certainly didn’t invent rap or anything. I was just interested in it and I guess years later we were the first to record it. At the time you could already see cats rapping everywhere in the streets and doing stuff.” Precursors also exist in non-African/African-American traditions, especially vaudeville and musical theater. The 1956 novelty song "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus contains rapping over sparse instrumentation and sound effects. The song eventually reached #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 In classical music, semi-spoken music was made popular by composer Arnold Schoenberg as Sprechstimme, which he used in such pieces as Gurre-Lieder and Pierrot lunaire. In the French chanson field, irrigated by a strong poetry tradition, such singer-songwriters as Léo Ferré or Serge Gainsbourg made their own use of spoken word over rock or symphonic music from the very beginning of the 1970s. Although these probably did not have a direct influence on rap's development in the African-American cultural sphere, they paved the way for acceptance of spoken word music in the media market, as well as providing a broader backdrop, in a range of cultural contexts distinct from that of the African American experience, upon which rapping could later be grafted. With the decline of disco in the early 1980s rap became a new form of expression. Rap arose from musical experimentation with rhyming, rhythmic speech. Rap was a departure from disco. Sherley Anne Williams refers to the development of rap as "anti-Disco" in style and means of reproduction. The early productions of Rap after Disco sought a more simplified manner of producing the tracks they were to sing over. Williams explains how Rap composers and DJ's opposed the heavily orchestrated and ritzy multi-tracks of Disco for "break beats" which were created from compiling different records from numerous genres and did not require the equipment from professional recording studios. Professional studios were not necessary therefore opening the production of rap to the youth who as Williams explains felt "locked out" because of the capital needed to produce Disco records. More directly related to the African-American community were items like schoolyard chants and taunts, clapping games, jump-rope rhymes, some with unwritten folk histories going back hundreds of years across many nationalities. Sometimes these items contain racially offensive lyrics. A related area that is not strictly folklore is rhythmical cheering and cheerleading for military and sports. Proto-rap In his narration between the tracks on