Hip hop  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 13:16, 22 January 2018

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Hip hop is both a music genre and a cultural movement developed in urban communities starting in the 1970s, predominantly by African Americans and Latinos. Coinage of the term hip hop is often credited to Keith Cowboy, a rapper with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. Today, it is a popular urban culture, associated with rap music, breakdancing, black music.

Since first emerging in New York City in the 1970s, hip hop has grown to encompass an entire lifestyle that consistently incorporates diverse elements of ethnicity, technology, art and urban life. There are four fundamental elements in hip hop:

• Hip hop dance: Breakdance and various forms of street dance
• Hip hop art: Urban inspired art, often as graffiti
• Hip hop music: DJing, beats and beatmaking, and hip hop production
• Rapping: MCing and urban inspired poetry

Etymology

Hip hop is the combination of two separate slang terms—"hip", used in African American English as early as 1898, meaning current or in the now, and "hop", for the hopping movement.

Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has been credited with coining the term in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the US Army, by scat singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into his stage performance. The group frequently performed with disco artists who would refer to this new type of music by calling them "hip hoppers". The name was originally meant as a sign of disrespect, but soon came to identify this new music and culture.

The song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, begins with the scat phrase, "I said a hip, hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don't stop." Lovebug Starski, a Bronx DJ who put out a single called "The Positive Life" in 1981, and DJ Hollywood then began using the term when referring to this new disco rap music. Hip hop pioneer and South Bronx community leader Afrika Bambaataa also credits Lovebug Starski as the first to use the term "Hip Hop", as it relates to the culture. Bambaataa, former leader of the Black Spades gang, also did much to further popularize the term. The words "hip hop" first appeared in print on September 21, 1981, in the Village Voice in a profile of Bambaataa written by Steven Hager, who also published the first comprehensive history of the culture with St. Martins' Press.

See also

• Old school hip hop
• Roots of hip hop