Timbaland (born March 10, 1971, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.) is an influential American producer and hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues performer who contributed to the chart-scaling success of a host of recording artists in the early 21st century.
Mosley grew up in Virginia with rappers Missy (“Misdemeanor”) Elliot and Magoo. At age 19, he began to learn how to use studio equipment under the direction of producer and musician DeVante Swing, whose mispronunciation of the shoe manufacturer Timberland resulted in a new name for his protégé. Timbaland’s inventive production skills were first evidenced on Aaliyah’s 1996 hit “One in a Million.” Soon afterward Timbaland signed with Blackground Records as both a solo act and part of the rap duo Timbaland and Magoo. In 1997 the two put out their first album, Welcome to Our World; featuring the contributions of Elliot and Aaliyah, along with the hit song “Up Jumps da Boogie,” it achieved platinum sales status.
By the late 1990s Timbaland had developed a signature sound that made him a much sought-after and often-imitated hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues producer. He used original beats—rather than samples—to create complex syncopated rhythms and complemented them with quiet background rapping or obscure sounds, such as a whinnying horse. With an uncanny knack for crafting commercially successful singles and albums, Timbaland produced hits for Jay-Z, Ginuwine, Elliot, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg. In the early 2000s Timbaland moved beyond the genres of hip-hop and rhythm and blues to produce albums for rock and pop stars, including Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Beck, Bjork, and Madonna. In addition to his notable work as a producer, Timbaland continued to release albums, both as a solo artist and in conjunction with Magoo. He created new record labels under the umbrella of Interscope—Beat Club and Mosley Music Group—and received three Grammy Awards for his work with Timberlake, on “SexyBack” (2006), “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows” (2007), and “Pusher Love Girl” (2013). He also earned a Grammy for his contributions to Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” (2013).
While there is some debate over the number of elements of hip-hop, there are four elements that are considered to be its pillars: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” (emceeing) or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and break dancing, or “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” Many also cite a fifth essential component: “knowledge of self/consciousness.” Other suggested elements include street fashion and language.
How did hip-hop get its name?
There are various explanations for the source of the term hip-hop. However, the most popular one involves Keith (”Keef Cowboy”) Wiggins, a member of the rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The rapper used the words hip/hop/hip/hop, imitating the sound of soldiers marching, in reference to a friend who had joined the army. According to some accounts, Kevin (”Lovebug Starski”) Smith was with Wiggins and helped create the phrase. Hip-hop was subsequently popularized in songs, notably the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”
Who are the founders of hip-hop?
While a number of people were influential in the creation of hip-hop, much credit is given to Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), a Jamaican immigrant who was the first major hip-hop disc jockey. At a Bronx party on August 11, 1973, he introduced the technique of playing the same album on two turntables and extending the drum section (which became known as the breakbeat). Many recognize this night as the birth of hip-hop. Other pioneering hip-hop deejays include Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. The three men are often called the “holy trinity” of early hip-hop.
What was the first major hip-hop song?
Although not the first hip-hop song, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) was considered the first significant single of the genre. Within weeks of its release, it became a chart-topping phenomenon and gave its name to a new genre of pop music. Part of its crossover appeal was attributed to its lighthearted lyrics, which were atypical of most rap songs at the time.
hip-hop, cultural movement that attained widespread popularity in the 1980s and ’90s and also the backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.
Origins and the old school
Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culturecomprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As the hip-hop movement began at society’s margins, its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and obfuscation.
Break dancingA B-boy break dancing in Washington Square Park, New York City, c. 1980s.
Graffiti and break dancing, the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colorful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol-like Campbell’s soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.
The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.
In the meantime, deejays developed new techniques for turntable manipulation. Needle dropping, created by Grandmaster Flash, prolonged short drum breaks by playing two copies of a record simultaneously and moving the needle on one turntable back to the start of the break while the other played. Sliding the record back and forth underneath the needle created the rhythmic effect called “scratching.”
Old-school foreverThe Sugarhill Gang performing at the Apollo Theater, Harlem, New York, March 9, 1990.
Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic histories of West African griots, talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent’s family). Other influences cited include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko Henderson; the Black power poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets; rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of rhythmized speech known as toasting.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious FiveAmerican hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five performing on the music television show The Tube, 1983.
Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill Gang’s song “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar Hill. Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name to a new genre of pop music. The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in “Rapper’s Delight.” These early MCs and deejays constituted rap’s old school.
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