When the poet laureate Andrew Motion penned a birthday rap to Prince William last year, the reaction was a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. Motion’s verses were declared unworthy of the genre. They also remained firmly on the printed page. Unlike literary poetry, rapping is an oral discipline which lives or dies by the microphone. By definition, this wasn’t a rap at all. More curious, though, was the incredulity with which Motion’s choice of prosody was received. After all, hip hop is a mainstream phenomenon which has dominated the charts and high street fashion for as long as most teenagers have been alive (even farmers in Devon have swapped their overalls for Adidas trainers and puffa jackets). What actually lay behind the reaction to Motion’s gesture was a notion of authenticity. Any old Joe can rap, but licence is only granted to residents of the street – to those toting an easy association with criminality and violence.

For a genre that is 25 years old this year, hip hop has little to show for its maturity. While its influence has stretched into the shires and beyond, walk down any megastore hip hop aisle and scowling back at you is a line-up of the same kind of hardmen as a decade ago. Numbers may have burgeoned (there are now believed to be over 100 hip hop millionaires in the world) as has the body count, but the lifestyles, platitudes and contradictions represented by protagonists of the culture have, if anything, grown narrower and more impossible. Repetitive images of material excess and recidivism continue to dominate the commercial rap market, and while production techniques have evolved to become the most sophisticated in pop music, rapping itself – the essence of hip hop culture – has not developed in at least a decade. As the ideas have dried up, celebrities and industry investors have been forced to promote the most sensational aspects of the culture. Even loyal fans are now claiming that hip hop’s message to the disenfranchised is one of confusion and self-destruction. For a musical form that once claimed to offer meaning, and even hope, this must spell the end.

Which is a shame, considering hip hop’s beginnings. The history of rap is as eclectic as America itself. Its influences range from the tall tales of Chicago blues singers to the sing-song declarations of Mississippi riverboat men; from wild west folk songs to the intoned rhetoric of Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali; from skipping rope rhymes and gospel to the syncopated rhythms of jazz, the pick ‘n’ mix culture of creole and even the lewder compositions of Cole Porter. Still regarded as rap’s essential ancestor, however, is the toast. Toasting is the African-American folk art of rhythmic narrative, a tradition probably passed down by nomadic African griots who would wander from village to village offering musical renditions of local history and mythology. Their early 20th-century American descendants told rhyming tales of exaggerated heroism, in which the black man, in contrast to his usual lot, won the day.

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