NEW YORK (AP) — It was born during a break decades ago. This is the moment when the song's vocals drop, the instruments quiet down, and the beat appears on stage. That's when hip-hop came into the world, seizing the moment and reinventing it. Something new is born from something familiar.
In the hands of the DJ playing the album, that moment of intermission becomes much more than that, becoming a song in itself, repeated in an endless loop across the turntables. The MCs also joined in, sharing their own clever rhymes and wordplay. The same was true for dancers, B-boys and B-girls who hit the floor and breakdance. It was brought to the streets and subways of New York City by graffiti artists and acquired a visual style of its own.
Of course, it didn't stop there. A form of music, a culture, can never reinvent its very DNA. Hip-hop spread from parties to parks to the boroughs of New York City and the region, then across the country and around the world.
And at each stage, changes, adaptations, new and different voices came in and made it their own in sound, lyrics, purpose and style. Its foundations have penetrated deep into the black communities where it first became known, spreading and expanding like ripples on water until no corner of the world remains untouched by its influence.
Not just reinvented, but re-invented. Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, and business. Hip-hop has influenced and changed all of that.
In hip-hop, “When someone does it, it determines how it's done. When someone does something different, it's a new way to do it,” says the Nigerian-American opera singer. says Babatunde Akinboboy, a longtime hip-hop fan who lives in Los Angeles. Create content on social media using both music styles.
Hip-hop “connects you to truth, and truth endures.”
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Female rappers have been a part of hip-hop since its debut. Women have fought for identity and recognition in hip-hop. (August 9) (AP Video: Sharon Johnson)
People who were looking for the starting point of hip-hop found the starting point of hip-hop, and this year marked its 50th birthday celebration. On August 11, 1973, a young Clive Campbell, known around his Bronx grounds as DJ Kool Herc, deejayed his sister's back-to-school party in the community room of his Sedgwick Avenue apartment. It is the day when
Campbell was born in Jamaica, where he spent his childhood before his family moved to the Bronx, although he himself was still a teenager at the time, aged 18 and extending his musical hiatus from the records he was playing to pursue a different kind of music. started making. dance opportunity. He began speaking over the beat, reminding me of the “Cheers” style heard in Jamaica.
It didn't take long for this style to be heard all over the city. And it began to spread throughout the New York City metro area.
Among the people who started hearing about it were young people across the river in Englewood, New Jersey, who started writing rhymes to the beat. In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for singer-turned-music producer Sylvia Robinson, who co-founded Sugarhill Records.
They were known as the Sugar Hill Gang. rapper's joy ”, giving the country a record that peaked at No. 36 on Billboard's Top 100 chart list and even reached No. 1 in some European countries.
“What you hear now is not a test: I’m rapping to the beat/And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to get your feet moving,” Michael “ “Wonder Mike” Wright said in one of the song's stanzas. .
Wright says he believed the song, and by extension hip-hop, “was going to be big.” “This was a new genre of music, so I thought it would explode and be played all over the world,” he told The Associated Press. “We had classic jazz, bebop, rock and pop, but here are new forms of music that didn't exist.”
And it was about self-expression, says Guy “Master Gee” O'Brien. “Even if you can't sing or play an instrument, you can still recite a poem or speak your mind. And that's now accessible to everyone.”
AP correspondent Deepti Hajera reports on an overview of hip-hop.
Of course, all the women too. Roxanne Chante, a native of Queens, New York, was just 14 years old in 1984. This year, she became one of the first female MCs. This was perhaps some of the first high-profile instances of rappers using tracks of their own songs to fire sonic shots at other rappers in the back-and-forth singing contest known as The Roxanne. war.
“When I look at female rappers today, it gives me hope and inspiration,” says Shante. “When I look at some of today's female rappers and see the businesses they own and the barriers they've been able to break through, it's amazing to me and I'm honored to even be a part of it.” Beginnings . “
Many of the women who have joined her over the decades, including Queen Latifah, Lil' Kim, Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, spoke about their experiences as women in hip-hop and the wider world. This doesn't even make it into the list of female rappers from other countries.
They are women like Tokaj Maiza, who was born in Zimbabwe and raised in Australia. Songwriter and rapper early in his career. She's excited about the diverse range of women in hip-hop and the variety of topics they're talking about.
“There are so many different pockets…so many ways of being,” she says. “It's not about what other people did. …The blueprint can always be recreated.”
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The emphasis on self-expression also means that hip-hop has been used as a medium for just about anything over the years.
Do you want to talk about parties and how nice and rich you are? Good luck. Do cute men or beautiful women catch your eye? Let's say it in one sentence. Do you want to adapt the sounds emanating from New York City to the vibes of the West Coast, the beats of Chicago, the grooves of New Orleans, the rhythms of Atlanta, or more recently the sounds of Egypt, India, Australia, and Nigeria? It's all up to you And it's all hip hop. (Now, whether anyone listening actually thought that was a good thing or not? That's another story.)
Mainstream America isn't always ready for that. Due to sexually explicit content by his 2 live crew in Miami, his 1989 album “Azuna Steez They Want to Be'' became the subject of a legal battle over obscenity and freedom of expression. A subsequent album, Banned in the USA, was the first to be certified by an official record industry label for explicit content.
Being from the black community in America means that in 1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Wild Five message”, notes that the stress of peri-urban poverty makes it “sometimes feel like a jungle/I wonder how I stay on top of it.”
Others, like Common and Kendrick Lamar, have also brought conscious lyricism to hip-hop, perhaps none more famously than Public Enemy. Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” became an anthem in 1989 when it was written for director Spike Lee's classic film “Doo.” the Right Thing,” which chronicled racial tensions in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Some in hip-hop have pulled no punches, using the art form and culture as a no-holds-barred way to showcase their life troubles. In many cases, these messages have been met with fear or disdain in the mainstream. Radio stations balked in 1988 when NWA aired “Straight Outta Compton,'' a loud, cheeky talk about police abuse and gang life.
Hip-hop (mainly produced by black artists) and law enforcement have had a contentious relationship for years, viewing each other with suspicion. There were some reasons. In some forms of hip-hop, the ties between rappers and criminals are real, and spiraling violence, like the high-profile deaths of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, is real. The action was at times very bloody. But in a country where black people are often viewed with suspicion by those in power, there are also many stereotypes about hip-hop and criminal activity.
As hip-hop has spread over the years, many people have used it to speak out about issues that are important to them. Look at Bobby Sanchez. I am a Peruvian-American transgender, two-spirit poet and rapper. Who released songs in Quechua?, the language of the Wari tribe, from which her father hails. “Quechua 101 Give Back the Land” refers to the killing of indigenous peoples and calls for the restoration of the land.
“I think it's very special and cool that artists use it to reflect society, because it makes society bigger than just them,” says Sanchez. “For me, no matter what I'm talking about, it's always political, because hip-hop is, in a way, a form of resistance.”
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Yes, it's an American work. And yes, it's still heavily influenced by what's going on in America. But hip-hop has found a home on the planet, and people from every community under the sun rely on it to express what's important to them.
When hip-hop first began to be absorbed outside the United States, it often imitated American styles and messages, says P. Khalil Saucier, who studies hip-hop's spread to African countries. .
Not so these days. Homegrown hip-hop is everywhere, and it's a prime example of the genre's tendency to stay relevant and vital by being reinvented by the people doing it.
“This culture as a whole is kind of firmly rooted because no matter which country you look at, it's been able to go from being just an import to something truly local in different expressions.” said Saucier, a professor of critical black studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
That's in everyone's interest, says University of London founder Rishma Dhaliwal. i am hip hop magazine.
“Hip-hop is… putting yourself into someone else's world. It allows you to be involved in someone's struggle,” she says. “It's a big microphone to say, 'This is what the word on the street is saying is this is what's going on here, and this is what you might not know about us.' This is how we feel; This is who we are.”
The impact is not limited to one direction. Hip-hop hasn't just changed. It made a difference. It permeated other spaces and made them different. He brought his unique sensibilities to streetwear and strutted around the fashion world. It revitalized businesses. Just ask Timberland what sales were like before work boots became a staple of hip-hop wear.
Or perhaps take a look at the perfect example. Lin-Manuel Miranda's groundbreaking musical brought a distant white historical figure to life to the rhythm of a hip-hop soundtrack, bringing a different energy and audience to the world of theater.
Hip-hop “has done a really good job of making culture more accessible. It's invaded spaces that we traditionally weren't allowed to invade,” Dhaliwal says.
For Usha Jay, freestyle hip-hop was the perfect fit to pair with the classic, formal South Asian dance style of Bharatanatyam. A 26-year-old choreographer born in France to Tamil immigrant parents. Created a series of social media videos Last year showed how the two styles interact. It was her hip hop training that gave her the confidence and spirit to do something different.
Hip-hop culture “encourages you to be yourself,” Jay said. “I feel like hip-hop helps me in my quest to find myself, because the culture of hip-hop is that you have to be you.”
Hip hop is, simply put, a “magical art form,” says Nile Rodgers. Legendary musician, composer and record producer. He would know. It was his song “Good Times” with the band Chic that was recreated many years ago to form the basis of “Rapper's Delight.”
“The impact it had on the world can’t really be quantified,” Rogers said. “Sometimes you find someone in a village you've never been to, in a country you've never been to, and all of a sudden you hear local hip-hop. And you don't even know who these people are, but… They adopted it and made it their own.”
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Associated Press Entertainment Writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Hajera is a member of The Associated Press' race and ethnicity team.
