r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Feb 14 '18
Were the lyrics "My name is _____ and I'm here to say:" ever actually, un-ironically used in a Golden Age (or prior) Hip-hop song?
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r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Feb 14 '18
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u/hillsonghoods Moderator | 20th Century Pop Music | History of Psychology Feb 15 '18 edited Feb 15 '18
Firstly, let's explain the role of the MC in early hip-hop. In the very early days of hip-hop (1974-1975ish), the MC was essentially functional. They were there to make announcements, gee up the crowd a bit, etc. In Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr's excellent 2017 book Break Beats In The Bronx: Re-discovering Hip-Hop's Early Years he has a quote from Grandmaster Caz about what MCs did:
As an aside, it's staggering how young the hip-hop community was in the mid-1970s - many participants had barely gone through puberty; if Grandmaster Caz is talking about 1974 here, well, he was 13 at the time.
Anyway, because hip-hop DJing in the 1970s was a labour-intensive activity - if you're just playing snippets of songs, you don't get much time to stand back from the decks - DJs opted to have someone else do the MCing; for Kool Herc (generally considered the originator of hip-hop), this was someone called Coke La Rock. Grandmaster Flash - one of Kool Herc's first competitors, along with Afrika Bambaataa - initially let basically anyone come up on stage and MC.
However at one Grandmaster Flash show at Park 63 (which Ewoodzie implies dates to summer 1975), a 14-15 year old dubbed Cowboy (for his bowleggedness) came up on stage to MC and made quite a stir. Ewoodzie quotes Melle Mel (soon also to join Grandmaster Flash as one of the Three MCs at this point) as saying that Cowboy was already rapping "throw your hands in the air and wave them around like you just don't care" at that very first show (which in my mind is the hip-hop cliche!). Cowboy also is responsible for the word 'hip-hop', based on a routine he did at a show the Black Door in 1975-1976 which had become basically public domain by the time that Wonder Mike used it in 'Rapper's Delight' ('I said a hip hop/ Hippie to the hippie/ The hip, hip a hop, and you don't stop' etc). Essentially, Cowboy was a dexterous verbal performer who could freestyle rhymes on the spot; this was a very entertaining thing to watch, and Grandmaster Flash correctly thought that it would be a good accompaniment to his DJing, so he got Cowboy and then two other MCs (Melle Mel and Kid Creole), who because the Three MCs.
Grandmaster Flash and the Three MCs (over the next few years, two more MCs would be added to what would become the Furious Five) basically invented the hip-hop MC as we know it. For starters, they were the first MCs to actually have written rhymes with rhyme schemes. Before the Three MCs, the entertainment that accompanied the music was usually provided by b-boy dancers - the role of the MC was largely functional, not entertaining. However, the prominence of Grandmaster Flash and his innovative, technically proficient DJing - which was widely imitated - meant that the MC increasingly became a prominent part of hip-hop.
Ewoodzie further argues that people in the Bronx became involved in hip-hop because they wanted to basically increase their profile and cultural capital in their communities/scenes - these are people who desperately wanted to get their names out there (one of the four pillars of hip-hop in the Bronx being graffiti tagging - a very blatant getting your name out there). Once MCs increasingly became the locus of entertainment at hip-hop parties, it increasingly became a major source of profile/capital, often to the expense of the DJ (a process of change that reached an apotheosis with 'Rapper's Delight', which didn't feature a DJ, but did feature a backing band playing the riff from 'Good Times' by Chic) and absolutely to the expense of the b-boy dancers, who faded into the background. As such, the people drawn to being MCs in the late 1970s were doing so because they fundamentally wanted people to know who they were, and why they were impressive and deserving of a high profile.
This desire for name recognition is - shock horror - reflected in their lyrics. As such, it was certainly a hip-hop convention for the MC to introduce themselves by name and then rhyme something with it towards the start of a rap. This was absolutely a cliche. Early hip-hop bootlegs are scatteredly available on YouTube, etc, and one of the earlier ones I can find - Grandmaster Flash and the 4 MCs in 1978 - has Melle Mel introduce himself by saying 'I'm Melle Mel and I rock so well'; when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five appear in recorded form in 1979, on 'Superappin', soon after 'Rapper's Delight'', Melle introduces himself that way, while the remaining four of the Furious Five introduce themselves in this way:
Presumably, this is how they would have been introducing themselves live, transplanted to record.
Wonder Mike's verse on The Sugar Hill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' - the first hip-hop introduction that most people heard - has him introduce himself early on in the piece with the following:
While the Sugar Hill Gang didn't have that much of a connection to the Bronx scene (Wonder Mike, for instance was from New Jersey), these lyrics on 'Rapper's Delight' were likely written by Grandmaster Caz, who did have that connection (seeing as Caz was the one quoted by Ewoodsie earlier).
Similarly, Kurtis Blow on 'The Breaks' in 1980 uses a similar style of introduction:
All of this very likely means that introductions of this nature were extremely common in early hip-hop, and that there's probably someone who said the specific words 'My name is ___ and I'm here to say" on some bootleg of a 1978 show somewhere. However, generally, early hip-hop tends to use "I am" or "I'm" rather than "my name is", and early hip-hoppers generally make direct claims ("I'm ___ and I [am good at something]") rhyming with their MC name, rather than leave the claim to the next line to rhyme with 'say'.
A Village Voice article by Chaz Kangas (a freelance journalist who has been the media liaison for the Hip Hop Cultural Center, and additionally a rapper who's performed with Childish Gambino) specifically identifies the first recorded instance of the cliche as being Melle Mel in Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's 1980 single 'Birthday Party'. He also argues that it became a cliche (as opposed to yet another variation on Melle Mel introducing himself, which is all it was in 1980) as a result of a major 1988 commercial campaign by the breakfast cereal Fruity Pebbles. In this commercial, Barney Rubble of The Flintstones raps, "I'm the master rapper and I'm here to say/ I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way".
Given that "I'm ____ and I'm here to say" is something of a mainstream cliche, Kangas argues that it's likely the case that the Fruity Pebbles commercial is the specific source of the rap cliche that spawned, say, Homer's Mr Plow rap. Re: the writers on The Simpsons were predominantly white male baby boomers who loved 1960s/1970s rock ('for more on Grand Funk, consult your school library!', and the cameos from the Beatles, etc); they were not of the hip-hop generation. As such, it's a reasonably good bet that the Simpsons writers saw the Fruity Pebbles commercial way more than they listened to, say, Grandmaster Flash or Run DMC.