Soul Jazz’s two-CD “Big Apple Rappin’: The Early Days of Hip-Hop Culture, 1979-1982” spotlights dance music’s profound influence on the sound that evolved into hip-hop. Disco and R&B beats pulsate and boom in the background of the 16 tracks here, which clock in at dance-remix song lengths, regularly hitting the sixminute mark. The slippery dance meters, the hip-wiggling bass lines, and the dance-floor ecstasy that these early DJs mined for these nascent rappers is a world away from the hard-edged machine-gun funk that became rap in the 1980s. In fact, everything here sounds like it came out of some all-night bash.

Tinkling bells and a swinging, wobbly beat powers Solo Sounds’s “Get the Party Jumping,” a track almost as syncopated and carnivalesque as early gogo music. This shout-out to stepping out is a call for people to dance the night away.

Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” provides the slapbass bounce behind Mr. Q’s “DJ Style.” The whole song is alive and sinewy in its joints in a way that speaks to DJ sound systems’ births as live music events. Mr. Q’s neighborhood rap is sincere and even cute: “See it started in my crib back when I was only just a baby brother boy / I found that I had what the women dug and I found that I brought them joy.”

These songs are structured more like dance music than contemporary hiphop. For the most part, a straightforward backbeat forms the song’s entire rhythmic motion, with a few drum breaks or early synthesizer keyboard blasts occasionally breaking up a meter. Pop-song hooks, verse-chorus-verse structures, and jazzy bridges haven’t entered the idiom yet. Songs are fused out of nothing but a simple, unwavering beat that can recycle itself endlessly.

This elasticity encourages the rappers to unwind pages and pages of narrative rhymes and call-and-response shouts. Better than anything yet written about the art form, this box set sells the idea that MC and DJ battles were their era’s jazz cutting contests.

Spyder D’s 10-minute “Big Apple Rappin'” – a marathon endurance test interrupted only by a space age synthesizer solo in the middle – brings to mind John Coltrane turning a simple “My Favorite Things” rendition into a charismatic and stylistic invention. Spyder D unwinds run-on sentence after run-on sentence, shifting the rhyme scheme from internal to line end, long vowels to slant schemas, creating a seemingly endless variety of verbal prattle over a lock-step metrical form.

As if mocking the underworld tour of the five boroughs in Walter Hill’s “The Warriors,” Spyder D narrates his vision of the black subcultures of the time: “Let me hear you Brooklyn and the Bronx / Let me hear you Manhattan while I sing my song / Let me hear you islands, Staten and Long” – before running down what music and culture black New York has to boast about. “We got Larry Levan and DJ Jones / New York is the rapper’s home / We got Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five / Kurtis Blow and Super Rhyme.”

Brother D’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise” is one of only a few moments here that touches on hip hop’s breeding grounds in the gangrun streets of the late 1970s and early 1980s Bronx. Over the summery chintz of Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real,” Brother D runs down a rhymed update of the Black Panthers’ platform, touching on talking points both economic and environmental before rolling into a call to rise up.

The original 1980 Clappers Records 12-inch release of this song – it was the B-side to “Dib-Be-Dib-Be-Dize” – featured a rasta in profile holding a handgun on the label. “America was built, understand, on stolen labor on stolen land,” Brother D declaims at one point. “As you’re moving to the beat to the early light / the country moving, too, moving to the Right / prepare now because we can’t all get high and wait.”

The 1990s explosion of nostalgic reissues, box sets, and CD mix tapes has made hip-hop’s history one of the most actively contested in contemporary American culture. “Big Apple Rappin'” doesn’t cover much new ground, but it makes for a fascinating piece of musical archaeology. The set’s compiler, the tireless underground archivist Johan Kugelberg, gathered a number of previously hard-to-find tracks – whose original LPs have become highly prized collectibles – and conducted interviews with such personalities as Jamaican transplant producer Glen Adams, Clappers Records founder Lister Hewan-Lowe, Grandmaster Caz, and flier designer Buddy Esquire.

Still, the set feels a little like a museum exhibition, trapped in glass. Kugelberg turns to Joe Conzo’s recently uncovered early rap photography – which Kugelberg previously debuted in the “Born in the Bronx” exhibit at London’s Vinyl Factory gallery last summer – and fliers from the era to provide some background color and historical context. These artifacts document a creative activity that parallels punk’s do-it-yourself agency around the same time – but they can’t fill in the narrative holes surrounding the collected songs. The CDs as a whole would have been better served by expanded interviews with the people who were actually there.