Hip Hop Culture Essay

The culture of hip hop “is colorless, it’s taken from all different types of music that make the beat and that funk, it’s what you put on top of your lyrics that make it for black people, white people or universal people” (Durand 1). It includes many forms of expression that identify it solely. Where dance, rap, and graffiti become the central role of expression and letting your voice be heard. Though, hip hop has been thought to be a new music genre that just begun. Hip hop has existed for long as four decades already. It has evolved throughout time and been able to keep the originality of its purpose which is being a music that sends a message through the expression of the word used. The American hip hop culture that has evolved throughout time has a beginning where its origins and influences from early on till the 1990s build a background for it to fall on and define it. The origins of hip hop come from the slavery period where instead of being called rap it was defined as a toast. Due to that “Toasts are long oral poems that had emerged by World War I” (Bradley xxii). Slaves used them to express their suffering and daily occurrences in their lives. They were songs that were used as stories to educate the younger also. Toast were, also the expressing of the horrors of the lynchings and mistreatments of their …show more content…
Afrika Bambaataa became the one to first practice it out of the streets and into clubs by his djeeing. Signifying or playing the dozens was a “particular form of verbal battle” (Durand 3) against two rappers where insulting and shaming the opponent was the focus. There was also the innovation into hip hop that year by Kool Herc who introduced the “Mobile Sound System and the Mixer” (Durand 3). Making Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc, the Grandfathers of Hip Hop. Due to that they were “the ones who helped rap music to enter the mainstream of America in the second half of the 1970s” (Durand