The Renaissance”
By
Christopher Bowman
Christopher Bowman
“Hip-Hop, The Renaissance”
They say "they never really miss you til you dead or you gone" So on that note I’m leaving after the song.
A wise MC by the name of Shawn Corey Carter told me this as his Black Album gave me identical eclectic vibes I felt listening to the likes of Digable Planets, Big L, Big Daddy Kane, Big Pun, Common, Mos Def and others artists born of “The Renaissance”. I have come to inform you all of this renaissance known as hip-hop, a renaissance that will never cease breathing until the last listener’s foot is finished tapping to the rhythm and rhyme scheme of their favorite record.
Hip-Hop, a genre of stylized rhythmic music that is used to accompany a rhythmic form of speech that would go on to become rap. Many have tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint the location of the birth of this “Renaissance” by saying that this is a West-coast, Midwest, and even a down South born style of music. However, I prefer to take you back to the 1970’s on 1520 Sedgwick Street in the Bronx, the home of Jamaican DJ Kool Herc who is arguably considered the father of hip hop, if not one of the many. See Kool Herc’s style of deejaying at house parties was that he would recite rhymes over what would in later time garner the title “an instrumental”. He would use a plethora of in house reference when dropping said rhymes on the microphone not knowing this would spawn a movement that would travel through the streets of Brooklyn and be spread by various other party Dj’s as well such as Coke La Rock.
Spoken- word and music by early founding fathers such as Gil Scott- Heron, Jalal Mansur, and The Last Poets (one of whom I know personally) helped this movement come into fruition because of the simple fact that their lyrics were based on post- civil rights era life in the urban community. Oh yes the movement was real. Not only because everyone could relate but because it came via a rhythmic