The Art of Storytelling: Hip-Hop Edition
Pens, notepads and rhymes.
Storytelling
noun
The activity of telling or writing stories.
adjective
Relating to the telling or writing of stories.
The origins of hip-hop music can be traced back to the 13th-century West African Griot tradition. The Mandinka Empire—encompassing Mali, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Côte D'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Gambia—was a brief sovereignty largely celebrated thanks to its influence on 21st Century African folk musicians.
Griots are gifted historians who preserve African heritage through oral traditions like storytelling, poetry, music and performance. Usually accompanied by the Kora—a traditional string instrument—Griots would create songs designed to evoke emotions and memories about the past, different initiations, rites of passage and family heritage.
Griot art travelled through generations and eventually made its way to the Caribbean, inspiring the 'toasting' tradition of Jamaican music where DJs would rhythmically talk over a riddim to rowse the crowd. By way of Caribbean immigrants like DJ Kool Herc, this oral tradition settled in 1970s New York. Finding a home on the bustling street corners and Big Apple block parties, hip-hop was funnelled through vintage sound systems: etching rap's first evolutionary change into history.
Hailed as one of the godfathers of hip-hop, Herc introduced his revolutionary style of DJ'ing by fading between two records on a turntable to extend the instrumental breakdowns, recreating anything from a steady boom bap to convulsive polyrhythms.
While Herc held it down on the decks, Coke La Rock—credited as hip-hop's first-ever emcee—would lay short rhymes and shout-outs on the mic. Under thick curls of cannabis smoke, crowds would go crazy at the drop of his phrases like "hotel, motel, you don't tell, we won't tell" and "you rock and you don’t stop". Herc and Coke were the blueprints for other DJ and emcee crews that would soon erupt from the Bronx, inspiring many innovators such as Grandmaster Flash, Whodini, Sugar Hill Gang and Big Daddy Kane, amongst others.
Separately, fellow pioneer, turntablist and producer Afrika Bambaataa began theorising hip-hop as a culture, and referred to the rapper as a 'postmodern Griot'. So, what happens when an oral tradition of the past is preserved and reimagined through the cultural lens of hip-hop?
Much like the Griots of West Africa, rappers often documented their daily lives through rhymes, detailing salacious rendezvous, gun-slinging joyrides or near-death experiences that lead to some form of enlightenment. Some go as far as conjuring fictional characters to tell these stories, allowing them to step outside of themselves and into an entirely different world generated by their limitless imagination.
Rakim let his internal rhyme schemes and golden ink spill onto wax for the 1986 Eric B. classic Paid in Full. However, it wasn't until 1988 that we received an official masterclass on rap storytelling by none other than Slick Rick on the album The Great Adventures of Slick Rick.
For the 12-track odyssey, he adopted a singsong cadence and manipulated his vocal pitch to portray his alter egos like MC Ricky D, The Ruler, and the whimsical female characters who were usually the brunt of his painfully explicit rhymes. Despite Rick's crafty use of humour and wit, the clarity of his narratives meant that listeners could still recognise the fatal realities of poverty, police brutality and the relentless pursuit of fast money that permeated the inner city neighbourhoods.
No one could tell a tale quite like he did, and the famous "Children's Story" might be the most disastrous of them all. He narrates the story of a 17-year-old street hustler who attempts to rob an undercover detective and every decision that follows only brings him a step closer to his demise, triggering a tsunami of guilt and fear as tensions rise.
The overall tone of the album merged a child-like curiosity with ripe wisdom gained through survival, and to this day it remains an essential point of reference when evaluating the evolution of storytelling in rap music.
Storytelling opens a portal for which abstract concepts can be explored, encouraging artists to bring forth their best world-building mechanics. Slick Rick's legacy parted the way for artists like OutKast, the lyrical soothsayers who fashioned their entire careers from a desire to tell stories. Their level of avant-garde thinking meant they could challenge the genre, style and aesthetic specifications of hip-hop in the early 90s.
Their debut record, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was a powerful introduction which set them on a path to redefining rap music via creative freedom. With SP-1200-style drum loops, blazing funk riffs and comic tongue twisters—OutKast's first album was fuelled by innovation. Through self-exploration, they began an inward journey while looking outward towards the cosmos and soon they returned to Earth as mad scientists with the gift of ATLiens.
The duo were like two sides of the same coin with André expressing his emotive nature, while Big Boi maintained the persona of a hustler who occasionally tapped into his vulnerability. Over the foreboding vocal hums and the sleepy kick and snare of "Babylon", Big Boi reflects on the loss of his aunt, saying: “people don't know the stress I'm dealing with day to day / speaking about the feelings I’m possessing for Reneé”, meanwhile Andre's lustful thinking leads to wandering hands in the heat of passion.
ATLiens highlight "Elevators (Me & You)" saw the duo trade stories of their penniless days spent writing rhymes, pushing to be recognised for their art. The elixir of hypnotic blues lures listeners into a trance, and by the time André's fourth verse kicks in, his words hit the pits of our subconscious. He recounts a conversation with a fan who wonders what flashy items André has to show following his newfound fame, but despite the appearance of success, he hits him with the truth that he still has to work just as hard as the average man to make ends meet.
The visuals illustrated OutKast's extra-terrestrial nature as they emerged from the rainforest on a red and blue planet, leading a tribe of other beings away from captors and into a promised land covered with Egyptian pyramids, a symbol of returning to one's origins. In conversation with Yo! MTV Raps, André gave a breakdown of its imagery saying: "It was all about symbolism. The scenes where we're going through the jungle, that represents that we're on a journey. The scenes where we're meditating, that's like we're trying to get our inner spirit right".
They incorporated space iconography—referencing the stars, aliens and the planets—as a vehicle to communicate their experiences with masculinity, grief, fame, Black rights in the south, spiritual oneness and the journey of understanding the meaning of love. OutKast stimulated our imagination with concepts that aligned them to the frequency of other space travellers like George Clinton and Sun Ra and his omniversal Arkestra. Bear in mind, that this was also the era of Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, Lil' Kim's Hard Core, Nas' It Was Written Mobb Deep's Hell On Earth, and many others whose timeless albums each occupied unique spaces within American music.
It's impossible to provide an accurate picture of hip-hop's evolution without first peering into the sonic multiverse of Daniel Dumille, better known as the masked villain MF DOOM. DOOM was truly a hip-hop orator who adopted a number of pseudonyms like Viktor Vaughn, the three-headed space dragon King Ghidra/Geedorah, the pre-masked Zev Love X, as well as his beatmaker alias Metal Fingers DOOM; each character existed in their own parallel realities, taunting their enemies and plotting world domination through polysyllabic rhymes.
Although DOOM never stepped beyond the veil of his mask, he had a way of letting us into his world of emotions and often grieved his late brother Dingilizwe 'DJ Subroc' Dumile in between low-fidelity comic book skits as seen on the 1999 classic Operation: Doomsday.
DOOM wasn't just a phenomenal storyteller on the mic, but he possessed an impeccable set of tools that allowed him to thread narratives within the actual music by way of sampling. In the self-produced Operation: Doomsday, some of his samples were much more intricate and subtle than others as he borrowed from an expansive range of styles to continue the story of a supervillain. He drew the curtains back for the opening act "The Time We Faced Doom (Skit)" which clipped some vocals from the 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon. He introduces his slurred jazzy beats with a speakeasy rendition of Sade's "Kiss Of Life" with vocals from Pebbles The Invisible Girl, which he hardened with an addictive boom bap.
For the track "Tick, Tick…", DOOM takes the closing strings arrangement of "Glass Onion" by The Beatles through a loop that alternates in tempo, unable to land on a steady pulse but it's a playground of internal rhyme schemes for DOOM and MF Grimm. The album reached another level of theatrics when he invited one of his alter egos King Ghidra over for a conversation on "Red and Gold" which borrowed from the sultry 80s hit “Shoot Em Up Movies” by The Deele. The sample tells its own story of a protagonist who goes to watch a Western flick and ends up falling in love in the movie theatre, but DOOM spins it on its head with a tale of past murders and those he suspects are yet to happen during what he described as "wig twisting season". In DOOM's own words, King Ghidra is an "etheric being—straight reptilian" who frequently channelled information to him from the cosmos.
This eventually inspired lyricists like Nas and J. Cole who would later adopt this similar method of expressing opposing perspectives through alter egos. Nas assumed the role of the vocally synthesised Scarlett for his 2004 double-disc Street's Disciple on "Sekou Story" and "Live Now" for storytelling purposes. kiLL Edward appears on two songs from Cole's KOD album and was created as a figure of his subconscious mind or a personification of his inner turmoil in regard to his relationship with his abusive stepfather.
In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, DOOM speaks of the essentiality of his characters to complete a story: "The idea of having different characters is really to get the storyline across. Coming from one particular character all the time makes the story boring. The more, the better; this way I can come from one point of view or another point of view, they might even disagree on certain things. A lot of times in hip-hop especially, artists get pigeonholed so I look at it like I'm a writer. Everything just flows better when I've got multiple characters to portray the story."
“The wizardry of MF DOOM meant that he could build an eternal soundscape that inspired generations of artists to create from a place of curiosity and freedom.”
In simpler terms, under the alias Zev Love X, he says: "now use your imagination, just a smidgen," on "PeachFuzz" by KMD.
The Notorious B.I.G. was another masterful storyteller. Sadly, because of the profanity and violent subject matter laced through B.I.G.'s work, sample clearance issues caused numerous reworks. The hood love story "Me And My Bitch" borrowed from Minnie Riperton and Stevie Wonder's angelic opus "Take A Little Trip", while the Life After Death jewel "I've Got A Story To Tell" spliced together the opening drums of Al Green's "I'm Glad You're Mine" overlaid with luscious melodies from a record by the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider titled "Belladonna". Co-producers Buckwild and Chucky Thompson accurately recreated the instrumentation to give Biggie the classic and innovative sound he desired.
The depth of storytelling runs more profound than most people realise, and it has served different intentions as rap music continues its advance through the ages. Rappers have used storytelling to explore the effects of oppression on individuals within the Black community.
For example, in 1991, Tupac created the character Brenda in the visceral "Brenda's Got A Baby" and delivers the story of a poor young girl who is non-consensually impregnated, rejected from her home and left to fend for herself and a new-born baby; in a desperate plea for survival, she deserts the baby and turns to prostitution to earn some money. The collision of Tupac's candid bars with the vocal's melancholic soul brings us to the conclusion of Brenda's murder. Most argue that it was based on a story Pac read in a newspaper, but could this also have been the reflection of many other young mothers?
Kendrick Lamar shares his observation of young girls falling into the traps of prostitution in the prolific "Keisha's Song (Her Pain)", taken from Section.80. In an interview with MTV; he shared that the track was indeed based on a personal story of a friend, which intensifies the chilling atmosphere of subdued melodies and pressing drums. Kendrick reflects on the surrounding issues that contributed to Keisha's demise, including the lack of love and care in her home life. In cases like these, storytelling becomes a medium for social commentary which was also the primary duty of an appointed Griot.
Rappers, poets, musicians, writers and artists form a long-standing lineage of orators, continuing the practice of storytelling which the West African Griots first demonstrated. Songs and stories carry information we receive from the past and send into the future. Through this, we come to understand that history isn't a linear occurrence.
Sacred traditions of the past will always find their way into present paradigms of self-expression, preserving the art of storytelling.
Listen to our playlist on Spotify below: