The Origin of Hip Hop and Rap Music From The Streets to Mainstream

Origins and the old school

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.

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.”

Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic histories of West African griots, talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent’s family). Other influences cited include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko Henderson; the Black power poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets; rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of rhythmized speech known as toasting.

Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill Gang’s song “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar Hill. Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name to a new genre of pop music. The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in “Rapper’s Delight.” These early MCs and deejays constituted rap’s old school.

The new school
In the mid-1980s the next wave of rappers, the new school, came to prominence. At the forefront was Run-D.M.C., a trio of middle-class African Americans who fused rap with hard rock, defined a new style of hip dress, and became staples on as they brought rap to a mainstream audience. Run-D.M.C. recorded for Profile, one of several new labels that took advantage of the growing market for rap music. Def Jam featured three important innovators: LL Cool J, rap’s first romantic superstar; the Beastie Boys, a white trio who broadened rap’s audience and popularized digital sampling (composing with music and sounds electronically extracted from other recordings); and Public Enemy, who invested rap with radical Black political ideology, building on the social consciousness of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982).

Rap’s classical period (1979–93) also included significant contributions from De La Soul—whose debut album on Tommy Boy, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), pointed in a new and more playful direction—and female rappers such as Queen Latifah and Salt-n-Pepa, who offered an alternative to rap’s predominantly male, often misogynistic viewpoint. Hip-hop artists from places other than New York City began to make their mark, including DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (Will Smith), from Philadelphia; the provocative 2 Live Crew, from Miami; and M.C. Hammer, from Oakland, California, who experienced short-lived but massive crossover success with a pop audience.

The most significant response to New York hip-hop, though, came from Los Angeles, beginning in 1989 with N.W.A.’s dynamic album Straight Outta Compton. N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) and former members of that group—Ice Cube, Eazy E, and Dr. Dre—led the way as West Coast rap grew in prominence in the early 1990s. Their graphic, frequently violent tales of real life in the inner city, as well as those of Los Angeles rappers such as Ice-T (remembered for his 1992 single “Cop Killer”) and Snoop Dogg and of East Coast counterparts such as Schoolly D, gave rise to the genre known as gangsta rap. As the Los Angeles-based label Death Row Records built an empire around Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the charismatic, complicated rapper-actor Tupac Shakur, it also entered into a rivalry with New York City’s Bad Boy Records. This developed into a media-fueled hostility between East Coast and West Coast rappers, which culminated in the still-unsolved murders of Shakur and the wildly gifted MC known as the Notorious B.I.G.

Snoop Dogg
Snoop Dogg
Snoop Dogg, 2014.
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By the late 1990s hip-hop was artistically dominated by the Wu-Tang Clan, from New York City’s Staten Island, whose combination of street credibility, neo-Islamic mysticism, and kung fu lore made them one of the most complex groups in the history of rap; by Diddy (also known by a variety of other names, including Sean “Puffy” Combs and Puff Daddy), performer, producer, and president of Bad Boy Records, who was responsible for a series of innovative music videos; and by the Fugees, who mixed pop music hooks with politics and launched the solo careers of Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill.

Sean “Diddy” Combs
Sean “Diddy” Combs
Sean “Diddy” Combs, 2006.
PRNewsFoto/Sean John Fragrances EsteeLauder,Stuart Morton/Wireimage.com/AP Images
Although long believed to be popular primarily with urban African American males, hip-hop became the best-selling genre of popular music in the United States in the late 1990s (at least partly by feeding the appetite of some white suburbanites for vicarious thrills). Its impact was global, with formidable audiences and artist pools in cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape Town, London, and Bristol, England (where the spin-off trip-hop originated). It also generated huge sales of products in the fashion, liquor, electronics, and automobile industries that were popularized by hip-hop artists on cable television stations such as MTV and The Box and in hip-hop-oriented magazines such as The Source and Vibe. A canny blend of entrepreneurship and aesthetics, hip-hop was the wellspring of several staple techniques of modern pop music, including digital drumming and sampling (which introduced rap listeners to the music of a previous generation of performers, including Chic, Parliament-Funkadelic, and James Brown, while at the same time creating copyright controversies).

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Hip-hop in the 21st century
As the century turned, the music industry entered into a crisis, brought on by the advent of digital downloading. Hip-hop suffered at least as severely as or worse than other genres, with sales tumbling throughout the decade. Simultaneously, though, it solidified its standing as the dominant influence on global youth culture. Even the massively popular “boy bands,” such as the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, drew heavily on hip-hop sounds and styles, and rhythm and blues and even gospel had adapted so fully to the newer approach that stars such as Mary J. Blige, R. Kelly, and Kirk Franklin straddled both worlds.

In the early 2000s, hip-hop’s creative centre moved to the American South. Following the success of the increasingly experimental OutKast and the stable of New Orleans-based artists that emerged from two record companies—Cash Money and No Limit Records (which was both founded and anchored by Master P)—the chant-based party anthems of such rappers as Juvenile, 8Ball & MJG, and Three 6 Mafia brought the sounds of the “Dirty South” to the mainstream.

OutKast
OutKast
Big Boi (left) and Andre 3000 of OutKast performing at an awards show in 2004.
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Dr. Dre remained a crucial figure. His protégé Eminem became perhaps the world’s biggest pop star when 8 Mile (2002), the loosely autobiographical film in which he starred, enjoyed huge popular and critical success (Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” won the Academy Award for best song). With Eminem, Dr. Dre then supported New York City-born 50 Cent, who achieved multiplatinum status with 2003’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. However, Dr. Dre remained mostly silent for the remainder of the decade, working on technology for a new brand of headphones but never releasing an album after 1999. Eminem, whose outlaw status was challenged by his Hollywood success, seemed adrift for a time, and the Los Angeles style exemplified by Dr. Dre in the 1990s lost much of its power.

Eminem in 8 Mile
Eminem in 8 Mile
Eminem in 8 Mile (2002).
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Dr. Dre’s legacy, though, was visible in the extent to which hip-hop had become a producers’ medium. In the 21st century the music—born from the sonic creations of the deejay—saw its greatest innovations in the work of such studio wizards as Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and the Neptunes. The focus on producers as both a creative and a commercial force was concurrent with a widespread sense that the verbal dexterity and poetry of hip-hop was waning. The genre had truly become pop music, with all of the resultant pressures of accessibility, and the intricacy and subversive nature of earlier MCs had largely been pushed to the “alternative”/“underground” scene spearheaded by rappers such as Mos Def (later known as Yasiin Bey) and Doom (MF Doom). The dissatisfaction with the state of mainstream hip-hop was sufficiently common that in 2006 Nas released an album titled Hip Hop Is Dead.

Timbaland
Timbaland
Timbaland, 2008.
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

Still, major stars continued to emerge. Many of the biggest figures continued to rise from the South, including Atlanta’s T.I. and Lil Wayne from New Orleans. Hip-hop celebrity now often came hand-in-hand with multimedia success, such as a burgeoning film career for Ludacris. The genre continued to be assimilated deeper into nonmusical culture, with some of the genre’s early stars—LL Cool J, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, Ice-T—established as familiar faces in movies and television. Snoop Dogg headlined rock festivals alongside Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps no one represented the cultural triumph of hip-hop better than Jay-Z. As his career progressed, he went from performing artist to label president, head of a clothing line, club owner, and market consultant—along the way breaking Elvis Presley’s Billboard magazine record for the most number one albums by a solo artist. Candidate Barack Obama made references to Jay-Z during the 2008 presidential campaign, and on the rapper’s 2009 album The Blueprint 3 he claimed to be a “small part of the reason” for Obama’s victory.

Queen Latifah
Queen Latifah
Queen Latifah, 2003.
PRNewsFoto/VH1/AP Images

Kanye West, one of Jay-Z’s producers, emerged as one of the most fascinating and polarizing characters in hip-hop following the success of his 2004 debut album The College Dropout. Musically experimental and fashion-forward, West represented many of hip-hop’s greatest possibilities with his penetrating, deeply personal lyrics. However, his endless self-promotion and often arrogant aura also demonstrated some of the elements that now tried the patience of many listeners.

Kanye West
Kanye West
Kanye West performing at the 47th annual Grammy Awards, February 13, 2005.
© Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
Regardless of hip-hop’s own internal struggles, the music’s global impact constantly continued to expand. No single artist may have better personified hip-hop in the 21st century than M.I.A. Born in London, raised in her family’s native Sri Lanka, and trained as a graphic designer, M.I.A. wrote politically radical lyrics that are set to musical tracks that drew from wildly diverse sources around the world. Not only was her album Kala named the best album of 2007 by Rolling Stone, but M.I.A. was also listed as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People”—illustrating the reach and power of a music born decades earlier on litter-strewn playgrounds.

M.I.A.
M.I.A.
M.I.A. at the 51st annual Grammy Awards, 2009.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
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Pan-Africanism
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Pan-Africanism

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Pan-Africanism, the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified. Historically, Pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement. There are many varieties of Pan-Africanism. In its narrowest political manifestation, Pan-Africanists envision a unified African nation where all people of the African diaspora can live. (African diaspora refers to the long-term historical process by which people of African descent have been scattered from their ancestral homelands to other parts of the world.) In more-general terms, Pan-Africanism is the sentiment that people of African descent have a great deal in common, a fact that deserves notice and even celebration.

History of Pan-Africanist intellectuals
Pan-Africanist ideas first began to circulate in the mid-19th century in the United States, led by Africans from the Western Hemisphere. The most important early Pan-Africanists were Martin Delany and Alexander Crummel, both African Americans, and Edward Blyden, a West Indian.

Those early voices for Pan-Africanism emphasized the commonalities between Africans and Black people in the United States. Delany, who believed that Black people could not prosper alongside whites, advocated the idea that African Americans should separate from the United States and establish their own nation. Crummel and Blyden, both contemporaries of Delany, thought that Africa was the best place for that new nation. Motivated by Christian missionary zeal, the two believed that Africans in the New World should return to their homelands and convert and civilize the inhabitants there.

Although the ideas of Delany, Crummel, and Blyden are important, the true father of modern Pan-Africanism was the influential thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. Throughout his long career, Du Bois was a consistent advocate for the study of African history and culture. In the early 20th century, he was most prominent among the few scholars who studied Africa. His statement, made at the turn of the 20th century, that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” was made with Pan-Africanist sentiments in mind.

For Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” was not confined merely to the United States and its “Negro Problem.” (During those years, it was common for many in the United States to refer to the problem of African Americans’ social status as the “Negro Problem.”) Du Bois’s famous statement was made with the clear knowledge that many Africans living on the African continent suffered under the yoke of European colonial rule.

Among the more-important Pan-Africanist thinkers of the first decades of the 20th century was Jamaican-born Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. In the years after World War I, Garvey championed the cause of African independence, emphasizing the positive attributes of Black people’s collective past. His organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), boasted millions of members, envisioning and then making plans for a return “back to Africa.” Garvey’s Black Star Line, a shipping company established in part to transport Blacks back to Africa as well as to facilitate global Black commerce, was ultimately unsuccessful.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, among the most-prominent Black intellectuals who advocated Pan-Africanist ideas were C.L.R. James and George Padmore, both of whom came from Trinidad. From the 1930s until his death in 1959, Padmore was one of the leading theorists of Pan-African ideas. Also influential were Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who were natives of Senegal and Martinique, respectively. A disciple of Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, was also an important figure in Pan-Africanist thought.

Despite their origins outside the United States, such Pan-Africanist thinkers drew many of their ideas from African American culture. Furthermore, James and Padmore resided in the United States for significant periods of time. An exchange of ideas about Africa and peoples of African descent took place between those intellectuals and African Americans, with African Americans taking the lead. It was, in many ways, a Black Atlantic intellectual community. Senghor and Césaire, in particular, were greatly influenced by Du Bois and by several Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. In the 1930s and ’40s, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson was also a significant contributor to the continuing exchange of ideas.

By the late 1940s the African American intellectual leadership of the movement had receded, with Africans now taking the lead. That was due in part to the leftist or communist sympathies of many Pan-Africanist advocates, as in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the United States was in the midst of a Red Scare, when Americans with communist affiliations or sympathies were actively persecuted and prosecuted. The most-important figure of this period was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who believed that European colonial rule of Africa could be extinguished if Africans could unite politically and economically. Nkrumah went on to lead the movement for independence in Ghana, which came to fruition in 1957. Many African Americans cheered those developments in Africa.

Pan-Africanist cultural thinking reemerged with renewed force in the United States in the late 1960s and ’70s as one of the manifestations of the Black Power movement. By the early 1970s it had become relatively common for African Americans to investigate their African cultural roots and adopt African forms of cultural practice, especially African styles of dress.

In subsequent decades perhaps the most-prominent current of ideas that can be called Pan-Africanist has been the Afrocentric movement, as espoused by such Black intellectuals as Molefi Asante of Temple University, Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, the American historian Carter G. Woodson, and Maulana Ron Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa. With its roots in the 1960s, Afrocentrism gained particular popularity in the United States during the 1980s. The movement emphasizes African modes of thought and culture as a corrective to the long tradition of European cultural and intellectual domination.

The Pan-African Congress movement
During the 20th century advocates of Pan-Africanism made many efforts to institutionalize their ideas and to create formal organizations to complement the work of Pan-Africanist intellectuals. The first meeting designed to bring together peoples of African descent for the purpose of discussing Pan-Africanist ideas took place in London in 1900. The organizer was Henry Sylvester Williams, a native of Trinidad. The meeting was attended by several prominent Blacks from Africa, Great Britain, the West Indies, and the United States. Du Bois was perhaps the most-prominent member of U.S. delegation.

The first formal Pan-African Congress (the first to bear that name) took place in 1919 in Paris and was called by Du Bois. That meeting was followed by a second Pan-African Congress two years later, which convened in three sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris. The most-important result of the second Pan-African Congress was the issuance of a declaration that criticized European colonial domination in Africa and lamented the unequal state of relations between white and Black races, calling for a fairer distribution of the world’s resources. The declaration also challenged the rest of the world to either create conditions of equality in the places where people of African descent lived or recognize the “rise of a great African state founded in Peace and Goodwill.”

After a third Pan-African Congress in 1923 and then a fourth in 1927, the movement faded from the world picture until 1945, when a fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England. Given that Pan-Africanist leadership had largely transferred from African Americans to Africans by the mid-1940s, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Padmore played the most-prominent roles at that congress. The only African American present was Du Bois.

With the coming of independence for many African countries in the decades following World War II, the cause of African unity was largely confined to the concerns of the African continent. The formation of the Organization for African Unity (OAU) in 1963 solidified African leadership, although a sixth Pan-African Congress was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974. A successor organization to the OAU, the African Union (AU), was launched in 2002 to further promote the social, political, and economic integration of Africa.

Calls for Pan-Africanism could still be heard in the United States at the turn of the 21st century, but by then the movement had generally come to stand for the unity of the countries on the African continent, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

Peter Kuryla
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Def Jam Records: Hip-Hop Harbingers
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Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons managed several pioneer hip-hop acts, including Run-D.M.C., through their Rush Management agency, and in 1984 they set up their own Def Jam label; shortly thereafter, Columbia Records made a deal with the label and became its distributor. Def Jam’s first success was LL Cool J, a soft-spoken “love” rapper whose style was compatible with black radio’s still-conservative ideas of itself and its audience. Next up were the Beastie Boys, a trio of white New Yorkers who helped redefine rap as a cool alternative for white suburban kids, notably with the infectious, tongue-in-cheek anthem “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” in 1986. Def Jam’s next substantial act, Public Enemy, was altogether more confrontational, stoking the flames of antiwhite and antipolice rhetoric. Rubin went off to form Def American, leaving Simmons to sustain the most successful of the first generation of rap labels.

Def Jam Records label
Def Jam Records label