NEW YORK — He was born in the pause, so many decades ago: that moment when the voice of a song faded, the instruments fell silent and the rhythm took to the stage. That’s when hip hop hit the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, sprung from something familiar.
At the hands of the DJs spinning the records, that breaking moment became something else: a composition unto itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs joined in, spouting their own clever rhymes and puns. The same did the dancers, the b-boys and b-girls who fell to the floor to dance break dance. He acquired his own visual style, with graffiti artists taking him to the streets and subways of New York City.
It didn’t stop there, of course. A musical form, a culture, with reinvention as its very DNA would never, never could. Hip hop spread, from parties to parks, through New York City counties and then across the region, across the country and around the world.
And at each step: change, adaptation, like new, different voices entered and made it their own, in sound, in lyrics, in purpose, in style. The foundation of it soaked into the black communities where it first became known and also spread and expanded, like ripples in water, until there is no corner of the world that has not been touched by it.
Not just reinvent yourself, but reinvent yourself. Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business: hip hop has impacted them all, transforming even as it has transformed.
In hip hop, “when someone does it, that’s how it’s done. When someone does something different, then it’s a new way,” says Babatunde Akinboboye, a Nigerian-American opera singer and longtime fan of hip hop in Los Angeles, who creates content on social media using both styles of music.
Hip hop “connects with what is true. And what is true lasts.”
A little history
Those looking for a starting point landed on August 11, 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc in The Bronx, DJed at a party. Campbell had started extending the musical breaks on records and talking about rhythm. It wasn’t long before the style could be heard all over the city.
And then in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight” and ushered in a rap record that would reach number 36 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart.
Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright says he knew the song “was going to be big. He knew it was going to blow up and play all over the world because it was a new genre of music,” he told The Associated Press.
And Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien says, “If you couldn’t sing or couldn’t play an instrument, you could recite poetry and speak your mind. And so it became accessible to everyone.”
Female voices took a chance, like Roxanne Shante, who became one of the first MCs to gain a wider audience. Other women have joined her, from Queen Latifah to Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion and more.
What’s up with hip hop now
Over the years, hip hop has been used as a medium for just about everything. Mainstream America hasn’t always been ready for it.
Coming from America’s black communities, that has also meant that hip hop has been a tool to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world on “The Message” about stress. of poverty in his city.
And Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” became an anthem when it was created for filmmaker Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing,” which chronicled racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
Some in hip hop don’t mince words, but often those messages have been met with fear or scorn in the mainstream. When NWA came “Straight Outta Compton” in 1988 with loud and brazen accounts of police abuse and gang life, radio stations backed down.
Hip hop (mostly that performed by black artists) and law enforcement have had a contentious relationship over the years, each eyeing each other with suspicion. There have been reasons for some of that. In some forms of hip hop, the links between rappers and criminal figures were real, and violence escalated, as in high-profile deaths like that of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and The Notorious BIG in 1997. But in a country where black people are often viewed with suspicion by authorities, there have also been many stereotypes about hip hop and criminality.
As hip hop spread, a host of voices used it to raise their voices, including Bobby Sánchez, a Peruvian American transgender rapper and poet who released a song in Quechua, the language of the Wari people from whom his father came.
“I think it’s very special and great when artists use it to reflect society because it makes it bigger than just them,” says Sánchez. “For me, it’s always political, really, no matter what you’re talking about, because hip hop, in a way, is a form of resistance.”
worldwide hip hop
When hip hop began to be absorbed globally, it often imitated American styles, says P. Khalil Saucier, who has studied its journey across the African continent. Homegrown hip-hop can be found everywhere these days.
“The culture as a whole has really taken hold because now it’s been able to transform from just being imported, if you will, to really being local in its many manifestations, regardless of what country you’re looking at,” says Saucier, a professor of black studies. critics at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
That benefits everyone, says Rishma Dhaliwal, founder of the magazine I Am Hip-Hop from London.
“Hip hop is… letting you into someone else’s world. It’s letting you into someone’s struggles,” she says. “It’s a great microphone to say, ‘Well, the streets are saying this is what’s going on here and this is what you might not know about us. This is how we feel, and this is who we are.’”
Hip hop has also entered other spaces and made them different.
For Usha Jey, hip hop was perfect to mix with the classical South Asian dance style of Bharatanatyam. The 26-year-old French choreographer created videos last year showing the two styles interacting with each other.
Hip-hop culture “pushes you to be you,” says Jey. “I feel that in the search to find myself, hip-hop helps me because that culture says, you have to be you.”
Hip hop is “a magical art form,” says Nile Rodgers, legendary musician, songwriter, and record producer. He would know. It was his song “Good Times” with the band Chic that was recreated to form the basis of “Rapper’s Delight” all those years ago.
“The impact it’s had on the world, you can’t really quantify it,” says Rodgers. “You can find someone in a town you’ve never been to, a country you’ve never been to, and all of a sudden you hear their own local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and made it their own.”
Associated Press Entertainment writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Hajela is a member of the AP team that covers race and ethnicity.
