It’s just a fad. That’s what critics and musicians, Black and white alike, had to say about hip-hop and rap music in 1983.
The history of recorded hip-hop and rap music began in 1979 with Fatback’s “Kim Tim III” and Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” In the following four years, the music’s progression commenced tremendously with Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” The Sequence’s “Funk You Up,” and Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock.”
Despite its emergence, hip-hop, particularly rap, was overlooked as little more than a passing trend or a quaint novelty from a disparaged community of people of color. People perceived it as primitive and devoid of natural talent.
Hip-hop started gaining the industry’s respect when one man stepped in to put this new innovative music on a pedestal. That man is Herbie Hancock. His 1983 single, “Rockit,” tapped into hip-hop’s incorporation of New York electro and record scratching with the facilities of a so-called jazz musician and opened the genre to a new plateau.
The Chicago-born piano virtuoso spent the 1960s building a stellar reputation as a nimble, intelligent sideman for Miles Davis and Donald Byrd while proving to be a prodigious composer as a leader. Compositions like “Cantaloupe Island,” “Watermelon Man,” and “Maiden Voyage” became instant standards in the realm of so-called jazz.
But Hancock wanted more. He wanted to make people dance. In the 1970s, Hancock attempted to remove himself from the consortium of the so-called jazz world in favor of making music that resembled the accessible funk of Sly Stone. He achieved as much with his 1973 album, “Head Hunters,” and its most famous single, “Chameleon.”
At the dawn of a new decade, Hancock…
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