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Jul 20, 2023 · July 20, 2023. Art. The 1980s was a revolutionary decade for many music genres, and hip-hop was no exception. Bursting onto the scene in a way that would indelibly stamp its influence on music and culture, 1980s hip hop was more than just a genre—it was a movement, a voice, and an expression of identity. What began in the urban neighborhoods ...
- Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message (1982) Perhaps the most important song in Hip Hop history. “The Message” was the first song with unabashed commentaries on life and society, and it had a huge influence on many conscious Hip Hop artists who came later.
- Public Enemy - Rebel Without A Pause (1987) “Rebel Without a Pause” was the first song created for and the first single released from Public Enemy‘s masterpiece It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
- Run DMC - Sucker MCs (1983) First released in 1983, this was the B-side to Run DMC‘s first single “It’s Like That”. “Sucker MCs” was a perfect early indicator of the direction Hip Hop was going in.
- Eric B & Rakim - Microphone Fiend (1988) This beat. These lyrics. PERFECTION. Strangely the single release of this track wasn’t a huge success in 1988, but since then this track has rightfully come to be recognized not only as the quintessential Eric B & Rakim song but as one of Hip Hop’s biggest songs ever as well.
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- Origins and the old school
While there is some debate over the number of elements of hip-hop, there are four elements that are considered to be its pillars: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” (emceeing) or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and break dancing, or “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” Many also cite a fifth essential component: “knowledge of self/consciousness.” Other suggested elements include street fashion and language.
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How did hip-hop get its name?
There are various explanations for the source of the term hip-hop. However, the most popular one involves Keith (”Keef Cowboy”) Wiggins, a member of the rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The rapper used the words hip/hop/hip/hop, imitating the sound of soldiers marching, in reference to a friend who had joined the army. According to some accounts, Kevin (”Lovebug Starski”) Smith was with Wiggins and helped create the phrase. Hip-hop was subsequently popularized in songs, notably the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”
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Learn more about Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As the hip-hop movement began at society’s margins, its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and obfuscation.
Graffiti and break dancing, the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American teenager who signed, or “tagged,” Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colourful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol-like Campbell’s soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.
The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.
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In the meantime, deejays developed new techniques for turntable manipulation. Needle dropping, created by Grandmaster Flash, 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. Sliding the record back and forth underneath the needle created the rhythmic effect called “scratching.”
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- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – “The Message” (1982) Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the group’s leader is an innovator in DJ scratching.
- Slick Rick – “Children’s Story” (1989) The British-born Slick Rick had already earned a reputation for storytelling rhymes by the time he released his solo debut The Great Adventures of Slick Rick in 1988.
- Public Enemy – “Rebel Without a Pause” (1987) No ‘80s rap group marched to the beat of a different drummer more memorably than Public Enemy, literally in the case of the group’s sophomore album It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.
- Eric B. & Rakim – “Paid in Full” (1987) Big Daddy Kane’s chief rival for the New York throne was Rakim, a teenage microphone fiend who revolutionized the art of rhyming with his debut album as a duo with producer Eric B., Paid in Full.
Mar 28, 2019 · View Gallery. 1980s hip-hop is remembered today as the Golden Age of hip-hop. This era marked the culture’s first big boom into the mainstream that exploded the genre’s five elements — turntablism, breakdancing or b-boying, graffiti, rapping or MCing, and the knowledge conveyed. From the Sugar Hill Gang’s world-famous "Rapper’s ...
Jul 5, 2021 · Sugarhill Gang – “Rappers Delight” (1979) Rappers Delight was one of the first songs to become popular in Hip Hop. Released in 1979, this song was written by James Brown and released by The Sugarhill Gang. Since this was one of the only songs that existed at the time, it is considered by many to be the first Hip Hop song ever produced.
80s Hip Hop Enters the Mainstream. For the early part of the 80s, Rap made a large impression on the Billboard R&B charts, but failed to break into the mainstream, then came the big break through. In 1986, Run DMC turned an old Aerosmith tune into a 80s Hip Hop classic. Their collaboration with Aerosmith on the song Walk this Way was a smash ...
