Hip Hop Theory
Hip hop/rap music is an art form and system governed by its own principles and rules. It’s based on methods, techniques, practices, and processes cultivated from within its own tradition and the larger Black music tradition.
Hip hop/rap music is an art form and system governed by its own principles and rules. It’s based on methods, techniques, practices, and processes cultivated from within its own tradition and the larger Black music tradition. While some of these processes are sometimes filtered through standard tropes of the European concept of music composition and theory, they are not guided by such tropes. Again, all musical cultures use some sort of music “theory”, i.e. a way of forming and expressing (describing, explaining) how and what musical events have occurred. However, not all musical cultures use a written notation to express their theories. (Some areas of hip hop/rap music can be analyzed and understood by some of the basic language and concepts of music theory, some areas cannot.) But music theory, as a whole, is an inadequate means for surveying and truly understanding hip hop/rap music and beatmaking.
We must also not forget that hip hop/rap music is a different musical convention altogether — the hip hop/rap music tradition is an amalgamation of a number of things. It’s a music tradition that is well embedded within the Black (African American) music tradition. It’s not a descendent of seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth-century European music traditions. Also, hip hop/rap music is a hybrid of pre- and post-industrialism, coupled with great advancement in recording technology. Even more telling, hip hop/rap music is the born product of urban American street culture and neglected lower class Blacks and Latinos, not privileged whites. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this study, hip hop/rap music is the first music in the world to be created exclusively through the use of prexisting songs and other sound recordings.
Hip hop theory is further distinguished by the fact that it governs and speaks to two different but co-equal and interdependent layers or dimensions of musical activity: the beat and the rhyme — the instrumental and the vocal. In the hip hop/rap music tradition, the “rap” or the “rhyme” describes the chief (native) form of vocalization, while the “beat” is used to describe the entire instrumental.
