hip-hop

The tradition & historical record

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. ¹

"Hip-hop" has been in use since the 17th century to mean a succession of hops. In George Villiers's 1671 play The Rehearsal, Prince Volscius exits a scene awkwardly with one boot on and the other off. The director of the scene exclaims, "to go off hip hop, hip hop, upon this occasion, is a thousand times better than any conclusion in the world". A common variation on "hip hop" is "hippity hop", which was in wide usage by the 19th century. It appears in works like a poem from 1882 where four children sing, "[h]ippity hop to the candy shop!" It was a common refrain in skipping games. Many dance steps include a hop. By the 18th century, "hop" began to be used interchangeably with "dance" as both a noun and a verb. ¹

An early usage of "hip hop" in recorded popular music is found in The Dovells' 1963 dance song "You Can't Sit Down", "...you gotta slop, bop, flip flop, hip hop, never stop". A decade later, Disco disc jockeys would pepper their sets with exhortations to the crowd, which is why the emerging style was originally known as "disco rap". One of DJ Hollywood's chants was "hip hop de hippy hop the body rock". Lovebug Starsky recalls originating the phrase when he messed up the change between records, "I picked up the mic and just started saying 'a hip hop, hip hop, de hibbyhibbyhibbyhibby hop'", claiming credit for inventing the name by 1979. In another version of Starsky's tale, he coined "hip-hop" with Keef Cowboy from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as they traded jibes at a friend who was going into the Army. Kidd Creole recalls the scene without Lovebug present, "Cowboy was on the mic playin around doing that Army cadence: Hip/Hop/Hip/Hop...Disco was king at the time, and the Disco crowd referred to us as those 'Hip Hoppers', but they used it as a derogatory term. But Cowboy was the first one I heard do that to music, as part of his crowd response." The phrase was in common usage by the time The Sugarhill Gang recorded "Rapper's Delight" in 1979. The chorus begins, "I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie/To the hip, hip-hop and you don't stop the rockin'". By the early 1980s, hip-hop's definition had expanded into "the all inclusive tag for the rapping, breaking, graffiti-writing, crew fashion wearing street sub-culture". Afrika Bambaataa was instrumental in turning the term into a positive force through his Universal Zulu Nation. Their social movement was anti-drug and anti-violence. As rappers began to dominate hip-hop, the terms became synonymous. ¹

Hip-hop's initial medium was the turntable. Vinyl records were the primary source for DJs who reworked songs into new material for dancing. The process echoed the appropriation of styles that created jazz decades earlier. The genres hip-hop initially assimilated were wide-ranging, but its primary sources were disco and funk records. Nowhere was this cross-pollination of musics better typified than in the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where AM radio signals from Miami, Florida, were audible. In the late 1950s, the U.S. stations played much more invigorating rhythm and blues music than the staid BBC which was syndicated by the island's only radio channel, Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. American DJs like Jocko Henderson and Jockey Jack introduced R&B records and jive talking to the island. Local DJs soon began setting up sound systems for outdoor parties. A vibrant music scene emerged. The jive of American DJs transmuted into toasts in Jamaican Patois. Jive talk popularized black-appeal stations in the post-war era. Its double entendres were a godsend to radio, re-invigorating ratings at flagging outlets. It emerged from traditions like call and response, signifyin', the dozens, capping, and jazz poetry. The transition from oral tradition to the commercial airwaves was exemplified by WDIA disc jockeys like Nat D. and Rufus Thomas. Their on-air jive was honed during their hosting duties at the Palace Theatre's Amateur Night on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. D.J's like Chicago's Al Benson (WJJD), Austin's Doctor Hep Cat (KVET), and Atlanta's Jockey Jack (WERD) spoke the same rhyming, cadence-laden rap style. ¹

By the 1970s, The Bronx had been cut in half by the Cross Bronx Expressway. The construction accelerated "white flight" from the neighborhood and concentrated lower income African American, Latin American, and Caribbean residents in the southern half of the borough. This massive, multi-ethnic, working class community is where hip-hop was born. The traditions of these ethnicities all informed the emerging genre. As all music does, hip-hop reflected the social, economic, and political realities of its creators, who were sometimes disenfranchised and marginalized. The dominant genre of the time was disco. Even black radio stations were playing hit disco records as they targeted larger suburban audiences. The way Europe stripped the blackness out of funk and disco and streamlined it became a target for parody in the black community. George Clinton mercilessly lampooned it as "The Placebo Syndrome" in his P-Funk mythology. Even though disco birthed hip-hop, much of the genre's early spirit was a rebellion against its parent. Hip-hop first had to inherit the rich trove of studio and DJ techniques that disco innovated. ¹

It became trendy for dancers to use the instrumental break in a song to show off their best moves. Some would even forego dancing until the break in a record came on. The practice became known as "breakdancing", and it increased demand for breaks that DJs would soon supply. ¹

Outside of the dance clubs, the biggest incubator o… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Hip-hop”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

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. ²

The source record links this tradition to 51 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²