distinctive sound of African- American anger, rebellion, cultural style, and contemporary experience. Anticipated by the ground-breaking work of the West Coast-based Watts Prophets and New York area Gil Scott Heron and the Last Poets in the early 1970s, the current configuration of rap emerged out of Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 "Rapper's Delight" and Grandmaster Flash's 1982 hit "The Message." Hip hop culture began developing its style, sounds, and ethos in New York party scenes in the Bronx, Brooklyn and other ghetto areas in the late 1970s. By the 1980s, a whole cycle of New York-based hip hop and rap artists emerged to public attention, including Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC, Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-ONE, Tone Loc, Salt 'n' Pepa, Queen Latifah, and Public Enemy. Russell Simmons founded his Def Jam music label, winning wide-spread distribution for many artists now considered "old school," representing the first wave of rap.
East coast rap ranged from the black nationalist fervor of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, to the radical politics of Public Enemy, to the feminism of Queen Latifah, to the emphasis on ghetto experience of Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, and KRS-One. Yet it should not be forgotten that from the beginning there was a strong component of dance and party music connected with rap, that it was integrally bound up with a broader hip hop culture, and thus was a highly energetic and expressive cultural form.
The rap explosion and controversy would dramatically accelerate with the rise to national and then global influence of West Coast gangster rap. Anticipated by Ice-T, the "original gangster" (see Kellner 1995), it was N.W.A.'s 1987 album Straight out of Compton that prefigured a grittier, grosser, and more controversial form of gangster rap, extolling the dilemmas and pleasures of what became known as "thug life." N.W.A. ("Niggaz With Attitude") comprised a group of young African-Americans from the 'hood, including Ice Cube penning lyrics and singing, Dr. Dre composing and orchestrating, Easy E rapping, and DJ Yella and Renn performing, N.W.A. crystallized attention on a new gangster genre and musical idiom. In turn, Easy E put out his own record and split with the group, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre also separated from N.W.A. and produced their own records, and Suge Knight formed Death Row Records, which released Dr. Dre's influential The Chronic in 1992 and then signed on Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, who would become highly controversial rap megastars.
Meanwhile, the East coast put out its version of G-rap, with Wu Tang Clan creating a sensation through its hard, gritty urban sounds. Sean "Puff D addy" Combs and his label Bad Boy Entertainment, featuring The Notorious B.I.G. brought a NY urban ghetto realism into rap, while the Fugees imported funk and R&B into the rap sound. A wide range of younger rap artists spun off of these groups and erupted from seemingly every corner of ghetto (and sometimes black middle class) life.
In the mid-1990s, spectacular feuds between East and West coast rap groups broke out with highly publicized shoot outs and the murder of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. Following the bizarre ruptures of divisions between art and life in G-rap, with the artists living and dying the violent scenarios they were performing, [2] a movement to stop the violence, to heal the rifts between East and West, emerged as did what became know as "New School," or "Now School," build
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