Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music

Why do rap MCs present their studio recorded lyrics as “live and direct”? Why do they so insistently define abilities or actions, theirs or someone else’s, against a pre-existing signifier? This book examines the compositional practice of rap lyricists and offers compelling answers to these questions. Through a 40 year-span analysis of the music, it argues that whether through the privileging of chanted call-and-response phrases or through rhetorical strategies meant to assist in getting one’s listening audience open, the focus of the first rap MCs on community building and successful performer-audience cooperation has remained prevalent on rap records with lyrics and production techniques encouraging the listener to become physically and emotionally involved in recorded performances. Relating rap’s rhetorical strategy of posing inferences through intertextuality to early call-and-response routines and crowd-controlling techniques, this study emphasizes how the dynamic and collective elements from the stage performances and battles of the formative years of rap have remained relevant in the creative process behind this music. It contends that the customary use of identifiable references and similes by rap lyricists works as a fluid interchange designed to keep the listener involved in the performance. Like call-and-response in live performances, it involves a dynamic form of communication and places MCs in a position where they activate the shared knowledge of their audience, making sure that they “know what they mean,” thus transforming their mediated lyrics into a collective and engaging performance.

1. Introduction.- 2. Call-and-Response in Rap Music.- 3.“Rock the House:” Emceeing and Collective Participation in Rap Music’s Formative Years (1974–1978).- 4. “Keeping It Real Live!” Maintaining Collective Participation on Records.- 5. “Coming to You Live and Direct!”: Performing Liveness and Immediacy on Record.- 6. Intertextuality in Rap Lyrics.- 7. From the Stage to the Booth to the Stage: Sustaining Collective Engagement During Live Performance.- 8. Rap Music and Singing Along to the N-word.- 9. Discussing Collective Participation and Audience Engagement with Sugarhill Gang’s Master Gee.- 10. Conclusion.

David Diallo is an Associate Professor at The University of Bordeaux, France. His research interests focus on rap music, folklore, sociology of art and urban ethnography. He has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Memorial University of Newfoundland and New York University and contributed to the Journal of American Folklore and Ethnologies. He is the author of the Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg article in Icons of Hip Hop: an Encyclopedia of the Music, Movement and Culture (2007) and of The Bronx and Los Angeles entries in Hip Hop in America: a Regional Guide (2009).