Hip-hop is a wonderfully centerless entanglement, ubiquitous, if not always completely visible.
It is both a constant source of innovation and a historical document ripe for plagiarism. It is a continuation of the traditions of rock, soul and jazz, while at the same time clearly loosening their cultural grip. It’s evolving faster than ever, with new styles emerging every year or sooner, doubling the genre’s potential. And it has influence far beyond music. Hip-hop is woven into television, film, fashion, advertising, literature, politics, and countless other nooks and crannies of American life. It is the lingua franca and impossible to avoid.
It’s too big to fit under one tent or confined to one narrative. The genre is huge, non-linear, and unruly. There are internal conflicts and misunderstandings, and stakeholders are sometimes friends and collaborators, and sometimes wary of each other.
So if you’re trying to fully catalog hip-hop, it’s only natural to lean towards cacophony. The package that accompanies this essay does just that, collecting oral histories from 50 giants of the genre over the last 50 years. Numbers matter. It’s the realization that, now at 50, hip-hop is broad, fruitful, captivating, multilingual, and a source of endless stories. It’s light fiction, but more on that later. Its richness cannot be captured without breadth and ambition. Many voices need to be heard, but not always agreed.
Style innovators, crossover superstars, regional heroes and micromarket celebrities line up. Some assert their supremacy and see themselves as the center of gravity, while others see themselves as proud students of the game, understanding their place in hip-hop’s broader artistic field. increase. Some are widely recognized and some are known mainly among enthusiasts. There are agitators and appeasers. respected and slandered. Some play around with the boundaries of what is usually thought of as rap.
Taken together, these artists form a family tree for the genre, emphasizing the bridges between groups that are usually discussed in isolation, and highlighting the way rappers do things, regardless of their city of origin or the era in which they met. To do. Their success is because they have struggled with similar situations, creative problems and obstacles.
These 50 histories detail hip-hop from a myriad of vantage points. upwards underground. Outer sparsely populated areas. From big cities to suburbs. They tell the story of an impromptu musical movement that laid the foundation for decisive cultural change over the past few decades.
But fifty years ago, the results seemed fantastic at best. In the 1970s, the Bronx block his parties were replaced by nightclubs, and a dedicated talking DJ laid the groundwork for his MC to take over. Soon, the invasion of capitalism removed and packaged the most transferable part of these live events: the rap.
Then off to the races. By the mid-1980s, the hip-hop industry had grown from small clubs to big business as the commercial release of countless New York artists’ recordings stoked audiences across the United States. Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Beastie Boys and more are on the rise to a wave of soon-to-be global stars. Hip-hop has become a global counterculture.
By the dawn of the 1990s, it had blossomed in every corner of the country, including the South, West and Midwest, and had penetrated the global mainstream. In the mid-’90s, thanks to the rise of Biggie Smalls and Puffy, Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre, Bad Boy and Death Row, there was resistance from those who believed rock was destined to reign forever. Nonetheless, it has become the epicenter of American pop music. .
In the 2000s, the genre’s center of power shifted from the coast to the South, where the genre flourished (mainly away from major label scrutiny) in Miami, Houston, Virginia, Atlanta and Memphis. 2 Live Crew, Geto Boys, Missy Elliot, Outkast, and Three 6 Mafia – each absorbed imports from other parts of the country and created new terminology and sonic frameworks around it. Hip-hop was becoming a widely shared language with many dialects.
All the while, the genre has expanded and become commercially successful, becoming more inevitable with each passing year. It became centrist pop, which spawned its own dissident. 1990s New York and Los Angeles underground. The progressive indie scene of the 2000s. and 2010s SoundCloud rap. Over the past two decades, hip-hop has not only been part of some of the biggest pop music of its time, such as Drake, Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Cardi B, but its templates have also been open-sourced to performers of other genres, allowing them to has borrowed from it and is widely borrowed. Hip-hop became a key contact point for country music, reggaeton, hard rock, K-pop, and more.
What’s amazing about the history collected in this package is that no part of that climb was taken for granted. Every era has had setbacks. For each artist, an unreachable scene was promised. And for all these rappers, it meant leaning into new ideas of what their version of hip-hop could be like and hoping their ears would meet them in this unexplored place. .
There are also untold history issues. Reading these memoirs is a constant reminder of those who are no longer here to share their stories. Beneath these stories is a punitive catalog of dying before death, a reminder that the canon cannot contain songs that were never made.
It’s the 50th anniversary, well, it’s an opportunistic frame. The date refers to August 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc played two copies of the same album in the rec room of his apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx for the first time into one seamless breakbeat. reportedly mixed with Of course, this is his one way of thinking about hip-hop’s Big Bang moment, but by no means the only way. Think of it as toasting rap, speaking to prerecorded music, and speaking rhythmically, and hip-hop has been around for over 50 years. Just ask The Last Poets or his DJ Hollywood. He was improvising rhymes on the mic while spinning his records in disco. Depending on who you ask, some say he’s mixed two of the same record.
But the madness and cynicism in trying to celebrate a date everyone can support reflects a darker, more disturbing truth. For decades, hip-hop was perceived as disposable, annoying, and perverted. Commemoration and enshrinement seemed like an outlandish story. For too long, hip-hop has had to claim its rightful place in pop music and pop culture in the face of racial, legal, and musical animosity.
So claiming the genre to have an origin is really just another way of claiming its importance, stability and future potential. We can debate the specific details, and many do, but we can’t debate the purpose of ensuring that no one ever misses the power and influence of the genre again.
But hip-hop was never going anywhere because there was no other style of pop music that was as malleable and deft. Hip-hop answers critics directly, voraciously consuming and reconfiguring its predecessors. It’s restless and immediate, sometimes changing so quickly that it can’t stop documenting itself. In other words, this is a landing point for reflection, and a starting point for the next 50 years or so.
