As the most popular and flourishing culture of the youth of this era, the spirit, culture, and aspirational ideas represented by Hip Hop have spread around the world through music, trends, design, and film, becoming a global phenomenon. Since the late 1970s, when the music of DJ Kool Herc started to play at parties, Hip Hop has been widely used as the core expression of black culture in America, from the Bronx to the world.
It is like eating granola bulk in the morning to let a person full of energy, it was an energetic subculture with its own unique language, customs, and rules, and has evolved to become a way of life for many people around the world, far beyond the party, the studio or the street. Many people only know hip hop as a genre of music, but it can be studied and appreciated in other ways as well. This article will serve as a simple guide to Hip Hop Culture telling you an overview of some of the history, culture and terminology associated with hip hop culture. Read on and you will discover what hip hop culture is and what it means in today’s world.
Origin of Hip Hop Culture
Hip hop is a cultural form born in the streets of America’s ghettos. It is generally believed to have been born in The Bronx, New York, first among African-American and Latino youth in the northern Bronx, the only neighborhood in New York connected to the United States and the poorest neighborhood in New York. In 1959, the New York City government decided to build a highway across the Bronx in the immigrant neighborhood, and in 1968 built a large number of condominiums, leaving it a poor and decaying ghetto, full of crime, drugs and unemployment in less than a decade.
At the time, DJ Kool Herc often held “music parties” in his home, playing jazz, R&B, funk, and soul, and his parties got bigger and bigger as Herc’s music became more relevant to the real lives of the people in the ghetto than the disco that was popular in America at the same time. Eventually, Herc decided to take the party outdoors and created a way to keep the party atmosphere at a climax by using two turntables and playing the same record breaks over and over again. At his parties, people started dancing and singing along with his music. This was the original origin of Hip Hop culture, a cultural movement that started from the bottom.
Four elements of Hip Hop Culture’
Rap music
Rap Music is the most important and widely known element of Hip Hop culture. Rap is a black slang word for “talking”, a special form of singing that involves talking rhythmically. It originated in the Bronx, New York. It is characterized by the rapid delivery of a series of rhyming verses against a backdrop of mechanical rhythmic sounds. The singers who specialize in rapping this kind of music are called rappers or MCs.
Originally rap was created simply to liven up the party atmosphere, but when music producer Sylva Robinson founded the record label Sugar Hill, she thought it would sell well on record, recruited her first rapper in front of a pizza parlor, and had him form the first hip hop group with two other rappers who were also roadies The Sugar Hill Gang.
Given the different elements of the music, Rap Music can be categorized as Old School Hip Hop Music, which focuses on the old school approach and often samples from disco, soul and punk music, Old School Hip Hop Music, which discusses party themes. New School Hip Hop Music, which discusses many social issues and begins to use electronic drum machines. Trap Music, which makes extensive use of 808 bass and discusses gang. And also other types rap, such as Jazz Hip Hop, Acid Hip Hop, Alternative Hip Hop, Concious Rap and more.
Street Dance
Street Dance is a collective name for a variety of different types of dance based on street culture, which originated in the United States in the 1960s and is an important part of hip-hop culture. It is called street dance because its performance venues are mostly on the roadside or in the square. As mentioned earlier, when DJ Kool Herc held a party, there was always a group of young people who started when the music appeared, and after a series of dazzling, acrobatic footwork, they suddenly stopped at the end of the break. These people were called B-Boy. Later they danced these moves gradually developed into the original street dance – breakdancing [Breaki by the 1970s it was categorized as part of hip-hop culture, with a strong performance, participation and competition.
DJ
DJ is the original face of hip-hop culture. While inheriting the skills of inherited DJ Kool Herc, the black New York Grandmaster Flash improved and innovated, innovating techniques such as rubbing discs and fast mixing, and adding devices such as operating levers and even-slip converters, making DJing officially a discipline. This is a kind of complex music skills developed based on Hip Hop, Jazz, Soul and other black music. Generally speaking, the DJ will use two turntables at the same time. The DJ performs between two spinning records using the methods listed above. The result is a unique sound – two disparate songs that look as if they have been synthesized together.
Graffiti
Graffiti art, like hip-hop, originated in the Bronx, N.Y. Around the 1970s, gang symbols were scrawled all over the Bronx, mixed with obscene “toilet literature”-like graphics. But a few talented painters, dissatisfied with the crude gang labels, began to design their own new labels, and from then on, the gang symbols looked good. Then later, a group of rebellious non-gang painters finally realized that walls were the cheapest and most practical canvas in the world, and they took up the cause. From there, a new art form, Graffiti, was born in New York.