After the first official recorded rap of the Kool Herc & disco kind, the 1980's was just around the corner.

This decade saw the emergence of some new types of hiphop and rap vocal styles.One of the most important and influential was that of Run D.M.C.Their style of rap vocals and music with it's booming vocal delivery was shaped heavily by both the earlier funk/soul rooted hiphopers and rock music.With tracks such as "It's Like That" and "Hard Times" they created a music that strattled the fence between funk and rock, owing about as much to each.(Some rap in the 80's continued to be essentialy funk music in a different form).Later on they made a more overtly rock influenced track with Aerosmith (a group I don't particularily like).Following the path of Run D.M.C. other straight forward rap artists would emerge with a similar rock punch like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, sometimes with a even harder hitting sound.

It should be noted however that rock had infiltrated alot of rap before Run D.M.C, going back to it's underground days of the 70's.(I'm using "rock" in the more narrow use of the term, such as hard rock).The way it primarily happened in the 70's was through the use of soul and funk records such as Sly and the Family Stone (a group that played soul with a psychedelic rock flavour) and the often sampled sounds Of Parliament/Funkedelic who also owe some of their sound to psychedelic rock.Infact this last group was doing funk-rock in the early 70's, their early sound strongly shaped by the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and even Black Sabbath.And these early records of these P-Funk musicians could have easily have been used by the early days of unrecorded rap (but I can't prove this).Maceo Parker who played with both James Brown and the P-Funk crew has recorded some funk that has both jazzy saxaphones and obvious rock touches in the drumming--and I've heard this very kind of funky sound crop up in rap.So with these things in mind and how rap evolved with the likes of Run D.M.C, I think the later trend toward rap-rock was a very natural progression.

Another influential rap/hiphop sound that croped up in the 80's was electro-hiphop, which is also categorised under the electro or electro-funk label.One of it's originaters was Afrika Bambaataa, his most popular electro rap being 82's "Planet Rock" (which was one of my all time favourite music tracks in the early 80's).The sound was mostly created by mixing up funk/hiphop beats and rapping with the rhythmic "techno" type of sound that Kraftwerk began to do in the late 70's.Kraftwerk was an all electronic group that came from Germany.In the early/mid 70's they pioneered a very original "synth pop" sound, something that was linked to both earlier electronic artists and pop/rock melodies of some kind (but not really a rock band).By the late 70's when disco dance music was a rage, they began to do songs in a more rhythmic danceable feel yet in a beat all there own.This techno or proto-techno sound of Kraftwerk not only helped to shape 80's electro-hiphop, but in a more indirect way has contibuted to other rap sounds like Miami Bass and the Crunk music that became very popular this decade.

So that's some of my look at rap roots, coming from more of an old school guy (when it comes to rap).I've kind of lost track of alot of the new rap scene.