by Pat Boardman

Created on: April 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 15, 2007

Rap Music is a contradiction in terms. Classifying Rap and Hip-Hop under the category of music is stretching the definition most generously and it's unfair to people with talent who can actually play an instrument or sing. This article outlines the roots of this billion-dollar industry that has such a wide audience despite the fact that it's not music. Music is an art form using melody, instrumentation, and lyrics if there are singers. Musicians work with scales, key signatures, and time signatures when their techniques are applied.

Iambic Tetrameter in poetry is the simplest form of rhyme scheme. It's also the mainstay of rap; you may have noticed the similarity of rap lines to the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in which the second and fourth line rhyme in each stanza. That is what rap has become in the last two decades: an urban competition for power and glory where four or five overdressed baggy-pants gangsters with toques skip as they come out on stage and take turns bending down to a camera making identical hand moves and spitting into their microphones to a drum machine. Anyone who's been under stage lights will attest to the fact that the heat is unbearable under your clothes, made worse by the strain of playing.

Most pop music styles fade out after the crowds find fresh new concepts, but the rap phenomenon goes on because of the infinite number of young people who see this as a way to escape the surroundings of poverty without going through the unpleasant necessities of work or education. In the current form we see rap's followers take a step backward; a violent obscene attempt to bring back racial hatred as the young people define themselves as being on the other side of the social fence that the previous four generations worked so hard to knock down. The majority of black people are satisfied that they have integration, civil rights, and a chance to be private citizens who have a chance to focus on something other than skin color. No one should forget the crimes of the past, but pushing on to a better future is the path to take - parents know this better than anyone; their efforts to reach the middle class were too painful to see it all erased by overfed youngsters trying to act as avengers using society as a scapegoat for perceived injustices without even knowing how rap started.

The beginnings of dirges, work songs, the Blues, and Black American Folk music appeared when slaves in the cotton fields would establish a call-and-answer rhythm to ease their

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