Hip hop (culture)

Breakdance, an early form of hip hop dance, often involves battles, showing off skills without any physical contact with the adversaries.

Hip hop (also spelled hip-hop or hiphop) is both a cultural movement and a genre of music developed in New York City in the 1970s primarily by African Americans and Latinos..

Since first emerging in The Bronx and Harlem, the lifestyle of hip hop culture has today spread around the world.

The four historic "elements" of hip hop are: MCing (rapping), DJing, urban inspired art/tagging (graffiti), and b-boying (or breakdancing). The most known "extended" elements are beatboxing, hip hop fashion, and hip hop slang.

When hip hop music developed in the 1970s, it was originally based around DJs who created rhythmic beats by "scratching" a record on one turntable while looping the break (an upbeat drum and rhythm phrase of a song often found in soul and funk music) of various records on another, which was later joined by the "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting) of MCs.

Etymology

The word hip was used as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as early as 1904. The colloquial language meant "informed" or "current," and was likely derived from the earlier form hep. Hip hop pioneer and South Bronx community leader Afrika Bambaataa credits the first use of the term "Hip Hop," as it relates to the instant culture to Lovebug Starski a DJ who put out a single called "The Positive Life" in 1981.

Keith Cowboy, a rapper with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five has been credited with the coining of the term hip hop in a musical sense. Though Lovebug Starski, Keith Cowboy, and DJ Hollywood used the term when the music was still known as disco rap, Cowboy claimed to have "created" the term while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army, by scat singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into a part of his stage performance, which was quickly copied by other artists; for example the opening of the song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang.

Bambaataa, a former Black Spades gang member, is credited with first using the term to describe the subculture that hip hop music belongs to, although it is also suggested that the term was originally used derisively against the new type of music.

History of hip hop

Main article: History of hip hop music

1970s

DJs: rhythmic grooves from the turntable

In the early 1970s, Clive Campbell, a Jamaican born DJ who went by the name "Kool Herc," arrived in New York City. In Jamaica, Herc was known for his dancehall beats, a key component to the movement of music in NYC and the Bronx. This idea of dancehall had nothing to do with where the music was played, but more of a feeling of getting the people of Kingston, Jamaica to get on their feet and dance. This music, known as reggae, became a staple in the new music made in the Bronx. Herc introduced the Jamaican tradition of toasting, or boasting impromptu poetry and sayings over Reggae, Disco and Funk records, during parties held in parks in the Bronx, New York.

Herc and other DJs would tap into the power lines at public basketball courts to connect their equipment and perform. Their equipment was composed of huge stacks of speakers, turntables, and one or more microphones. Herc was also the developer of break-beat deejaying, where the breaks of funk songs—the part most suited to dance, usually percussion-based—were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties.

Later DJs such as Grandmaster Flash refined and developed the use of breakbeats, including cutting and scratching. The Bronx building "where hip hop was born" is 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where Kool Herc started spinning records, and is now eligible to be listed on the national and state register of historic sites. The approach used by Herc was soon widely copied, and by the late 1970s DJs were releasing 12" records where they would rap to the beat. Popular tunes included Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks", and The Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight."

Rapping and emceeing

Main article: Rapping

Emceeing is the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay, delivered over a beat or without accompaniment. Rapping is derived from the griots (folk poets) of West Africa, and Caribbean-style toasting.

Rap developed both inside and outside of hip hop culture, and began with the street parties thrown in the Bronx neighborhood of New York in the 1970s by Kool Herc and others. It originated as MCs would talk over the music to promote their DJ, promote other dance parties, take light-hearted jabs at other lyricists, or talk about problems in their areas and issues facing the community as a whole.

Melle Mel, a rapper/lyricist with The Furious Five is often credited with being the first rap lyricist to call himself an "MC".

1980s

Hip hop as a culture was further defined in 1983, when Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released a track called "Planet Rock." Instead of simply rapping over disco beats, Bambaataa created an innovative electronic sound, taking advantage of the rapidly improving drum machine and synthesizer technology. The appearance of music videos changed entertainment: they often glorified urban neighborhoods, commonly called ghettos.. The music video for Planet Rock showcased the subculture of hip hop musicians, graffiti artists and breakdancers. Many hip hop-related films were released between 1983 and 1985, among them Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, Breakin, and the documentary Style Wars. These films expanded the appeal of hip hop beyond the boundaries of New York. In 1984 was created in France the first hip hop tv show in the world (so before american hip hop tv shows), named H.I.P. H.O.P. by Sidney, who became by the fact the first black announcer in french tv history, a hip hop symbol.

By 1985, youth worldwide were laying down scrap linoleum or cardboard, setting down portable "boombox" stereos and spinning on their backs in Adidas tracksuits and sneakers to music by Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Fat Boys, Herbie Hancock, EPMD, Soulsonic Force, Jazzy Jay, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and Stetsasonic, just to name a few. The hip hop artwork and "slang" of US urban communities quickly found its way to Europe and Asia, as the culture's global appeal took root.

The 1980s also saw many artists make social statements through hip hop. In 1982, Melle Mel and Duke Bootee recorded "The Message" (officially credited to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five), a song that foreshadowed the socially conscious statements of Run-DMC's "It's like That" and Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos."

During the 1980s, hip hop also embraced the creation of rhythm by using the human body, via the vocal percussion technique of beatboxing. Early pioneers such as Doug E. Fresh, Biz Markie, and Buffy from the Fat Boys made beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using their mouth, lips, tongue, voice, and other body parts. "Human Beatbox" artists would also sing or imitate turntablism scratching or other instrument sounds.

Legacy and Social Impact

Main article: Hip hop culture

Early hip hop has often been credited with helping to reduce inner-city gang violence by replacing physical violence with dance and artwork battles. In the early 1970s, Kool DJ Herc began organizing dance parties in his home in the Bronx. The parties became popular and were moved to outdoor venues to accommodate for the amount of people attending. New York City teenagers, after years of gang violence, were looking for new ways to express themselves. These outdoor parties, hosted in parks, became a means of expression and an outlet for teenagers, where “Instead of getting into trouble on the streets, teens now had a place to expend their pent-up energy.” Tony Tone, a member of the pioneering rap group the Cold Crush Brothers, noted that “Hip-hop saved a lot of lives.” Hip hop culture became an outlet and a way of dealing with the hardships of life as minorities within America, and an outlet to deal with violence and gang culture. MC Kid Lucky mentions that “people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting.” Inspired by Kool DJ Herc, once-gang leader Afrika Bambaataa created a street organization called Universal Zulu Nation, centered around hip hop, as a means to draw teenagers out of gang life and violence.

Hip-hop was not only centered around violence, drugs, and weapons like most people thought in the early days. Many people used hip-hop in positive ways. "Young black Americans coming out of the civil rights movement have used hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s to show the limitations of the movement." Hip-hop gave young black Americans a voice to let their issues be noticed. It also gave young blacks a chance for financial gain by "reducing the rest of the world to consumers of its social concerns." This shows that hip-hop's social impacts on the country have not been all negative. It has positively affected many youth and encouraged them to voice their opinions on world and personal issues. "Like rock-and-roll, hip hop is vigorously oppose by conservatives because it romanticizes violence, law-breaking, and gangs" . Both hip hop and rock-and-roll were musical movements use by teens in order to express how they felt about certain issues. "Last night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who proved that hip-hop was more than party music with their 1982 hit “The Message,” became the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" Now hip hop and rock-and-roll are used together in many ways including rewriting songs where a rapper or rock band play with the other.

With the emergence of commercial and crime-related rap during the early 1990s, however, an emphasis on violence was incorporated, with many rappers boasting about drugs, weapons, misogyny, and violence. While hip hop music now appeals to a broader demographic, media critics argue that socially and politically conscious hip hop has long been disregarded by mainstream America in favor of gangsta rap.

Though created in the United States by African Americans and Latinos, hip hop culture and music is now global in scope. Youth culture and opinion is meted out in both Israeli hip hop and Palestinian hip hop, while France, Germany, the U.K., Brazil, Japan, Africa, and the Caribbean have long-established hip hop followings. According to the U.S. Department of State, hip hop is "now the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world," that crosses social barriers and cuts across racial lines. National Geographic recognizes hip hop as "the world's favorite youth culture" in which "just about every country on the planet seems to have developed its own local rap scene." Through its international travels, hip hop is now acknowledged as a “global musical epidemic,” and has diverged from its ethnic roots by way of globalization and localization. Although some non-American rappers may still relate with young black Americans, hip hop now transcends its original culture, and is appealing because it is “custom-made to combat the anomie that preys on adolescents wherever nobody knows their name.” Hip hop is attractive in its ability to give a voice to disenfranchised youth in any country, and as music with a message it is a form available to all societies worldwide.

Even in the face of growing global popularity, or perhaps because of it, hip hop has come under fire for being too commercial, too commodified, too much about money and bling-bling. Artist Nas said it himself in his 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead. While this of course stirs up controversy, a documentary called The Commodification of Hip Hop directed by Brooke Daniel interviews students at Satellite Academy in New York City. One girl talks about the epidemic of crime that she sees in urban black and Latino communities, relating it directly to the hip hop industry saying “When they can’t afford these kind of things, these things that celebrities have like jewelry and clothes and all that, they’ll go and sell drugs, some people will steal it…” Many students see this as a negative side effect of the hip hop industry, and indeed, hip hop has been criticized all over the world for spreading crime, violence, and American ideals of consumerism. In an article for The Village Voice, Greg Tate argues that the commercialization of hip hop is a negative and pervasive phenomenon, writing that "what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer" . Ironically, this commercialization coincides with a decline in rap sales and pressure from critics of the genre . However, in his book In Search Of Africa, Manthia Diawara explains that hip hop is really a voice of people who are down and out in modern society. He argues that the “worldwide spread of hip-hop as a market revolution” is actually global "expression of poor people’s desire for the good life,” and that this struggle aligns with “the nationalist struggle for citizenship and belonging, but also reveals the need to go beyond such struggles and celebrate the redemption of the black individual through tradition.” This connection to "tradition" however, is something that may be lacking according to one Satellite Academy staff member who says that in all of the focus on materialism, the hip hop community is “not leaving anything for the next generation, we’re not building.”

As the hip hop genre turns 30, a stronger analysis of the music’s impact has taken place. It has been viewed as a cultural sensation which changed the music industry around the world, but its commercialization has turned many to see the negative aspects of hip hop; the marriage of “New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global-hypercapitalism.” Its transformation from a cultural expression into a value of money has turned it into a “mainstream that had once excluded its originators.” While this has been seen to be true in many ways, hip hop has allowed for a shared common identity among its followers and originators. These different aspects of analyzing hip hop’s influence expose the dangers of popular music and mass production of cultural output.

Global Hip hop

There is much to be said concerning hip hop on a global level. From its early spread to Europe and Japan to an almost worldwide acceptance through Asia and South American countries such as Brazil, the musical influence has been global. “From West Orange, New Jersey, to Dakar, Senegal, every where hip hop goes, it’s turned music upside down - jump-starting traditions as it breaks the older down.” Different hip hop sounds and styles differ from region to region, but there is also a lot of crossbreeding. In each separate hip hop scene there is also constant struggle between “old school” hip hop and more localized, newer sounds. Regardless of where it is found, the music often targets local disaffected youth. Hip hop has given people a voice with which to express themselves, and even hope to live a better life, and its cultural influence is therefore also widespread. “There is no question that Hip Hop's influence has spread the world over. From the Bronx to Beirut, Kazakhstan to Cali, Hokkaido to Harare, Hip Hop is the new sound of a disaffected global youth culture." Though on the global scale the influence from American culture is heavy, cultures world wide have embraced and transformed hip hop with their own traditions and beliefs. “Global Hip Hop succeeds best when it showcases Hip Hop's influence on cultures that reside outside the main arteries of the African Diaspora.” Not all countries have embraced hip hop, where, “as can be expected in countries with strong local culture, the interloping wildstyle of hip hop is not always welcomed.”

As a criticism of globalization it has been a major concern that globalization “represents a challenge for cultural diversity.” Globalization as a whole however, is not a one-sided process that has been seen to eradicate local cultures. There is a constant blending of what is global with what is local and this has been clearly seen by the spread of hip-hop representing the different cultures around the world. This synthesis has sometimes been referred to as “glocalization.” While the fundamentals of hip hop such as MCing, break dancing, DJing, and graffiti are still intact, the language, lyrics, and musical elements are ultimately determined by the cultural, political, and social situation in each land. Through the globalization of music, people around the world can learn about each other’s cultures and from the music, can also learn about the political and social situations that many of these locations are undergoing. Thus, hip hop can also be viewed as a global learning experience.

Often lumped as "world music" for the American consumer, hip hop from countries outside the United States has a striated presence in the United States. Consumers listen to world music for various reasons, and author Jeff Chang attributes the idea of a cipher to the classical view of a hip hop consumer: "...the essence of hip-hop is the cipher, born in the Bronx, where competition and community feed each other." Those consumers who constitute the cipher itself differ from those who consume the music without any involvement in cipher-like activity. It's a general truth that those not involved in the idea of a cipher have less invested in the culture of the music and therefore are less dedicated to the music, but of course these feelings are largely voiced by those who are involved in the cipher of a type of music. In Chang's literal sense, "the cipher is the circle of participants and onlookers that closes around battling rappers or dancers as they improvise for each other.". Figuratively, though, the cipher of a given genre of music is made up of the individuals who make their own presence known in that field in one way or another. In the broad field of global hip hop, there is a wide variety of consumers (those involved in the "cipher" and those not, as well as everyone in between).

Hip-hop has impacted many different countries culturally and socially in positive ways. It gives a chance to make the people that viewed themselves as unheard to release their frustrations and issues out in a way that can bring some positive attention to their problems. Not only in the U.S. is hip-hop used for social injustice, but also in many other places. "Thousands of organizers from Cape Town to Paris use hip-hop in their communities to address environmental justice, policing and prisons, media justice, and education." Also, "young people in places as disparate as Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Norway use hip-hop to push their generation's views into the local conversation." While hip-hop music has been criticized as a music which creates a divide between western music and music from the rest of the world, a musical "cross pollination" has taken place, which strengthens the power of hip-hop to influence different communities. Hip hop's impact as a "world music" is also due to its translatability among different cultures in the world. Hip hop's messages allow the under-privileged and the mistreated to be heard. These cultural translations cross borders. While the music may be from a foreign country, the message is something that many people can relate to- something not "foreign" at all. Even the countries that have not experienced the social injustices that the aforementioned peoples of certain countries have endured, find some form of proactive, positive message that is, in a way foreign because they have no experienced it in a way other countries have, yet have benefited from the message that hip hop brings to challenge the concepts of apathy and encourages a proactive stance to the audiences who listen to hip hop. But one thing about hip-hop has remained consistent across cultures: a vital progressive agenda that challenges the status quo. This constant challenging of status quo has definitely attracted even countries that have not endured the oppression that other countries have endured, and still have youths who listen to this genre of music feel the drive to take initiative. Global hip hop is the meeting ground for progressive local activism and has even allowed countries that have not experienced such social injustices to join together creating a global hip hop network. Thousands of organizers from Cape Town to Paris use hip-hop in their communities to address environmental injustice, policing and prisons, media justice, and education. In Gothenburg, Sweden, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) incorporate graffiti and dance to engage disaffected immigrant and working class youths. And indigenous young people in places as disparate as Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Norway use hip-hop to push their generation's views into local conversation.

See also

• Rap Music
• Hip hop culture
• Hip hop music
• Hip hop production
• Hip hop dance
• Hip hop fashion
• Hip hop theatre
• Hip-hop magazines
• 2007 in hip hop
• Dancehall
• Reggaetón
• Rhythm
• Beats (music)
• Universal Hip Hop Parade
• National Hip Hop Political Convention

Further reading

• Wunderlich, Annelise. "Cuban Hip-hop: Making Space for New Voices of Dissent." In The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, ed. by Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, 167-79. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006.
• Sellin’ Out: An Essay on Commercial Hip Hop by Amrita Singh
• The "Death" of Hip-Hop by David Drake
• Theses on Hip-Hop by the Democracy and Hip-Hop Project
• The Globalization of Hip-Hop Culture by Eric Richardson
• Don't blame hip-hop for society's sexism by Cousin Jeff
• Hip-Hop Divided by Andy Carrington