1Almost thirty-five years after the publication of Steven Hager’s Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (1984) and David Toop’s Rap Attack (1984) the body of scholarly and journalistic literature on rap music has grown to remarkable proportion. Embracing a large catalog of themes and disciplinary approaches, rap studies have mainly explored topics pertaining to that music’s relation to race (Rose, 1994; Kajikawa, 2015), to space (Forman, 2002; Keyes, 2002), to religion (Dyson, 1991) and to politics (Bonnette, 2015). Problematic aspects of the genre such as its rampant sexism and glorification of violence have also been covered at length in detailed analyses. Robin D. Kelley argued in “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles” that gangsta rap is the product of the socioeconomic precariousness which followed the deindustrialization of large urban centers in the US (Kelley, 1996). On a similar note, Charis E. Kubrin (2004) and Eithne Quinn (2005) in their scholarly works on gangsta rap have highlighted how these controversial aspects reflect some of the complexities of the expressive culture of poor blacks. Other academics have contributed to discussions on the aesthetic aspects of rap music and offered elaborate studies on topics such as the role of language (Alim, 2006), on its cultural and literary elements (Cobb, 2008) and on its intertextual aesthetics (Williams, 2014). Still, this wide-ranging scholarship has left blank spaces and topics that have remained unexplored. The contention between the terms MC and rapper in American rap that I intend to delve into in this article is one of them.
2Several works have been published on rapping and/ or emceeing as expressive forms. In his book How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC (2009), Paul Edwards breaks down rapping/ MCing as an art form and focuses mostly on the technical aspects of the practice. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’s examination of the full range of rap’s artistry and poetic tradition in their Anthology of Rap (2011) similarly showcases the vitality and inventiveness displayed by hip hop vocalists (they use both “rappers” and “MCs”) in their rhyming performances. Although the debate around their merits has been widely acknowledged, it has barely been inspected. William Jelani Cobb’s To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (2008) may be the closest book addressing it in its introduction:
“Every MC raps, but not every rapper is an MC. (…) The difference between a rapper and an MC is the difference between smooth jazz and John Coltrane, the difference between studio and unplugged. Or to cop a line from Alice Walker, the difference between indigo and powder blue. Nelly is a rapper; KRS-One is an MC twenty-five hours a day. Lauryn Hill is, straight up and down, an MC’s MC; the Fresh Prince was an MC; Will Smith is a rapper. Nas has been an MC since he breathed his first; P. Diddy and Master P. are rappers down to their DNA.” (Cobb: 8-9)
3My objective in this article is to examine why it is reckoned that “every MC raps, but not every rapper is an MC” and to inspect this dichotomy further through an array of archive material and reliable sources that may help to contextualize and sort out the contention that has confounded rap fans and scholars for decades. Through a pluridisciplinary approach deeply rooted in cultural studies and combining sociology, textual analysis and semiology, I will highlight a chronological sequence which testifies to the widespread use of the term “MC” to designate the first live performers who used rhyming on the microphone to supplement the mixes of the DJs. I will then explain how this term, although it retains strong symbolic power in the rap milieu, came to be eclipsed by “rapper” when rap as a performance-based music was superseded by radios, news stories, the recording industry and academia.
4The terms rapping (or rap) and emceeing generally refer to the act of reciting elaborate rhymes over a melodic and rhythmical loop. Although most rap scholars agree on this definition, rapping and emceeing might not have the same meaning or refer to the same idea for all its practitioners and critics. For some, throwing some incentives to dancers may qualify as rapping/emceeing, while for others rapping/emceeing might refer to slightly more sophisticated rhymes over instrumental breaks. For greater clarity and consistency, I will use here Cheryl Keyes’ definition of rapping/ emceeing as “a musical form that makes use of rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular, which is recited or loosely chanted over a musical soundtrack” (2002: 1). Although rapping and emceeing are commonly used interchangeably, hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz, cited in Alex Ogg’s The Hip-Hop Years: a History of Rap, clearly distinguishes MCs from rappers in these words:
“We’re MCs, we rhyme, we’re masters of ceremony, we’re mic controllers. We’re MCs, not rappers. I just have a problem with the term.” (quoted in Ogg: 41)
- 1 In Paul Edwards’s Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music, KRS ONE clearly distinguishes MCs from rappers in (...)
5Caz’s “problem” with the term “rapper” echoes a sentiment expressed multiple times by other authoritative figures of rap music.1 His disapproval of that description certainly derives from what sociologist Andrew Abbott, in his work on contexts and temporalities, calls present-to-past perspective (1995). In his research on processual sociology, Abbott attempts to address the problems of reconstructing the past as it had been as a present. Applied to Caz’s narrative, Abbott’s approach reveals that his construction of the past may in fact differ from what he might have experienced at the time. In other words, his retrospective knowledge of the beginnings of the movement and the particular way the field of rap has unfolded may have led Caz to confer more symbolic resonance to “MCing” than to “rapping,” even though the terms were not, in the period he refers to, in contention. For this reason, Caz presents a certain encoding of both terms (MC and rapper) in the present which may not mirror their signified versions of the past. Essentially, when Caz made that comment, the MC/rapper opposition had already appeared and had already been fueled by the impact that “Rapper’s Delight” (and its “borrowed lyrics”) had had on the music. And this was a music that, in his eyes, he and other Bronx “MCs” had participated in building. To find out more precisely what each term referred to at that particular time, let us examine some reliable and factual sources of that era.
6Based on the flyers and recordings available to researchers on the hip hop movement, we can establish a reliable chronology of the use of “MC” and “rapper.” In his book To the Break of Dawn, William Jelani Cobb remarks that all definitions of MC, whether one understands these two letters as “Microphone Controller,” “Mic Checker,” “Master of Ceremonies,” or “Mover of Crowds,” point to their pivotal role in keeping the crowd amped (Cobb: 8). Rap scholarship is replete with studies whose titles explicitly acknowledge this role. Jim Fricke and Charles Ahearn’s authoritative oral history Yes Yes Y’all (2002) is named after that popular MC incentive. Michael Eric Dyson chose the ubiquitous and equally interactive Know What I Mean? for the reflections on hip hop that he published in 2010. Similarly, Jeff Chang’s book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (2005) and William Jelani Cobb’s essay To the Break of Dawn (2007) borrow standard incentives of the rap vernacular to hint at the persistent concern of MCs to establish a dynamic relationship with their audience.
- 2 See Robert Ford, Jr., “Jive Talking NY DJ Rapping Away in Black Discos,” Billboard May 5, 1979.
7If we generally find both “MCing” and “rapping” in these books and in oral histories of rap music to describe the act of rhyming, a close analysis of the (somewhat limited) lyrical content of pre-1979 recordings reveals that over a 1977-1979 period, “MC” was the overriding term used to describe live performers at hip hop parties. As Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. explains in Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years, this term was used during that pivotal phase to establish hip hop rhyming by street kids from the Bronx as “a site of difference” with what older DJs were doing in clubs (2017). Unlike what “rappin’ DJs” like DJ Hollywood or Eddie Cheeba were doing in black discos,2 the term “MC” referred to street rhymers who adhered to the rhyming format that Kool DJ Herc and Coke La Rock had conceptualized in the Bronx in 1973. Indeed, outside of the black disco scene, where the term “rapping” was used to describe what jive-talking DJs were doing to get the dancers to participate in the performance, “rap” or “rapper” are nowhere to be found. It is, for example, absent from the extant recordings of hip-hop parties from the pre-1979 period.
- 3 As far as I can tell, there are no recordings of rap parties from the 1973-1976 era in circulation. (...)
8For reasons pertaining to the nature of the rap genre in its early form, there are very few surviving recordings of block parties and indoor hip hop jams before 1977.3 The music existed only in live form at that time. If you wanted to listen to the records mixed by the DJs and the incentives of their MCs, you had to attend live jams. Some bootleg cassettes of recorded rap routines and DJ sets were unquestionably circulating throughout the Bronx and the neighboring boroughs (Cummings: 164). However, these “party tapes” as they were known – meant to take the party to your home or car – have practically disappeared as they would deteriorate rapidly. As music journalist Andrew Nosnitski points out, their fragility and the burying of the sounds further in hiss after each playback “only amplified the mystique of the format” (2013). As old school “party tapes” collector Troy Smith observes, “beautiful clear tapes” of the early jams are extremely rare and most surviving tapes, like the ones found piling dust in someone’s storage “have a lot of hissing sounds, have been recorded many times over, sound too fast, sometimes with gaps. I even had a couple of tapes that were made from a radio sitting in front of a speaker” (Smith, 2006). Although DJ Hollywood was reportedly selling his mixes on eight-track tapes as early as 1972 (Shanks: 33), and although DJ Disco Wiz and Grandmaster Caz apparently pressed their “mixed dub” on to a 10-inch acetate record plate in 1977 (Katz: 284), there are no known extant recordings documenting the performance of the DJs who played records at parties and of the MCs who rhymed over their “breakbeats” before that year, making it somewhat difficult to assess the prevailing hip hop vocabulary as well as the use of “rapper” in live routines.
9Still, this term is not mentioned once in the rare available party tapes recorded after 1977, such as in Mean Gene and DJ Theodore’s Jam recorded at 3rd Ave. Ballroom4 or in the recording of the party hosted by Mr. Hyde, Mr. Bond, Star Child, D.J. Ronnie Green, and D.J. Artie Art which took place at the Foster Center in 1979.5 Neither is it used once by Master Flowers throughout his 1979 Brooklyn Park Jam6 or during Grandmaster Flash and the Four MCs (Melle Mel, Kid Creole, Cowboy and Mr. Ness)’ performance, which took place at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on December 23, 1978, and is the subject of “one of the best-preserved recordings of hip hop music prior to 1979” (Kajikawa, 2015: 27).
10To supplement these sources, for which placing an exact date is generally difficult (some tapes turn out to be excerpts of shows from different months or years edited together) the term “rapper” is equally absent from the hundreds of existing flyers advertising hip hop parties over a 1974-1979 (and after) period (Figure 1 to 3) where the term “MC” is strikingly prevalent. More of these cultural artifacts have survived the early period of rap music than audio recordings of that same era have. The Cornell Hip Hop Collection, established in 2007, notably preserves nearly 500 digitized party and event flyers designed between 1976 and 1984. As its curator Katherine A. Reagan recounted last year in an article published in Global Hip Hop Studies, several New York libraries and museums, unwilling to preserve these materials before they began to disappear, had declined to collect them. In contrast, Reagan and her colleagues at Cornell, where several courses on hip hop had already been included in some programs, believed that the history of the movement was too important to ignore and went on to build a preservation and outreach model based on public openness and open digital access (150).
11As the webpage of the library digital collections indicates, these flyers, “created entirely by hand,” preserve raw data from the days when hip hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx. On top of the live audio recordings and the handful of battle tapes available, these written sources are amongst the relatively few artifacts of the live years of rap music. As Amanda Lalonge and Johan Kugelberg respectively point out in “Buddy Esquire and the Early Hip Hop Flyer” (Lalonge, 2014) and in Born in the Bronx (Kugelberg, 2010: 70-127), these specimens are miraculous testaments of the early years of a music where “by Sunday morning the previous evening’s flyers are scattered in the gutter and last night’s improvised combinations of vinyl fragments and rhymes have dissolved, waiting to emerge again next weekend in new configurations” (Lalonge, 2014: 35).
- 7 As Reagan points out in her article “The Cornell Hip Hop Collection: An example of an archival repo (...)
- 8 Their digital format enables anyone seeking information to browse through the archive using keyword (...)
12Other enterprises to collect these historical artifacts and make them accessible to scholars and the public have been launched since by a range of institutions. For instance, the Harvard-affiliated Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, launched in 2002 at UCLA by anthropologist Marcyliena Morgan, houses a large collections of early hip hop records (Classic Crates Project) and rap memorabilia. More recently, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem acquired around 120 boxes of multimedia archive of artifacts (videotapes, notebooks, flyers and photographs) from hip hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy’s personal collection.7 Although these archives give a strong sense of how rap music developed in the early years, with a vast selection of collected items, the flyers featured in The Cornell Hip Hop Archive – the largest institutional collection to date – , provide additional help in the scope of this research paper. Not only do they, like the ephemera collected from hip hop’s early days in other formats “contain information about early Hip Hop groups, individual MCs and DJs, promoters, venues, dress codes, admission prices, shout outs and more” (webpage Cornell), they importantly provide reliable documentation of the prevailing lexicon used to advertise parties.8 Amongst the 494 flyers listed in the collection, 95 range from Oct 28, 1977 to late 1979. 1980 clearly surpasses the previous years with a total of 198 flyers. This increase can be explained both by the booming of the genre, the popularity of which had then extended to other New York boroughs, and by better documentation and archival work with greater scrutiny of the music. A detailed analysis of these “hip hop parties and event flyers” from the 1973-1979 era reveals a couple of interesting things. Firstly, almost half of them feature announcements for disco shows (especially those hosted by DJ Hollywood, DJ Cheeba or DJ Pete Jones) aimed at older dancers (“do dress/ no minors”), for dance contests, or for local production companies. The other half of the flyers predominantly advertise DJs and breakdancers in multiple “battles of the DJs” which reflects the preeminence of deejaying and breakdancing in the early years of the music.
- 9 The MCs advertized are: MC Kevie Kev, MC Mike Bee, MC Kool Ice, MC Money Moe and MC Mr. Magic.
13The first occurrence of the term MC in the collection of flyers is to be found in 1978, where it is featured 5 times amongst the 37 announcements of that year.9 According to Steven Hager, 1978 was the year when the emphasis noticeably shifted within rap music from the DJs onto their MCs (Hager, 1984). Interestingly enough, that same year, the mention “with the voice of” as a synonym for “MC,” was also quite common (with 5 occurrences) to refer to the verbal accompaniment of MCs. In 1979, the term MC is featured 24 times in the 198 flyers catalogued in The Cornell Hip Hop Collection. That year, rap music gradually shifted from live performance to studio recorded performance and supporting DJs and hyping the crowd was no longer the primary function of MCs. Emceeing was slowly starting to become an autonomous expressive form and was no longer considered as a mere accessory to the mixes of the DJs. Flyers make clear that the MCs were no longer subordinate and that their rhymes no longer a “musical ad campaign for the DJ who ran the show” (Cobb: 17), but a quickly maturing practice. Another pronounced pattern of the blossoming rap music scene and of the rise of the MC was the multiplication of multimember groups built around one or two DJs like The Funky Four + One, The Cold Crush Brothers, The Fantastic Five, or The Treacherous Three.
Table 1. Number of occurences of mc / rapper in the flyers collection of The Cornell Hip Hop Collection (1978-1979)
|
Year
|
“with the voice of”
|
“MC”
|
“Rapper”
|
|
|
|
1978
|
5
|
5
|
Ø
|
|
|
|
1979
|
1
|
24
|
Ø
|
|
|
14As we can see in Figures 1 and 2, “MC” is the favored term to refer to the live performers who where rocking the mic (“with the Mighty 3 M.C.” in Figure 1 and “Soulsonic Force MCs” in Figure 2).
Figure 1: The Royal Masters, May 18, 1979
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library10
Figure 2: Bronx River Center, Sept. 28, 1979
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
15Also, as evidenced with Melle Mel, Cowboy and Kidd Creole’s choice of “The Three MCs” as stage name, the term “MC” (or “em cees,” see Figure 3), in the mid-to late 70s was widely used to refer to the rhyme spitters who were “rapping” on the break beats.
Figure 3: Marvin’s, Nov. 9 & 10 (year unknown)
16The following poster (Figure 4) even shows that crews – like Kool Herc’s in this case – were advertising “M.C.” try-outs.
Figure 4: T-Connection, Nov. 3, 1982
- 11 Although the last one represents a post-“Rapper’s Delight” period where those parties were fading a (...)
- 12 The term rap is absent from the unofficial first rap record “King Tim III (personality jock)” by th (...)
17At the time these flyers were in circulation, the music was all about crews of DJs and MCs.11 The MC was the performer, rhyming and complementing the music of the DJ with a microphone. The same way that DJ was the name given to the performer who was “cutting up records,” the term “MC” was ever-present in the mid-to late 70s; unlike the term “rapper.” This remained the case until the release of the first records.12 The turning point, as I have hinted at before, was 1979 and the release of “Rapper’s Delight”. As Joseph C. Ewoodzie remarks in his book on the first years of hip hop in the Bronx, “MCing became rap with “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (…) MCs were now called rappers, and the music they produced became known as rap music” (2017: 184).
18The release and success of “Rapper’s Delight” was clearly a turning point. This assumption can be verified in the way the music and its members were then described in the media. In August 1980 The Washington Post published the first national article on “rap” and “rappers” entitled: “Recording the Rap: Jive Talk at the Top of the Charts.” The Post article was followed in March 1981 by an article published in The New York Times entitled “Pop: The Sugarhill Gang” and by another one published by the Associated Press dated August 28, 1981: “Music Makers: Not What You Say, But How You Say It.” The latter addressed the cultural impact of this new rap genre and appears to be very close in content to ABC’s 20/20 TV report on the rise of that music entitled “Rappin’ to the Beat.”
- 13 For example, in an interview with Ewoodzie, Grandmaster Flash indicates that “Rapper’s Delight just (...)
19As the title of this news report indicates, the interest and focus of these observers on the “rap/rapper” lexicon came in the wake of the commercial success and the ubiquity of “Rapper’s Delight” (the lyrics of which are even “sampled” in the title). “Rapper’s Delight” is known for being a game changer, at many levels.13 However, the way it has affected the terminology has – as far as I know – never been discussed. Yet, it marks a pivotal moment in the terminology of the hip hop movement and the sudden disruption of the existing conventions. The term MC, though it remained relevant, was suddenly overshadowed by the term “rapper”. The term appears in the title of the Sugarhill Gang’s song (“Rapper’s Delight”), and is reinforced in its opening of the song (“Now, what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat.”) Discussing the first lines of this landmark verse in Dan Charnas’ book, Master Gee explains that as rap was only a club phenomenon at the time, somebody in the studio suggested he explained what it was so that new listeners would not be confused by him talking over the music (2011: 39). The song needed, he felt, an explanation. Something that would describe what they were about to do to people across the country who had never heard the unfamiliar sounds of “rappin’ DJs” (i.e. club DJs like Cheeba and Hollywood) and of hip hop MCs like The Furious Five or Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush MCs.
- 14 They use them in the title and eight times during the song, one more time than “MC,” which they use (...)
20In “Rapper’s Delight,” even though Master Gee, Hank, and Wonder Mike do what “MCs” had been doing all over the Bronx for the last few years, they primarily put forward the words “rapping” and “rapper”14 that listeners not familiar with the vibrant hip hop scene of the Bronx could ascertain more easily as they were commonly used to refer to an informal conversation or to someone’s rambling. The unexpected magnitude and the cultural impact of the song were so great that gradually, MCs performing live were not identified as “MCs” anymore, but as “rappers.” The two terms certainly referred to the same practice, but the performance having been transferred to new media (records and the radio) somehow transformed that apparent sameness. It merged MC and rapper for everyone outside of the DJ/MC existing scene. Interestingly enough, the change was shaped not by participants of the hip hop scene, i.e. by pioneers, prominent members and early production companies, but by the Sugarhill Gang (whose legitimacy as a crew of MCs was quite faint at the time), by former R&B singer-turned-record-producer Sylvia Robinson, and by other outside influences (the Washington Post, the NY Times, ABC, comedians including rapping bits in their routines or academics interested in the aesthetics of this new expressive form.) This unintentional but highly performative influence from individuals who were outside of the “original” scene, disregarding the Bronx scene’s rules and terminology, was definitely instrumental in imposing a new lexicon. The term “rap” subsequently became widely used in the US to describe the expressive form. In his study on the processes of identification, Thomas Hylland Ericksen explains how the role of external social categorization can shape the identity of a group (1993). In this case, the overemphasis on the terms “rapper” and “rap” after the release of “Rapper’s Delight” altered the social identity of MCs who were now publicized as “rappers.” Their identification as MCs somewhat changed and adapted to the latest development in the field. The term “rapper” was then an important source of symbolic and cultural capital (but also, and perhaps more importantly, of financial gain). This new social identity as “rapper” was quite divisive as we have seen, and most importantly no longer self-defined. This can explain its repudiation by the builders of the movement who would then favor the street-oriented term “MC” over its less “authentic” substitute, to some extent “dumped” on them by outside cultural forces and used by emerging crews from other boroughs like Brooklyn’s the Rapperteers’ (Rapmaster Mellow Mell and Royal Rapper “Desire”) or Queens’ Rappermatical 5 (Rapper Ron et al.) in the early 80s (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: Chez Julie, Apr. 10, 1981
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
21For those who discovered Bronx music through the airwaves, “rap” and “rapper” were simple ways to characterize the scene that had emerged in the Bronx a few years before and its performers under a different name, although the term “rapper” did not have the same symbolic resonance and clout as “MC.” After “Rapper’s Delight,” however, participants in the music started to slowly embrace this conflict-ridden term as we can clearly see with its use all over the place. Capitalizing on the success of “Rapper’s Delight” and on the freshness and broader appeal of the term, several crews and record companies jumped on the “rap” bandwagon and marketed their releases as such.
- 15 In a 2013 interview to The Village Voice, Furious Five MCs Kidd Creole and Rahiem provide valuable (...)
22The Furious 5 (as the Younger Generation) quickly released “We Rap More Mellow” (1979), Flash and the Furious 5’s (“The Three MCs” plus two additions) released “Super-rappin,” Spoonie Gee released “Spoonin’ Rap”, Kurtis Blow then put out “Christmas Rappin” on Mercury Records, Willie Wood and Willie Wood Crew’s released “Willie Rap,” Family’s put out “Family Rap,” Scoopy put out “Scoopy Rap,” and The Treacherous Three released “New Rap Language” (1980). The Funky 4+1 then released “Rapping and Rocking the House.” Interestingly enough, on this latter the term “rapping” is used only twice overall – including once in the title – while “MC” is used thirteen times. It is also very likely that lines like “We’re the five MCs y’all all too much” were in fact lines that had been previously used during earlier live shows. Indeed, like other MCs of that era, The Funky 4+1 simply took their stage routines into the studio and put them on record.15
23This semantic slide from MC to rapper, as we have seen, triggered a somewhat ambiguous dismissal of the latter by the Bronx rhymers who had established this music and who gave preferentiality to term “MC” over the less “authentic” word “rapper” (although opportunistically embracing it at times).
24In a party tape of a Fantastic 5 jam recorded in 1980 at Celebrity Club, MC Kevie Kev can be heard rapping “I don’t play the game of the *Rapper’s Delight* because originality is what I like.” One could argue, rightfully so, that his dismissal of these “rappers” is primarily in tune with rap music’s spirit of competition. Rap music is indeed, it has been established numerous times, an extremely competitive expressive form. Without dwelling on this here, it is important to point out that the fact that rap lyricists must demonstrate to the audience how each of their characteristics surpasses those of any potential or identified rival derives from the agonistic inclination of the formative years. In his book on the rap aesthetics, French philosopher and rap scholar Christian Béthune compares rap music to the athletic contests of ancient Greece and argues that the rap genre displays similar combative values (1999: 67). The emphasis hip hop vocalists lay on verbal jousts and rivalry has also been pointed out by music scholar Elijah Wald, who discusses “the martial art of rhyming” in his book on the dozens (2015) or by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois who remark in their Anthology of Rap that the rap genre is unusually characterized by a prevailing spirit of competition:
“As poetic practice, rap verses are often confrontational, composed either in competition with an actual rhyme adversary or in a mock battle with an imagined one. A dominant theme, therefore, is the elevation of the self and the denigration of the opponent.” (xxxi)
25When “rapper” came to replace “MC,” that spirit of competition found its raison d’être in pitting them against each other, with the latter (epitomized here by Kevie Kev) depicting those who embrace it as authentic while portraying their opponent as fake (or, in this case lacking “originality”).
The chronological precedence and symbolic value implied in Kevie Kev’s put-down then morphed into a question of legitimacy and authenticity which has continued to fuel the opposition between the two words. Indeed, at the core of Kevie Kev’s inference of the Sugarhill Gang’s lack of originality lies the question of “being real,” a question essential to the dispute over what characterizes an MC as opposed to a rapper, and a question that has major implications whether one wants to be acknowledged in a hip hop milieu where participants put the idea of authenticity at the core of their discourse.
- 16 To see how the idea of realness in rap remains a subjective and personal concept with no objective (...)
26Still, the Will Smith/ Fresh Prince – MC/ Rapper duality underlined at the beginning of this article testifies to the difficulty of putting a confident label on somewhat volatile terms whose scope and meaning keep being negotiated and manipulated.16
Numerous works have highlighted how rap music’s statements of “realness” take a variety of forms in a multitude of contexts. “Keepin’(g) it real” will, at times, mean being true to the African and/or “black” legacy from which rap music emanates (Kopano, 2002). Some other time, it will mean describing the realities of black ghetto life in America, or, as Murray Forman puts it, representing “the real” (2002). As Laura Speers acknowledges in her book on the London rap scene, the concept is rather malleable and has come to signify a wide range of things (2017). Finally, in his article “Tha Realness: In Search of Hip Hop Authenticity,” Jonathan Williams argues that claims to authenticity are widespread to an unparalleled degree in rap music (2007). Hip hop vocalists, through the use of idioms like “Keepin’ it real,” or “trill” (a combination of the words “true” and “real”) repeatedly invoke the idea of authenticity and the dispute over the precedence of “MC” over “rapper” examined in this article provides a compelling illustration of what Anthony Kwame Harrison refers to as “the big investment in hip hop among its own artists in defining authenticity” (2008).
27Through a pluridisciplinary analysis which made it possible to tackle more comprehensively the multifaceted evolution of the hip hop movement, I have argued that “MC” is a signifier that connotes “realness” (as opposed to “rapper”) for chronological and symbolic reasons. As this examination of some cultural artifacts and sources has made clear, the term “MC” (or “emcee”) was the prevalent term used to publicize the first youngsters who spoke rhythmically and in rhymes over the beats of “street” DJs. However, the term “rapper” (to refer to the same MCs) subsequently gained significant traction with the release and success of “Rapper’s Delight” and with the identification of the genre by outsiders (lyricists from other New York boroughs, the media, the music industry).
28This lexical curve reveals to what extent social categorization by outsiders is just as important in the process of identification as internal formation. As we have seen, that “imported” credence of the term “rapper” was collectively embraced at the expense of that of the term “MC,” which had less symbolic power outside of the hip hop scene. “Rapper” thus became a common alternative title for “MC,” an even easier one since it reprised the name of the rhyming performance. However, since the legitimacy and street credibility of the Sugarhill Gang was, at that point, weak and the term felt like it had been “dumped” on legitimate hip hop MCs, the term “MC” has continued (to this day) to connote realness, integrity, authenticity, while “rapper” has remained tainted for some, although used broadly (and universally) to refer to hip hop vocalists. Yet, both terms refer to the same sociocultural practice of rhyming over an instrumental or a beat. The negative/ positive connotations attached to both mainly derive from the symbolic implications attached by some authoritative participants in the hip hop movement (like those quoted in this piece) who have put forward a prevalent and highly performative cultural narrative over notions of authenticity and credibility.