Compare And Contrast Hip Hop And Rap

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Hip-Hop/Rap is one of the biggest growing genres of today. From its early stages in the 1970’s to today’s pop culture, it has grown quite a lot. Unfortunately, it has developed a terrible reputation of drugs, violence, abuse, and gangs. When people associate Hip-Hop with things it is usually a negative image that comes to the person’s mind. Which is sad, Hip-Hop/Rap has a great artistic quality to them that gets so easily overlooked. There is true poetry and emotion behind these lyrics and beats, but not everyone is willing to sit down and listen to it. They quickly judge this music genre and the immediately dislike it without giving it a second thought. Rappers pour their emotions and their souls into their songs and it really speaks to people …show more content…

The best way to describe it is rap is what you are saying and it is what you do. Another way to look at rap is thinking of it as a verb. For instance, one could say “Go ahead, rap.” And that would be present tense where as someone could say “Did you hear what he just rapped?” and there is also a future tense “I’ll start rapping right after you are done.” That is what rap is. Now Hip-Hop is something else. Hip-Hop is a culture. There is Hip-Hop dancing, Hip-Hop music, Hip-Hop abs, etc. Other things associated with Hip-Hop would be breakdancing, graffiti, and of course rapping. Often people get these things mixed up but they are different. Rapping dates all the way back from the civil war era. Slaves would rhyme words just to pass the time when they worked they would also sing hymns to make the time fly by. Rapping had many roots and it can be traced almost anywhere at any time. Rap could also be in spoken poetry whether people know it or not. Hip-Hop started around the 70’s mainly in block parties in New York City. And it blew up and became a hit within years. Some of the fathers of Hip-Hop such as DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, or Grandmaster Flash started out as a disc jockey at block parties. This entire music genre has real urban roots. It is funny to think that his entire musical genre happened because of a turntable and two vinyl records. Breakdancing caught on in Hip-Hop because of the spaces between the songs when a DJ would scratch a record, and that is how it got its name “Break-Dancing”. One of the first major singles of Hip-Hop/Rap was Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”. The song had a simple bass line that would get easily stuck in anybody’s head and it would make them get up and want to start dancing. The bass line has been used in commercials today, for instance Applebee’s has an ad on television that has the “Rapper’s

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