Rap Genius says Jamaican Sound Clash culture is what created Hip Hop.... thoughts?

[IllmaticDelta]

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The whole "battling" thing was imported from Afram Jazz culture going back to the 1930s




Jazz Articles: Jazz to Ska Mania - By Christopher Porter — Jazz Articles

Cutting Contests

Black Lexicon: What “Cutting Contest” Means (LISTEN)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) In today’s Daily Drop, for #JazzAppreciationMonth, we explore the term “Cutting Contest.” To hear about it, press PLAY: You can follow …

goodblacknews.org

A cutting contest is a type of musical battle that was traditionally held between various stride piano players from the 1920s to the 1940s, and to a lesser extent in improvisation contests on other jazz instruments during the swing era.

Up to the present time, the expression cutting in jazz is sometimes used, sometimes facetiously, to claim a new musician's technical superiority over another.


Cutting contests also took place between blues musicians.[2]

An enduring form of the cutting contest is the "trading" tradition in jazz improvisation, where two or more musicians alternately play parts of solo choruses. Cutting contests are common events at Tap Dance festivals. Rap battles could also be considered a present-day form of the cutting contest.

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Had it in R&B/Soul music too

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Can't forget

The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama

Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called "the dozens." At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube. Wald explores the depth of the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore. In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap



The dozens as American art form: No, your mama!

You can’t understand hip-hop without understanding the insult-battle tradition, says Elijah Wald



In 1939, a Yale psychologist named John Dollard traveled to the Jim Crow South to study the personality development of black children. Over and over again, he found something he hadn’t been looking for. On street corners and in schoolyards, in big cities and small towns, among the young and old alike, he found black folks facing off in games of street banter that followed specific rules: two players, fueled by the reaction of a gathered crowd, insulting each other in rhyme. The more ingenious the insult, the better.

What Dollard had stumbled on—and breathlessly described in a psychoanalytic journal—was a tradition that influenced Langston Hughes in the 1920s, made Richard Pryor a legend in the 1970s, and continues to fuel rap beefs today: the dozens.

“The Dozens is a pattern of interactive insult which is used among some American Negroes,” Dollard reported, in the first known article written about the street-rhyme combat typically touched off by two little words: yo’ mama. “The jests fly—about infidelity, though each seems a faithful husband—about impotence, though both are apparently adequately married and have children—about homosexual tendencies, although neither exhibits such to public perception.” Not to mention mothers, sisters, and girlfriends being stupid, raunchy, or just plain old ugly.

In “The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama,” writer, musician, and blues scholar Elijah Wald traces the comic and profane arc of the dozens clear through African-American culture—through rural works songs and the competitive jamming of jazz masters, through Mississippi barrelhouse songs and the iconic literature of the Harlem Renaissance. “No one has attempted a serious historical insult mapping of the United States,” Wald cautions in his book, and yet “The Dozens” ambitiously charts such a geography, outlining a heritage of verbal smack-downs from West African insult games to “Welcome Back, Kotter,” from jump-rope rhymes to rapper Grandmaster Flash to YouTube. Along the way, Wald’s underlying argument emerges with its own distinct challenge: It’s precisely the raw, filthy, unprintable essence of the dozens that makes it so important to preserve.

The dozens as American art form: No, your mama! - The Boston Globe






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