In Brazil, the great composer and aesthete of MPB, Lincoln Olivetti, drank from the endless well of inspiration that was Nile Rogers to create the Brazilian version of The Sugarhill Gang’s hit. Both were, respectively, Rap versions of “Genius of Love”, by Tom Tom Club and “Funky Sensation”, by Gwen McCrae. Hyde and “Jazzy Sensation”, by Afrika Bambaataa & The Jazzy 5. Little by little, other artists followed Sugarhill’s formula, resulting in songs like “Genius Rap”, by Dr. Criticism and musical preference aside, one thing is true: although the first phonographic record of Rap music appeared a few months earlier with Fatback's “King Tim III”, “Rappers Delight” reached more places it introduced the world to an art form that was yet obscure to many. “Rappers Delight” may have had a commercial appeal, but it was also a timeless piece of music.
This formula was embodied in Rap’s beginnings on vinyl with “Rapper’s Delight”, by The Sugarhill Gang, which contained elements from the hit “Good Times”, by Chic. Electro Rap, for example, can be defined as a musical cycle that was a step forward from the “Old School Rap” aesthetic, which occurred within the sphere of Hip-Hop between the late 1970s to the early 1980s, primarily in New York City.įrom 1979 to 1982, Rap was made by live studio bands, incorporating Rap versions of other successful genre-bending songs as their backdrop. Cycles in music, much like cycles in cinema, are located within specific periods in a limited time-frame. According British author Stephen Neale, styles are transitory and historical phenomena that, in some way, suffer periodic transformations and can be dominated by repetition. In principle, it’s difficult to comprehend Electro as one style or one genre of music due to the myriad of concepts that sprung from it in the last forty years. Bit by bit, scenes mingled to the point where a record of the style might be perceived as containing tracks from either of its tangents.
The early scene from 1982-1983 houses the largest number of productions related to pure Electro and Electro Funk, while 1984-1985 was marked by the rise of Electro Rap.
To comprehend it, its development and its particularities, we must take into account its historical context between the early to late 1980s, when it made way for the rise of complementary scenes, distinct phases and peculiar moments. Meanwhile in the United States, singles like “Electrophonic Funk", by Shock in 1981, hinted at the direction Black Music would take in the years to come the group Elektrik Funk even incorporated the novelty into its own name.Įlectro eventually branched out in many directions over time. Later on, the japanese Ryuichi Sakamoto (member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra) launched the song “Riot In Lagos” in 1980 and, the following year, the German group Kraftwerk launched “Computer World”, wich contains the song “Numbers”, with its minimalist and timeless beat these records that spoke the language of the future and laid the foundation for this musical style. However, the album that drove the development of this new rhythm was “The Man-Machine”, conceived by Kraftwerk in 1978, with the opening song for the album, “The Robots”, as the main track. And Although Electro acquired an identity from the intersection with Hip-Hop that occurred in the United States, Europe had its “Electro Wave” brought by Italo Disco experimentalists, Synth-pop enthusiasts and Electronic Music aesthetes like Art of Noise. But before the classic made its presence known, songs like “You’re The One For Me", by the legendary D Train, and “Thanks To You", by the US-American group Sinnamon, were already drafting an Proto-Electro aesthetic within Black Music, incorporating elements of the sound when the term “Electro” was still uncommon. The fusion of Electro and Hip-Hop took shape in 1982 via the classic by Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force, “Planet Rock”, now considered the style’s birth certificate in the United States.