s together and combining old songs into new, danceable collages. Using different techniques such as quickly changing play speeds and equaliser settings, scratching records back and forth, and mixing in different types of music, made the art of disk jockeying extremely popular. So popular in fact that by the late 1970's artful mixing had become such a spectacle that crowds would cease dancing in order to watch DJ's perform. To keep people moving a DJ would recruite either one or a few people to act as a "master of ceremonies" or MC. An MC would speak into a microphone, over the music and "fire up" the crowd, with shouts such as "get up" and "jam to the beat" in a similar fashion to that used by James Brown. As MC's popularity grew, so too did their task. To stay popular with the public and attractive to their recruiting DJ's, MC's were continually forced to come up with new techniques of encouraging their crowds to dance. Many MC's followed the examples given to them by radio DJ's by devising simple rhymes comprised of only two or four short lines. Most of these rhymes were very basic, short verses related to the crowd, which were thought up by the MC "on the spot". It was not until a DJ named "Grandmaster Flash" and his group of MC's "The Furious Five" that the rap genesis was completed. They began speaking longer, pre-rehearsed rhymes to the beat of the music, trading rhymes in sync with each other and the DJ. Slowly but surely other MC's began to follow suit, reciting their own rehearsed lyrics in time with the beat. And so became the popular style of music known as rap.
             It is thought that rap lyrics descended directly from a few specific African-American cultural figures. Radio DJ's such as Holmes "Daddy-O" Daylie, Al Benson and DJ Hollywood, spoke witty, jive-based talk between playing songs, and heavy...