Hip hop (culture)
Hip hop or hip-hop is a culture and art movement that was created by African Americans,[1][2] starting in the Bronx, New York City.[a] Pioneered from Black American street culture,[4][5] that had been around for years prior to its more mainstream discovery,[6] it later reached other groups such as Latino Americans and Caribbean Americans. Hip-hop culture has historically been shaped and dominated by African American men,[7] though female hip hop artists have contributed to the art form and culture as well.[8] Hip hop culture is characterized by the key elements of rapping[b], DJing and turntablism, and breakdancing;[9][10] other elements include graffiti, beatboxing, street entrepreneurship, hip hop language, and hip hop fashion.[11][12] From hip hop culture emerged a new genre of popular music, hip hop music.
This article is about the culture in general. For the music genre, see Hip hop music. For other uses, see Hip hop (disambiguation).
The Bronx hip hop scene emerged in August 1973 when brother–sister duo DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell hosted the first hip hop party in the Bronx, sparking the rise of the genre.[13] Hip hop culture has spread to both urban and suburban communities throughout the United States and subsequently the world.[14] These elements were adapted and developed considerably, particularly as the art forms spread to new continents and merged with local styles in the 1990s and subsequent decades. Even as the movement continues to expand globally and explore myriad styles and art forms, including hip hop theater and hip hop film, the four foundational elements provide coherence and a strong foundation for hip hop culture.[15]
Hip hop is simultaneously a new and old phenomenon; the importance of sampling tracks, beats, and basslines from old records to the art form means that much of the culture has revolved around the idea of updating classic recordings, attitudes, and experiences for modern audiences. Sampling older culture and reusing it in a new context or a new format is called "flipping" in hip hop culture.[16] Hip hop music follows in the footsteps of earlier African-American-rooted and Latino musical genres such as blues, jazz, rag-time, funk, salsa, and disco to become one of the most practiced genres worldwide.
In the 2000s, with the rise of new media platforms such as online music streaming services, fans discovered and downloaded or streamed hip hop music through social networking sites beginning with Blackplanet & Myspace, as well as from websites like YouTube, Worldstarhiphop, SoundCloud, and Spotify.[17][18]
Etymology
Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has been credited with coining the term[19] in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army by scat singing, in alternation, the made-up words "hip" and "hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into his stage performance.[20][21] The group frequently performed with disco artists who would refer to this new type of music by calling them "hip hoppers". The name was originally meant as a sign of disrespect, but soon came to identify this new music and its broader culture.[22] Therefore, the words chosen are probably not related to contemporary definitions for either "hip" or "hop", although that pair of words in conjunction had been swirling in the public lexicon since at least the 1950s, with older folks describing the parties of the youth as "hippity hops".[23]
As the name was getting established, the words were a signature part of some songs. The song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the phrase "I said a hip, hop, the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, and you don't stop".[24] The 1980 hit "Rapture" by Blondie contains a rapping part with the line "And you hip-hop, and you don't stop, just blast off, sure shot." Lovebug Starski — a Bronx DJ who put out the single "The Positive Life" in 1981 – and DJ Hollywood then began using the term when referring to this new "disco rap" music. Bill Alder, an independent consultant, once said, "There was hardly ever a moment when rap music was underground, one of the first so-called rap records, was a monster hit ('Rapper's Delight' by the Sugar Hill Gang on Sugarhill Records)."[25]
Hip hop pioneer and South Bronx community leader Afrika Bambaataa also credits Lovebug Starski as the first to use the term "hip hop" as it relates to the culture. Bambaataa, former leader of the Black Spades, also did much to further popularize the term. The first use of the term in print, referring specifically to the culture and its elements, was in a January 1982 interview of Afrika Bambaataa by Michael Holman in the East Village Eye.[26] The term gained further currency in September of that year in The Village Voice, in a profile of Bambaataa written by Steven Hager, who also published the first comprehensive history of the culture with St. Martins' Press.[20][27]
Values and philosophy
Essentialism
Since the age of slavery, music has long been the language of African American identity. Because reading and writing were forbidden under the auspices of slavery, music became the only accessible form of communication. Hundreds of years later, in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by high illiteracy and dropout rates, music remains the most dependable medium of expression. Hip Hop is thus to modern day as Negro Spirituals are to the plantations of the old South: the emergent music articulates the terrors of one's environment better than written, or spoken word, thereby forging an "unquestioned association of oppression with creativity [that] is endemic" to African American culture".[210]
As a result, lyrics of rap songs have often been treated as "confessions" to a number of violent crimes in the United States.[211] It is also considered to be the duty of rappers and other hip hop artists (DJs, dancers) to "represent" their city and neighborhood. This demands being proud of being from disadvantaged cities neighborhoods that have traditionally been a source of shame, and glorifying them in lyrics and graffiti. This has potentially been one of the ways that hip hop has become regarded as a "local" rather than "foreign" genre of music in so many countries around the world in just a few decades. Nevertheless, sampling and borrowing from a number of genres and places is also a part of the hip hop milieu, and an album like the surprise hit Kala by Anglo-Tamil rapper M.I.A. was recorded in locations all across the world and features sounds from a different country on every track.[212]
According to scholar Joseph Schloss, the essentialist perspective of hip hop conspicuously obfuscates the role that individual style and pleasure plays in the development of the genre. Schloss notes that Hip Hop is forever fossilized as an inevitable cultural emergent, as if "none of hip-hop's innovators had been born, a different group of poor black youth from the Bronx would have developed hip-hop in exactly the same way".[210]
However, while the pervasive oppressive conditions of the Bronx were likely to produce another group of disadvantaged youth, he questions whether they would be equally interested, nonetheless willing to put in as much time and energy into making music as Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, and Afrika Bambaataa. He thus concludes that Hip Hop was a result of choice, not fate, and that when individual contributions and artistic preferences are ignored, the genre's origin becomes overly attributed to collective cultural oppression.