History of Hip Hop
Origins
What we know as Hip Hop culture first began in a section of New York City called the Bronx in the 1970's. As a marginalised group, ghetto youth didn't have any formal way to express themselves. Instead, these black and Latino youth - some recently arrived from the islands of the Caribbean- developed Hip Hop as a way to have fun, communicate their experiences, and criticise the social inequality and poverty they were experiencing.
Competition and battles encouraged a sense of pride and achievement. The competition/or battles involved MCs, DJs, graffiti artists and Bboys/Bgirls. Hip Hop provided a creative outlet to an often frustrating and difficult life. It encouraged competition and the opportunity to be the best at something. Street corner conflict or battles changed from fighting to dancing; shooting guns to spraying paint.
The social climate of the last 20-30 years in the United States has greatly impacted on marginalised youth in the sense that every significant institution in American society makes it clear to them [young people] that they do not count, that their parents are losers, and that their communities are places where no one would live if they were not forced to do so.1
As Hip Hop grew in popularity around the world, its audience quickly became pioneers in their own communities. Many cultures adopted and adapted aspects of Hip Hop to make it their own. For example in Europe, immigrant populations originating mainly from Turkey and parts of Northern Africa, in particular Morocco, have appropriated aspects of African American and Latino Hip Hop culture and, moving beyond a point of straightforward imitation, are now beginning to rework it to act as a mode of expression for a range of local issues.2
Closer to home, Hip Hop has been wholeheartedly embraced by Maori and Pacific Island youth, and increasingly by, pakeha, refugee and migrant youth. It has enabled some practitioners to achieve significant commercial success.
What began as a mimicking of American Hip Hop has since become a varied continuum, where there simultaniously exists people that precisely mimic US rap, people that consciously don't, and everything in between.
For many, Hip Hop has come to be seen as a unique fusion of local music, language and cultural values arranged on a tableau of Hip Hop music and culture.
This scenario of localising Hip Hop repeats itself in communities throughout Africa, Central and South America, Europe and Asia. It demonstrates both the common experience of world youth today and an increasingly ‘global flow’ of people, information, commodities, capital, images and ideas across national borders, and the implications which this has for conceptions of national culture and national identity.3
Hip Hop quickly became a popular genre throughout the United States.
Within only a few years, Hip Hop culture was transformed from being an aspect of a small subculture identified with young, city-dwelling African Americans and Latino's, to a genre that had been absorbed into mainstream US culture. Everything from softdrink commercials to white pop music appropriated Hip Hop music’s musical and visual style.4
There was a major increase in the commercialisation of popular music during the 1980s. Music videos and international broadcasting of the MTV channel allowed Hip Hop culture to spread rapidly throughout the world.
In 1988, the annual record sales of Hip Hop music reached $100 million… The next year, Billboard added rap charts to its magazine, and the music video outlet MTV debuted Yo!MTV Raps, which quickly became the network’s highest rated show.5
The social inequality and marginalisation experienced by some groups in the United States were, of course, not limited to that country. Economic recessions, during the late 1970's and 1980's, and the rise of political conservatism became international trends. The increasing dominance of American culture, combined with existing social problems, meant that youth outside the United States could easily relate to the ideas put forward through Hip Hop.
Academics began to recognise the universal appeal of Hip Hop. One writer suggests that the key to understanding Hip Hop relates not so much to its point of origin as the way in which … it reflect[s] and contest[s] the social roles open to inner city youth at the end of the twentieth century.6
1 Lipsitz, G. 1998. The Hip Hop Hearings; Censorship, Social Memory, and Intergenerational Tensions among African Americans., in Generations of Youth; Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth Century America, Austin & Willard eds., New York University Press, New York. p75.
2 Bennett, A. 1999. Hip Hop am Main: The localisation of rap music and hip hop culture. Media, Culture & Society, Vol 21, No 1. p75.
3 Smart 1993: 149 in Bennett 1999: p 79.
4 McLeod, K. 1999. Authenticity within Hip Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation. Journal of Communication, Vol 49, Issue 4, Autumn.
5 Samuels 1995; Silverman 1989 ‘Stereotyping Hip-Hop, Rap Music’ supplementary reference source for Myllynen, American rap Music, 2001, http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US8/PAPS/scoggins.html .
6 Rose 1994: 72 in Bennett, A. 1999. Hip Hop am Main: The localisation of rap music and hip hop culture. Media, Culture & Society, Vol 21, No 1. p75.
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