Music

African-American music is an umbrella term given to a range of musics and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large and significant ethnic minority of the population of the United States. Many of their ancestors were originally brought to North America to work as enslaved peoples, bringing with them typically polyrhythmic songs from hundreds of black African ethnic groups across West and sub-Saharan Africa. With the convergence in the United States of peoples from different regions, multiple cultural traditions merged with influences from polka, waltzes and other European music. Later periods saw considerable innovation and change. African-American genres have been highly influential across socio-economic and racial groupings internationally meeting also with tremendous popularity on a global level. African-American music and all aspects of African American culture are celebrated during Black History Month in February of each year in the United States.

Hip Hop, Rap, and R&B are the most popular genres of music for African Americans in this period.

African-American rapper 2Pac had huge success in 1995 with his album Me Against The World, which was released while he was imprisoned for rape. He had further success after being released from prison, with his albums All Eyez on Me and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, and after his fatal shooting and death in Las Vegas in 1996, his politically-charged lyrics influenced many hip-hop artists and a big part of the African-American community.

Contemporary R&B, as the post-disco version of soul music came to be known as, remained popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Male vocal groups in the style of soul groups such as The Temptations and The O'Jays were particularly popular, including New Edition, Boyz II Men, Jodeci, Dru Hill, Blackstreet, and Jagged Edge. Girl groups, including TLC, Destiny's Child, and SWV, were also highly successful. TLC would go on to hold the title of the highest girl group with the highest selling female group album ever, with their 1994 album CrazySexyCool influencing creativity in many young women around the world.

Singer-songwriters such as R. Kelly, Mariah Carey, Montell Jordan, D'Angelo, and Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné! were also significantly popular during the 1990s, and artists such as Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, and BLACKstreet popularized a fusion blend known as hip-hop soul. The neo soul movement of the 1990s looked back on more classical soul influences and was popularized in the late 1990s/early 2000s by artists such as D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, India.Arie, Alicia Keys, and Musiq. According to one music writer, D'Angelo's critically acclaimed album Voodoo (2000) "represents African American music at a crossroads. To simply call it neo-classical soul would be to ignore the elements of vaudeville jazz, Memphis horns, ragtime blues, funk and bass grooves, not to mention hip-hop, that slip out of every pore of these haunted songs.

By the first decade of the 21st century, R&B had shifted towards an emphasis on solo artists with pop appeal, with Usher and Beyoncé being the most prominent examples. The line between hip-hop and R&B and pop became significantly blurred by producers such as Timbaland and Lil Jon and artists such as Missy Elliott and OutKast.

"Urban music" and "urban radio" are largely race-neutral today, terms which are synonymous with hip hop and R&B and the associated hip hop culture which originated in New York City.[citation needed] The term also reflects the fact that they are popular in urban areas, both within black population centers and among the general population (especially younger audiences).

The hip-hop movement has become increasingly mainstream as the music industry has taken control of it. Essentially, "from the moment 'Rapper's Delight' went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow. As a result, the music that is popularized by the music industry is becoming increasingly different from what hip hop was meant to be, and in the process makes people wonder who is responsible for this unappreciated shift.

African American work songs

African American work songs originally developed in the era of slavery, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Because they were part of an almost entirely oral culture they had no fixed form and only began to be recorded as the era of slavery came to an end after 1865. The first collection of African American 'slave songs' was published in 1867 by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison. Many had their origins in African song traditions, and may have been sung to remind the slaves of home, while others were instituted by the slave masters to raise morale and keep slaves working in rhythm. They have also been seen as a means of withstanding hardship and expressing anger and frustration through creativity or covert verbal opposition.

A common feature of African American songs was the call-and-response format, where a leader would sing a verse or verses and the others would respond with a chorus. This came from African traditions of agricultural work song and found its way into the spirituals that developed once slaves began to convert to Christianity and from there to both gospel music and the blues. Also evident were field hollers, shouts, and moans, which may have been originally designed for different bands or individuals to locate each other and narrative songs that used folk tales and folk motifs, often making use of homemade instruments. In early slavery drums were used to provide rhythm, but they were banned in later years because of the fear that black slaves would use them to communicate in a rebellion; nevertheless, slaves managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies. Perhaps surprisingly, there are very few examples of work songs linked to cotton picking.

Corn, however, was a very common subject of work songs on a typical plantation. Because the crop was the main component of the slaves’ diet, they would often sing about it regardless of whether it was being harvested. Often, communities in the south would hold “corn-shucking jubilees,” during which an entire community of planters would gather on one plantation. The planters would bring their harvests, as well as their slaves, and work such as shucking corn, rolling logs, or threshing rice would be done, accompanied by the singing of the slaves doing work. The following is an example of a song slaves would sing as they approached one of these festivals. It is from ex-slave William Wells Brown’s memoir “ My Southern Home.”

“All them pretty gals will be there, Shuck that corn before you eat; They will fix it for us rare, Shuck that corn before you eat. I know that supper will be big, Shuck that corn before you eat; I think I smell a fine roast pig, Shuck that corn before you eat….”

Another common type of African American work song was the “boat song.” Sung by slaves who had the job of rowing, this type of work song is characterized by “plaintive, melancholy singing.” These songs were not somber because the work was more troublesome than the work of harvesting crops. Rather, they were low-spirited so that they could maintain the slow, steady tempo needed for rowing. In this way, work songs followed the African tradition, emphasizing the importance of activities being accompanied by the appropriate song.