Who Invented Rap?

Rapping is an African tradition and to narrow down to a person who invented rapping is as difficult a task as to answer who invented music. During the imperialist age, European nations captured Africans from their homeland and carried them off as slaves to the American continent. There, the Africans kept alive their tradition and it is from there that the tradition got its current name ‘rap’. Rap is sometimes defined as ‘poetry sung with beats.’ Rap, for most of the time, has been dominated by the African-Americans and rap is mostly sung in African-American accent.

‘Rap’ is an art of storytelling in a distinctly African way. Even the sixteenth century English dictionaries define rap as ‘to say’. Although rap is considered as a part of the Hip Hop culture, there is no doubting the fact that rap existed when no one had even heard about Hip Hop.

Around the middle of the 20th century, singers in the Caribbean were mixing their custom of storytelling with the modern music instruments of the time and this gave rise to what we now know as ‘rap’. In terms of style, The Last Poets, a music album by some African-American musicians and poets in the late 1960s in considered to be the forerunner to rap. The late 80s and the early 90s are considered as the golden age of rap music. Although rap music started to decline in popularity since 1993, but it is still relatively popular compared to many other music genres.