HIP-HOP

MUSIC AND CULTURAL MOVEMENT

WRITTEN BY:Greg Tate, Alan Light

Hip-hop, cultural movement that attained widespread popularity in the 1980s and ’90s; also, the
backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that
became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.

Origins And The Old School

Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a
complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as
“MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,”
which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language
that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of
self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially
conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African
American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As
the hip-hop movement began at society’s margins, its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and
obfuscation.

Graffiti and break dancing, the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the
least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek
American teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on
walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx, Queens,
and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colourful
mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and
even Andy Warhol-like Campbell’s soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art
dealers in the United States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New
York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-
removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.

The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound
together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop
deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge
sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded
percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of
music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika
Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance
record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests
developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic
and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.

The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound
together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop
deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge
sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded
percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of
music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika
Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance
record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests
developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic
and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.

Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over
records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic
histories of West African griots, talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems
recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on
exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent’s family). Other influences cited
include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko
Henderson; the black power poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets;
rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of
rhythmized speech known as toasting.
Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill
Gang’s song “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar
Hill. Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name
to a new genre of pop music. The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is
controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in
“Rapper’s Delight.” These early MCs and deejays constituted rap’s old school.

The New School

In the mid-1980s the next wave of rappers, the new school, came to prominence. At the forefront
was Run-D.M.C., a trio of middle-class African Americans who fused rap with hard rock,
defined a new style of hip dress, and became staples on MTV as they brought rap to a
mainstream audience. Run-D.M.C. recorded for Profile, one of several new labels that took
advantage of the growing market for rap music. Def Jam featured three important innovators: LL
Cool J, rap’s first romantic superstar; the Beastie Boys, a white trio who broadened rap’s
audience and popularized digital sampling (composing with music and sounds electronically
extracted from other recordings); and Public Enemy, who invested rap with radical
black political ideology, building on the social consciousness of Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982).

Rap’s classical period (1979–93) also included significant contributions from De La Soul—
whose debut album on Tommy Boy, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), pointed in a new and more
playful direction—and female rappers such as Queen Latifah and Salt-n-Pepa, who offered
an alternative to rap’s predominantly male, often misogynistic viewpoint. Hip-hop artists from
places other than New York City began to make their mark, including DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh
Prince (Will Smith), from Philadelphia; the provocative 2 Live Crew, from Miami; and M.C.
Hammer, from Oakland, California, who experienced short-lived but massive crossover success
with a pop audience.
The most significant response to New York hip-hop, though, came from Los Angeles, beginning
in 1989 with N.W.A.’s dynamic album Straight Outta Compton. N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude)
and former members of that group—Ice Cube, Eazy E, and Dr. Dre—led the way as West Coast
rap grew in prominence in the early 1990s. Their graphic, frequently violent tales of real life in
the inner city, as well as those of Los Angeles rappers such as Ice-T (remembered for his 1992
single “Cop Killer”) and Snoop Dogg and of East Coast counterparts such as Schoolly D, gave
rise to the genre known as gangsta rap. As the Los Angeles-based label Death Row Recordsbuilt
an empire around Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the charismatic, complicated rapper-actor Tupac
Shakur, it also entered into a rivalry with New York City’s Bad Boy Records. This developed
into a media-fueled hostility between East Coast and West Coast rappers, which culminated in
the still-unsolved murders of Shakur and the wildly gifted MC known as the Notorious B.I.G.

By the late 1990s hip-hop was artistically dominated by the Wu-Tang Clan, from New York
City’s Staten Island, whose combination of street credibility, neo-Islamic mysticism, and kung
fu lore made them one of the most complex groups in the history of rap; by Diddy (known by a
variety of names, including Sean “Puffy” Combs and Puff Daddy), performer, producer, and
president of Bad Boy Records, who was responsible for a series of innovative music videos; and
by the Fugees, who mixed pop music hooks with politics and launched the solo careers
of Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill.

Although long believed to be popular primarily with urban African American males, hip-hop
became the best-selling genre of popular music in the United States in the late 1990s (at least
partly by feeding the appetite of some white suburbanites for vicarious thrills). Its impact was
global, with formidable audiences and artist pools in cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape
Town, London, and Bristol, England (where the spin-off trip-hop originated). It also generated
huge sales of products in the fashion, liquor, electronics, and automobile industries that were
popularized by hip-hop artists on cable television stations such as MTV and The Box and in hip-
hop-oriented magazines such as The Source and Vibe. A canny blend of entrepreneurship
and aesthetics, hip-hop was the wellspring of several staple techniques of modern pop music,
including digital drumming and sampling (which introduced rap listeners to the music of a
previous generation of performers, including Chic, Parliament-Funkadelic, and James Brown,
while at the same time creating copyright controversies).