Defining Hip Hop Youth Subculture

Youth subcultures can be seen everywhere we look and have an undeniable effect on the young people who choose to be involved at either an individualist level or as a collectivist unit. The emergence of youth subcultures and young people’s embracing of them not being surprising to Harris (2004) who explained that there has always been a tendency for young people to associate together in public spaces and adopt distinctive styles of clothing, their own idiomatic speech, and their own ways of life. Hip hop embraces all of these ideas as an expression of the subculture. While people may think that hip hop is just music it is made up of a number of components that include rapping, mc’ing, beat making, break dancing, block parties DJ’ing and graffiti, while these are expressions of the subculture “Hip-Hop is not only a genre of music, but also a complex system of ideas, values and concepts Adelman, H., & Taylor, L. (2010).” Scholars, Morgan and Bennet (2011) have said that hip hop is inextricably bound to African American history and experience and that it emerged as overt resistance towards discrimination, poverty and racism faced by the African American people in the United States. It is the rise against resistance, the values, beliefs and the formation of identities that make the hip hop subculture so interesting and popular with young people not only in America but also around the world.