African American Culture: Hip Hop And Black Culture

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Black culture in our society has come to the point where it is allied with pop culture. The most popular music genres, slang terms, to dance forms it all comes from black culture. Hip hop emerged from black culture, becoming the soul of it that is seen in the media. Hip hop helped the black community by creating new ways of expressing themselves, from breakdance, graffiti, rap and other music, to slang. This culture was rooted in their tradition and created from something new. Hip hop created a new form of music that required the use of turn tables, ‘cuts’, loops, rhythm, rhyme, stories, and deep-rooted emotions, but also incorporated black oral forms of storytelling using communal authors. In order to comprehend hip hop, one must first know the definition and its importance as a component of black culture. Hip hop culture is rap, rap a musical …show more content…

They would tell stories what would involve mass use of repetition. In their situation they used it as a method for memorization, but in hip hop, repetition was used as a key element to get a message across. Also in the past African Americans practiced communal authorship, in which the original author of a story would be unknown, the stories would be passed orally from generation to generation combined with others stories in one. Such communal authorship is also an element in hip hop, otherwise known as sampling. Sampling involves one artist using another’s work in order create a new song. In years’ past this did create many copyright problems but it also helped create a new form of art that still has ties to black tradition. Also in the past loud sounds where used as a form of “coded communication [which] inspired fear in slaveholders” (Rose 62), there is a slight similarity with this and how loud car speakers driving playing rap music can alert the people that something may occur

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