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Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels
i think the early rappers were more influenced by Jamaican deejays like U-Roy & I-Roy than by people like the Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron.
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That's an interesting point. I'm not sure if it goes for rappers but certainly the Jamaican born DJ Clive Campbell aka Kool Herc (who is generally considered to have been the founder of hip hop music) was massively influenced by the sound systems he heard during his childhood. It's inevitable that, along with listening to sound systems, he would've also heard toasting, although in the case of Herc this translated into a style of shouting simple phrases into the mic while he mixed, rather than 'rapping' as we now tend to think of it. I think the likelihood when it comes to the rise of rapping is that it was a fusion of influences that would include toasting, but also the 'dozens' tradition, artists like the Last Poets (who were definitely pivotal for someone like Afrika Bambaataa) and the disco 'shout out'.
I'm not sure about this, but I believe there must have been an influence from Latino culture too, especially on early latino MCs such as Prince Whipper Whip, Charlie Rock, etc. It's a real shame that so much of Hip Hop's latino tradition has been written out of the genre's history, which tends to present it as an almost exclusively 'black' genre - completely undermining the significance of early groups like The Mighty Force crew, The Mean Machine and the massively important Rock Steady Crew.
