Rap’s Heart Beats Strong as Ever

Like rock and punk before it, rap is an art form that was left for dead only minutes after its birth.

The new album “In tha Beginning . . . There Was Rap,” on which today’s hottest rap stars revisit (and in some cases reinterpret) early rap hits, shows how wrong that early thinking was, and how vibrant the music continues to be. Among the artists featured on the collection, which entered the national sales chart at No. 15 this week: the Wu-Tang Clan, Master P and Sean “Puffy” Combs.

From the time in the mid-’70s when turntable deejays in South Bronx playgrounds had the bright idea of mixing two copies of an instrumental drum break to extend a groove indefinitely, and other kids started rhyming words over those rhythms to elevate the spirit of the boogie, critics have been saying that rap was nothing but a passing fad. It was bad disco, it was the degenerate art of street thugs. It wasn’t even real music.

Against all odds, despite the parodies and the television commercials that accented the novelty of the music, rap is now widely viewed as the most definitive and influential musical form of the last 20 years. Not only are some of the biggest-selling records on the charts this year rap songs, but many of the most successful rock groups also incorporate hip-hop techniques. The influence can be heard in everything from Beck’s offbeat lyrical style and quirky beats to the dark, brooding tempos sustaining the vocals of Fiona Apple and Portishead’s Beth Gibbons.

Not that rap doesn’t still suffer from certain stigmas. With rappers going beyond sampling to lift entire old hits as the foundations for records (Puff Daddy’s use of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” in “Been Around the World,” the Firm’s reworking of Teena Marie’s “Square Biz” for “Firm Biz”), there are those who say the music has lost its creative edge.

And some say the problems with rap today run even deeper. The field has been jarred by the shooting deaths of 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., the imprisonment of Death Row Records titan Suge Knight for parole violations, and a reported federal investigation of alleged money laundering and racketeering at Death Row and possibly other rap labels.

Amid all this, it’s been getting harder to say that simple beats and rhymes and having a good time are what rap music is all about.

So, “In tha Beginning” arrives at what may be a crucial time in the music’s history, and the collection may do much to remind the pop world of just how much rap has contributed.

The album unites East Coast and West Coast, old school and new school in a dynamic package that looks at rap’s past while pointing a way to its future.

It brings the music away from the booming Jeep system and back to the dance floor, all the while proving that rap’s best songs are legitimate compositions that can be passed around and reinterpreted without losing any of their spirit or meaning.

The goal in the album isn’t necessarily to improve on the original songs--just to tweak them a little bit to update the flow.

“In tha Beginning” starts off with the RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Method Man--from the Wu-Tang Clan--doing a spirited rendition of Run-DMC’s “Sucka M.C.’s,” and the 1982 lyrics sound surprisingly up to date. It’s interesting how natural and contemporary Run’s line about “champagne, caviar and bubble baths” sounds rolling off Method Man’s tongue. At its heart, rap is all about rough-and-tumble kids from the ghetto talking about their neighborhood. They are statements of self-affirmation and aspiration.

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “F--- Tha Police,” Puff Daddy’s “Big Ole Butt” and Master P’s “6 N’ Tha Mornin’ ” take fewer chances, but the trio of songs prove that the originals, by N.W.A., LL Cool J and Ice-T, respectively, were great songs whose appeal hasn’t died.

But the soul of “In tha Beginning” is found in four tracks: “Rapper’s Delight,” featuring the Def Squad’s Erick Sermon, Redman and Keith Murray; Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Freaky Tales” (originally done by Too $hort); Too $hort’s “I Need a Freak” (by Sexual Harassment); and Cypress Hill’s “I’m Still #1” (KRS-One).

It’s one thing to remake certain songs--it’s another to make them so good that they feel better than the originals.

Pound for pound, the most exhilarating hip-hop moment of the year may be the reworking of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” That song was the first worldwide rap smash, and the kind of good-time record that always makes you recall the first time you came across its bouncy charm.

The exuberance you hear as the Def Squad runs through its favorite verses recalls the days before rap became a business, when the music still belonged to the streets, not to conglomerates.

Hip-hop was the culture, and rap was the music--being part of it was like having a second job. You were almost too busy spinning on your back on cardboard or learning a rhyme to worry about whatever problems existed. Rap was an escape, not always the bleak reflection.

As “In tha Beginning” shows, the party spirit of rap--the movement of the body, the nodding of the head, the stomping of the feet--is the secret of the music’s survival. As long as that doesn’t change, it will never die.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

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“In tha Beginning

. . . There Was Rap”

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