The Devil’s Music?
The term hip hop was not found in any books until 1976, in a book titled, “The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues.”
While reading pieces of this book, I realized that it’s not about hip hop, but about the blues era of music and black culture. The contents page of the book features a lot of language used to describe African American culture, including words which would not be acceptable for me to use today.
Interestingly enough, the term “hip hop” is not described in this book at all, which makes me think that it was a term used, but not often written about. Or, it may have had a double meaning of a sort. The first quote about is seems to use the word quite lightly as it says” Rap and hip hop, an explosively percussive and urgent range of sounds fed by new electronic technologies and the urban rage of the ghetto, erupted from the youth of the Bronx and Harlem in the late 1970s” (Page 238). That quote tells me a lot about this genre of music, and also a lot about the culture it holds behind it. The next page of the book talks about how should and hip hop were trying to become the new swing beat, and be the newest music fad of the time period.
It’s a very interesting genre and one I never seemed to know much about.