Origins :
Hip hop as music and culture formed during the 1970s in New York City from the multicultural exchange between African-American youth from the United States and young Puerto Rican and children of immigrants from countries in the Caribbean.[35] Hip hop music in its infancy has been described as an outlet and a voice for the disenfranchised youth of marginalized backgrounds and low-income areas, as the hip hop culture reflected the social, economic and political realities of their lives.[36][37] Many of the people who helped establish hip hop culture, including DJ Kool Herc, DJ Disco Wiz, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa were of Latin American or Caribbean origin.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact musical influences that most affected the sound and culture of early hip hop because of the multicultural nature of New York City. Hip hop’s early pioneers were influenced by a mix of music from their cultures and the cultures they were exposed to as a result of the diversity of U.S. cities.[38] New York City experienced a heavy Jamaican hip hop influence during the 1990s. This influence was brought on by cultural shifts particularly because of the heightened immigration of Jamaicans to New York City and the American-born Jamaican youth who were coming of age during the 1990s.
In the 1970s, block parties were increasingly popular in New York City, particularly among African-American, Caribbean and Latino youth residing in the Bronx. Block parties incorporated DJs, who played popular genres of music, especially funk and soul music. Due to the positive reception, DJs began isolating the percussive breaks of popular songs. This technique was common in Jamaican dub music,[40] and was largely introduced into New York by immigrants from the Caribbean, including DJ Kool Herc, one of the pioneers of hip hop.[41][42]
Because the percussive breaks in funk, soul and disco records were generally short, Herc and other DJs began using two turntables to extend the breaks. Herc created the blueprint for hip hop music and culture by building upon the Jamaican tradition of impromptu toasting, a spoken type of boastful poetry and speech over music.[43] On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was the DJ at his sister’s back-to-school party. He extended the beat of a record by using two record players, isolating the percussion “breaks” by using a mixer to switch between the two records. Herc’s experiments with making music with record players became what we now know as breaking or “scratching“.[44]
A second key musical element in hip hop music is emceeing (also called MCing or rapping). Emceeing is the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay, delivered at first without accompaniment and later done over a beat. This spoken style was influenced by the African American style of “capping”, a performance where men tried to outdo each other in originality of their language and tried to gain the favor of the listeners.[45] The basic elements of hip hop—boasting raps, rival “posses” (groups), uptown “throw-downs”, and political and social commentary—were all long present in African American music. MCing and rapping performers moved back and forth between the predominance of “toasting” songs packed with a mix of boasting, ‘slackness’ and sexual innuendo and a more topical, political, socially conscious style. The role of the MC originally was as a Master of Ceremonies for a DJ dance event. The MC would introduce the DJ and try to pump up the audience. The MC spoke between the DJ’s songs, urging everyone to get up and dance. MCs would also tell jokes and use their energetic language and enthusiasm to rev up the crowd. Eventually, this introducing role developed into longer sessions of spoken, rhythmic wordplay, and rhyming, which became rapping.
By 1979 hip hop music had become a mainstream genre. It spread across the world in the 1990s with controversial “gangsta” rap.[46] Herc also developed upon break-beat deejaying,[47] where the breaks of funk songs—the part most suited to dance, usually percussion-based—were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties. This form of music playback, using hard funk and rock, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell’s announcements and exhortations to dancers would lead to the syncopated, rhymed spoken accompaniment now known as rapping. He dubbed his dancers “break-boys” and “break-girls”, or simply b-boys and b-girls. According to Herc, “breaking” was also street slang for “getting excited” and “acting energetically”.[48]
DJs such as Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and Jazzy Jay refined and developed the use of breakbeats, including cutting and scratching.[50] As turntable manipulation continued to evolve a new technique that came from it was needle dropping. Needle dropping was created by Grandmaster Flash, it is prolonged short drum breaks by playing two copies of a record simultaneously and moving the needle on one turntable back to the start of the break while the other played.[51] The approach used by Herc was soon widely copied, and by the late 1970s, DJs were releasing 12-inch records where they would rap to the beat. Popular tunes included Kurtis Blow‘s “The Breaks” and The Sugarhill Gang‘s “Rapper’s Delight“.[52] Herc and other DJs would connect their equipment to power lines and perform at venues such as public basketball courts and at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx, New York, now officially a historic building.[53] The equipment consisted of numerous speakers, turntables, and one or more microphones.[54] By using this technique, DJs could create a variety of music, but according to Rap Attack by David Toop “At its worst the technique could turn the night into one endless and inevitably boring song”.[55] KC The Prince of Soul, a rapper-lyricist with Pete DJ Jones, is often credited with being the first rap lyricist to call himself an “MC”.[56]
Street gangs were prevalent in the poverty of the South Bronx, and much of the graffiti, rapping, and b-boying at these parties were all artistic variations on the competition and one-upmanship of street gangs. Sensing that gang members’ often violent urges could be turned into creative ones, Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap musicians. By the late 1970s, the culture had gained media attention, with Billboard magazine printing an article titled “B Beats Bombarding Bronx”, commenting on the local phenomenon and mentioning influential figures such as Kool Herc.[57] The New York City blackout of 1977 saw widespread looting, arson, and other citywide disorders especially in the Bronx[58] where a number of looters stole DJ equipment from electronics stores. As a result, the hip hop genre, barely known outside of the Bronx at the time, grew at an astounding rate from 1977 onward.[59]
DJ Kool Herc‘s house parties gained popularity and later moved to outdoor venues to accommodate more people. Hosted in parks, these outdoor parties became a means of expression and an outlet for teenagers, where “instead of getting into trouble on the streets, teens now had a place to expend their pent-up energy.”[60] Tony Tone, a member of the Cold Crush Brothers, stated that “hip hop saved a lot of lives”.[60] For inner-city youth, participating in hip hop culture became a way of dealing with the hardships of life as minorities within America, and an outlet to deal with the risk of violence and the rise of gang culture. MC Kid Lucky mentions that “people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting”.[61][62] Inspired by DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa created a street organization called Universal Zulu Nation, centered around hip hop, as a means to draw teenagers out of gang life, drugs and violence.[60]
The lyrical content of many early rap groups focused on social issues, most notably in the seminal track “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which discussed the realities of life in the housing projects.[63] “Young black Americans coming out of the civil rights movement have used hip hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s to show the limitations of the Hip Hop Movement.”[64] Hip hop gave young African Americans a voice to let their issues be heard; “Like rock-and-roll, hip hop is vigorously opposed by conservatives because it romanticises violence, law-breaking, and gangs”.[64] It also gave people a chance for financial gain by “reducing the rest of the world to consumers of its social concerns.”[64]
In late 1979, Debbie Harry of Blondie took Nile Rodgers of Chic to such an event, as the main backing track used was the break from Chic’s “Good Times“.[52] The new style influenced Harry, and Blondie’s later hit single from 1981 “Rapture” became the first single containing hip hop elements to hit number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100—the song itself is usually considered new wave and fuses heavy pop music elements, but there is an extended rap by Harry near the end.
Boxer Muhammad Ali, as an influential African-American celebrity, was widely covered in the media. Ali influenced several elements of hip hop music. Both in the boxing ring and in media interviews, Ali became known in the 1960s for being “rhyming trickster” in the 1960s. Ali used a “funky delivery” for his comments, which included “boasts, comical trash talk, [and] the endless quotabl[e]” lines.[65] According to Rolling Stone, his “freestyle skills” (a reference to a type of vocal improvisation in which lyrics are recited with no particular subject or structure) and his “rhymes, flow, and braggadocio” would “one day become typical of old school MCs” like Run–D.M.C. and LL Cool J,[66] the latter citing Ali as an influence.[65] Hip hop music in its infancy has been described as an outlet and a “voice” for the disenfranchised youth of low-income and marginalized economic areas,[36] as the hip hop culture reflected the social, economic and political realities of their lives.[37]