An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 20 | HIP-HOP 509

song, usually an instrumental passage or break, into an occasion for ecstatic

dancing. The dancers, b-boys and b-girls, developed a vocabulary of gymnastic

moves that came to be called b-boying or breaking by its practitioners and, by

the general public, break dancing.

At fi rst the DJ, with the help of a microphone, would offer spoken patter and

shouts of encouragement to heighten the celebratory mood of a dance party. As

turntablism g rew more complex, this role was often handed over to an MC, who,

as the name indicates, acted as a master of ceremonies. In short time the MC’s

patter developed into rap, the vocal component of hip-hop music and, along

with DJing, b-boying, and graffi ti, one of the four pillars of hip-hop culture.

MCs used rhyme and meter to raise rap into a half-spoken, half-sung form of

oral poetry. Rap draws on African American traditions of rhythmically intoned

speech, including the oratory of black Pentecostal preachers; toasting, the tell-

ing  of humorous stories often boasting about the narrator’s exploits; and the

dozens, or dirty dozens, a game of exchanging humorous insults, a source as

well of the innumerable jokes beginning “Yo momma.. .” Rap also benefi ted

DJs and MCs

K DJ Grandmaster Flash at the

turntables in the 1980s.

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