He does have some flow and I dig his tone and as far as it goes; I think I could dig it, could follow 'em.

I think the last album I listened through in full was DAM's debut, Dedication. Arabic is a nice langauge to rap in, very physical sounding.

opened a bunch of threads and replied to the wrong one.

HIP HOP IS GOOD. I PREFER THE '90S TO ANY OTHER ERA

UH...

I don't think I'm all that impressed with any of the Odd Future collective, even the highlights (ES, TTC). It just feels so damn underwhelming.

What's the oldest hip hop song that you like? How far back can you go with it and still call it hip hop?

1979-1980.

Both Blondie's "Rapture" and The Sugarhill Gang's "Rappers Delight" are some of the earliest existing produced hip-hop songs.

Oh. I guess I knew that already, just wondering if there were any more. Is that as far back as it goes? Rapping goes back even further, doesn't it?

It does, but not within recorded music (or at least contemporary music that was recorded before '79), I admit I don't know much of it outside that it evolved from disco, electro and beat poetry of the era.

I like to go back even further than that into history (thanks to music!) and try to find instances of rapping that happened by chance somehow. There was a type of wordsmith from the 1950s called a beatnik who would make rhymes and then they would go onstage and recite their rhymes while being backed by a band playing music behind them. I've found several instances of rapping in 1950s recorded music. I don't know what else you'd call it, it's not singing. I suppose it would be called prototypical rapping if it came out before the Seventies?

If you want to liken beat poetry done by beatniks to hip-hop rapping, then I suppose it's not that much of a far cry. But like I said beat poetry, electro and to a lesser extent disco were the instrumental building blocks of hip-hop. But do understand that rapping as a technique is so rhythmically dominating and at times complex to say it's the same as spoken word and beat poetry; though it does take heavy influences (especially conscious hip-hop) from the latter of the two. It is pretty much musical fact that beat poet and soul musician Gil Scott-Heron heavily influenced hip-hop musicians and lyricists (Kanye sampled Comment #1).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGaRtqrlGy8