What is hip-hop?
Hip-hop is an umbrella of a lifestyle that includes a music genre. Hip-hop experts generally cite four elements of hip-hop: graffiti, DJing, MCing and break dancing. In order to be classified as hip-hop, something has to have at least one of these elements.
Hip-hop has common themes, such as poverty, drugs, violence, struggle and righteousness. A majority of the major hip hop acts are racial and ethnic minorities, and the themes follow their personal life experiences. Many of the best songs are about everyday life or wanting to start a political movement to create societal change. Musicians take cues from their lives to create the songs, which is why hip-hop moved so quickly through communities in the 80s when people were so personally interconnected in urban areas.
Graffiti is an urban art form that is generally spray painting on walls in an illegal manner. Young people are the most likely to start writing graffiti in order to spread their name across a city, whether it is on subway cars, abandoned buildings or in alleyways. The art is not for other people, but rather for other graffiti artists. The lettering and tagging means something intrinsically for the people behind the aerosol can, but that message is not always clearly conveyed to the public.
DJing is the act of playing the same record on two turntables and splicing the sounds and effects together to create a new song. It is usually done with the breaks, or drum solos, of other songs. DJs create the tracks for rappers to create lyrics over, and they also keep the energy up in the venue they are playing.
MCs are commonly called rappers. That’s why lots of hip hop artists have MC in their names, such as MC Lyte, Young MC or even MC Hammer. MCs historically freestyled over whatever the DJ spun in the club. Now rappers often write their lyrics and producers create tracks for them to rap over. Lyricists share a lot of personal stories in their songs, and it is a very recent movement to have other rappers write songs for stars.
Break dancing is a type of hip hop dance that traces its origins back to the 1960s and James Brown. The dance form is also commonly called b-boying, which is short for break-boying because the originators dances over the breaks in songs (what the DJs use to spin new records). The movement is syncopated, sharp and has a distinctly acrobatic nature with lots of spins, flips and floorwork.
The dance form gained popularity when Afrikaa Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation began using break dance battles as a substitute for gang-on-gang violence. Then other groups formed, like the trailblazing Rock Steady Crew. The dancers booked gigs in different clubs in New York City and the surrounding area. With this kind of publicity, more people started break dancing. The dance form reached its height in the 1980s with press attention and a movie made called “Wildstyle.” Since then, the dance form has died down, but it still continues to influence modern hip hop dance as it evolves with the hip-hop movement as a whole.
Hip-hop is more than just a genre of music, even though that’s what people primarily think of today. However, there is a rich culture involving all four of the elements mentioned. It evolves and develops as time goes on, but this will always be the core.
