In Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s book The Power of Black Music, the author discusses how blues singers created their songs “by combining fragments and verses from the hundreds or thousands of formulas that were floating around in black communities everywhere.” This sounds remarkably similar to dance moving from hood to hood via TikTok or rap flows gaining popularity and being quickly adopted by rappers around the world today. It reminds me of how samples become hip-hop standards and are used across decades by numerous artists as a form of homage, how old school rap references become like speakeasy passwords for acceptance into the black underground.
From: Bedroom Rapper by Rollie Pemberton