A History Of Underground Hip Hop And Popular Music

By Todd S. Braun


Hip Hop is a cultural, musical and artistic movement that emerged in South Bronx, New York, around the early 1970s. Originally, it was popular in black and Latino ghettos of New York, but later spread quickly throughout the country and the world to the point of becoming a major urban culture. Hip Hop culture spans several disciplines: rap (or MCing), DJing, breakdancing (or b-boying), graffiti, beatboxing. These disciplines, appeared before Hip Hop and were integrated at the birth of the movement.



A building located on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx is often referred to as the birthplace of Hip Hop because the pioneer Kool Herc worked there. Kool DJ Herc began working in 1973, he was the DJ who introduced the practice of repeating the beats of funk, soul and disco, instead of playing the whole piece and assemble two different beats (the so-called beat juggling). On his block parties, B-Boys appear as the new break dance outfit.

Afrika Bambaataa was one of the DJs that were inspired by DJ Kool Herc. In 1976 he organized his first party, accompanied by a crew of breakers he called the Zulu Kings and Zulu Queens, and later the Zulu nation emerged from these crews. From 1976, Grandmaster Flash developed other important DJ techniques such as Cutting, back spinning and phasing (where the disk is spun backwards to repeat a specific section). This action resulted in a slight speed reduction generated by the velocity of two turntables, known as the phase effect.

The strongest acts of the early 1990s on the East Coast were either intellectual formations, especially the Native Tongues Posse, such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep, Jungle Brothers, and the Fu - Schnickens, or political acts such as Public Enemy or KRS-One. Although some very experimental or politically dedicated tones found strong favor with the critics.

A possible origin of the term Hip Hop could be from a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Cowboy, who allegedly used for the first time the term Hip Hop while teasing a friend who had just joined the U. S. Army. In fact, he used a onomatopoeia consisting the words "hip / hop / hip / hop" in a jerky way to mimic the rhythmic cadence of military marches performed by soldiers. But, these are only legends and stories.

The genre fits both continuity and rupture with black American music. It continuous manifestation as a distant descendant of complaints about the living conditions of African Americans in the Bronx, the tradition of improvisation appeared with ragtime and jazz, and musical dialogues (call and response).

Unlike older styles of African-American music that reflected only incidentally or diverted living conditions of black communities, Hip Hop stands as the very expression of these conditions and proposes to stick to street, that is, follow the codes and relationships that govern life in ghettos.

In the same year as The Message and the second single of another DJ veterans of Block Party era, Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa appeared. The international hit "Trans Europe Express" was first produced with synthesizers. Fast drum machine beats and machine synthesizer riffs and arpeggios by Bambaataa, on the other hand, seemed influential for the genre of electro funk that gradually broke away from Hip Hop producers and experienced a revival in the late 1990s at the Technopark area.




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