Origins and The OldSchool
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.
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.