Rap music is a highly globalized form of hip hop culture that has gone from the fringe to the mainstream. Originating in the 1970’s, it was a culture introduced by the poverty-stricken residents of South Bronx, New York. In the very beginning of hip hop’s emergence, it was a creative outlet that allowed for freedom of expression on issues such as social, economic and political disparities. A key founder that can be held accountable for the emergence of hip hop culture is Jamaican born DJ Kool Herc. However, it wasn’t until 1979, when Sugar Hill Records released the hit song “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, that hip hop culture and rap music gained popularity. From that moment on, hip hop culture in the form of rap music would become increasingly popular among the global population and develop into what we know today as the rap scene.
In order to understand the foundations of hip hop culture and rap music, one must consider the changing landscape in which it began to develop. The 1960’s was a time period in which there was a considerable amount of change in the United States. Led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights movement aimed to stop racial discrimination and battle against racial and economic inequality, not just for blacks, but for all who were without basic rights in the United States (Price, 2006, p.2). The racial and economic inequality that the Civil Rights movement was fighting against was very much present in South Bronx neighborhoods. Unemployment rates among young Blacks and Latinos within the Bronx were sky high, running between 60 and 80 percent (Higgins, 2009, p.16). With such a high unemployment rate, youth became further invested in the already prominent gangs in the area. Hip hop then evolved during the 1970’s as a liberation movement in the form of a diverse culture; it was a next-generation civil rights movement sparked by ostracized, marginalized and oppressed inner-city youth (Price, 2006, p.1).
A symbolic individual that contributed to the creation of hip hop and rap music is DJ Kool Herc. Herc was a Jamaican born emigrant who came to New York in 1967, introducing the Jamaican sound system deejay-led party rituals to American music culture (Higgins, 2009, p.16). Coke La Rock, hip hop’s first acknowledged emcee (rapper), was the first to rap along to Herc’s deejay set music (Higgins, 2009, p.19). The sounds that Herc created continued to be used as a back track for hip hop’s first recognized rappers throughout the mid-1970’s. However, rap music didn’t gain much momentum until the release of Sugar Hill Gang’s song “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. After the recording was released, the record label officials began to persuade DJs around the country to play the record on the radio. Eventually St. Louis radio station played the record and later that night a local distributor phoned in with an order for thirty thousand records (Watkins, 2005, p.16). “Rapper’s Delight” would later become a huge hit that sold more than two million units worldwide.
Since the release of “Rapper’s Delight” and its associated success in 1979, rap music continued to gain popularity throughout the 1980’s. During the early 1980’s, numerous college radio stations around the country began to schedule isolated times that were dedicated to rap music programming, playing many of the recent releases of the independent and major record labels (Price, 2006, p.14). By the mid-1980’s, entire radio stations were dedicated to broadcasting rap music and urban radio became a major form of entertainment within the country’s cities. With all of the popularity that hip hop music was gaining through the radio, artists began to host live performances in concert settings that would eventually catch on and capture a larger audience (Price, 2006, p.14). The constant playing of hip hop music on the radio and the touring of hip hop artist ultimately led to its popularization and large fandom in the 1990’s.
By the 1990s, hip hop was the dominant force in popular culture as numerous hip hop artists rose in prominence as popular culture icons (Price, 2006, p.16). It was the time period in which we saw artists such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, P. Diddy, and Jay Z rise to fame. Unfortunately, it was also the years in which we saw the media driven East Coast versus West Coast gan
gsta rap rivalry and the rise and fall of two popular hip hop artists Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. Innovators were also creating multi-million-dollar-earning record labels that were signing new artists such as Def Jam Records and Roc-A-Fella Records. Not only this but, hip hop artists also began to enter the fashion world and the film industry (Price, 2006, p. 16). Hip hop culture and music had shifted from the fringe to the mainstream, becoming a source of popular culture that still exists today. It has grown from a local, non-profit-bearing culture to an international, multi-billion-dollar industry that is now to many a model of success (Price, 2006, p. XI)
References:
Higgins, D. (2009). Hip Hop World. Toronto, ON: Groundwood Books.
Price, E. (2006). Hip Hop Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Watkins, C. (2005). Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Pop Culture Anthropology 