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The beginning of rap and hip hop
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Hip hop has become widely recognized in recent years and is now considered an essential component in mainstream youth culture. Like all other music, hip hop has a rich history behind it. The evolution of hip hop can be traced back to the 1970’s, when block parties became increasingly popular in African American neighborhoods, such as the Bronx in New York City. Going back even further, in the 1920’s, a whole new market was discovered when music targeted towards the African American public started being produced. The Jazz Age in 20’s and 30’s made Jazz and swing music, which was previously associated with black artists and culture, mainstream, especially among the youth; Jazz and swing at this time was almost a symbol of revolution against the
South Bronx is hailed as the original center of this kind of hip hop. Early hip hop can be compared to what is referred to as “gangsta rap” which focuses on violent lifestyles that these youth are faced with to make a living. This music served as an outlet for frustration and struggles of this specific group and culture. The lyrics connected the youth, who wrote and rapped about the things they’ve seen and done in their lives; it was filled with truth and honesty. Because most were very poor, they could not afford to feature music in clubs. Instead, block parties and house parties popped up all over ghettoes, and DJs and MCs established themselves in the community. The music bonded a culture that was on the outskirts of society, a group that never had a voice
By then, it was a multibillion dollar industry; it was a business. The lyrics had changed, it was not about struggles and the truth of poor black kids but rather the opposite, about living lavishly and being rich. It is truly remarkable to connect those two things together through the same style of music. Specific roles started being established in hip hop, particularly the one of a black successful male artist, singing about money and sex. While many artists still rapped about themes similar to those of the 1970’s, those artists weren’t as popular in the mainstream. Hip hop became a carefree style of music, one of boasting and
Hip-Hop became characterized by an aggressive tone marked by graphic descriptions of the harshness and diversity of inner-city life. Primarily a medium of popular entertainment, hip-hop also conveys the more serious voices of youth in the black community. Though the approaches of rappers became more varied in the latter half of the 1980s, message hip-hop remained a viable form for addressing the problems faced by the black community and means to solve those problems. The voices of "message" hip...
The movie ‘From Mambo to Hip-Hop’ is a great documentary about a revolution in the entertainment industry. It talks of evolution on Salsa music and Hip-Hop culture in suburbs of New York. South Bronx is a ghetto neighbourhood. The people living in the area are challenged economically. There is a record of high cases of violence that exist in the streets due to high crime rate and drugs being traded as a means of survival (Gordon, 2005). Most of the people living in the area are descendants of African immigrants who could trace their origin in the Caribbean islands with a large number Latin American population too.
Motown paved the way for future artists to explore themselves. It helped created the grounds of a great music and cultural integration in the 1970’s to now and hopefully forever. Hip Hop’s arrival was credit to Motown triumphs in the musical world. Through the mixing of percussion and the rhythm of the drumbeats of funk and disco, hip hop revealed the opposition to social inequality and discrimination
In the words of rapper Busta Rhymes, “hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It’s a platform where we could offer information, but it’s also an escape” Hip-hop is a culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York, during the early 1970s. Hip-Hop was a result of African American and Latino youth redirecting their hardships brought by marginalization from society to creativity in the forms of MCing, DJing, aerosol art, and breakdancing. Hip-hop serves as a vehicle for empowerment while transcending borders, skin color, and age. However, the paper will focus on hip-hop from the Chican@-Latin@ population in the United States. In the face of oppression, the Chican@-Latin@ population utilized hip hop music as a means to voice the community’s various issues, desires, and in the process empower its people.
Back in the disco days, in the early 1970’s, began a new genre called Hip Hop. It was born in the crime ridden neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Hip Hop is the extracting rhythms of melodies from existing records and mixing them up with searing poetry chronicling life in the hood. Though, hip hop started on the east coast, it did spread rapidly throughout all the clubs and hotels in New York. Then later on, it began to spread to the west coast in Los Angeles. This is where hip hop began to develop its own musical style. Hip hop is known and described as the voice of a generation that refused to be silenced by urban poverty. It is a genre that is fueled up with a lot of passion and truth that is spreading across the entire world. Hip hop is
Hip hop is both a culture and a lifestyle. As a musical genre it is characterized by its hard hitting beats and rhythms and expressive spoken word lyrics that address topics ranging from economic disparity and inequality, to gun violence and gang affiliated activity. Though the genre emerged with greater popularity in the 1970’s, the musical elements involved and utilized have been around for many years. In this paper, we will cover the history and
Hip-Hop is a cultural movement that emerged from the dilapidated South Bronx, New York in the early 1970’s. The area’s mostly African American and Puerto Rican residents originated this uniquely American musical genre and culture that over the past four decades has developed into a global sensation impacting the formation of youth culture around the world. The South Bronx was a whirlpool of political, social, and economic upheaval in the years leading up to the inception of Hip-Hop. The early part of the 1970’s found many African American and Hispanic communities desperately seeking relief from the poverty, drug, and crime epidemics engulfing the gang dominated neighborhoods. Hip-Hop proved to be successful as both a creative outlet for expressing the struggles of life amidst the prevailing crime and violence as well as an enjoyable and cheap form of recreation.
“Hip hop has been named the most influential musical genre to emerge since 1960, beating the British invasion of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, soul, punk, prog rock, heavy metal, disco and many more in a new study” (Von Radowitz and Webb).
Hip hop culture has been around since the 1970s. Multiple sources all come down to the South Bronx in New York City, as the origin of hip hop culture. The culture began to take its shape within the African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities. The father of the start of this culture was a Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell but also known as DJ Kool Herc. He brought forth a new sound system and the Jamaican style of “toasting.” Toasting was when Jamaicans would talk or rap over the music they played. This whole new style soon brought what is now known as DJs, B-Boys, MC’s, and graffiti artists (Kaminski).
Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries, and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and content. It will also identify the history of hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular, this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them.
Hip hop has permeated popular culture in an unprecedented fashion. Because of its crossover appeal, it is a great unifier of diverse populations. Although created by black youth on the streets, hip hop's influence has become well received by a number of different races in this country. A large number of the rap and hip hop audience is non-black. It has gone from the fringes, to the suburbs, and into the corporate boardrooms. Because it has become the fastest growing music genre in the U.S., companies and corporate giants have used its appeal to capitalize on it. Although critics of rap music and hip hop seem to be fixated on the messages of sex, violence, and harsh language, this genre offers a new paradigm of what can be (Lewis, 1998.) The potential of this art form to mend ethnic relations is substantial. Hip hop has challenged the system in ways that have unified individuals across a rich ethnic spectrum. This art form was once considered a fad has kept going strong for more than three decades. Generations consisting of Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians have grown up immersed in hip-hop. Hip hop represents a realignment of America?s cultural aesthetics. Rap songs deliver a message, again and again, to keep it real. It has influenced young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulfillment, and a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass (Foreman, 2002). Though it is music, many people do not realize that it is much more than that. Hip hop is a form of art and culture, style, and language, and extension of commerce, and for many, a natural means of living. The purpose of this paper is to examine hip hop and its effect on American culture. Different aspects of hip hop will also be examined to shed some light that helps readers to what hip hop actually is. In order to see hip hop as a cultural influence we need to take a look at its history.
It was used to express the feelings of a certain group towards another. Hip-Hop is spontaneous in that the music was free style. Artist would take up to the stage and start describing a thing of interest. The thing of interest in most cases was a bad thing being perpetrated by the other gang they are competing. They would use that opportunity to rant against and offer remedial measures. At the end of the day they would decide on who had worn the competition. The Hip-Hop culture also used drawings to spread message that was appropriate to accompany their music. Lastly, Hip-Hop has grown into a multi-billion industry that the black community took with lots of seriousness as a means of
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 Total Chaos, Jeff Chang references Harry Allen, a hip hop critic and self-proclaimed hip hop activist. Harry Allen compares the hip hop movement to the Big Bang and poses this complex question: “whether hip-hop is, in fact a closed universe-bound to recollapse, ultimately, in a fireball akin to its birth-or an open one, destined to expand forever, until it is cold, dark, and dead” (9). An often heard phase, “hip hop is dead,” refers to the high occurrence of gangster rap in mainstream hip hop. Today’s hip hop regularly features black youths posturing as rich thugs and indulging in expensive merchandise. The “hip hop is dead” perspective is based on the belief that hip hop was destined to become the model of youth resistance and social change. However, its political ambitions have yet to emerge, thus giving rise to hip hops’ criticisms. This essay will examine the past and present of hip hop in o...
Hip-hop music is portrayed by an entertainer rapping over a track that regularly comprises of loops or specimens of other music woven together (Selke INT). Hip-hop originally appeared in the Bronx around the 1970s and steadily turned into the predominant mainstream music structure by the 1990s, representing a multi-billion dollar industry today (Selke INT). Hip-hop music can additionally have some positive impacts. For example, its verbal imagination can motivate audience members to play with dialect, and acknowledge musicality and rhyme (Selke INT). Just like poetry, hip-hop can be a way of expressing oneself.