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Preferred term

rap: the genre  

Definition

  • Rap music first gained commercial visibility with the SugarHill Gang's “Rapper's Delight” (1979), but it had been circulating locally in private tapes and public performances since the early 1970s. Currently the music genre arguably most widely associated with African American performers, it owes its origins to practices of the African diaspora, though not all of them, strictly speaking, African American: toasts (from both the United States and Jamaica), disc jockey incantations, and earlier artists such as the Last Poets all contributed to some strands of early rap music. [Source: Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society; Rap: The Genre]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/rap:_the_genre

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