After laying claim to everything under the sun except O.J. Simpson, white folks are now trying to claim hip-hop as their own. Though hip-hop’s origins have been consistently linked to early African slaves, some Professor Funny Name says it actually originated in medieval Scotland. This bittersweet news was broken by Professor Ferenc Szasz, who argued that “freestyle rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, originally stemmed from the ancient Caledonian art of flyting.”
Professor Szasz is convinced there is a clear link between this tradition for settling scores in Scotland and rap battles, which were famously portrayed in Eminem’s 2002 movie 8 Mile.
He said: “The Scots have a lengthy tradition of flyting – intense verbal jousting, often laced with vulgarity, that is similar to the dozens that one finds among contemporary inner-city African-American youth.
Let me get this straight: Some drunk men in a Scottish bar invented Yo Mama insults 2 million years ago, which in turn gave birth to hip-hop? Oh well, the good news is that rappers will no longer take the heat for inventing something as filthy as rap music. [The Telegraph]
