slang. It took shape in the Bronx in the early 1970s, but its roots run back to West African griots, and the word itself was already centuries old.
Rap has three working parts: content, meaning the words; flow, the rhythm and rhyme; and delivery, the cadence and tone. It sits somewhere between speech, prose, poetry and song. Unlike singing it does not depend on changes of pitch, so some rappers experiment with timbre and other vocal textures instead. Live, the beat usually comes from a DJ, a turntablist or a beatboxer, and occasionally a rapper performs with no backing at all; in the studio a producer typically builds the track. The form is so central to hip-hop that the genre is often simply called rap music.
The verb meant to strike lightly long before it meant anything musical. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary records it in 1541 in the sense of blurting out something, such as an oath, sharply and suddenly. An American slang dictionary lists a 1932 meaning of speaking to or acknowledging someone, and later of talking openly and frankly, possibly as a shortening of repartee. By the late 1960s rap meant an oration among the hip crowd in protest movements, which is why Hubert G. Brown became H. Rap Brown, and in African American speech it meant simply to converse.
Records picked the term up early. Isaac Hayes's 1970 album To Be Continued included Monologue: Ike's Rap I, and his husky spoken raps became part of his signature. Del the Funky Homosapien, born in 1972, recalled that rapping then meant talking persuasively, trying to win someone over through the way you spoke.
The musical ancestors include the griot storytellers of West Africa, vocal styles in blues and jazz, the insult game known as playing the dozens, which foreshadows battle rap, and African American poetry of the 1960s. Hip-hop rapping grew out of party announcements by DJs and MCs on the microphone in the Bronx, became steadily more elaborate, and entered popular music later that decade. It has since become a vehicle for confronting racism, poverty and political oppression, and by the twenty-first century a global force in music and fashion.
Source: Rapping
