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.
Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, is the credited as being the pioneer of hip hop in the United States. “Kool Herc was inspired by the Jamaican tradition of impromptu poetry during toast, and thus decided to accompany it with rhythmic beats generated by sampling. “ (Chan) Hip hop offered the youth a way to express themselves and bought forth new ideas. Hip hop was a way youths in black inner city neighborhoods to express what they were feeling, seeing, and living and to many it became a form of entertainment. Back in the days as some people may call it hip hop was a way that a certain person felt and the things that they would say was things that happens in real life everyday situations.
When compared to the other rap hits of the time, Run DMC's sound was very unique in the sound of the beats and the skillful, push it to the limit vocals. By the mid 80's, Simmons had founded the hip hop record label Def Jam, and Run DMC became the most powerful group in hip hop. Run DMC then started to experiment mixing their sound with samples of heavy metal guitars, basically combining the sound of each genre to create a gritty, street savvy sound. Run DMC's success showed the rest of the hip hop world that success could be achieved by delivering constant new material that challenged the status-quo with unique sounds and challenging lyrics. Their 1986 album Raising Hell was preceded by the top ten hit “My Adidas”, and then the release of a cover of Aerosmith's “Walk This Way”, off the same album, became the groups biggest commercial hit.
As I researched on what Hip Hop is, I found out that it isn’t just a music genre, but a massive culture that originated within the Bronx during the 1970s. Hip Hop was established to stop gang violence on the foundations of expression, peace, love, unity, and having fun with the addition of having four elements: Graffiti art, DJ-ing, breakdancing, and rapping. These four elements, together, acted as positive pastimes to keep kids from becoming involved with gangs by organizing artistic “battles” on who’s the better person. These Hip Hop battles take place in organized events, promoting a positive and peaceful way to resolve conflict, while also providing a safe, friendly community for urban youth. This surprises me because I never would’ve thought that Hip Hop is a culture, especially the fact that it started out as a peaceful youth community.
The members of this group quickly became famous as the new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated the way of rebelliousness and natural creativity (Gair, 2008, P. 26). The beat generation originally met in New York but later on they all except for Burroughs moved on to San Francisco and started associating with San Francisco Renaissance in early 1960s. This was a huge transformation to the sixties culture which by the duration of time changed beatnik to “hippie” in the urban life and nationwide. It is very interesting to know where the beats got their name from. The name “beat” was originally brought up by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to differentiate the underground and rebellious youth group in New York.
HISTORY OF HIP HOP Hip-Hop emerged in the 1970’s upon the arrival of a one Kool DJ Herc. Kool DJ Herc migrated to the United States from Kingston, Jamaica and settled in the West Bronx of New York. Kool DJ Herc was a disc jockey that attempted to incorporate his Jamaica style of disc jockeying, which involved reciting improvised rhymes over reggae records. Unfortunately for Kool DJ Herc New York seemed uninterested in reggae at that time. This forced Kool DJ Herc to find another appealing sound in order to please his audiences, which he did.
In 2001, this and other strains of dark garage music began to be showcased and promoted at London's night club Plastic People, at the "Forward" night (sometimes stylised as FWD>>), which went on to be considerably influential to the development of dubstep. The term "dubstep" in reference to a genre of music began to be used by around 2002 by labels such as Big Apple, Ammunition, and Tempa, by which time stylistic trends used in creating these remixes started to become more noticeable and distinct from 2-step and grime. [2] A very early supporter of the sound was BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who started playing it from 2003 onwards. In 2004, the last year of his show, his listeners voted Distance, Digital Mystikz, and Plastician (formerly Plasticman) in their top 50 for the year. [3] Dubstep started to spread beyond small local scenes in late 2005 and early 2006; many websites devoted to the genre appeared on the internet and aided the growth of the scene, such as dubstepforum, the download site Barefiles and blogs such as gutterbreakz.
Reggae music originated from Jamaica in the early 1960's. In the streets and ghettos of Kingston, shortly after independence from Britain in 1962, reggae started to evolve from Mento, which was a local form of Jamaican music in the 30's to what it has become today. Originated in Jamaica, reggae music is recognized by rhythmic accents on the offbeat, usually played by piano, guitar, or sometimes both. Changing American popular music, the genre began to be played in the 1960s producing a new and different sound. Reggae's origins are in traditional African and Caribbean music, American rhythm and blues, and in Jamaican ska and rock steady (Scaruffi, Piero).
In the mid 60s”Rock Steady”-a slower tempo with emphasis on syncopation-grew out of “Ska”. However, by the late 60s, yet another new Jamaican musical form had emerged-“Reggae”, the most famous of the musical styles developed on the island. Reggae spans the globe and has influenced the music of internationally famous performers in the US, Japan, UK, South America, and the rest of the world. Cuba: For most of the eighteenth
In 1959 a man by the name of Theoptilus Beckford recorded the first ska record. Ska music was a mix of Caribbean mento, jazz and the blues. A group called The Wailers made the next big move in music when they slowed down the tempo in the ska music. When the 1960s came along another music genre came about, reggae. This music style sometimes aquired chanting and emphasized the syncopated beat.