MMStingray54 wrote:I think you guys may be confusing gangsta rap with hip hop.
Hip hop started in the 70s, often uses the drum break from James Brown's Funky Drummer (1970), played by Clyde Stubbefield, as its drum part. As with much R and B, soul and funk, there are some fantastic bass parts in hip hop (The Message - Grand Master Flash, Funkin for Jamaica are examples), and as a bass player it has certainly influenced my style.
It has influenced mainstream styles like house, garage and 80s/90s pop.
As I say, I think you're mixing up gangsta rap with hip hop - understandable - but it's like saying you don't like rock and roll because of the MC5 or some of Frank Zappa's more lyrically disgusting period.
Assuming that Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge, is correct, just had a very cursory glance at their hip hop page...
"In the 1970s, an underground urban movement known as "hip hop" began to develop in the South Bronx in New York City. It focused on emceeing (or MCing) over "breakbeats", house parties and neighbourhood block party events, held outdoors. Hip hop music has been a powerful medium for protesting the impact of legal institutions on minorities, particularly police and prisons.[30] Historically, hip hop arose out of the ruins of a post-industrial and ravaged South Bronx, as a form of expression of urban Black and Latino youth, whom the public and political discourse had written off as marginalized communities."
"By 1979 hip hop music had become a mainstream genre. It spread across the world in the 1990s with controversial "gangsta" rap."
Whilst there can be no doubt that the likes of Bernard Edwards from Chic came up with some killer bass lines - although I have always equated this group with funk and disco - I cannot stand any kind of rap, hip-hop (gangsta or otherwise). Nothing good has come out of this genre, as far as I can tell, but plenty of bad. And just about the only Blondie song that I don't like is 'Rapture' - ironic that they probably did more to bring it to the masses than all the 'artists' of the previous decade put together.
Interesting that 'Apache' seems to figure so significantly in the history of hip hop, but I'd say that this is more to do with the US #2 hit by Jorgen Ingmann than by the Shads' vastly superior UK #1 version, which I doubt made much of an impact in the South Bronx!
Sorry, but hip hop is all (c)rap to me. And I wear it as a badge of honour that I'm old and grumpy!!!!