Word: rap
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...stands for maximum cool, part of the patter of a complex, sometimes convoluted, urban street culture that includes rap music, graffiti art and dancing that goes by a couple of generic styles and several specific names. Like spray-painted murals down the side of a New York City subway, or a ghetto blaster carried on a shoulder broadcasting 130 beats a minute all over a Bronx street, this subculture, nicknamed hip hop, is about assertiveness, display, pride, status and competition, particularly among males. Clothes are not only a part of this offhand cultural statement; they are a kind of uniform...
...shows signs of traveling well. Groups like The Bronx's Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five tour the country, and some new wave nightspots have devoted evenings to the new street music where post-punkers can check out the sartorial flash of the hip hoppers. There are already rap clubs in London, and last summer's No. 1 song on the German charts was a bit of Euro-rap called Der Kommissar...
...black teen-agers have a way of working themselves off the streets and into closets all over town, just as the work of high-fashion designers becomes assimilated into a more generalized style. Fashion does not just waft down to the streets. It also comes up from there. In rap style you find not only a retro-replay of the past and a sometimes ironic comment on it, but also a fast back alley to the future...
...uptown kids dress to chill, they turn themselves out like some wild amalgam of Cab Galloway going for broke and Isaac Hayes going to a gogo. That is inaccurate, but it does have one small home truth: musicians, more than anyone else, set the style, just as, this minute, rap music is setting the beat...
Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays...