Some of my audience can take rap or leave it. Some of you just plain detest hip-hop (and some others just don’t care for pop music in general).<\/p>\n
I’d say “this isn’t the post for you”. \u00a0But what fun would that be?<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
In the seventies, “black” and “white” music, at least in the mainstream, stayed firmly in its respective ghettoes – except for the fairly brief “disco” fad (which started out as a black\/gay counterculture thing), R&B and white pop music were no closer than East and West Berlin.<\/p>\n
And that’s the way it is today, too.<\/p>\n
But in the late seventies, in and among the burgeoning rap culture in the boroughs of New York, there was a cross-pollination – more of convenience than from any artistic initiative. \u00a0The disc jockeys who played behind the rappers, looking for backup tracks, would spin anything they could find that had a good beat.<\/p>\n
And among white artists, the rock and rollers who’d started out worshipping R&B music – the Stones, J Geils, and the like – had a beat you could hang a side of beef from. \u00a0(I mean, come on; try finding a beat in “Candle In The Wind”) and, of course, Aerosmith, who were in the seventies known as “the American Rolling Stones”.<\/p>\n
And it was in 1986, looking for a crossover hit, that Run DMC paid homage to that extemporization, riffing on Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”.<\/p>\n