West Coast hip-hop

The tradition & historical record

West Coast hip-hop is a regional genre of hip-hop music that encompasses any artists or music that originated in the West Coast of the United States. West Coast hip-hop began to dominate from a radio play and sales standpoint during the early to-mid 1990s with the birth of G-funk and the emergence of record labels such as Suge Knight and Dr. Dre's Death Row Records, Ice Cube's Lench Mob Records, the continued success of Eazy-E's Ruthless Records, Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment, and many others. Though the term "West Coast hip hop" may also be used to describe Northwest hip-hop and other movements from the Western U.S., it is primarily associated with the state of California, especially Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. ¹

African American communities of the Bay Area and southern California emerged as new bases of hip-hop culture in the 1980s. Hispanics in the Los Angeles area have played a significant role in West Coast hip-hop culture. ¹

Several events laid the foundations for West Coast hip-hop, long before the emergence of West Coast rappers such as Ice-T, Mellow Man Ace, Too Short, Kid Frost and Eazy-E—or even before the emergence of rap itself. According to Syd Caesar, "a cataclysmic event helped give rise to it out West: the Watts riots of 1965." In 1967, Budd Schulberg founded a creative space in Los Angeles entitled Watts Writers Workshop, intended to help the people of the Watts neighborhood and provide a place for them to express themselves freely; one group to emerge from the workshop was the proto-rap group The Watts Prophets. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, political and social justice movements in the San Francisco Bay Area inspired the emergence and growth of hip-hop culture in the region. The Bay Area developed a unique style of break dancing, and graffiti art sprayed along city streets and buildings, similar to what was expressed in The Bronx on subway cars and abandoned structures. From the inspiration of funk music, to the political and social movements that were energized by the Black Panther Party (founded in Oakland), hip-hop music had strong roots in the Bay. In the late 1970s in Los Angeles, Alonzo Williams, a young disc jockey from Compton, California formed a partnership with another DJ named Rodger Clayton from Los Angeles, California who created a promotion company called Unique Dreams that would hire Williams to DJ at local events. ¹

On June 19, 2024, Juneteenth, Kendrick Lamar hosted The Pop Out: Ken & Friends concert following his highly publicized feud with Drake, noted as a celebration of the West Coast. ¹

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

West Coast hip-hop is regional genre of hip-hop music that encompasses any artists or music that originated in the West Coast of the United States, 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 7 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²