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Hip-Hop Digital Essay: The Evolution of Hip-Hop into the Modern Era- By Matt Scott

Trinity College

Digital Essay: The Evolution of Hip-Hop into the Modern Era (Essay #2)

Matt Scott FYSM 212: Introduction to Hip-Hop Professor Markle Due: 12/15/19

Looking back at the history of hip-hop, and the rich culture surrounding the art form, it’s clear that the roots of the genre have been stripped down to almost nothing over the years. I believe hip-hop is an art form, a mix of breaking, DJing, and MCing all coming together under one roof with emphasis on the sound and rhythm of the music, created in black communities as an outlet. In its early days, hip-hop lyrics weren’t preaching any particular message, but the movement and its impact on communities sent a powerful message. The movement was about bringing together communities, stopping violence, and inspiring a generation of youth – and its impact on black culture was positive and powerful. Today we see the art form being used to promote violence, the disrespect of women, drug abuse, and other negative messages that are at odds with hip-hop’s origins. It is now about making money, selling records, and gaining popularity at all costs. The popularity of hip-hop opened the door for many talented black artists and created new opportunities for a community of people who have been mistreated at every turn throughout history. I think the new era of hip-hop has had a negative impact on the art form itself, and it puts a bad label on the community. Without its core principles, hip-hop loses what made it special. When all the lyrics are just hollow and meaningless words, it leaves you with something that’s not hip-hop at all, but just a way to make money. In this essay I’m going to be looking at five hit songs from top artists from each decade, starting with Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” and ending with Migos’s “Bad and Boujee”. The purpose of this essay is to show the evolution of hip-hop from its roots in the Bronx through the present day by exploring the lyrics and message behind each song.

Hip-hop without the other forms of creative expression tied to it is a way of mixing lyrics and beats to convey a meaningful message about the culture and community from which it emerged. If you take away the powerful message of justice and equality that many true hip-hop songs convey, you’re left with a money hungry industry doing whatever it takes to sell records. When hip-hop is being fueled by money, and not by meaning, we see the most damage being done to the community of people the art form represents. This era of hip-hop is hurting the image and meaning that hip-hop once stood for, but there’s still hope for hip-hop moving forward. If we can go back its roots, to some of those early songs from the 80s, 90s and into the early 2000s that represent the true ideals behind hip-hop, there is a chance for the industry and genre to regrow with its strong roots back in place.

Work Cited “Song Lyrics & Knowledge.” Genius, https://genius.com/. Chang, Jeff, and DJ Kool Herc. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St.Martins Press, 2008.

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The Day Hip-Hop Changed Forever

A s a person who loves history, I'm one of those people who can spot a historical moment as it's happening—both as a participant and as an outside viewer. So, to be two years older than what we consider to be the birth of hip hop and to grow up with it like a sibling is a fortunate feeling because I got to witness a lot of firsts. Every time I’ve experienced these seismic shifts, I've taken note of where I was because music is a polaroid of memory—a song, a melody, an album is classic because you know where you were the second that you heard it. Sometimes, this shifting of paradigms was to the benefit of hip hop and sometimes, unfortunately, to its detriment. But nothing could’ve prepared me for the moment when hip hop, as I knew it, changed forever: the 1995 Source Awards.

The ’95 Source Awards was a funeral in hip hop’s history, and I don’t say that in hindsight. I knew it walking into the Paramount Theater in New York City that day on August 3, 1995, and I knew it running away. And when I say running, I'm not exaggerating. I was running for my life—it felt like the creative version of Apocalypse Now .

Hip hop was created as a rejection of the opulence of Studio 54 culture, a direct result of Black people historically being edged out from places of social mobility and of consistently being the “have nots.” But by the time the 90’s rolled around, hip hop was slowly turning into the very thing that it was once against.

In 1992, Dr. Dre released The Chronic , and what really made that album notable was that it signaled the first push toward the rock-star lifestyle in hip hop. While Nirvana at the time was rejecting all those things that hair metal rockers stood for—all the women, the money, the drugs—and deep-diving into nihilism, The Chronic , while not blatantly representing opulence, was the blueprint that Sean Diddy Combs listened to and made the new standard.

In the people's eyes, The Chronic was the first album by a credible producer and emcee that didn't have to pander to a very safe, we-come-in-peace formula that your grandma was singing along to. Snoop Dogg burst on to the scene as an incredible, promising new emcee and Dre became God at producing. They put big numbers on the boards, dominated MTV, and once New York saw that this was the golden ticket, suddenly everyone fell in line. Questionable compromises were made, and many acts felt cast aside, including The Roots. (We ultimately made the decision to move to Europe for two years of our record deal because of The Chronic ’s effect.) Art was one thing, but survival became more important—and by any means necessary.

Read More: How Rap Became the Sound of the Mainstream

That was the mentality with which everyone was walking into the Paramount Theater in ‘95. Just a year prior at the first-ever, untelevised Source Awards, tensions were already building between Tupac and A Tribe Called Quest, not just further cementing the East versus West Coast rivalry, but also dividing New York into two—a sinister foreshadowing. And that’s exactly how the theater was split up, too: If you were facing the stage, the right side is where all the winners were, which was basically anyone two degrees to Combs. They looked shiny, which is kind of a thing that we didn't know that we had to do. In the middle was the other territories: the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast. So they were already defensive because they're in New York, and well, we were a bunch of pricks and looking at them in a very arrogant sort of way. And then on the left side were, I would say, the have-nots—New York-centric hip-hop; the people that would eventually become the grumpy old people that complain that hip hop is dead.

The first person that I noticed was Nas. As I saw him walk in, I noticed he was wearing a very peculiar red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger shirt. It was 4-XL—I think I could fit into that shirt, and I’m a big guy—and Nas was drowning in it. He made his way to his seat on the left side of the theater, four rows ahead of me, and sat down.

The big question of the night was who was going to get crowned for Rap Album of the Year. Would it be Nas’ Illmatic or Biggie’s Ready to Die ? Having received a rare five-mic rating from The Source for Illmatic , Nas was the gold standard. It seemed like it could’ve been his night. But the momentum that Biggie had since his album came out was undeniable, and as he began to sweep one award after the next, Nas sank lower and lower into his seat as the night went on.

I was very familiar with Nas’s heartbreaking, defeated body posture, living in my low self-esteem back then. To this day, I wish I would have gone up to him and said, “Do not let this moment determine your future.” Because by the end of the night, I instantly knew that he was going to throw away everything, this whole night, and now do it: compete with Biggie. It wasn't until I spoke to Nas’ former manager, Steve Stoute, and he gave me his account of that moment, that it was confirmed to me. Nas felt dejected, like the last year was a total waste, and the result of that night was, in part, the release of his second album It Was Written . And while it was Nas’s most successful record that had his most successful single, it came at a cost. Nas was open for business—adjusting his music so people who embraced The Chronic and Ready to Die would also embrace him.

Literally one by one, everyone realized that they had to compromise. And I don't mean compromise as a four-letter word because nothing comes before your survival when you're a Black person. Often, Black people hate when rap critics, who are mainly white, are quick to use the term “sellout,” as if Black people aren't in a constant rat maze of fight or flight all their lives. Because yes, even your art might have to be sacrificed. And that realization, and the hopelessness that followed, was why the Source Awards was one of the most depressing days of my life. I didn’t know if I had a future.

Later in the night, as they were about to hand Dr. Dre the award for Producer of the Year and Snoop Dogg gave his infamous “East Coast ain’t got no love for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg” speech , none of us were sitting in our seats anymore. The energy, at that point, was reminiscent of old-fashioned Western barroom brawl. All I remember was I grabbed my date, and said, “We’re leaving right now.” And we ran for our lives. The second we heard “Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg,” I thought, ”We're all going to die.”

At the time, it wasn't even hyperbole, but in a metaphorical slow way, I was right. The hip hop that I knew, loved, embraced was gone, and that night, the hourglass turned over. But as I was running out of that place, there was this one guy in the street that came up to me, and said, “Yo, take this.” He put the cassette in my hands, and it said D'Angelo, Brown Sugar . Now, normally, I never took demos, but I just put the tape in my pocket and kept running. When I got back to my hotel room, and listened to just how good the cassette was, I sat there and realized that I had a chance to be on this record, and I didn't do it. I had to make music with this guy.

I don't think it's a coincidence that, on the day that I thought the culture was ending, I would meet the very person I would wind up creating Voodoo with, another paradigm shifting masterpiece—for us. That was my introduction to him—a rebirth, on what I felt was ultimately hip hop’s funeral.

—As told to Rachel Sonis

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Hip Hop History: From the Streets to the Mainstream

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From the street corner to the world stage, hip hop has grown into one of the world’s most prominent musical genres and cultural influences. Explore significant events in hip hop history and its explosive evolution.

In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force released “Planet Rock,” one of the most influential early hip hop songs. Instead of rapping over funk beats, Bambaataa created an electronic sound by sampling Kraftwerk and using the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The song helped popularize the TR-808, which became a staple of hip hop music.

Grandmaster Flash

In 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made history again. The group became the first hip hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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While there is some debate over the number of elements of hip-hop, there are four elements that are considered to be its pillars: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” (emceeing) or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and break dancing, or “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” Many also cite a fifth essential component: “knowledge of self/consciousness.” Other suggested elements include street fashion and language.

There are various explanations for the source of the term hip-hop . However, the most popular one involves Keith (”Keef Cowboy”) Wiggins, a member of the rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five . The rapper used the words hip/hop/hip/hop , imitating the sound of soldiers marching, in reference to a friend who had joined the army. According to some accounts, Kevin (”Lovebug Starski”) Smith was with Wiggins and helped create the phrase. Hip-hop was subsequently popularized in songs, notably the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

While a number of people were influential in the creation of hip-hop, much credit is given to Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), a Jamaican immigrant who was the first major hip-hop disc jockey. At a Bronx party on August 11, 1973, he introduced the technique of playing the same album on two turntables and extending the drum section (which became known as the breakbeat). Many recognize this night as the birth of hip-hop. Other pioneering hip-hop deejays include Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash . The three men are often called the “holy trinity” of early hip-hop.

Although not the first hip-hop song, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) was considered the first significant single of the genre. Within weeks of its release, it became a chart-topping phenomenon and gave its name to a new genre of pop music. Part of its crossover appeal was attributed to its lighthearted lyrics, which were atypical of most rap songs at the time.

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hip-hop , cultural movement that attained widespread popularity in the 1980s and ’90s and also the backing music for rap , the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.

Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying , or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As the hip-hop movement began at society’s margins, its origins are shrouded in myth , enigma , and obfuscation.

Graffiti and break dancing , the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx , Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colorful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol -like Campbell’s soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United States , Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.

The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa , and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.

In the meantime, deejays developed new techniques for turntable manipulation. Needle dropping, created by Grandmaster Flash, prolonged short drum breaks by playing two copies of a record simultaneously and moving the needle on one turntable back to the start of the break while the other played. Sliding the record back and forth underneath the needle created the rhythmic effect called “scratching.”

Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic histories of West African griots , talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent’s family). Other influences cited include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko Henderson ; the Black power poetry of Amiri Baraka , Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets ; rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of rhythmized speech known as toasting.

Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill Gang ’s song “ Rapper’s Delight ” (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar Hill . Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name to a new genre of pop music . The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five , Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in “Rapper’s Delight.” These early MCs and deejays constituted rap’s old school.

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Hip-hop turns 50, reinventing itself and swaths of the world along the way

Breakdancer Victor Montalvo, 27, of Kissimmee, Fla., performs in New York City on June 22, 2021. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

A street sign at Bronx’s Sedgwick Houses apartments is shown renamed as Hip Hop Blvd, recognizing the site where hip hop’s creator DJ Kool Herc first held parties featuring his new sound, July 26, 2023, in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. Hip-hop has impacted everything: Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business. This year is being marked as a 50th anniversary celebration. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

FILE - DJ Kool Herc speaks at a news conference to launch “Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, The Rhymes, The Life,” the first ever hip-hop initiative at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in New York, Feb. 28, 2006. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. Those looking for a hip-hop starting point have landed 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 grounds, deejayed a back-to-school party for his younger sister in the community room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams, file)

A subway train is adorned with various words from un authorized writers July 22, 1972 in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. (AP Photo/Jim Wells, file)

FILE - Hendogg from The Sugarhill Gang, left, Grandmaster Dee of Whodini, center, and Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright of The Sugarhill Gang, pose for a photo on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 11, 2008. Members of The Sugarhill Gang put out “Rapper’s Delight” and introduced 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 countries. Wright says he had no doubt the song — and, by extension, 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.” (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

FILE - A demolition crew takes down an address sign from the Sugar Hill Studio recording studio in Englewood, N.J., Oct. 14, 2002. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Among those who started to hear about it were some young men across the river in Englewood, New Jersey, who started making up rhymes to go along with the beats. In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for Sylvia Robinson, a singer turned music producer who co-founded Sugar Hill Records. As The Sugarhill Gang, they put out “Rapper’s Delight” and introduced 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 countries. (AP Photo/Mike Derer, file)

FILE - Grandmaster Flash (at podium) & the Furious Five accept their award for being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during ceremonies in New York, March 12, 2007. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Coming from America’s Black communities, it has meant hip-hop has been a tool to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world in “The Message,” that the stresses of poverty in their city neighborhoods made it feel “like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.” (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, file)

Roxanne Shante poses for a portrait on July 18, 2023, in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. 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 MCs, those rhyming over the beat, to gain 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. (Photo by Matt Licari/Invision/AP)

Flavor Flav, left, and Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy, pose for photographers upon their arrival for the MTV Music Awards at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Sept. 8, 1994. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. Public Enemy’s “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 neighborhood. (AP Photo/Malcolm Clarke)

FILE - Luther Campbell, leader of hip hop group of 2 Live Crew, right, holds a copy of a federal judge’s order ruling his best-selling album obscene, outside of the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., June 6, 1990. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it spread around the country and the world. Mainstream America hasn’t always been ready for it. The sexually explicit content from 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. (AP Photo/Bill Cooke, file)

In this photo taken July 22, 2010, Palestinian members of the Camps Breakerz breakdancing troupe performance at a children’s center in Gaza City. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill, file)

In this photo taken Tuesday, April 19, 2011, Youssef al-Briki, 24, a.k.a. SWAT, center, Mohammed al-Yemeni, 24, a.k.a. Migo, far left, and other members of the Revolution Beat rap group hang out next to a banner of Libya’s legendary anti-Italian fighter Omar al-Mukhtar, in their makeshift studio in a room of the media center in Benghazi, Libya.In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, file)

Drake performs in concert as part of the Summer Sixteen Tour at Madison Square Garden on Aug. 5, 2016, in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. Hip-hop has impacted everything: Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business. This year is being marked as a 50th anniversary celebration. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

FILE - In this April 8, 2016, file photo, inductees MC Ren, from left, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and DJ Yella from N.W.A appear at the 31st Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the Barclays Center in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Some in hip-hop pulled no punches, using the art form and the culture as a no-holds-barred way of showcasing the troubles of their lives. Often those messages have been met with fear or disdain 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 recoiled. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - In this June 12, 2016 file photo, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of “Hamilton” perform at the Tony Awards in New York. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. And at each step there’s been change and adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own. Its foundations are steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known but it’s spread out until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it. Miranda’s groundbreaking musical about a distant white historical figure that came to life in the rhythms of its hip-hop soundtrack, brought a different energy and audience to the theater world. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Guitarist Nile Rodgers of Chic performs at the Jazz Festival of 5 Continents, in Marseille, southern France, July 20, 2013. Hip-hop is, simply, “a magical art form,” says 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 own local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and have made it their own.” (AP Photo/Claude Paris, file)

From left, DJ T Dynasty, Wonder Mike, Master Gee, Leland Robinson of Sugar Hill Records, son of Sylvia Robinson, Hen Dogg pose for a photograph in Englewood, N.J., Friday, May 5, 2023. In the five decades since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. Among those who started to hear about it were some these men across the river in Englewood, N.J., who started making up rhymes to go along with the beats. In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for Sugar Hill Records. As The Sugarhill Gang, they put out “Rapper’s Delight” and introduced 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 countries. (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)

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NEW YORK (AP) — It was born in the break, all those decades ago — that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage. It was then that hip-hop came into the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, coming out of something familiar.

At the hands of the DJs playing the albums, that break moment became something more: a composition in itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the b-boys and b-girls who hit the floor to break-dance. It took on its own visual style, with graffiti artists bringing it to the streets and subways of New York City.

It didn’t stay there, of course. A musical form, a culture, with reinvention as its very DNA would never, could never. Hip-hop spread, from the parties to the parks, through New York City’s boroughs and then the region, around the country and the world.

And at each step: change, adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own, in sound, in lyric, in purpose, in style. Its foundations steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known and also spreading out and expanding, like ripples in water, until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it.

Not only 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 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 singer and longtime hip-hop fan in Los Angeles, who creates content on social media using both musical styles.

Hip-hop “connects to what is true. And what is true, lasts.”

Female rappers have been a part of hip-hop since its debut. Women have fought to shape their identification in hip-hop and demand recognition. (August 9)(AP Video: Sharon Johnson)

Those looking for a hip-hop starting point have landed 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 grounds, deejayed a back-to-school party for his younger sister in the community room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue.

Campbell, who was born and spent his early years in Jamaica before his family moved to the Bronx, was still a teen himself at that time, just 18, when he began extending the musical breaks of the records he was playing to create a different kind of dancing opportunity. He’d started speaking over the beat, reminiscent of the “toasting” style heard in Jamaica.

It wasn’t long before the style could be heard all over the city — and began to spread around the New York City metro region.

Among those who started to hear about it were some young men across the river in Englewood, New Jersey, who started making up rhymes to go along with the beats. In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for Sylvia Robinson, a singer turned music producer who co-founded Sugar Hill Records.

As The Sugarhill Gang, they put out “ Rapper’s Delight ” and introduced 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 countries.

“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 doubt the song — and, by extension, 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 in 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.”

Music Hip Hop at 50-HH50 special

AP correspondent Deepti Hajela reports on Hip-Hop Overview

And everywomen, too, of course. Female voices took their chances 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 MCs, those rhyming over the beat, to gain 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 honor 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, born in Zimbabwe and raised in Australia, a songwriter and rapper in the early part of her career . She’s thrilled with the diverse female company she’s keeping in hip-hop, and with the variety of subjects they’re talking 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 emphasis on self-expression has also meant that over the years, hip-hop has been used as a medium for just about everything.

Want to talk about a party or how awesome and rich you are? Go for it. 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, or a Chicago beat, a New Orleans groove, or an Atlanta rhythm, or these days, sounds in Egypt, India, Australia, 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.

Coming from America’s Black communities, that has also meant hip-hop has been a tool to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world in “ The Message ,” that the stresses of poverty in their city neighborhoods made it feel “like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.”

Other figures like Common and Kendrick Lamar have also turned to a conscious lyricism in their hip-hop, 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 neighborhood.

Some in hip-hop pulled no punches, using the art form and the culture as a no-holds-barred way of showcasing the troubles of their lives. Often those messages have been met with fear or disdain 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 recoiled.

Hip-hop (mainly that done by Black artists) and law enforcement have had a contentious relationship over the years, each eyeing the other with suspicion. There’s been cause for some of it. In some forms of hip-hop the ties between rappers and criminal figures were real, and the violence that spiraled out, as in high-profile deaths like that of Tupac Shakur in 1996, The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, sometimes got very bloody. But in a country where Black people are often looked at with suspicion by authority, there have also been plenty of stereotypes about hip-hop and criminality.

As hip-hop spread over the years, a host of voices have used it to speak out on the issues that are dear 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 killing 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.

When hip-hop first started being absorbed outside of the United States, it was often with a mimicking of American styles and messages, says P. Khalil Saucier, who has studied the spread of hip-hop across the countries of Africa.

That’s not the case these days. Homegrown hip-hop can be found everywhere, a prime example of the genre’s penchant for staying relevant and vital 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 own 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 theater world.

Hip-hop “has done a very good job at 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 own local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and have made it their own.”

Associated Press Entertainment writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Hajela is a member of the AP’s team covering race and ethnicity.

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• Hip Hop Culture

Hip Hop: A Culture of Vision and Voice

Hip hop is global, lapping on every shore and landing at every airport. But what does hip hop  mean? Is it the music with a chest-thumping beat? The rapid-fire lyrics rapped into a handheld mic? Gravity-defying dance steps? Writers turning walls into canvases with larger-than-life letters and illustrations?

Lesson Content

DJ Tony Tone and DJ Kool Herc, 1979 © Joe Conzo, Jr. photographs and ephemera, #8091. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.  

DJ Kool Herc is credited with throwing the switch at an August 1973 dance bash. He spun the same record on twin turntables, toggling between them to isolate and extend percussion breaks—the most danceable sections of a song. It was a technique that filled the floor with dancers who had spent days and weeks polishing their moves.  The effect that night was electric, and soon other DJs in the Bronx were trying to outdo Herc. It was a code that has flowed through hip hop ever since: 1) Use skills and whatever resources are available to create something new and cool; 2) Emulate and imitate the genius of others but inject personal style until the freshness glows. Competition was, and remains, a prime motivator in the hip hop realm. Like a powerful star, this dance-party scene quickly drew other art forms into its orbit. A growing movement of hopeful poets, visual artists, and urban philosophers added their visions and voices by whatever means available. They got the word out about what was happening in their neighborhoods—neighborhoods much of mainstream, middle-class America was doing its best to ignore or run down. Hip hop kept coming, kept pushing, kept playing until that was no longer possible. Today, some hip hop scholars fold as many as six elements into hip hop culture. They include:

• DJing —the artistic handling of beats and music
• MCing , aka  rapping —putting spoken-word poetry to a beat
• Breaking —hip hop’s dance form
• Writing —the painting of highly stylized graffiti
• Theater and literature —combining hip hop elements and themes in drama, poetry, and stories
• Knowledge of self —the moral, social, and spiritual principles that inform and inspire hip hop ways of being.

From its work-with-what-you-got epicenter in the Bronx, hip hop has rolled outward to become a multibillion-dollar business. Its sounds, styles, and fashions are now in play around the world. DJs spin turntables in Sao Paulo, Brazil. MCs rap Arabic in the clubs of Qatar. B-boys and b-girls bust baby freezes in Finland. Graffiti rises on the Great Wall of China. Young poets slam poetry in D.C. So what is hip hop? All of the above and more—whatever we love enough to bring.

The Evolution Of Hip Hop [1979-2017]

Breaking: The Dance Style of Hip Hop

Richard Colón was just 10 when his cousin took him to his first schoolyard bash in 1976. “Ah, I was just blown away,” he says in Jeff Chang’s history of hip hop,  Can’t Stop Won’t Stop . “I just saw all these kids having fun...checking out the whole scene, and it was my first time watching the dance with the music being played...I just immediately became a part of it.”

He soon became a  big  part of it. By his early teens, the boy now immortalized as “Crazy Legs” became a trendsetter for breaking—a dance revolution still popping, locking, and rocking the world.

Making a B-line from the Bronx

As hip hop culture rose from the streets of the Bronx, breaking spun up and stepped out from the concrete itself. Early b(reaker)-girls and b-boys like Crazy Legs and his Rock Steady Crew earned their skills on that hard ground, admiring each other’s cuts, bruises, and “battle scars” as they pushed one another to evermore audacious displays of style and guts.

In keeping with hip hop’s ethic of improvisation, breaking is often a create-on-the-fly dance style. It mixes super-quick footwork with body-torquing twists. Robotic movements flow into smooth whole-body waves before dropping into acrobatic leg flares that suddenly halt in mid-spin freezes that seem to defy gravity. Breaking is the ultimate 3-D dance—flipping high, spinning low, and putting a premium on physical imagination and bravado.

Getting on the Good Foot

Breaking has copied from many dance styles to generate this uniqueness. These styles include the Charleston from 100 years ago that loaned its characteristic leg kick and arm swing as a top-rocking move. The ad-libbing of the Lindy Hop, popular from the 1920s on, also lives in breaking’s style. For individual inspiration, though, no one can best soul singer James Brown. His high-energy dance moves in the 1960s and 70s have inspired b-boys and b-girls ever since, and his song “Get on the Good Foot” is one of breaking’s early anthems. Tap, steppin’, ballet, disco, and modern all continue to contribute.

Breaking has rummaged beyond the dance floor and stage to find many of its most dramatic moves. The whirling torsos and legs of gymnasts on the pommel horse are seen in leg flares, for example. Down-rocking reflects techniques from gymnastic floor routines.The world of hand-to-hand combat has also provided inspiration for b-boys and b-girls. Hip hop scholars often link breaking with  capoeira , a martial arts dance with roots in Angola and Brazil that displays acrobatics, grace, and power. A full-blown showdown makes it clear why breaking contests are referred to as “battles” as dancers mix dance moves with shadow kicks, leg sweeps, and fake attacks in the faces of the competition.

Breaking is much more than a sum of moves from various dances and disciplines, though. It is a living, breathing art form unique every time dancers take their turn in a cypher (see sidebar). Through the years the Rock Steady Crew, the Mighty Zulu Kings, the Lockers, the Electric Boogaloos, and thousands of other individuals and crews have continuously renewed and refreshed the style with original spins, fresh freezes, and new twists on power moves—often laced with body-bending humor. Competition and innovation in breaking—as with all things hip hop—is essential and inspired, and today its style inspires wherever people dance.

Flying Legs Crew: Kings of New York

Hip Hop Vocabulary

B-Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of breaking—hip hop’s dance style include:

popping  fluid movements of the limbs, such as moving arms like an ocean wave, that emphasize contractions of isolated muscles  locking  snapping arms or legs into held positions, often at sharp angles, to accent a musical rhythm  top-rocking  fancy footwork performed upright  down-rocking  dance moves performed on or close to the ground  up-rocking  martial arts strikes, kicks and sweeps built into the dance steps often with the intent of “burning” an opponent  power moves  acrobatic spins and flares requiring speed, strength, and agility  freeze  sudden halt of a dance step to hold a pose, often while balanced on a hand, shoulder, or head  cypher  group of b-boys/b-girls taking turns in the center of the dance floor

DJing: The Artist at the Turntable

DJs are the soul behind the beat that pleases, surprises, and puts people on the dance floor. The best DJs have an almost mystical sense of mood at a party or club. They sense the right moment to cue the right song using the right technique to take the party where it’s ready to go. It is that insight, a passionate knowledge of music, and technical know-how that make DJing one of the pillars of hip hop culture.

Working the Sound System

A DJ’s sound system is a laboratory for making music magic. Twin turntables are standard, allowing the DJ to switch easily between songs, or spin and manipulate records in tandem to create effects or unique musical combinations. The turntables are wired to a receiver, amplifier, and earthquake-causing speakers. The DJ may use headphones to cue up the next song or song segment as the current music plays. Then he or she uses a mixer, or fader, to make transitions from one turntable to the other—hopefully without missing a beat. Today’s DJs often incorporate digitized and computerized components, as well. But most hip hop purists frown on DJs who button-push preprogrammed playlists. Hip hop culture saves its greatest praise for inspired improvisation.

Before the rise of hip hop, the DJ’s basic role was relatively simple—spin records at a party, club, or on the radio. DJ Kool Herc’s keen observations changed that game. He noticed the energy on the dance floor went off the charts during the “breaks” of songs. Breaks are the instrumental sections in many pop and rhythm & blues numbers that highlight percussion and rhythm.

Herc experimented with methods to extend these sections by playing the same record on both turntables, a technique refined by fellow pioneering DJ Grandmaster Flash. With needle-fine timing, they switched back and forth between the turntables to multiply the break. Crowds, especially dancing b-boys and b-girls, couldn’t get enough. Since the beginning, hip hop DJs have been instrumental in channeling youthful energy away from trouble and toward creative fun.

Good DJs constantly explore ways to pleasantly shock their audiences. They may give people the songs they expect, planning out smooth transitions by matching beats and musical keys from one number to the next. They also innovate by listening for songs within songs, lifting and linking snippets to take the music somewhere new.

In the never-ending quest to distinguish their mix, DJs often haunt used-record stores. They are on the prowl for long-lost songs or sounds they can make new again through the magic of hip hop. Legendary DJ and all-around hip hop luminary Afrika Bambaataa is famous for creating sets that spin from the Pink Panther theme to Kraftwerk to calypso to speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. All that is good from the past and present has a place at the hip hop turntable.

Scratching and Turntablism

As part of the hip hop style of life, DJs are constantly experimenting to set themselves apart from competition. One technique DJs embraced is scratching. To scratch, the DJ physically manipulates the record beneath the needle. Grand Wizzard Theodore stumbled on the technique in the mid-70s. He was a young teen blasting his music when his mom scolded him to turn it down. He fumbled the needle, liked the effect, practiced it, and began using it in shows. Other DJs quickly added scratching to their repertoire as a way to inject more personal style into the music flow.

More recently, turntablism has become an astounding source of new style. It involves extensive real-time sampling from spinning records to create something funky and fresh. Watching an experienced turntablist create in real time is an awe-inspiring experience.

Kool Herc "Merry-Go-Round" Technique

DJ-Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of  DJing —hip hop’s music style include:

back spinning  turntable technique that quickly “rewinds” a section of a recording beat juggling  manipulating two or more recordings to create a unique musical arrangement beat matching  following a song with another that uses an identical or similar rhythm break , or  breakbeat  instrumental section of a song that emphasizes percussion and rhythm cue  positioning a recording to play at a specific point DJ  short for “disc jockey,” a person who plays recorded music for an audience drum machine , or  beat box  electronic device used by DJs to synthesize drum beats looping  replaying a section of a song to extend it sampling  lifting a section of a recording and using it in a different number or recording scratching  technique of physically manipulating a recording to create a unique effect turntablism  live and extensive manipulation of recordings to create a unique song

MCs: Masters of Rhythm, Rhyme, and Flow

Today, MCs like Jay-Z, MC Lyte, and Kendrick Lamar fly high profiles in the world of hip hop. But that wasn’t always the case for the poets of the microphone.

In hip hop’s early years, its music scene focused on the disc jockey and the dance floor. The MC—short for “master of ceremonies”—was often a kind of sidekick to the DJ. In  Yes Yes Y’all , an oral history of early hip hop, Grandmaster Caz describes the rise of MCing this way: “The microphone was just used for making announcements, like when the next party was gonna be, or people’s mom’s would come to the party looking for them, and you have to announce it on the mic.”

Before long, though, MCs wanted to showcase their own talents. Grandmaster Caz continues: “Different DJs started embellishing what they were saying. I would make an announcement this way, and somebody would hear that and they add a little bit to it. I’d hear it again and take it a little step further ’til it turned from lines to sentences to paragraphs to verses to rhymes.”

More and more, MCs earned the right to grab the mic using freestyle skills to entertain and command a live audience. A “master of ceremonies” might make all the needed announcements; but the job of an MC then and now is to guide everyone’s good time with their energy, wit, and ability to interact with people on the floor. And good MCs don’t just demand the mic—the audience honors their skills by demanding they take it.

Rappers emerged as a somewhat distinct group as rap gained commercial success. They were the voices and characters that created and sold the records. In some ways, the talents and responsibilities of rappers overlap with MCs, and an MC might also rap. The interaction with the audience is the big difference.

In 1979, a trio of MCs rapped over the break from Chic’s “Good Times.” The result was The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” rap’s first hit. Three years later, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five released  The Message , a funky but unblinking account of hard times in an inner-city neighborhood. As the 1980s unrolled, MCs and rappers rose rapidly from second fiddles to big dogs including Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Run DMC, and Public Enemy. They created personas, cooler-than-life characters that might be super-smooth or gangland tough. They boasted about their style and talents and made sure to honor the DJ. MCing and rapping went from sideshow to main event as one of hip hop’s essential elements.

Hip Hop’s Rapping Poets

An MC or rapper’s “flow” is crucial to his or her performance. The flow is the combination of rhyme and rhythm to create the rap’s desired effect: fluid and soothing to communicate romance, for example; staccato and harsh to signal anger and conflict.

Before hip hop and rap took hold in the United States, spoken-word poetry occasionally worked its way into jazz performances. Many history-minded rappers also connect their art to The Last Poets, a Harlem-based group, and The Watts Prophets out of Los Angeles. Both emerged in the late-1960s and paired political poetry with improvisational jazz. Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” resembles rap before it got the name.

Increasingly, students of hip hop culture recognize the best MCs as accomplished formal poets. They rap complex rhyme schemes, most built on a rock-solid four-beat rhythm, or meter. But again, a good MC surprises audiences with syncopation and other off-the-beat techniques. hip hop aficionados reserve special respect for MCs with freestyle skills—the ability to improvise fresh rhymes while standing in the heat of the spotlight.

The Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight

MC-Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of  MCing —hip hop’s vocal style:

end rhyme  rhyming words at the end of lines flow  a rapper’s vocal style freestyle  improvised rapping griot  (gree-OH) oral storytellers and historians of West Africa internal rhyme  rhyming words within the same line MC  short for “master of ceremonies”; also performer who uses rap techniques to interact with an audience meter  rhythm of a poem persona  character assumed by a performer rap  spoken-word lyrics performed to a beat; one of the elements of hip hop rapper  performer that rhymes lyrics to a rhythm spitting  speaking, performing a rap syncopation  shifting a rhythm away from the normal beat

Writing: Graffiti and Hip Hop Culture

One element of hip hop predates the music and dance scene itself—graffiti writing, or simply  writing  as the artists themselves call it. But it blossomed at the same time the music and dance scenes were finding their feet, and its wild and color-outside-the-lines improvisational style were influenced and inspired by the desire to create something new and fresh.

Graffiti has been around since humans first painted, etched, or carved on rock walls. But urban youth put a new spin on it in the 1960s. In 1967, a Philadelphia teen named Darryl McCray spray painted his alias “Cornbread” wherever he could reach on walls and trains. (He was striving to impress a girl named Cynthia.) In 1968, the budding art form made the jump to New York City. The names JULIO 204, TRACY 168, and TAKI 183 became familiar sights here, there, and increasingly everywhere.

Writing’s Heyday

The number and talents of writers spiked in the mid-1970s as hip hop’s competitive drive kicked in. They added illustrations and second colors to outline stylized bubble and block lettering. The writers—many if not most of them young teens—jumped the limits of size, complexity, and color. Their finest designs seemed to bring life to whatever they graced. They called it  wild style —and it was.

They also jumped over fences, snuck into subway tunnels, and trespassed in nighttime yards where subway cars slept. There, they practiced their art with blank walls and unstained trains as their canvases. When opportunities arose, they painted the whole sides of subway cars and even entire ten-car trains with their elaborate, colorful designs.

They had no illusions their creations would last long. But the opportunity to see their art rolling through the subway was the ultimate payoff for writers like DONDI, LADY PINK, FAB FIVE FREDDY, KASE2, and ZEPHYR. It was outrageous to think thousands of New Yorkers saw their creations each day in one of the richest cities in the world. “If art like this is a crime let God forgive me!” wrote the writer known as LEE of the Fabulous Five crew. They embraced the identity of outlaw artists and admitted the dangers and thrills were part of the appeal. They were on missions to prove they were not only the most imaginative and talented writers in their neighborhood, but the most fearless.

Not surprisingly, NYC officials were not amused. Cops cracked down on writers, and train yards were encircled with new security. At the same time, the art world was catching on that something fresh was happening in the city beyond their fancy uptown galleries. Graffiti-inspired exhibitions popped up, and some writers took the opportunity to commit their passion to canvas instead of granite and steel.

Wild, Hungry, Inspired

Writing's place in hip hop culture was cemented by the early 1980s. Early rappers used wild style on their album covers. Writers painted cool kids’ clothes with designs and got paying gigs painting murals. And two movies— Style Wars  and  Wild Style —debuted. The films made the case that a similar hungry, inspired creativity flowed through writing as well as hip hop’s music and dance scene.

Today, graffiti-influenced writing styles show up worldwide in graphic design, fashion, and street art. Outlaw artists like Banksy are still out there painting trouble. But the vision, passion, and humor the best of these writers display—legit or not—give people the chance to see the work-a-day world in new ways. They seem to say if we pay attention, we can find beauty, meaning, and art most everywhere we look.

Dan One: Alphabetical Engineer

Writing Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of  writing graffiti —hip hop’s visual art include:

all city  being known for one’s graffiti throughout a city; originally referred to the artwork on subway cars appearing in all five New York City boroughs bite  to steal another writer’s design or style black book  sketchbook used by graffiti writers bombing  to paint many surfaces in an area burner  elaborate, large designs crew  team of writers that often work together gettin’ up  developing one’s reputation or “rep” through writing graffiti graffiti  writing, or drawing on surfaces in public places, usually without permission kings  or  queens  highly respected, experienced writers with most tags piece  short for “masterpiece,” a large, complex graffiti design stencil graffiti  premade designs of paper or cardboard that allow quicker, more exact transmission of images or lettering tag  or  scribble  stylized, but basic graffiti writer’s signature throw up  quick execution writing; generally one color outline and one color filled in toy  inexperienced writer wild style  style of writing that usually involves bold, interlocked letters writer   graffiti artist who has a distinct way they design their letters

Knowledge: A Philosophy of Hip Hop

The 1970s were lean, mean years in sections of New York City. This was especially true in the Bronx and the city’s other low-income areas. Much of the optimism of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement had faded. New York was broke. City officials sliced and diced basic services, school funding, arts education programs, and job training. Life-destroying drugs and crime haunted the streets. Absentee landlords neglected properties until building after building fell into disrepair or went up in flames.

In the face of all that, however, the energy of urban youth refused to shut down. Young people, many of them teens, created new ways of spinning records and dancing. They experimented with new styles of poetry and visual art that revealed their thinking and feelings. Eventually, the elements grooved together into a culture. A name started to stick to it: hip hop .

The Fifth Element

Hip hop’s fifth element of “knowledge” teaches the hip hop community about its identity and ways to express that identity. It places great importance on claiming a stake in one’s own education. “Knowing where YOU come from helps to show YOU where YOU are going,” writes legendary MC KRS-One. “Once you know where you come from you then know what to learn.” (By the way, “KRS” stands for “Knowledge Reigns Supreme.”)

Hip hop believes that people can take control of their lives through self-knowledge and self-expression. Knowledge influences style and technique and connects its artists under a collective hip hop umbrella. It engages the world through hip hop’s history, values, and ideas, and adds intellectual muscle to support and inform its music and moves and its poetry and art. Most importantly, it allows for a shared experience against an uncertain world.

Bambaataa Brings It

Afrika Bambaataa deserves much credit for putting this concept of knowledge into word and action. Bambaataa is a pioneering DJ and MC from the Bronx. A one-time teen leader of a gang, Bambaataa had universal respect and a powerful ability to make peace with and between enemies. His legendary music and dance parties brought together rivals to party in peace. “Free jam!” his flyers announced. “Come one come all, leave your colors at home! Come in peace and unity.”

The young Bambaataa was also a devoted student of history. He absorbed the tactics and strategies of historical leaders—from the French emperor Napoleon to the South African chieftain and military commander Shaka Zulu. He grasped the power of music as a strategy for clearing barriers that divided people, whatever their backgrounds.

By the 1980s, Bambaataa and his large and growing crew had founded the Universal Zulu Nation. Dedicated to hip hop values, the organization’s motto is “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun.” They developed “Infinity Lessons”—principles and codes of conduct for living an honorable hip hop life. They emphasize community, peace, wisdom, freedom, justice, love, unity, responsibility, respect for others, and respect for self. He put his knowledge into words, and the words radiated around the Bronx, throughout New York, and across America.

Boogie Down Productions - My Philosophy

Knowledge Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of  knowledge —hip hop’s philosophy include:

culture  the behaviors and beliefs of a particular group of people didactic  intended to teach a lesson, especially a moral lesson empowerment  increasing of economic, political, social, educational, gender, or spiritual strength of individuals or communities praxis  process when a theory, custom, or lesson is practiced society  social, economic, and cultural system strategy  plan to reach a desired result worldview  ideas about how the world works

Hip Hop Theater and Literary Arts

“Be warned, this  is  theater—but it’s hip hop  theater,” a loud voice booms before the curtain rises for  Into the Hoods . This show has been blowing away London audiences since 2008. It is an urban re-visioning of the fairy tale-genre, following a pair of school kids into a tough part of town instead of a haunted forest. But as with all fairy tales, not everything or everyone is what they seem. Ultimately the stage blazes with wild style art, DJ voiceovers, beats from multiple musical styles, b-boys and b-girls breaking in high-flying choreography, and fresh takes on familiar characters. (DJ Spinderella or Rap-On-Zel ring a bell?)

More and more, the stage has been welcoming hip hop’s elements, energy, and world view. Graffiti writing may splash across the scenery. DJing, rapping, and breaking are likely to take turns in the spotlight. Some shows, like  Into the Hoods , tell their tales mainly through dance and music, while others lay hip hop style over more traditional scripts. Hip hop artists are tackling drama, comedy, and tragedy, and some classic material is getting the hip hop makeover. Will Power’s  The Seven , for example, retells the ancient Greek tragedy  Seven Against Thebes  by Aeschylus using a DJ and rapping cast.

Collaboration and Content

Collaboration is a core ingredient for most hip hop theater groups. In the tradition of the culture, producers, directors, and playwrights stress input and participation by stakeholders—the very people the play is intended to speak to and entertain. Long-time hip hop theater writer/actor/director Danny Hoch says it this way: “Hip-hop theatre… must be  by ,  about  and  for  the hip hop generation, participants in hip hop culture, or both.”

This collaborative process clearly informs the content in hip hop plays and musicals. Plots often tackle current social issues, especially as they relate to urban communities, with characters exploring the strengths and limits of activism and empowerment. Questions of identity are often front and center, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and anything regarded as “different.” The struggle between the individual and society is a central theme as characters seek to create meaning in their lives while struggling to claim their place in the world.

Hip Hop in Prose and Poetry

MCs tell complex stories in rhythm and rhyme. Rappers write and polish their lyrics before delivering them in raps. The secret is out: hip hop poets love words. “The toughest, coolest, most dangerous-seeming MCs are, at heart, basically just enormous language dorks,” cracks music critic Sam Anderson. “They love puns and rhymes and slang and extended metaphors ….” These skills can translate smoothly into literary forms—short stories, novels, scripts, poetry, and comic book-style graphic novels. Some works relate the gritty realities of poverty or inner-city living; others find the humor there and wherever; all describe trying to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Rapped aloud or published on paper, hip hop-influenced literary forms have roots in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. BAM inspired a generation of African American, Latino, and feminist writers, including Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, the Last Poets, and many others, to share stories and views often overlooked or outright rejected by mainstream America. Along the way, spoken word—a forerunner of rap—injected energy into performance. Through poetry slams, it has developed its own fans with its forceful, fun wordplay.

As in theater, the literary world is making more space for hip hop style, subjects, and themes. Scholars Andrew DuBois and Adam Bradley recently edited and published  The Anthology of Rap , a huge collection of lyrics. Says Bradley: “[R]appers are perhaps our greatest public poets, extending a tradition of lyricism that spans continents and stretches back thousands of years… They expand our understanding of human experience by telling stories we might not otherwise hear.”

Some hip hop-savvy teachers are bringing the best of hip hop literature into their classrooms. And writers for kids, teens, and young adults are telling hip hop tales in books like  Think Again  by Doug E. Fresh, Debbie Allen’s  Brothers of the Knight , and the  Hip-Hop Kidz  series by Jasmine Bellar.

Theater and Literary Terms to Know

The basic vocabulary of hip hop theater and literary arts  include:

choreography  arrangement of dance moves collaboration  working together content  subject or information genre  category of literature, such as fairy tales or historic fiction lyricism  poetic or musical style metaphor  symbolic figure of speech scenery  backdrop for a theater production stakeholder  someone who shares interest or responsibility

All The Way Live - Hip Hop Connections

Sean McCollum

Lisa Resnick

October 30, 2019

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Hip Hop — The Origin and History of Hip Hop Music

The Origin and History of Hip Hop Music

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Published: Sep 25, 2018

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Chapter 5: African American English and the communities it influences

5.4.3 The way rap and hip-hop have influenced today’s African American youth (research essay)

Amiri Austin

English 102, November 2020

Today I believe young people not just limited to African American’s find themselves being in a situation in which they have turned to their favorite rapper for motivation, a voice to listen to, or even just background music. Since I started this topic, I’ve been intrigued to find out just how big of an impact Rap and Hip-Hop have had on African American youth in areas of high income along with impoverished areas. Music has helped many of these kids get through tough situations and help escape their reality of gang violence and perhaps not the best circumstances. Rap and Hip-Hop music have also helped influence this generations views on certain topics and helped create opportunities young men and women of color otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to experience.

Now you may be wondering how exactly music can help African American communities. To start I will introduce you to a study used and created by counselors to better help them understand their clients of color. In the article titled “Using Rap Music to Better Understand African American Experiences.”, the authors start off by describing Hip-Hop as more than just a culture you can adopt by buying certain clothes or going to see a few concerts. Hip-Hop is described as more of a dream or an emotional outlet or a way to build relationships and to help young people network their way to a career or profession to get out of the projects or another tough living situation. The authors went about this study by using a content analysis design and chose a genre known as conscious rap, featuring multiple artists and 10 different songs. The songs included were NWA-F**K The Police, 2Pac-rapped, Killer Mike- Don’t Die, Rage Against the Machine-Killing the Name, MainSource- Just a Friendly Game of Baseball, Dead Prez-Cop Shot, Gil Scott Heron- No Knock, Ice-T – Cop Killer, KRS-One-Sound of Da Police, and UGK-Protect and Serve.(7) Each of the researchers listened to the songs in 30 second intervals and then wrote down their thoughts/decoded versions.  Time was taken to relisten and truly feel what the artist was trying to describe to its listeners. The authors found that these songs were more than just lyrics for people to memorize and recite at concerts, they were words used to help these artists get out of their struggle and help their family members out, they were words used to inspire other youth and let them know that even in the worst situations you can achieve the biggest of dreams. This advancement of understanding the lyrics and usage of certain verbiage in songs helped counselors become more culturally competent and helped them institute encouraging activities and helped bring out locked up stories from clients of color. It also helped them understand their social identity and made them feel more wanted even in a world of privilege and oppression. This study is important to the climate of today’s world because I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding of Rap and Hip-Hop music and how it can be used to help. Counseling especially is now more important than ever with the increased awareness of mental illness in the United States and around the world. Suicide rates are at the highest they’ve been in a long time especially in teens and youth and a lot of these kids talk about artists like Juice Wrld or Lil Peep who helped them get through rough times in their life where they thought the only way out was suicide. My next topic will be moving from a health perspective in counseling to ways in which rap and hip-hop have helped African American youth from an education perspective.

From my education experience I never really was forced to have music as a class until 5th grade when I had a required recorder class and we learned how to read basic sheets of music and perform songs in front of our peers. In a scholarly article titled “Connecting Black Youth to Critical Media Literacy Through Hip-Hop Making in the Music Classroom” a program called Foundations of Music encouraged participants to increase their effort and maximize their abilities in the classroom through making music of the hip-hop genre. The Foundation of Music program introduces students to both the process of writing lyrics of a rap song and the technology used to produce rap songs in a classroom. Each day the authors would record observations like the concept’s kids learned every day, reactions from student-to-student and student-to-teacher, along with informal conversations between the students. It was discovered that having the same group of kids come in every day and work on a new hobby built a sense of belonging among them that replicated what it felt like to be a part of a team. A common goal of bettering themselves every day and a sense of having an actual end goal of creating a song or producing a song helped them create a work ethic they weren’t otherwise used to or aware of. Many kids were also able to express their emotions and real-life experiences and let their stories be heard in their communities without being harassed by their normal teachers for talking during a lesson or being off topic. One of my research questions I’d like to answer with this topic would be just “How effective are these literacy practices involving rap music” and “How do African-Americans benefit as a whole from literacy teaching practices involving rap or hip-hop music.” In the article titled “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of popular Culture: Literacy Development Among Urban Youth”, the author talks about how educators have wanted to use new strategies and approaches to teach literacy to urban youth. It can be argued that hip-hop music is the representative voice of urban youth because it was created by and for urban youth, in addition to acting as voices in their urban communities’ rappers consider themselves educators and see at least a portion of their goal as raising consciousness of their communities. The author and his colleague in this article first designed a unit in their curriculum that incorporated hip-hop music and culture into a traditional senior English poetry unit. The major portion of the unit was a group presentation of a poem and a rap song from a historical period that was discussed in the class. The groups were asked to prepare a justifiable interpretation of their poem and song with relation to their specific historical and literary periods and analyze the links between the two. The students generated quality interpretations and made interesting connections between the poems and the rap songs. Their critical investigations of popular texts brought about oral and written critiques like those in college preparatory English classrooms. The students moved beyond critical reading of literary texts to become cultural producers themselves, creating and presenting poems that provided crucial commentary and encouraged action for social justice. Another area used by this study was teaching with popular film. The notion of films as visual texts worthy of academic study has been growing within the postsecondary academy for some time. The critical studies field has grown in prominence, and there are now academics who use critical theory to study film at nearly every major university in the U.S. During the units, the students watched the films in class while reading the accompanying texts at home. By combining popular film with canonical texts, the students were able to hone their critical and analytical skills and use them in interpretations. They were also able to understand the connection between literature, popular culture, and their everyday lives. Further they were able to translate their analyses into quality oral debates and expository pieces. While working with urban youth in Los Angeles, the author coordinated a group of research seminars that brought high school students to the local university to study access to corporate media and the corporate media’s portrayal of urban youth. The students read literature relating to critical media literacy and the sociology of education, designed a study, conducted interviews, analyzed countless hours of news coverage, and performed a content analysis of major U.S. daily newspapers. The author noticed that through the teens research process they were increasingly able to meaningfully draw upon personal experiences during the reading of texts concerning critical media literacy or during interviews they conducted with members of the mainstream media. Motivated and empowered by the prospect of addressing a real problem in their community, the students learned the tools of research, read difficult texts, and produced their own text of high academic merit.

The next topic I will move on to is the “healing power of hip-hop” as stated in an article written by authors Alexander Crooke and Raphael Travis Jr on theconversation.com. Hip-hop and rap culture alike have been criticized as a criminal threat and numerous studies have been undertaken on the harmful influence of hip-hop on kids. While there’s no denying that the lyrical content of hip-hop can be confrontational and many rappers do glorify violence and drugs if you look past certain artists and certain situations you find the “hidden gem” that everyone loves and enjoys. Hip-hop at its core is built on the values of social justice, peace, respect, self-worth, community, and having fun. That is why it is so increasingly popular to youth all around the world and why many kids alike idolize these artists and truly believe they are a therapeutic tool. At its simplest you can make a beat with your mouth or by using a pencil on a school desk or just recite lyrics about anything and with cost-friendly music creating software, young kids are able to take their talents to new levels and pathways to entrepreneurship. Aside from assisting African American youth in urban areas in career options, hip-hop music can also just be a way to cope with problems in their life. I know at least for me that in my first semester in college 10 hours away from home I have definitely used music as an outlet in many situations. In fact for the first week or two my roommates and I would come back from lacrosse practice, sit on the couch and listen to music or “vibe” as we call it. Each day we played different music depending on our mood and just talked about our problems or just listened to the music and relaxed. It was the only time we really interacted to be honest but after two or three days it was what I looked forward to the most in my day, just listening to music and screaming lyrics with my friends. In his U.S. based research Dr. Travis found that those who listen to hip-hop have strong benefits to individual mental health, in areas of coping, emotions, identity and personal growth, can help promote resilience in communities.  Marginalized urban communities around the world share the feeling of resisting exclusion or discrimination and fighting for equity and justice and the rappers that come from these areas have a certain sound that echoes this feeling. Hip hop is not a cure or antidote and it isn’t perfect, but its promise is undeniable. It is a culture with complicated social and historical roots. Its complicated history enables us to critically reflect on our society, and forces us to face issues of race, privilege, class, and cultural appropriation.

I’d like to discuss a very controversial topic in today’s society for many reasons but the main one is that this topic often intertwines with African American youth today and I believe Rap and Hip-Hop music play a very big part in this. That topic would be Police brutality and the way in which Rap lyrics are used as a political force against it. In the scholarly article titled “Rap Music as a Positive Influence on Black Youth and American Politics” the author Natalie Wilson discusses lyrics from an artist named Ice-T in his song titled “Squeeze the Trigger”. He raps “Cops hate kids, kids hate cops. Cops kill kids with warnin’ shots. What is Crime and what is not? What is justice? I think I forgot.” The lyrics in this song are quite blunt but I do believe he is stating true information and addresses the grey area of our justice system. African-American youth are constantly the victims of homicide by cops in most cases they are unarmed and in most cases cops are let off with no charges. I believe a lot negativity in rap songs comes from the artist just speaking on the climate they were raised in whether it be around gang violence and drugs or living in harsh situations where their parents couldn’t provide them with certain necessities. Many young black men are in a situation in which they get a sudden sense of discomfort around police wondering of they’ll be the next hashtag or next face on a t-shirt that people are purchasing in order to support my family. I do understand that in some situations the teens or people are in the wrong and the media takes some stories are out of context but like Ice-T said cops kill kids with warning shots and certain precautions are not taken. I also understand that it can be out of self-defense but in cases in which the civilian is unarmed how are they supposed to protect themselves or even attack without a weapon. There is no question that black youth are unproportionally racially profiled and stooped and questioned simply because of their skin color. I will now discus an artist named Kendrick Lamar who is a positive role model to black youth across the U.S. as he persevered as a good kid and escaped the dangerous streets of Compton. In one of his songs titled “good kid” he shares his experience of gang violence while never being affiliated with one himself. He depicts memories of being jumped by gang members despite his disaffiliation, he is self-described as a good kid who stays out of trouble and attends bible studies regularly. When recognized by the wrong person he is a victim of conflict simply because he associates with friends who are gang members, he then recognizes he is a good kid trapped in a mad city, alluding to the title of this song being good kid and the title of the album m.A.A.d. city. I believe many young African American kids struggle with this situation and often turn to music as a way to escape their city and live a better life away from conflict.

In the next article I will be introducing titled “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form” helps me take a slightly odd view on my thesis but nonetheless it states that hip-hop is one of the most popular genres’ in America and that it is really becoming the lingua franca for popular and political youth culture around the world. As hip-hop has skyrocketed in global popularity, its defiant and self-defining voices have been both multiplied and amplified as they challenge conventional concepts of identity and nationhood. Global hip-hop has emerged as a culture that encourages and integrates innovative practices of artistic expression, knowledge production, social identification, and political mobilization. The hip-hop nation is an international, transnational, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual community made up of individuals with diverse class, gender, and sexual identities. While hip-hop heads come from all age groups, hip-hop culture is primarily youth driven. The global influence of hip-hop directly relates to its popularity as a major music source among youth in the United States. According to the national Gallup poll of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in 1992, hip-hop music had become the preferred music of youth (26 percent). Along with hip-hop’s cultural norm of inclusion, global hip-hop remains symbolically associated with African Americans. It has incorporated many aspects of African American language ideology. Hip-hop presents African American English (AAE) as a symbolic and politicized dialect where speakers are aware of complex and contradictory processes of stigmatization, valorization, and social control. The hip-hop speech community is not necessarily linguistically and physically located but rather bound by this shared language ideology as part of politics, culture, social conditions, and norms, values, and attitude.

It would be unfair if after discussing all the positive effects and influence rap and hip-hop has on African American youth I didn’t discuss the negative effects. I will be doing so with the help of an article titled “How Hip-Hop holds Blacks Back” and it is by John H. McWhorter who’s podcast we listened to earlier this year in class. He believed that encouraging rap culture reinforced stereotypes that long hindered people of color, and by teaching young African Americans that a thuggish appearance or dialect is the “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society impedes future black success. Of course, not all hip-hop is belligerent or profane, entire CDs of gang-banging, police-baiting, and woman-bashing would get old fast to most listeners, but it’s the nastiest rap that sells the best, and the nastiest cuts that make a career. The top ten best-selling hip-hop recordings all celebrate the ghetto as “where it’s at”. Keeping the thug front and center has become the quickest and most likely way to become a star. So much so that many artists nowadays try to cultivate a gangsta image, even if they aren’t actually from an area they claim to be or if they never struggle like they say they do. Many fans, rappers, producers, and intellectuals defend hip-hop’s violence, both real and imagined as a revolutionary cry of frustration from disempowered youth. While I do agree with McWhorter on some of his stances about hip-hop, not all rappers or hip-hop artists preach violence and negative energy. I do believe there was a time period where there was a lot of civil unrest and racial tension where artists did just seem like their music was just angry rants about rival gangs or police or certain events but I believe that rap and hip-hop, like all things evolve and grow and we have a new generation of artists who are trying to turn the views of rap and hip-hop around. There will always be some artists that just rap to rap and say what they want to say but if you’re really looking for someone speaking real lyrics you can find it. That’s another great part of music that I enjoy, you can really find anything you want for your mood and it doesn’t always have to be someone speaking deeply about their story, you can just listen to someone mumbling over a cool beat if you want.

To conclude my paper, I will discuss my final thoughts on how rap and hip-hop influence African American youth. As I’ve stated many times above, music can be used in many ways to help people get through their days whether it’s playing music in the car or listening to a playlist while working out. So, music isn’t just tailored to those who are in tough times or those who need it to get out of a certain situation. I just believe that rap and hip-hop have had an extremely significant impact on African-American youth because to some of those kids it’s all they have, and even for me some days this semester when I missed home or just didn’t feel like doing anything, turning on some music was always my go-to. For some African American youth music is what drives them to do well in school, as you saw in the studies above adding music to a curriculum helped students stay engaged longer and helped them learn multiple advanced techniques just by creating what they thought was a silly rap. The study of rap and hip-hop songs helped counselors better understand their clients of color just by hearing what the artists had to say, it helped them come to a better understanding of possibly what some of their clients were going through and they were able to better connect with clients and truly fulfill their task of helping people feel better. Many artists are telling their stories of their youth through their songs and you really get a look into the good, bad, and the ugly. I believe that rap and hip-hop both get a bad reputation for being all about drugs, violence, or disrespecting women but maybe it’s just what these artists saw growing up and at that moment they weren’t able to tell right from wrong. I bring this up to say that we must come together as a society and understand the cries out for help and instead of just letting songs go by without any action we must get out and help these people and save them from their struggles and help break this everlasting cycle of poverty and recession in black communities. Especially with the political climate of the United States right now, there’s riots in the streets over a black man being killed by the police and there were protests in all 50 states at one point. It’s more important than ever to understand what is going on with African American youth and I believe that rap and hip-hop music are a good gateway to an inside look on their lives, of course their stories don’t represent all of the youth but there is a fairly good representation of different cities that rappers are from and each of their stories relate in some way or another. This topic has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me, from being confused at the start of what I really wanted to write about but I did enjoy truly understanding stories and seeing interpretations of a hobby so simple as listening to music because I do it just about every day.

Works Cited

Brooks, Michael. “Using Rap Music to Better Understand African American Experiences.”  Taylor & Francis , 26 Feb. 2020, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15401383.2020.1732251.

Evans, Jabari. “Connecting Black Youth to Critical Media Literacy through Hip Hop Making in the Music Classroom.”  Latest TOC RSS , Intellect, 1 July 2020, www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jpme/pre-prints/content-intellect_jpme_00020.

Morrell, Ernest. “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development among Urban Youth.”  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 72–77.  JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/40017507. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020.

Powell, Catherine Tabb. “Rap Music: An Education with a Beat from the Street.”  The Journal of Negro Education , vol. 60, no. 3, 1991, pp. 245–259.  JSTOR ,  www.jstor.org/stable/2295480. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020 .

Wilson, Natalie, “Rap Music as a Positive Influence on Black Youth and American Politics” (2018).  Pop Culture Intersections . 21. https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl_176/21

McWhorter, John H., et al. “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back.”  City Journal , City Journal, 18 June 2019, www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html.

Crooke Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Music Therapy, Alexander, and Raphael Travis Jr. Associate Professor of Social Work. “The Healing Power of Hip Hop.”  The Conversation , 18 May 2019, theconversation.com/the-healing-power-of-hip-hop-81556.

“Positive Impacts.”  Impacts of Rap Music on Youths , impactofrapmusiconyouths.weebly.com/positive-impacts.html.

Morgan, Marcyliena, and Dionne Bennett. “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form.”  Daedalus , vol. 140, no. 2, 2011, pp. 176–196.  JSTOR ,  www.jstor.org/stable/23047460. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020 .

D’Amico, Francesca. “Welcome to the Terrordome: Race, Power and the Rise of American Rap Music, 1979-1995.”  YorkSpace Home , 11 May 2020, yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37409.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Amiri Austin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home » Classic and New Style Hip Hop: A Journey Through the Ages

Classic and New Style Hip Hop: A Journey Through the Ages

Hip hop has been a dominant force in music since its inception in the 1970s. Over the years, the genre has evolved and branched out into different styles, with “classic” and “new style” hip hop being two of the most prominent. But what exactly distinguishes these two styles from each other?

In this article, we’ll explore the differences between classic and new style hip hop, from their origins and influences to their musical characteristics and cultural significance. We’ll also highlight some of the most notable artists and songs from each style, and provide insights into how hip hop has continued to evolve and shape the music industry.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a deeper appreciation for the diversity and richness of hip hop music , and a better understanding of the differences between classic and new style hip hop. So, if you’re ready to explore the world of hip hop and discover the nuances of these two distinct styles, let’s dive in and get started!

Origins of Hip Hop

Before we dive into the classic and new style hip hop, let’s take a step back and explore its roots. Hip hop originated in the South Bronx during the early 1970s, arising from the ingenuity and perseverance of underprivileged communities. It was more than just music; it was a cultural movement encompassing elements like graffiti art, breakdancing, and DJing.

The DJ played a pivotal role, using turntables to create beats and loops that became the backbone of hip hop music. MCs (Master of Ceremonies) would rhyme and rap over these beats , engaging in friendly battles and showcasing their lyrical prowess.

The early hip hop scene was fueled by block parties, where DJs and MCs would come together to entertain the neighborhood, and this grassroots movement soon found its way into the recording studios.

The Birth of Classic Hip Hop

The late 1970s and early 1980s marked the birth of what we now call classic hip hop. During this period, legendary songs like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” were launched, which not only entertained but also depicted a vivid portrayal of the social and economic challenges confronted by inner-city communities. Classic hip hop was characterized by its socially conscious lyrics and its ability to serve as a voice for the marginalized.

Artists such as Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, and Public Enemy achieved widespread recognition, spearheading the genre with their innovative sound and thought-provoking lyrics.

Classic hip hop albums like “Raising Hell” and “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” have become timeless masterpieces that still resonate with audiences today.

Influential Artists and Albums

Several artists and albums are regarded as influential cornerstones of the classic hip hop genre. Run-D.M.C.’s eponymous album, launched in 1984, is frequently recognized as a game-changer.

With songs like “It’s Like That” and “Sucker MCs,” they introduced a raw, stripped-down sound that established the basis for future hip hop acts.

Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” released in 1988, is another seminal album. Renowned for its politically charged lyrics and innovative production, it continues to be a must-listen for anyone exploring the classic hip hop era.

As classic hip hop continued to gain momentum, it was not just the music but also the fashion and culture that left an indelible mark on society. Artists like Salt-N-Pepa challenged gender norms, while groups like N.W.A. pushed the boundaries of lyrical content and storytelling in hip hop.

In our next section, we will journey into the world of new style hip hop, examining its transition, key figures, and notable works. Stay tuned for more on this ever-evolving genre!

New Style Hip Hop

In the ever-evolving world of hip hop, the transition to new style hip hop marked a pivotal moment in the genre’s history. This period introduced fresh sounds, diverse influences, and a new generation of artists who would leave an indelible mark on the musical landscape. In this section, we’ll explore the transition to new style hip hop and highlight key figures and their notable works.

Transition to New Style

As the 1990s rolled in, hip hop underwent a significant transformation, giving birth to what we now refer to as new style hip hop. This era was characterized by a shift towards a more diverse range of sounds and themes. The genre expanded beyond its original roots, incorporating elements of R&B, funk, and electronic music.

One of the key transitions in the evolution of hip hop was the incorporation of melodic hooks and smoother production. Artists like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg ushered in the G-funk era, known for its laid-back, West Coast vibe and the use of synthesizers. This marked a departure from the gritty, sample-heavy beats of classic hip hop.

At the same time, the East Coast was undergoing its own transformation, with artists like The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z dominating the scene with their lyrical aptitude and storytelling proficiency.

The conflict between the East and West Coast hip hop scenes, culminating in the heartbreaking deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., added a level of intricacy to the genre’s story.

Key Figures and Works

New style hip hop introduced us to a new generation of artists who would become legends in their own right. These key figures brought innovation, charisma, and a fresh perspective to the genre, reshaping it for a new era. Let’s explore some of these influential artists and their notable works.

Dr. Dre, a pioneer of the G-funk sound, played a monumental role in shaping new style hip hop. His 1992 album “The Chronic” is often regarded as a cornerstone of the genre. Tracks like “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and “Let Me Ride” not only showcased Dre’s production prowess but also introduced the world to Snoop Dogg, who would become an icon in his own right.

The release of Snoop Dogg’s first album, “Doggystyle,” in 1993, generated a cultural sensation. With its mellow, entrancing rhythms and Snoop’s relaxed style, the album epitomized the West Coast sound and propelled Snoop to fame. Songs like “Gin and Juice” and “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)” became anthems of the time.

The Notorious B.I.G.

The East Coast witnessed The Notorious B.I.G., also recognized as Biggie Smalls, make an unforgettable impression with his first album “Ready to Die” in 1994. Biggie’s lyrical aptitude and storytelling proficiency distinguished him from the rest. Songs like “Juicy” and “Big Poppa” displayed his adaptability and solidified his reputation as one of the greatest MCs ever.

Jay-Z, often referred to as the “King of New York,” emerged as a dominant force in new style hip hop. His 1996 debut album “Reasonable Doubt” was a masterclass in lyricism and wordplay. Jay-Z’s ability to seamlessly blend street narratives with introspection paved the way for his long and successful career.

These key figures and their seminal works are just a glimpse into the rich tapestry of new style hip hop. As we journey further into the evolution of hip hop, we’ll explore the comparisons between classic and new style hip hop, dissecting the musical differences, cultural impact, and commercial success of these two distinct yet interconnected eras.

Comparing Classic and New Style Hip Hop

Now that we’ve explored the birth and evolution of classic and new style hip hop, it’s time to dive into a comparative analysis of these two distinct yet interconnected eras.

In this section, we’ll dissect the musical differences, cultural impact, and commercial success of classic and new style hip hop, providing insights into how these periods have shaped the genre.

Musical Differences

Classic hip hop was characterized by its raw and unapologetic sound, often relying on sampled beats and straightforward drum patterns. The lyrics were socially conscious and often addressed issues such as poverty, racism, and inequality.

In contrast, new style hip hop embraced a more polished production style, incorporating a wider range of musical influences. Melodic hooks, intricate production, and diverse subject matter became the norm.

Classic hip hop tracks often featured looped breaks from funk and soul records, giving them a gritty and nostalgic feel. Artists like Public Enemy and N.W.A. used these samples to create powerful and thought-provoking music that served as a voice for their communities. The beats were sparse, focusing on rhythm and groove.

On the other hand, new style hip hop saw the emergence of lush, cinematic production. Dr. Dre’s use of synthesizers and live instrumentation brought a new level of sophistication to the genre.

Artists like Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill blended hip hop with R&B and soul, creating a fusion that resonated with a broader audience. The use of auto-tune and electronic elements also became more prevalent, expanding the sonic palette of hip hop.

Cultural Impact

Classic hip hop played a crucial role in giving a voice to marginalized communities and shedding light on the challenges they faced. It served as a powerful tool for social commentary and activism, influencing not only music but also fashion, art, and language.

Classic hip hop artists like Public Enemy, with their politically charged lyrics, and Salt-N-Pepa, challenging gender norms, made significant cultural impacts.

Moreover, classic hip hop’s street-level authenticity inspired a sense of pride and resilience among its listeners. It provided a platform for communities to express their frustrations and aspirations, ultimately leading to social change.

New style hip hop continued to address social issues but also embraced a more diverse range of themes, including personal success, partying, and romance.

The culture of hip hop expanded globally, transcending borders and connecting people from different backgrounds. This globalization brought about a broader cultural exchange and a sense of unity among hip hop enthusiasts worldwide.

Commercial Success

Both classic and new style hip hop achieved remarkable commercial success, but the paths they took were different. Classic hip hop artists often had to navigate an industry that was still learning to embrace the genre, and many achieved success independently before gaining mainstream recognition.

In contrast, new style hip hop, especially during the late 1990s and early 2000s, saw artists signing lucrative record deals and achieving instant fame. The commercialization of hip hop brought with it both opportunities and challenges, including debates about authenticity and artistic integrity.

Albums like Run-D.M.C.’s “Raising Hell” and The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Life After Death” achieved significant commercial success in the classic era, while new style hip hop witnessed record-breaking sales with albums like Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP” and Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint.” The genre’s mainstream success during the new style era solidified its position as a dominant force in the music industry.

As we reflect on the musical differences, cultural impact, and commercial success of classic and new style hip hop, it becomes clear that both eras have contributed significantly to the genre’s rich tapestry. Each period brought its own unique flavor, pushing the boundaries of what hip hop could be and ensuring its enduring relevance in the world of music.

The Influence of Hip Hop on Other Genres

Hip hop, a genre that has continuously evolved and reshaped itself over the years, has not only made a profound impact within its own realm but has also significantly influenced other musical genres. In this section, we will explore how hip hop has left its mark on various genres, from pop to rock and beyond.

Hip hop’s influence on other genres is a testament to its versatility and cultural significance. It has introduced new rhythms, storytelling techniques, and lyrical styles that have resonated across the musical spectrum.

One of the most noticeable ways in which hip hop has influenced pop music is through the incorporation of rap verses into pop songs . Artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Beyoncé have all collaborated with rappers to add a hip hop flavor to their tracks. This fusion of pop and hip hop has not only diversified the sound of pop music but has also expanded its audience reach.

Additionally, the use of hip hop beats and production techniques has become commonplace in pop music. Producers often draw inspiration from hip hop to create catchy, danceable tracks. The influence of hip hop in pop has blurred the lines between genres, leading to a more eclectic and dynamic musical landscape.

Rock and hip hop may seem like contrasting genres, but they have frequently intersected over the years. The fusion of rock and rap, often referred to as “rap-rock” or “nu-metal,” gained popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Bands like Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine incorporated rap vocals and hip hop beats into their rock sound, creating a new and exciting sonic experience.

The influence of hip hop can also be heard in the lyrical storytelling of rock artists. Hip hop’s tradition of vivid storytelling and social commentary has inspired rock musicians to delve deeper into their lyrics, addressing complex themes and societal issues.

Electronic Dance Music (EDM)

Hip hop’s impact is evident in the domain of electronic dance music. EDM producers have drawn inspiration from hip hop beats and rhythms to create high-energy tracks that dominate dance floors around the world.

The fusion of hip hop and EDM, often referred to as “trap,” has become a genre of its own, characterized by its heavy basslines and syncopated rhythms.

Artists like Diplo and Skrillex have successfully blended hip hop elements with electronic music, resulting in chart-topping hits that bridge the gap between underground hip hop culture and mainstream EDM festivals.

The Future of Hip Hop

As we peer into the future, it’s evident that hip hop will continue to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing musical landscape. The genre’s ability to absorb new influences, experiment with sounds, and reflect the socio-cultural climate ensures its enduring relevance.

The rise of the internet and digital platforms has democratized music production, allowing aspiring hip hop artists to create and share their work more easily than ever before. This democratization has led to a proliferation of diverse voices within the genre, with artists from all walks of life contributing to its evolution.

Furthermore, collaborations between hip hop artists and musicians from different genres will likely become even more prevalent, leading to exciting and unexpected musical hybrids. The genre’s global reach will continue to expand, resulting in a more interconnected and culturally diverse hip hop landscape.

In conclusion, hip hop’s influence on other genres and its limitless potential for innovation ensure that it will remain a driving force in the music industry. As new artists emerge, technology advances, and societal perspectives shift, hip hop will continue to reflect and shape the world around it, cementing its place in music history. The future of hip hop is bright, bold, and boundless.

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When hip-hop first originated, everyone thought it was just a "fad." Nobody believed it would last and nobody really took the genre seriously. Surprisingly, this was the mindset of many people when new genres came out, but most were in for the long run. Not only did hip-hop present a new style, it gave artists a new voice. Politics were already a running theme within rock music, so rappers decided they could voice their opinions too. Originally, artists spoke of unity and empowerment of African American people. Some even incorporated the names of their long-time friends who may not have even been in the music industry. However, the core message was always peace. This lasted until N.W.A brought a completely new, unfiltered voice to the world of hip-hop. You could say they brought some... attitude. N.W.A's lyrics were more of a response to the oppression facing African Americans rather than comforting hope. Not only did they cause controversy, but adults began to blame the lyrics for their children's acts of violence. This was because the lyrics of the songs actually meant something...

Nowadays, hip-hop has faded to the underground and rap fills the airwaves. Typically, rap songs consists of three topics: sex, money and drugs. Very rarely is anything uplifting ever discussed, except in the case of songs meant to uplift one's self. Another con of modern day rap is the fact that hooks are often repetitive and simple. They usually have no creativity to them and are just simple. A hook should drive a song and add to the importance of the verses. But a listener would have to understand what the artist was saying to notice any of these things in the first place. With so much auto-tune and mumbling nowadays, it's hard to tell. However, there is hope for the world of mainstream artists. Storytellers like J.Cole may not have the "turn up" qualities of most songs but they do leave you with an impression. They not only reach your ears but, sometimes even your heart. Then there's the man who some say is the savior of modern rap: Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick's Grammy-winning album To Pimp A Butterfly discusses problems of today's society and uplifts African Americans. It gives us a sense of hope that everything will be -- as the single says -- "Alright." It mirrors the themes of songs from the hip-hop days of old. Some even consider it the soundtrack of the Black Lives Matter movement. And his latest album untitled. unmastered. only continues this theme. Yes, overall the world of mainstream rap seems headed in a downward spiral but, contrary to popular belief, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

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25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

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The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

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Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

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Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

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Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble .

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

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John McWhorter

How hip-hop became america’s poetry.

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

This month, America celebrates the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Most of the country first encountered this musical revolution with the release of the national hit “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. But it all started six years earlier, on Aug. 11, 1973: An energy crisis was looming, Lucille Ball was about to enter her final season of “Here’s Lucy,” and DJ Kool Herc pioneered rapping over turntable beats in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.

But America is celebrating more than just a musical form. It’s celebrating the moment when rap gave America back its poetry.

In 1991, Dana Gioia’s renowned essay “Can Poetry Matter?” made a powerful case that poetry had entered an eclipse, from a staple of our national culture to a boutique concern cherished by a rarefied few. “The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past 30 years,” Gioia wrote, “has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation.” I recall reading the article eagerly in my graduate student days and feeling almost validated: “So that’s why I don’t really like poetry — I was born too late!”

Gioia was on to something. For most of our national history, schoolchildren memorized poetry and eventually became grandparents able to recite long passages of verse. Even Bugs Bunny pitched in, lolling alongside a river reading a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” in one of his first cartoon appearances in 1941. There were celebrity poets who were real celebrities. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, even with their elevated vocabulary, were cherished by young women the way the lyrics of Alanis Morissette would later be; Millay even had a national radio show for a spell. As late as the 1960s, Marianne Moore appeared on the “Tonight” Show. (Amanda Gorman’s star status as a poet since reading at the inauguration of President Biden is the exception that proves the rule.)

You could barely escape poetry back in the day. Newspapers commissioned bits of doggerel to print between columns. The N.A.A.C.P.’s doughty house organ and beacon to Black America, “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, included poetry of varying degrees of quality between its articles. A cultivated person often at least pretended to like poetry and had a volume or two on her bookshelf. (My mother did like it, and retained a copy of one of Louis Untermeyer ’s grand old anthologies from her early adulthood.)

But fast-forward to what Gioia was referring to. As a kid in the 1970s, even one attending private schools, I was directed to drive by poetry slowly now and then, but rarely to actually stop and take it in deeply. Many Russians can recite some Pushkin by heart; I have never known a single poem by heart. As I put it in a book once, poetry is the marjoram on my spice rack: It’s nice to know it’s there, but I use it for only one dish, lamb chops. And I am hardly alone in this among educated Americans of Generation X and beyond.

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Hip-Hop Music Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Creations of hip-hop, history of hip-hop, socio-cultural influences of hip-hop music, reference list.

Hip-Hop is perhaps the form of music that has attracted the most controversy. Many people have blamed hip-hop for a number of societal issues like violence, promiscuity, bad language, etc. Whether or not these people are right in blaming hip-hop for these societal problems is still a matter of heated debates among interested parties.

Hip-hop refers to a form of music that is a part of popular music, and that is mainly comprised of deejaying and emceeing. It is associated with other aspects and forms of music that some people view as standalone aspects of popular culture, while others view them as integral aspects of hip-hop.

These aspects are discussed in the “creations of hip-hop” section. This paper is a detailed description of hip-hop music that also gives a sociological analysis of the same.

The most important creation of hip-hop music is, perhaps, rap music. Rap music refers to a form of hip-hop music in which artists sing by talking poetically and rhythmically. It has become so common that some people view it as a popular culture genre by itself while in fact it is a creation of hip-hop music. Other creations of hip-hop are the components of the hip-hop lifestyle.

These include the hip-hop lingo, the hip-hop dress code, graffiti, and breakdancing. The lingo has been the main source of public backlash at hip-hop. For instance, in the year 2007, Don Imus, a radio host, referred to a women’s basketball team as “some nappy headed hos” (Sanneh, 2007, p. 1).

This not only led to him losing his job, but it also led to a spirited discussion of the inappropriateness of hip-hop language in public places. The genre of hip-hop has therefore earned an unmatched global reputation for promotion of crime, misdemeanors, and the promotion of the use of bad language. Among the misdemeanors is graffiti, which is illegal in many countries.

Hip-hop started in Bronx, a New York City borough, when a Jamaican DJ started the deejaying and rapping. The DJ’s name was Kool Herc. Rap is actually a product of the integration of different cultures, which got its popularity after the invention of the hip-hop art of deejaying. It is an integral part of the ancient culture and oral tradition of Africans (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Kool’s deejaying style was composed of the reciting of rhymes over instrumentals. He was invited in house parties during which he would use in-house references while rapping with the microphone. Artists in Manhattan and Brooklyn copied this style of entertaining people in house parties, and eventually Herc and other DJs spread hip-hop messages in towns and won many followers.

Hip-hop had humble beginnings. At first, as evidenced in the discussion above, hip-hop comprised of live raps accompanied by instrumentals. This implies that hip-hop artists were not recording songs at that time.

However, with time, artists started recording songs, hip-hop became more popular, and its commercial potential was seen. The earliest rap songs that were recorded include “ King Tim III (Personality Jock) by Fatback Band and Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang” (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Rapper’s Delight reached number 36 on the charts, which was a big achievement in the 1970’s, and therefore it demonstrated the ability of hip-hop music to draw commercial appeal. Up-to-date hip-hop is still evolving. The good thing about hip-hop is that it can be merged with other genres and styles to make it more appealing.

Contemporary hip-hop has largely borrowed from Jazz, soul, live instrumentations, and other music resources to make it more eclectic. Kanye West is currently championing a movement known as the soulful rap movement. This combines aspects of soul music with rap music, which has served to enrich rap music (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Hip-hop has had many influences on the society. Most of these influences are on the social aspect of societal life. A number of unacceptable behaviors in the society have been encouraged by hip-hop leading to a conflict between the ambassadors of hip-hop and the ambassadors of good behavior in the society. One aspect of hip-hop that has attracted substantial controversy, and which has led to various social effects is graffiti.

Hip-hop fans tend to adore graffiti, which is a socially unacceptable behavior. This has led to untidy public places and even offensive writings in public places. In fact, there was so much graffiti in the U.S. during the growth of hip-hop that the government had to illegalize the art of graffiti (Codrington, 2006).

Hip-hop has encouraged social activism. After the birth of hip-hop in South Bronx, hip-hop artists targeted the poor and urban youth with their messages. They became the voice of the voiceless by singing about slums (ghettos) and even mentored rappers from the ghettos who ghetto youth greatly appreciated.

One legendary rapper Chuck D, who was a member of a group called Public Enemy once called the hip hop music genre “the CNN of the Ghetto” (Muhammad, 2008, p. 1). This group also started rapping about the history of Afro-Americans and the plight of black people in the U.S., which attracted youth of virtually all races into social activism and consciousness.

Contemporary rappers are borrowing from these hip-hop legends and rapping about the issues that are affecting the youth in the modern society. This has made them darlings to the youth who have become involved in contemporary social activism due to the political and social commentaries that the hip-hop artists sing.

“This is something that you might not know by looking at many of the controlled news channels which are much more likely to report a hip-hop artist’s run in with law enforcement than their philanthropic deeds and service” (Muhammad, 2008, p. 1). In light of this, politicians are increasingly endorsing the hip-hop lifestyle in order to get support from the youth (Forman, 2010).

Hip-hop has been blamed for the use of bad language in the society. The hip-hop lingo has been quite influential affecting people of all age groups. In the discussion above, it has been stated how a radio host lost his job after referring to basketball players as ho’s. Ho’s is a hip-hop lingo for a prostitute. The hip-hop language has adversely affected the youth in particular.

The uses of offensive language like the aforementioned ho, bitch, and the like, is commonplace in the society courtesy of hip-hop influence. The youth associate the use of such language with sophistication, and thus the language has adversely affected the society.

In the contemporary society one can listen to a conversation between two young people and leave thinking that the two are angry at each other yet it is just normal conversation. It has reached a point where other leaders like political leaders who associate with hip-hop artists are also associated with the hip-hop lifestyle (Stelter, 2011, p. 1).

Hip-hop has also been of great influence on the rates of crime in the contemporary society. Rap and hip-hop artists are considered the best if they were once imprisoned. This is the reason behind such labels like Konvict Muzik owned by Akon. It is common to hear the sound of gunshots in rap music.

The lyrics of many rap songs are also full of instances in which the artists praise violence and openly advocate for revenge and vendettas. By so doing, opponents of hip-hop music consider the genre to be recruiting the youth to crime and encouraging criminal behavior in the society.

Hip-hop artists, on several occasions, have been imprisoned for possession of illegal firearms. This information is normally in the public domain and thus youth who adore such artists would be delighted to own illegal firearms like their hip-hop celebrities. This has led to substantial increase in criminal activities.

Initially men dominated hip-hop, which, together with the promotion of violence, irresponsible behavior, and Ebonics made hip-hop a sexist genre. The raps soon became rants about how undeserving women were. Some artists would even rap about their girlfriends calling them unprintable names, and telling of how undeserving they were. In fact, the integration of love expression in hip-hop is a recent phenomenon.

Up to this date, rap artists still sing negatively about members of the opposite sex, with some men even ridiculing their fellow female rappers. In effect, hip-hop has been a sexist genre and it has negatively affected the society since the youth look up to these artists. The youth are therefore likely to be sexists like their celebrities leading to a society that does not appreciate gender diversity.

Hip-hop has also had an effect on the youth’s valuing of materialism. Rap and other hip-hop videos are normally made with flashy cars, jewelry, and even cash money, which the artists brag about in their songs. This is bound to have an effect on how the viewers of such videos value materialism.

Hip-hop has also had an effect on how people dress. It is common to see young people in sagging trousers, which is a trademark for most hip-hop artists. Youngsters are also sporting more jewelry and tattoos courtesy of hip-hop influence (Ogbar, 2009). The dress code of baggy jeans is also common among the youth due to the influence that hip-hop has had on them. This is because many hip-hop artists wear baggy jeans.

Just like any other invention, hip-hop has been innovated with time leading to a more perfected genre. What started out as a combination of instrumentals and rap in Bronx is now a multibillion-dollar industry that has made many youth rich. The creations of hip-hop are also very much alive today with youth in almost all corners of the world engaging in graffiti, practicing breakdancing, and producing rap songs.

The most commendable influence of hip-hop is perhaps its socio-cultural influence, which many have regarded as negative.

Hip-hop has influenced the way a large faction of the youth world-over talk, the way they dress, the way they treat the opposite sex, their involvement in social activism, their behavior in relation to criminality and even the way the youth value wealth. Hip-hop can therefore be regarded as the invention that has had the greatest influence on the youth.

Adaso, H. (2012). A Brief History of Hip-Hop and Rap . Web.

Codrington, R. (2006). In the Beginning: Hip Hop’s Early Influences . OUPBlog. Web.

Forman, M. (2010). Conscious Hip-hop, Change, and the Obama Era. American Studies Journal, 54 (3), 1433-5239.

Muhammad, A. (2008). Hip Hop: The voice of youth and social activism. Web.

Ogbar, J. (2009). Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Sanneh, K. (2007). Don’t Blame Hip-Hop . The New York Times . Web.

Stelter, B. (2011). Fox News Site Calls Obama Party a ‘Hip-Hop BBQ’ . The New York Times . Web.

• The History of Hip-Hop Culture in the United States
• Hip-Hop Music and the Role of Women in It: Fight for Women’s Rights in Society
• The Beginnings of Hip-Hop
• Sound and Space: Sonic Experience
• Teaching a Musical Instrument in School
• How Music Can Influence Our Behaviour
• Beyonce in Academic Works and News Media
• The Irish Rock Band U2 as a Modern Critique of Religion
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, May 30). Hip-Hop Music. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/

"Hip-Hop Music." IvyPanda , 30 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Hip-Hop Music'. 30 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

1. IvyPanda . "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

The evolution of R&B: from the 90s to now

R &B, along with hip-hop, are arguably the two biggest genres of contemporary mainstream music. Nowadays they are arguably interchangeable. Their rise to becoming the most popular genres amongst our generation is an almost 50-year journey beginning in the 90s and culminating with the stardom now enjoyed by prominent R&B artists, such as Lizzo and The Weeknd.

30 years ago, 1990 was a major turning point for R&B. The R&B singles chart in America became known as ‘Hot R&B singles’ in October of that year, after eight years of being called the ‘Hot Black Singles’. The significance and root of this racial label is clear; R&B was considered a genre listened to specifically by black people. R&B’s transcendence beyond racial lines in the present shows that there has been a clear, and much welcomed, shift in the way in which society tries to label everything.

At the beginning of the 90s, R&B was heavily infused in the sub-genre of new jack swing: an amalgamation of 80s R&B and hip-hop production techniques. Examples of new jack swing songs from this time are Michael Jackson’s ‘Remember the Time’ and Whitney Houston’s ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’.

R&B traded in the slow-jams and chill vibes of the late 90s for funkier and more upbeat sounds with faster tempos

In 1995, Mariah Carey, who was the most popular mainstream singer of the time thanks to her pop ballads, gained more creative control over her artistry and opted to produce more R&B orientated music. The executives at her record company were very wary of her transitioning into full on R&B as it wasn’t considered commercially bankable at the time. When she revealed she wanted to include rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the lead single for her album that year, they thought she was deluded to believe people would enjoy an R&B/hip-hop hybrid song. The single, ‘Fantasy’, made her the first ever woman to debut at the top of the charts and she stayed there for eight weeks. Her gamble paid off and ushered in a new era for R&B, the hip-pop hybrid, that went on to influence other famous songs featuring both R&B singers and rappers such as ‘Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems’ by The Notorious B.I.G., and ‘Crazy in Love’ by Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

At the beginning of the 00s, R&B traded in the slow-jams and chill vibes of the late 90s for funkier and more upbeat sounds with faster tempos. Some 90s artists like Aaliyah and Mariah Carey were able to embrace the change for a new era that kicked off with dance infused R&B tracks like Ciara with ‘1, 2 Step’, and Chris Brown with ‘Run It!’. The new century also saw the debut of Rihanna, who emulated the dance infused R&B genre with songs such as ‘Pon de Replay’, but later on experimented with more genre-bending R&B songs such as ‘California King Bed’ and ‘What’s My Name?’.

Beyoncé is still an R&B artist, albeit one who has mastered the art of genre-fluidity

It was the 10s that marked the advent of classic R&B’s death. Up until this point, R&B had evolved drastically but there was still a common sound connecting all these different eras and movements. 00s artists such as Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys were still able to top the charts at this time with hits such as ‘Suit & Tie’ and ‘Girl on Fire’ respectively. The beginning of this decade saw the last days of classic R&B artists, whilst the rest of the decade saw R&B become a genre of many different faces and sounds.

An artist who has survived many different eras of R&B is Beyoncé. She comes from the hip-pop era of the late 90s and has successfully experimented in many different forms of the genre. In 2018, with husband Jay-Z, she released a collaborative album, Everything is Love . The album’s lead single, ‘Apeshit’, sees Beyoncé, famous for her pioneering sounds in R&B, deliver a flawless performance in what can only be described as a trap song. Despite this transition into pure hip-hop, Beyoncé is still an R&B artist, albeit one who has mastered the art of genre-fluidity.

R&B over the past 30 years has evolved, from what was originally a genre of rigid conformity, guidelines and tropes, into a style of music permeated by different sounds and explored by artists such as Frank Ocean, with sometimes experimental R&B, and SZA, who has at times incorporated more traditional neo-soul sounds. It is a genre now only defined by the artist’s intentions and creativity rather than their colour or a specific sound.

Comments (1)

I remember watching this video on MTV for the first time in the 90s. Never thought it would become such a classic. In fact, all Mariah’s big songs became classic.

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Rachel Brathen aka Yoga Girl snark page. Welcome !

In this essay, I will compare and contrast Yoga Girl and Kendrick Lamar…

Is anyone here a hip hop fan?

I started following and listening to Kendrick Lamar and Yoga Girl around the same time: 2010/2011. I saw both of their rises to fame and how they navigated being in the public eye. They have obvious differences - racially, socioeconomically, gender-wise, nationality, etc. but something that stood out to me at first from both was how authentic they each felt.

Fast forward 13 years, and the veil has been lifted for me in regard to yoga girl. Someone whose page I checked nearly every single day for over a decade, she was truly a pillar in my list of role models. I lived in Costa Rica for awhile, followed her to Envision festival, I did all the meditation and yoga in search of happiness (and still felt like it wasn’t me.) I still think she is good at verbalizing her emotions and relating to people through them, but she has lost so much of her humility and simplicity for me. I cannot believe that this person I thought was so carefree and go with the flow was really so petulant, controlling, and above all, money-hungry behind the scenes. She used to present herself with humility and respect to everyone. Now she seems so jaded and defensive from social media that she’s actively aggressive towards anyone who says anything even mildly dissenting. It’s just been… incredibly disappointing.

I watched Kendrick Lamar’s show in LA a few days ago the same day I read another user who posted the screenshot where she said to not come to her house, but people could engage by taking a yoga class, attending a workshop, donating to 109, etc etc. The difference was so fucking stark. Rachel claims that her biggest desire is community, but she only wants it on her own terms in the form of payment. Even with Island Yoga, she reportedly didn’t attend a lot of the workshops as much as people expected she would, or she snuck out the back after promising to meet them in the gift shop. The dream of community that she has is literally people just giving her money in some form or another. Same thing with how she chases happiness: expensive hot tubs, acres of land, red light masks and body suits, $5k water filtration systems, $40,000k coffee roasting machines. It’s all so superficial and fleeting. The Home course was the tipping point. I went from side eyeing in secret to thinking, “this is full out grifting.” I imagine it must be very hard to keep your wits about you when you start to make big money, but her entire nomadic brand was a lie to begin with! Her father is one of the wealthiest men in Sweden! She always had a support system to fall back on, so of course she could take chances. It’s like that meme: is it manifestation, or financial privilege?

Watching Kendrick Lamar unite his community - the majority of whom were either in or affiliated with conflicting gangs - that was a historic moment in time. It was beautiful to see. It brought tears to my eyes. What started out as a major rap beef with Drake ended as a peaceful moment of gang unification of the community he’s from and the people he loves and respects. He doesn’t pilfer them for money. He donates to them and lifts them up. And this isn’t to say he’s perfect; I take issue with the underhanded (and overt) sexism in some of his lyrics. But he’s given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Compton Unified School District's music, sports, and after-school programs. He donated $50k to his former high school’s music department. It feels like Rachel tried to do something sustainable and charitable with 109, but whatever even happened with that? What happened to the money she raised in that go fund me? Remember when she swore to never sell out and shill products? And when she did the Tide advertisement, all the money went to her nonprofits, but now they fund her expensive health gadgets? Why does she asking people for donations in her stories? What the fuck is going on??? Where is the person who used to be passionate about activism and generosity? Did she feel like Aruba turned on her and gave it all up? The anti-vaxxing, the hinting that Covid isn’t that bad after her family didn’t get super sick, ugh. So many things just feel like a sham now, and it comes off as another white woman who is aware of racism and sexism, but completely dismissive of how capitalism can bring out the greed in a person.

It’s just very interesting how you can sense that the way they interact with their communities and the idea of community itself are vastly different.