Is ‘Rap Song’ a Misnomer?

The clock radio came to life, filling our once-silent bedroom with the sounds of news radio.
7:30 a.m.
I can never say that I thoroughly absorb everything that happens in these first hours of consciousness, but I will say that a number of the stories I’ve heard have piqued my interest, sending me off to my laptop computer with a question for the internet. Once or twice I have even looked up the specific story, because I needed the exact source, for whatever reason. (Then, there are also the times I just get excited to hear people I know, because I work at the classical sister station, and these folks are but down the hall from us. We share restrooms and a mailroom and a few other spaces.)

This morning, it was not a story that caught my ear, so to speak, but a song. At least they called it a song. The artist in question was rapping, and there was background music.
“That’s not a song, he’s not even singing,” I thought to myself. Then I caught myself- perhaps ‘song’ is yet the best word for it. This isn’t the first era in history composers have bent that standard definition into gray areas. Even ‘music’ itself has been challenged by the likes of John Cage. Scholars can’t decide amongst themselves if locrian mode “counts”. Then, we come back to the matter of sprechstimme.

Sprechstimme first appeared as the 19th century became the 20th, and is defined by the New Harvard as “A use of the voice midway between speech and song. In general, it calls for only the approximate reproduction of pitches and in any case avoids the sustaining of any pitch.” I wasn’t there, but I have a feeling that the first time this was introduced, it was considered weird. I giggled when the first recording of it was played for me. It doesn’t appear that it’s caught on terribly well, since we don’t see a lot of it used today (not that I’m certain we don’t see any…) I do have to wonder, though, if this could be considered the European/American venture that took us closest to the phenomenon of rap. Rap didn’t come to be until the mid-1970s and New Harvard tells me it “arose in the South Bronx in New York… with antecedents in black oral forms such as the “dozens” and “toasting” that can be traced back to the expressive culture of sub-Saharan Africa.” Did disparate subcultures come to the idea of ‘less-sing-y singing’ of their own accord and in different ways? Was it really an accident? Did sprechstimme prime us for rap? It sort of seems a natural progression to me, but it’s difficult to say without delving deeper into it. I’m not exactly a music scholar and would welcome input from anyone better-read than me. All I can tell you is that American ears had been bent to re-define song before rap ever was.

As to the question of song, I have always considered anything with lyrics a song (and considered Mendelssohn to be full of it). Never were pop lyrics more true than when the Wallflowers stated “a song ain’t a song until someone starts singin’!” New Harvard backs me pretty effectively on this one: “Song. A form of musical expression in which the human voice has the principal role and is the carrier of a text; as a generic term, any music that is sung; more specifically, a short, simple vocal composition consisting of melody and verse text. In this latter, narrower sense, song would exclude, for example, the ornate Baroque solo cantata or the extended opera aria.” (…and Bohemian Rhapsody.) Rap involves a human voice playing the principal role and carrying text, does it not? Since “singing” is “the use of the voice as a musical instrument with the mouth open (as distinct from humming)”, one could very well argue that the rhythmic speech of rap is, in fact, singing. This existence of singing would then make rap selections ‘songs’.

Once again, I stand corrected.
I still wonder about whether sprechstimme plays into this.
I’m still not a fan of rap, either.