Rotating a Phonograph Record To and Fro

From A Glossary of Literary Terms, Ninth Edition, Abrams and Harpham (Wadsworth):

The most widely known and practiced performance poetry is rap, an element in hip-hop; the latter term since the 1980s has come to designate a cultural movement among urban African-American youths that originated in New York and was marked by distinctive clothing, graffiti, break dancing, and music, especially rap. The verbal component, technically speaking, consists of an irregular meter, in verse lines of variable length and a varying number of mainly sequential rhymes. “To rap” is slang for “to talk,” and rap verse is spoken, in a heavily stressed beat, over an accompaniment of bass, percussion, and sometimes other musical instruments. Often the accompaniment is punctuated by “scratching” (the sounds made by rotating a phonograph record to and fro on a turntable so that the needle moved back and forth in the groove) and by “sampling” (the insertion of fragments of recorded music). In the mode known as freestyling or battle-rapping, rap verses are improvised during performance, often in competitions between rival rappers. A rapper’s distinctive style is called his or her “flow.”

In its early years rap usually conveyed a contentious and anti-establishment message, and in the 1980s the genre came to be dominated by the highly aggressive form, originating on the West Coast, called gansta rap (“gangster rap”), which flaunted its transgressive stance against propriety, law, and conventional morality by celebrating violence, misogyny, homophobia, and a candid desire for material goods and sex. In recent years rap has achieved a remarkable and wide-ranging popularity.

Stephen Connolly, Film for Tom, 2005, Courtesy of Bloomberg SPACE, London