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Aug 10, 2023 · Hip-hop 50. Features. On 11 August 1973, a 'back to school jam' in New York's West Bronx kick-started a movement and birthed a whole culture, writes Rebecca Laurence.
Nov 16, 2009 · Hip hop is born at a birthday party in the Bronx. Like any style of music, hip hop has roots in other forms, and its evolution was shaped by many different artists, but there’s a case...
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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.”
History Detectives. Investigations. Birthplace Of Hip Hop. Download the Transcript. The Case: A hip hop enthusiast from New York City has always heard that 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx...
Hip-hop or hip hop, also known as rap, and formerly known as disco rap, is a genre of popular music that originated in the early 1970s by African Americans and Caribbean immigrants in the Bronx, a borough of New York City.
- Early 1970s, the Bronx, New York City, U.S.
Aug 5, 2023 · Nearly 50 years ago, on August 11, 1973, some teenagers threw a back-to-school party in the rec room of their apartment building in the Bronx. And presiding over it all was deejay Kool Herc. Since...
May 19, 2018 · On 11 August 1973, at a house party on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, hip hop was born. DJ Kool Herc threw a party for his sister, Cindy, in the rec room of their apartment block. It was the first time all the elements of hip hop culture came together: breakdancing, graffiti artists, DJs and an MC.