Raaddrr-Van – “Hip-Hop & Protest Da Movie Documentary Part I” – Real Hiphop!

How did hip-hop start? To hear most people tell it, the history of rap comes from a whole lot of directions. MCs were originally rapping primarily to showcase their DJs. Then Sugar Hill Gang put out “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. It was the second rap record of all time, and an enormous hit, proving there was a market for rapping on record.

From there, Kool Moe Dee battled Busy Bee and changed how rappers could rap, Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel put out “The Message” – changing what rappers could rap about – and Run-DMC released “Sucker MCs (Krush Groove 1),” which changed how rap could sound.

At the start of it all, of course, was DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 block party in the Bronx, which effectively birthed hip-hop as we know it. Others credit The Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron. While there’s no denying The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron helped popularize rhyming as a means of social communication, there’s debate as to how much influence they had on those early 1970s block parties, like the ones Kool Herc rocked.

Either way, no matter how real hip-hop took its first steps, we can’t deny the mush it’s become on radio today. But just below the mainstream junk, there is a whole underground movement that has been forging a wealth of talent who are still carrying the torch for what real hip-hop stood for from the outset.

Trendies and hipsters will think of them as maybe outdated and weird today, but hip-hop heads know what people like Raaddrr-Van stand for.

Raaddrr Van is a soldier, out of Brooklyn’s Eastside, where he grew up and went to school, with Masta Killa and Raekwon. Raaddrr Van says he has also been a Wutang Clan family member since they started in 1993. The very next year, in 1994 Raaddrr Van dropped his own debut album “Rappin 4 change” under the name Lodd Manafess.

Since then he has released material under a variety of monikers, never loosing track of the meaning of real hip-hop. Today we find Raaddrr Van going one step further, dropping the first episode of his brand new webseries, entitled “Hip-Hop & Protest Da Movie Documentary Part I”.

The man walks us through neighborhoods, city live, clubs, live shows, and just about anything else that happens in the real world. And along the way Raaddrr Van keeps us informed through anecdotes, comments and interviews of the real hip-hop trends, and who is still delivering the goods, in the spirit of the genre’s forebearers.

In doing all of this, he doesn’t shy away from political, social and religious commentary. Be on the look for this series!