Boom Bap

New York's hard drums and vinyl samples, where kick and snare knock out a sound like the name itself

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ContemporaryThe MPC seriesSamplers

Boom bap is the rap drum sound and sampling aesthetic of late-1980s New York, where kick and snare knock out something like the name itself.

Origins and era

Between 1986 and 1988 Marley Marl, in Queens, rearranged James Brown breaks with samplers and drum machines, and Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded and EPMD carried that hard drum sound onto albums. After 1987 the SP-1200 and the MPC let producers cut samples into shorter pieces, and drums were squeezed dry and hard; after a 1991 sampling copyright ruling, chops became shorter and more hidden. Around 1990 A Tribe Called Quest and Large Professor cut jazz phrases into the drums; in 1994 Nas's Illmatic and Gang Starr's records fixed it as the East Coast standard. The name imitates the drums and was only settled by critics in the later 1990s.

What you hear

Tempos mostly run from 85 to 95 BPM. Kick and snare alternate, the snare usually on two and four, and hats stay fine with a little swing. Samples come from vinyl, often four-bar loops of jazz, soul and funk, with the cuts deliberately left noisy; early samplers had only twelve-bit resolution, so the top end sounded dull, and that limit became a timbre. The voice sits in front, the drums leave it room, and choruses lean on scratching or a sampled voice. Arrangements do not stack layers; they polish one loop until it fits.

Key figures

DJ Premier's drums and chops, Pete Rock's warm samples, Large Professor and Q-Tip's jazz bent, and RZA's dirtier sampling in early Wu-Tang; Marley Marl connected drum machine and sampler, Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang made the drums emptier and colder, and Rakim and Nas showed how to write over these drums.

Lineage

1980s sampled rap, James Brown breaks, jazz funk and Jamaican toasting feed in; underground rap, lo-fi hip-hop, later retro production and a new generation such as Griselda come out. It turned sampling from a shortcut into a craft.

Common misunderstandings

Boom bap is not a synonym for old-school rap, since plenty of 1990s records did something else. Nor is it slow, because tracks at 95 to 100 BPM can still be boom bap. And it is not melodyless, since the melody usually hides inside the sample; the drums do not always come from a machine either, as many are sampled breaks with a kick added.

Sources

• Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop（St. Martin's Press, 2005），用于核对纽约采样说唱与 1980 年代场景
• The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, edited by Justin A. Williams（Cambridge University Press, 2015），用于交叉核对制作技术与年代

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.