Bakı Dövlət Universiteti

Fakultə : Tarix

İxtisas : Regionşünaslıq (Amerika üzrə )

Qrup : RA088

Fənn : English
Müəllim : Hüsniyyə İsmayılova
Tələbə : Günay Rüstəmova
Mövzu: Hip-hop culture

Hip-hop is an artistic and cultural movement that has influenced everything from
fashion to politics. One major manifestation of hip-hop culture is its music.
Hip-hop, cultural movement that attained widespread popularity in the 1980s and
’90s; also, the backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or
rhyming speech that became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.

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.

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.