Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000

Or at least, some of the evolution

My Advanced Pop Transcription class has started our rap unit, where the students have to pick a verse and transcribe eight bars of it into notation. In preparation for that project, we are listening to and analyzing tracks from various styles and eras, and also talking about the larger social and political context of the music. I won’t be getting into any of that context here, but if you do want to read about it, you might enjoy this paper I wrote about the weirdest white rap cover ever.

Anyway, I chose these five songs because they represent some big trends in the music in the 80s and 90s, and because I like them. I’ll talk about more recent developments in hip-hop in a future post.

Run-DMC - “Peter Piper” (1986)

This is the sound of the mid-1980s: a Roland TR-808 drum machine, two turntables, and two guys joyfully yelling over them. Here’s a podcast episode about the Bob James record that forms the basis of the track. The lyrics sound like playground chants, and not just because they are referencing nursery rhymes. Dr. Kyra Gaunt argues that rap originates in part from musical games like double dutch, and that sounds right to me. Run-DMC’s rhythms are steady and predictable, and the rhymes come in pairs at the ends of the lines. If we’re comparing hip-hop to jazz, this is like Louis Armstrong in the 1920s: close to the folkloric origins of the music, innovative yet accessible.