What is Hip-Hop?

Hip-hop is a cultural movement best known for its impact on music in the form of the musical genre of the same name. It has its origins in the Bronx, in New York City, during the 1970s, mostly among African Americans but with some influence from the Latin American population of the area as well. The culture has gone from being a relatively underground style to being a major style throughout the world, and it has been commercialized and popularized, especially in the United States. The four traditional pillars of hip-hop are DJing, rapping, breakdancing, and graffiti art. Five additional pillars are sometimes added: hip-hop fashion, beatboxing, hip-hop slang, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurship.

Hip-hop music incorporates a number of iconic elements, most notably DJing and rapping, along with things like beatboxing, sampling, and juggling beats on turntables. In early forms of the music, DJs would loop portions of songs, highlighting the interest percussive patterns found in them, to create their own new, emergent beats. These beats were eventually coupled with a rhyming, chanting style of singing, referred to as rapping.

Beatboxing was a hip-hop movement that broke from the machine-oriented DJs, replicating their sounds and breaks with the human vocal apparatus. Early drum machines were referred to as beatboxes, and early beatboxing simply replicated these drum sounds. Later, it became a much more complex art form, with the human vocal system mimicking even the most complex of instruments, and often even layering beats over one another by using a form of overtone singing. Some later beatboxers, notably Rahzel of the Roots, even sing at the same time.

Along with the musical scene of hip-hop, the culture also originated its own form of dancing, called breakdancing. It began in the South Bronx, along with the music of hip-hop, and is sometimes called Bboying. Breakdancing involves a frenetic, but incredibly controlled, style of dancing that highlights strength and dynamic movement of the body, matching the precise beats laid out by DJs or beatboxers. Often, breakdancing is done in a battle format, with various competitors facing off by showing their skills and trying to one-up each other.

Graffiti art became an important cornerstone of the hip-hop scene as well, helping to incorporate elements of the culture in a visually-stimulating way. Although graffiti had existed since time immemorial, and was widely spread in the United States among activists and gangs during the 1960s, hip-hop culture took hold of it and redefined it to create a visually distinctive style, most notably the bubble letters and wildstyle of writing now associated with the form. Graffiti art is in many ways viewed as the visual manifestation of hip-hop, in the same way breakdancing can be viewed as its physical manifestation.

In recent years, hip-hop has become ever more commercialized, while at the same time battling to keep its free and independent spirit. While mainstream ad campaigns appropriate aspects of the culture, major rappers become multimillionaires, and aspects of hip-hop slang trickle down into a society unaware of their origins, a constant revitalization occurs at the grassroots level. The exporting of the hip-hop scene around the world has led to a new global hip-hop, incorporating traditional musical arrangements and native languages into the forms. At the same time, hip-hop in the United States continues to innovate at the street level, constantly rejecting and challenging a consumer culture that more and more accepts it.