Rap is Scat

Rap has been called a new art form.  It is not.  Rap is Scat.  Saying that rap is a new form of art is like making a stew and then selling it to people while telling them it is a new kind of food.  It is not; it is just a different recipe of stew.  A new recipe is indeed a new kind of stew, but it is not "new cooking."  There is nothing "new" about cutting up various vegetables and/or meat and cooking them for a while, then serving the mix.  Many recipes, in fact, are various forms of chopping up different items and serving them together.  Doing a new one of those is not making a new art form.  

Scat was a type of music where short rhyming verbal components were compiled as a finished product.  These components were assembled, and often the human voice was used in rhythmic formation--such as having the human voice serve as a percussion instrument (by providing a "beat").  Selling rap as a new kind of art because it involved short rhyming verbal components compiled as a finished product is not communicating truly about a thing.  People promoting such ideas may or may not have known they were just selling the products produced by new scat artists.  Whether or not they were lying is irrelevant; what is relevant is that they were wrong.  "Rap" is "scat."  

Consider Mel Tomé, Kurt Eilling, and Scatman John.  

Actually just a long-running form of jazz vocality, scat was, many decades later, repackaged as a new art form--rap.  This representation--re-presentation--can be likened to the way that a merchant may cause sales by saying a product is new and improved.  The product is not actually new; it is the same old product.  The marketing says it is new, but you shouldn't trust marketing (if you disagree, I have a great product to sell you.  It costs only a dollar and solves all your problems but you have to send me the money right now).  Like a deceptive cook selling customers a new recipe of stew while telling them he had discovered a brand new kind of food and the people franchised to sell that recipe were brilliant cooking geniuses who had invented a new kind of food, it was deceptive.  You should not be fooled; you should not believe that "rap" was a new art form.  It was just more stew, or rather, rap was just more scat.  

Rap did offer lyrics which referred much more often to violence and to the objectification of women.  This development of scat was often sold via artists who presented a certain kind of image, such as a skillful propensity for violence, an authoritative bearing, and the status of being able to engage in fricative physical activity with many women, often with their consent.  Presenting it as a new art form was a trick--it was just scat, decades later, being delivered by new artists who displayed a new image.  

The adoption and representation later of this form of scat as brand new rap by artists such as Vanilla Ice or Eminem was not them using for themselves a type of novel art form which they had discovered and repurposed, but in truth them just putting on a new scat show.  Them having done what they did was not them adapting a new type of music which was completely foreign to their culture, but them just playing scat, which was not at all foreign to their culture.  They were not stealing, borrowing, using, etc. that new type of music, but rather they were just like the original rap artists: more scat artists.

The deception--the marketing trick--of calling rap a new art form demonstrates how that type of trick was done before.  It is a simple matter to take a type of music--a series of artists presenting each their repertoire--and calling it brand new.  That is sad, because every new musical composition ever is by definition new.  Beethoven's fourth symphony was different than his third symphony, otherwise it would have just been another copy of his third symphony.  Thus it was new.  Beethoven having used a different kind of scale, a different progression of chords, and so on, does not mean he has discovered a new type of music (although dirty people may advertise the new symphony that way if they get to skimanage the proceeds i.e. if they get a commission).  Rather, he has just written a new symphony.  Focusing on the newness of new music is fine, but it becomes deceptive behavior when that newness is excessively emphasized, like making a show over a person taking a walk as having developed with each step a new step (Omigod!  That genius!  He's discovered this amazing way to get across those pebbles!).  Nothing new has occurred, of course, and yet fools can be led to marvel at the newness of each step.  Each step is a brand new thing in a way.  

Like someone selling snake oil as a brand new health sensation, what is being presented for sale is not in any way, shape, or form a new thing, but is an old thing presented in new wrapping.  The presentation of detailed chord sequences delivered in then-quick repetition--ragtime--was not an entirely new art form, but was just a new way of selling music.  It was new in the sense that its associated phenomenon was new, and it is quite certain that listed composers who had never before demonstrated even 10% of that compositional complexity (such as, for one, Scott Joplin) were being listed as having composed music to present that sort of music when they were actually just part of the show--presenting an image.  Like the frontmen for early rap, and "rap" throughout its history, it was very easy for people to dance and (for ragtime) play music without having created that music.  The acquisition and use by Jay Z of finding a notebook filled with someone else's gangster rap lyrics and presenting them as his own experiences with urban life is actually a duplication of much-earlier-occurring historical phenomena.  The presentation of an actor as a creator is normal.  It makes the show more exciting, and helps demonstrate the connection between the product and the image, as though a certain type of attitude creates a certain type of image.  

This is the same type of deceitful display--the shtick (schtick); the marketing trick--as has always been used by snake oil salesmen and other such types of sellers of such deceptive products, often claimed to be medical.  The ruse is old, and has been done many times before.  The use of a beat combined with authoritative lyrics has been claimed to be as a new thing before.  Think of rock music.  A fungible willingness to speak about (sing about) things which culture has prohibited (thereby suggesting it is socially deleterious toward which to adopt a positive attitude), such as "free love," has been done before.  It is how human groupings (societies) get broken up.  Building cultural notions that the creation of children and the fostering of human-growing relationships (child-raising; "family") are concepts which should be primarily personally pleasing, pleasurable, and emotionally fulfilling were presented in rock music as a good thing.  Just like with the early Romans knowing what had happened to Egypt and realizing there was a problem with notions of a common origin breaking down the Roman concept of being a Roman, and how important that concept was, older people felt that there was something wrong with rock music.  They very often couldn't put it into words very well, and as we all know now, the forces behind the desacralization of human-growing (child-raising and the family assaulted by many things, such as rock music) triumphed.  

In the same way, the obscene, violent, female-propertizing form of scat known as rap became quite popular.  Convincing most people that the anti-tiger-stone is not a brand new thing, but is a very old thing repurposed for sale, is not going to happen.  The image of very cool, very tough people carrying around that type of stone is a powerful one.