hip-hop

Hip-hop (also known as rap music or simply rap) is a genre of popular music that emerged in the early 1970s alongside an associated subculture created by African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in New York City. The musical style is a synthesis of a wide range of techniques, but rapping is frequent enough that it has become a defining characteristic. Other key markers of the genre are the disc jockey (DJ), turntablism, scratching, beatboxing, and instrumental tracks. Cultural interchange has always been central to the hip-hop genre: It simultaneously borrows from its social environment while commenting on it. The hip-hop genre and culture emerged from block parties in the Bronx. DJs began expanding the instrumental breaks of popular records when they noticed how excited it would make the crowds. The extended breaks provided a platform for break dancers and rappers. These breakbeats enabled the subsequent evolution of the hip-hop style. Many of the records used were disco due to its popularity at the time. This disco-inflected music was originally known as disco rap and later described as "old-school hip-hop". In the mid-1980s, hip-hop began to diversify as electro music started to inform the genre's new school. The period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s became known as hip-hop's "golden age", as the genre earned widespread critical acclaim and generated massive sales.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Hip-hop”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

hip-hop is rhythmic music accompanied by rhyming speech, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 51 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶