As you already know, Afro attached to anything signifies that it is a blend of African language,sound or feel to whatever it is merged with. Afro-rap is a blend of Afro vibes into rap music. No matter how refined the English of an Afro musician is, you will recognize the African vibes in the music. The Afro-rap is a genre of music that shouldn’t really work but it does. Aren’t you amazed at the way Olamide and Phyno can mix rhymes with their indigenous languages?
Afro-rap was born out of the conception that Africans can replicate other genres of music, but they cannot make music as dope as rap. This believe was dominant because rap is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates rhyme, and rhythmic speech. They felt Africans were too ghetto to produce rhymes, too clumsy and rough to produce rhyme pattern. Well, guess who has the special genre of rap music now!
Coincidentally, it is known that even rap music has its root from Africa. According to Wiki,
“…the origins of rap precede hip-hop culture. The earliest precursor to modern rap is the West African griot tradition, in which “oral historians”, or “praise-singers”, would disseminate oral traditions and genealogies, or use their rhetorical techniques for gossip or to “praise or critique individuals. Griot traditions connect to rap along a lineage of black verbal reverence through James Brown interacting with the crowd and the band between songs, to Muhammad Ali’s verbal taunts and the poems of The Last Poets. “
And you wonder why you need to incorporate slangs and street vernacular into this genre of music? Why there are many black rapper? Why the ghetto streets of America are into rap battles? You can smell a piece of Afro in rap any day.
Rap is not a poem. Yes it has rhymes and rhythm, but it is more than just all of that. Rap is all about delivery! It’s about the energy you put in it. Even if you are standing still during a rap delivery, your standing has to be swaggish. Rap is about the style, The way a rapper says a line of lyrics would be different from how a poet or a musician says it. It’s about the strength. When you listen to rap, you will notice that constant flow between anger and happiness. The need to deliver a message.
Rap is no ordinary music, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. So, if you ask me, I’d say you can call rap music the true Art. It does the purgation of emotions more than any other piece of music. Through rap, you can be angry, sad, worried, confrontational. You can tell a story through rap. Before, it was believed that rap couldn’t stand on it’s own as a form of music, that it had to be performed alongside hip pop. Of course it was wrong. Rap music can do completely fine on it’s own.
While rap is doing fine, Afro-rap is doing even better as a genre of music. We have the opportunity to be wowed with amazing flow in our own language, our own sound by our own people. Now, aren’t you glad you got to be part of the generation that embraces culture, color, skin, everything African even in music?
There are many Afro-rap legends that cannot go unnoticed. In no particular order, we have;
Olamide (Nigeria), Phyno (Nigeria), AKA (South Africa), Sarkodie (Ghana), Nasty C (South Africa), Falz (Nigeria), Khaligraph (Kenyan) and many others.
Finding solace in rap is gold, but finding it in Afro-rap is freaking diamonds!
