The genre was birthed in the break dancing era, all those decades ago — that point when a tune’s lyrics dropped, instruments cooled down and the beat took the stage.
It was then that Hip-Hop arrived into the world, seizing the moment and reinventing it. Something new, emanating out of something ordinary.
At the needles of the Disc Jockeys playing the albums, that broken moment became something more: an arrangement in itself, reiterated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables.
The emcees got in on it, “spitting’ their clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the b-boys and b-girls who stormed the floor to break dance.
It took on its visual technique, with graffiti artists carrying it to the streets and subways of New York City. It didn’t remain there, of course. A musical form, a culture, with reinvention as its very DNA would never, could. Hip-hop stretch, from the parties to the parks, via New York City’s boroughs and then the region, around the country and the rest of the world catch the fever.
And at each phase: modification, transformation, as new, different mouthpieces entered and made their own, in sound, in lyric, in purpose, in style. Its footings saturated the Black communities where it first made itself known and also scattered out and growing, like surges in water, until no corner of the world hasn’t been brushed by it.
Not just being reinvented, but reinventing. Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business: Hip-hop has impacted them all, transforming even as it has been transformed.
In the genre Hip-hop, “when someone does it, then that’s how it’s done. When someone does something different, then that’s a new way,” says Babatunde Akinboboye, a Nigerian-American opera vocalist and longtime hip-hop enthusiast in Los Angeles, who produces content on social media using both musical styles.
Hip-hop “connects to what is true. And what is true, lasts.”
Music lovers pursuing hip-hop commencing point have touched down on one, turning this year into a 50th-birthday celebration.
Aug. 11, 1973, was the date a young Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc around his Bronx stomping floors, deejayed a back-to-school party for his younger sister in the community room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue.
Campbell, who was birthed and lived his early years in Jamaica before his family migrated to the Bronx, was still a teenager himself at that period, just 18 years when he started expanding the musical breaks of the records he was playing to create a different kind of dancing opportunity. He’d begun talking over the beat, reminiscent of the “toasting” style heard in Jamaica.
It wasn’t long before the style could spread all over the city — and commenced to circulate the New York City metro region.
Among those who began to hear about it were some youthful guys across the river in Englewood, New Jersey, who began making up rhymes to go along with the beats.
In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for Sylvia Robinson, a vocalist turned music producer who co-founded Sugar Hill Records.
As The Sugarhill Gang, they put out “ Rapper’s Delight ” and oriented the country to a record that would reach as high as 36 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart list, and even make it to No. 1 in some European nations.
“Now what you hear is not a test: I’m rappin’ to the beat/And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet,” Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright said in one of the song’s stanzas.
Wright says he had no suspicion the song — and, by elongation, hip-hop — was “going to be big. “I knew it was going to blow up and play all over the world because it was a new genre of music,” he tells The Associated Press. “You had classical jazz, bebop, rock, pop, and here comes a new form of music that didn’t exist.”
And it was one based on self-expression, says Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien. “If you couldn’t sing or you couldn’t play an instrument, you could recite poetry and speak your mind. And so it became accessible to the everyman.”
And every woman, too, of course. Female vocalists took their opportunities on the microphone and dance floors as well, like Roxanne Shante, a native of New York City’s Queens borough who was only 14 years old in 1984.
That was the year she became one of the first female emcees, those rhyming over the beat, to attain a wider audience — and was part of what was likely the first well-known instance of rappers using their song tracks to take sonic shots at other rappers, in a back-and-forth song battle known as The Roxanne Wars.
“When I look at my female rappers of today, I see hope and inspiration,” Shante says. “When you look at some of your female rappers today and you see the businesses that they own and the barriers that they were able to break it down, it’s amazing to me and it’s an honour for me to even be a part of that from the beginning.”
Plenty of other women have joined her over the intervening decades, from Queen Latifah to Lil’ Kim to Nicki Minaj to Megan Thee Stallion and more, speaking on their experiences as women in hip-hop and the larger world. That doesn’t even begin to touch the list of women rappers hailing from other countries.
They’re women like Tkay Maidza, birthed in Zimbabwe and raised in Australia, a songwriter and rapper in the early part of her career. She’s excited with the diverse female firm she’s maintaining in hip-hop, and with the variety of topics they’re gabbing about.
“There’s so many different pockets … so many ways to exist,” she says. “It’s not about what other people have done. … You can always recreate the blueprint.”
The priority on self-expression has also implied that over the years, hip-hop has been employed as a medium for just about everything.
Want to talk about a party or how awesome and rich you are? Go for it. Does a cute guy or beautiful girl catch your eye? Say it in a verse. Looking to take that sound coming out of New York City and adapt it to a West Coast vibe, a Chicago beat, a New Orleans groove, or an Atlanta rhythm, or these days, sounds in Egypt, India, Australia, and Nigeria? It’s all you, and it’s all hip-hop. (Now whether anyone listening thought it was actually any good? That was a different story.)
Mainstream America hasn’t always been ready for it. The sexually explicit content from Miami’s 2 Live Crew made their 1989 album “As Nasty As They Want To Be” the subject of a legal battle over obscenity and freedom of expression; a later album, “Banned in the USA,” became the first to get an official record industry label about explicit content.
Emanating from America’s Black communities has also meant hip-hop has been a device or way to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world in “ The Message,” that the emphases of deprivation in their city neighbourhoods made it feel “like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.”
Additional notable figures like Common and Kendrick Lamar have also switched to a conscious lyricism in their hip-hop prowess, with perhaps none better known than Public Enemy, whose “Fight the Power” became an anthem when it was created for filmmaker Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing,” which chronicled racial tension in a Brooklyn neighbourhood.
Some in Hip-Hop yanked no stabs, employing the art form and the culture as a no-holds-barred manner of displaying the problems of their lives. Often those messages have been met with fear or disrespect in the mainstream. When N.W.A. came “Straight Outta Compton” in 1988 with loud, brash tales of police abuse and gang life, radio stations flinched.
Hip-Hop (largely that accomplished by Black artists) and law enforcement have had an aggressive relationship over the years, each eyeing the other with apprehension. There’s been cause for some of it. In some forms of hip-hop the links between rappers and criminal figures were real, and the violence that meandered out, as in high-profile demises like that of Tupac Shakur in 1996, The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, sometimes got extremely bloodstained. But in a jurisdiction where Black people are often looked at with distrust by authority, there have also been plenty of stereotypes about hip-hop and crime.
As hip-hop stretched over decades, a host of voices have used it to speak out on the matters that are precious to them. Look at Bobby Sanchez, a Peruvian American transgender, two-spirit poet and rapper who has released a song in Quechua, the language of the Wari people that her father came from. “Quechua 101 Land Back Please” references the slaying of Indigenous peoples and calls for land restoration.
“I think it’s very special and cool when artists use it to reflect society because it makes it bigger than just them,” Sanchez says. “To me, it’s always political, really, no matter what you’re talking about, because hip-hop, in a way, is a form of resistance.”
Yes, it’s an American creation. And yes, it’s still heavily influenced by what’s happening in America. But hip-hop has found homes all over the planet, turned to by people in every community under the sun to express what matters to them.
How The Genre Was Felt In Africa
When hip-hop first commenced being soaked outside of the United States, it often with a mimicking of American styles and messages, according to P. Khalil Saucier, who has studied the spread of hip-hop across the nations of Africa.
That’s not the issue these days. Homegrown hip-hop can be found everywhere, a premium instance of the genre’s predisposition to staying relevant and crucial by being reinvented by the people doing it.
“The culture as a whole has kind of really rooted itself because it’s been able to now transform itself from simply an importation, if you will, to now really being local in its multiple manifestations, regardless of what country you’re looking at,” says Saucier, a professor of critical Black studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
That’s to everyone’s benefit, says Rishma Dhaliwal, founder of London’s I Am Hip-Hop magazine.
“Hip-hop is … allowing you in someone’s world. It’s allowing you into someone’s struggles,” she says. “It’s a big microphone to say, `Well, the streets say this is what is going on here and this is what you might not know about us. This is how we feel, and this is who we are.’”
The impact hasn’t just been in one direction. Hip-hop hasn’t just been changed; it has made change. It has gone into other spaces and made them different. It strutted through the fashion world as it brought its sensibility to streetwear. It has revitalized companies; just ask Timberland what sales were like before its workboots became de rigueur hip-hop wear.
Or look at perhaps the perfect example: “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical about a distant white historical figure that came to life in the rhythms of its hip-hop soundtrack, bringing a different energy and audience to the theatre world.
Hip-hop “has done a very good job of making culture more accessible. It has broken into spaces that we’re traditionally not allowed to break into,” Dhaliwal says.
For Usha Jey, freestyling hip-hop was the perfect thing to mix with the classical, formal South Asian dance style of Bharatanatyam. The 26-year-old choreographer, born in France to Tamil immigrant parents, created a series of social media videos last year showing the two styles interacting with each other. It was her training in hip-hop that gave her the confidence and spirit to do something different.
Hip-hop culture “pushes you to be you,” Jey said. “I feel like in the pursuit of finding yourself, hip-hop helps me because that culture says, you’ve got to be you.”
Hip-hop is, simply, “a magical art form,” says Nile Rodgers, legendary musician, composer and record producer. He would know. It was his song “Good Times,” with the band Chic, that was recreated to form the basis for “Rapper’s Delight” all those years ago.
“The impact that it’s had on the world, it really can’t be quantified,” Rodgers says. “You can find someone in a village that you’ve never been to, a country that you’ve never been to, and all of a sudden you hear its local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and have made it their own.”
