Where did Rap come from? Why we call it "Rap" music? Who it was named after...

[infinite59]

No doubt... it came from the man in my signature...H. "Rap" Browne.

A major player in the civil rights movement of the sixties, with high ranking position in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party, he is now known as Imam Jamil Al Amin since his conversion to Islam in the 70's.  He had the nickname "Rap" because of the many colorful and rhyme-style speaches he used to give in the sixties.  The roots of this colorful, rhythmic way speaking, as H. "Rap" Browne says in his 1960's book, "Die Nigger Die" comes from 'playing the dozens' a game in which inner-city youths would form circles and take turns clowning on eachother, and the crowd would decide by their reaction who was the winner.  This is the roots of battle rap![/i]  H. "Rap" Browne talks about this growing phenomenon and even drops several of his rhymes, iller than anything any rapper is spitting out today, he did all this, all the way back in the 1960's, and it was published in his popular 1960's book, "Die Nigger Die."   So when it came time to choose a name for the one of the 4 elements of hip-hop, they borrowed from the langauge that was already out there, and called it "rap" after H. "Rap" Browne.  This is common knowledge of true hip-hop heads who were around at the time of hip-hop's inception.

H. Rap Browne isn't H. Rap Browne anymore, he has submitted his life to the will of Allah, and has chosen the name Jamil Al-Amin.  It has been decades since he was a rapper, and his tone has changed since his acceptance of Islam.  He doesn't use foul language or curse words anymore.  Infact he has been silenced by the government.  Today, he is a political prisoner, and there are many movements and appeals being made by African American and Islamic groups to achieve his release from prison.

[Shallow]

Wow I never knew  rap came from this guy, and he then converted to Islam! If the guy who started rap converted then that means I should convert! You just changed my life!

[Kill]

^^ this for once was an interesting post, i'd need to verify "rap" really comes from there, but why u hatin? just cuz infinite wouldn't care about it if that guy wasn't muslim this post contained a few interesting things

[Shallow]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

His first paragraph was great. I have no problem with that, even though I feel rap has a lot of other influences that contibuted to it's existance. However the second paragraph was run of the milll infinite trying to convert people. And I felt like having some fun with it. I wasn't hating, I was just having some fun.

[Trauma-san]

WOW! I never knew that! I'm gonna go convert. 

[Shallow]

WOW! I never knew that! I'm gonna go convert. 

I think we're the only ones that are going to see the light.

[Lincoln]

That's a great book, I love the raps in it.
I'll type some up later on tonight.

[ZILLA THA GOODFELLA]

I've known about this guy and that whole story. I didn't know about what religion he practices tho, and I don't care for it anyway, It does not matter.

[Throwback]

i always thought Rap ment somethin like Rythmic Afro-american Poetry. and it all started in NY with Kool Herc and shit..

[MANBEARPIG.]

Somehow I knew this all already, I remember reading it somewhere else, nice post tho

[Thirteen]

shouldn't it be called Al now?

i think i'm going to buy a new Al CD today...

or Eminem is a good Aler

[Suga Foot]

Do yourself a favor and buy a dictionary.  They call it "Rap Music" because that is the best way to describe it.  "Rap" is just slang for talk/discuss.

[Leggy Hendrix]

i thought Gil Scott-Heron was one of the first to make the rap style of delivery popular and bring it to the forefront...and the word rap coming from H Rap Browne, i doubt it...

[DAYUM]

Infinite wouldnt give 2 fucks if this dude wasent Musloom...

[Jome]

^^ And he's not even right...


rap4   Audio pronunciation of "rap" ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (rp)
n.

   1. Slang. A talk, conversation, or discussion.
   2.
         1. A form of popular music developed especially in African-American urban communities and characterized by spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics with a syncopated, repetitive rhythmic accompaniment.
         2. A composition or performance of such music.


intr.v. rapped, rap·ping, raps

   1. Slang. To discuss freely and at length.
   2. To perform rap music.


[Possibly from rap1.]

    Our Living Language The culture of hip-hop has been the source of dozens of words and expressions in American English, of which rap is one of the most familiar. The word is probably a development ultimately of rap meaning “to hit.” It shows up in the early 1900s in the extended meaning “to express orally,” as used by so notable a figure as Winston Churchill in 1933. Over the next few decades it came to mean “to discuss or debate informally,” a meaning that was well established in the African-American community by the late 1960s. A decade later the word was applied to an evolving style of music characterized by, among other things, beat-driven rhymes of an often improvisatory nature. The slang that is integral to the lyrics of rap continues to be a source of borrowings into colloquial American English; recent examples include chill meaning “to calm down,” and diss meaning “to show disrespect to.” These are but the latest examples in a long series of such borrowings from Black English stretching back a century or more, many of them directly from popular music lyrics or from musicians' lingo.


1933, Winston Churchwill wins, some Islam dude lose.. 
I read somewhere that "rap" was used in the early 1900's as "to talk fast", so the Islam dude shouldn't be given much credit..