Hip-hop culture

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hip-hop culture was born at a party on the 11th of August 1973, at a high-rise apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx. Cindy Campbell organized a back-to-school gathering and enlisted her brother, Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell, as the DJ. What Kool Herc did that night with two turntables and a mixer would plant the seed for one of the most widely practiced art forms in human history. He isolated the percussion "breaks" in funk records, switching between two copies of the same disc to extend those moments into something dancers could inhabit. Cindy produced and funded the event entirely, earning her the title Mother of Hip-Hop and First Lady of Hip-Hop. But Kool Herc was not the only person building something that night. Outdoor park jams organized by Disco King Mario of the Bronxdale Houses predate that indoor party, and Kool Herc himself was among the people who attended Mario's events. The culture did not have a single founding father. It had a neighborhood. From that neighborhood in the Bronx, a movement spread across urban and suburban America, then across the world, gathering the elements of rapping, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti, and beatboxing into a coherent culture that now shapes music, language, fashion, and political life on every continent. What made it last, and what nearly broke it along the way, is what this documentary sets out to explore.

• 2. A Name Born from a Joke

  ›

  Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins gave hip-hop its name in 1978 while mocking a friend who had just enlisted in the US Army. Wiggins, a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, scat-sang the made-up syllables "hip" and "hop" in alternation, mimicking the rhythmic march of soldiers. He worked the cadence into his stage performances. The group frequently performed alongside disco artists, whose crowds started calling these new performers "hip hoppers". The label was originally meant as an insult. It stuck anyway. Lovebug Starski, a Bronx DJ who released the single "The Positive Life" in 1981, and DJ Hollywood began using the term when describing what they called "disco rap" music. Afrika Bambaataa, hip-hop pioneer and South Bronx community leader, credits Starski as the first to apply the name to the broader culture. The first time the term appeared in print specifically to describe the culture and its elements was in a January 1982 interview of Afrika Bambaataa conducted by Michael Holman in the East Village Eye. A few months later, in September 1982, The Village Voice ran a profile of Bambaataa written by Steven Hager, who also published the first comprehensive history of the culture through St. Martins' Press. The song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, released in 1979, had already woven the words into its opening bars: "I said a hip, hop, the hippie to the hippie to the hip-hip-hop, and you don't stop rockin'". The 1980 hit "Rapture" by Blondie also contained a rapping section referencing the phrase, becoming the first major single containing hip-hop elements by a white artist to reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.

• 3. The Bronx That Made the Music

  ›

  The South Bronx in the 1970s was a neighborhood in crisis. Post-industrial decline had hollowed out the borough, leaving behind communities of Black and Latino youth that public and political discourse had largely written off. Street gangs were prevalent in the poverty of the area, and much of the early rapping, graffiti, and b-boying grew directly out of the competition and one-upmanship of gang culture. Sensing that gang members' often violent urges could be turned toward creative ends, Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap musicians. The New York City blackout of 1977 accelerated the spread of the culture in a surprising way. Widespread looting struck the Bronx particularly hard, and a number of looters stole DJ equipment from electronics stores. The hip-hop genre, barely known outside the borough at the time, grew at a rapid rate from 1977 onward as newly acquired equipment fed new performers. DJ Kool Herc's house parties grew in popularity and eventually moved outdoors to parks to accommodate more people. Tony Tone of the Cold Crush Brothers stated that "hip-hop saved a lot of lives." MC Kid Lucky observed that "people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting." Billboard magazine took notice, printing an article titled "B Beats Bombarding Bronx" that commented on the local phenomenon and mentioned Kool Herc by name. The lyrical content of many early groups channeled these realities directly. "The Message," released in 1982 by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and recorded by Melle Mel and Duke Bootee, discussed the conditions of life in the housing projects in terms that no mainstream artist had previously attempted.

• 4. The Elements Take Shape

  ›

  Grandwizard Theodore is credited with creating scratching in 1977 or 1978, adding a signature sound to the DJ techniques that Kool Herc had pioneered. DJs including Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and Jazzy Jay refined and developed the use of breakbeats, incorporating cutting and scratching into a disciplined practice. The Technics SL-1200 MK 2, first sold in 1978, gave DJs a turntable with precise variable pitch control and a direct drive motor, and it became the foundation of professional turntablism. By the late 1970s, DJs were releasing 12-inch records on which they rapped over their own beats. Influential early releases included Fatback Band's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)", The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", and Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", all from 1979. Rapping grew out of the MC's original function as a hype man. The MC would introduce the DJ, urge the crowd to dance, and fill time between songs with jokes and energetic speech. Over time this role expanded into the sustained, rhythmic wordplay now recognized as rapping, described as "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics with a strong rhythmic accompaniment." MCing itself draws on deep roots: the African American style of "capping," in which men competed in originality of language to win the favor of listeners, and the broader oral tradition of verbal jousting in Afro-American and Latino-American communities. KC The Prince of Soul, who worked with Pete DJ Jones, is often credited as the first rap lyricist to call himself an MC. Breakdancing evolved alongside these sonic developments. Dancers at Kool Herc's parties saved their best moves for the percussion break sections of songs. DJ Kool Herc described the "B" in B-boy as short for breaking, which was street slang for "going off." Early acts including the Rock Steady Crew and New York City Breakers, made up largely of Latino Americans, helped develop the form. In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released "Planet Rock," built using a Roland TR-808 drum machine and samples from Kraftwerk. Both Wired and Slate described the 808 as hip-hop's equivalent to the Fender Stratocaster.

• 5. Gangsta Rap and the Mainstream

  ›

  Ice-T released "6 in the Mornin'" in 1986, a track widely regarded as the first gangsta rap song. N.W.A followed, and their 1989 album Straight Outta Compton established West Coast hip-hop as a force, positioning Los Angeles as a genuine rival to New York City. The song "Fuck tha Police" on that album drew a letter from FBI Assistant Director Milt Ahlerich, expressing law enforcement's resentment in formal terms. Gangsta rap brought hip-hop a commercially lucrative mainstream audience, but in doing so shifted the center of gravity. N.W.A's second album Niggaz4Life became the first gangsta rap album to enter the charts at number one. Albums by Eazy-E and Ice Cube were selling in large enough numbers that Black teenagers were no longer hip-hop's sole buying audience. Music industry executives recognized this shift in the late 1980s and marketed a formula of hypermasculinity and glorified violence specifically to a new fan base of white males. Commercialization carried internal costs. Greg Tate, writing in The Village Voice, argued that "what we call hip-hop is now inseparable from what we call the hip-hop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer." Nas and KRS-ONE both claimed publicly that "hip hop is dead," arguing the form had been reshaped so thoroughly to suit consumer taste that its original purpose had been lost. The debate over commercialization was not simple, however. Released in 2004, Kanye West's The College Dropout sold over 4 million copies worldwide and introduced what became known as the "chipmunk soul sound," in which West would speed up or slow down sampled source material. At the same time, Eminem surpassed The Beatles for the top-selling album of the 2000s with 32.2 million in sales, and artists like Jay-Z established themselves as entrepreneurs beyond music, giving some observers reason to see commercial success as a form of Black aspiration.

• 6. Graffiti and Its Arguments

  ›

  Graffiti is the most disputed of hip-hop's elements. Several of the most prominent graffiti pioneers flatly reject the link. Lady Pink has said, "I don't think graffiti is hip-hop. Frankly I grew up with disco music. There's a long background of graffiti as an entity unto itself." Grandmaster Flash asked directly, "You know what bugs me, they put hip-hop with graffiti. How do they intertwine?" The practice predates hip-hop's origin in the Bronx. Julio 204, a Puerto Rican graffiti writer and member of the Savage Skulls gang, was writing his nickname in his neighborhood as early as 1968. In 1971, the New York Times published an article titled "'Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals" about another writer, TAKI 183, who had tagged his name across the city. The style known as "wildstyle," the elaborate Brooklyn approach dubbed by Tracy 168, came to define graffiti's visual language. The 1983 film Wild Style is widely considered the first hip-hop motion picture, featuring prominent figures from the New York graffiti scene. The book Subway Art and the documentary Style Wars introduced mainstream audiences to hip-hop graffiti in the same period. Writers joining the early trend-setters in the 1970s included Dondi, Futura 2000, Daze, Blade, Lee Quinones, Fab Five Freddy, Zephyr, Rammellzee, Crash, Kel, NOC 167, and Lady Pink. Whether or not graffiti practitioners identify with hip-hop, the art form has since crossed into gallery exhibitions worldwide, and certain works now fall under federal protection in the US, making their erasure illegal.

• 7. Censorship and Consequence

  ›

  In 1990, Luther Campbell and his group 2 Live Crew filed a lawsuit against Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro after Navarro moved to prosecute stores selling the group's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. A US district court judge labeled the album obscene and illegal to sell in June 1990. In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned that ruling, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Broward County's appeal. Professor Louis Gates testified on behalf of 2 Live Crew, arguing that the material the county called profane had important roots in African American vernacular, games, and literary traditions. Ice-T's song "Cop Killer," from the album Body Count, infuriated government officials, the National Rifle Association, and police advocacy groups. Time Warner Music refused to release Ice-T's upcoming album Home Invasion in the aftermath. Ice-T responded by pointing out to journalist Chuck Philips that actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had killed dozens of cops as the Terminator without generating comparable outrage. He added: "The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer." The White House administrations of both George Bush senior and Bill Clinton criticized the genre publicly. Sister Souljah told The Times: "The reason why rap is under attack is because it exposes all the contradictions of American culture." Until its discontinuation on the 8th of July 2006, BET ran a late-night segment called BET: Uncut to air near-uncensored videos. Following the attacks of the 11th of September 2001, Oakland group The Coup came under scrutiny for album artwork that depicted the Twin Towers exploding, despite the fact that the cover had been created months before the attacks. Their record label pulled the album until new artwork could be designed.

• 8. A Global Art Form

  ›

  The US Department of State has described hip-hop as "now the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world" that crosses social barriers and racial lines. National Geographic recognizes it as "the world's favorite youth culture," noting that "just about every country on the planet seems to have developed its own local rap scene." In Gothenburg, Sweden, nongovernmental organizations incorporate graffiti and dance to engage disaffected immigrant and working-class youth. An anonymous Libyan musician known as Ibn Thabit used anti-government hip-hop songs to fuel resistance during the Arab Spring. In Canada, groups like Dead Obies rap in Franglais, a mix of French and English, with powerful implications for debates about Canadian language and identity. Author Jeff Chang has argued that "the essence of hip-hop is the cipher, born in the Bronx, where competition and community feed each other," and that organizers from Cape Town to Paris use hip-hop to address environmental justice, policing, prisons, media justice, and education. The practice of "flipping" captures something essential about how the culture travels: taking a sample, a beat, or an attitude from an existing record and recontextualizing it for a new audience. Hip-hop borrowed the technique of isolating percussion breaks from Jamaican DJ Clive Campbell and built an entirely new music from it. Then communities around the world borrowed that music and built their own variations. Academics now study hip-hop linguistics at institutions including the University of Toronto, where poet and author George Eliot Clarke has taught the potential of hip-hop music to promote social change, and at the University of Miami, where Greg Thomas offers undergraduate and graduate courses studying the feminist and assertive dimensions of Lil' Kim's lyrics.