Definition and description of Hip Hop music

Hip-Hop is a cultural movement and musical genre which started in 1970s. It began with a group of urban African-American young people living in the poorest borough of New York City ‘The Bronx’. It was a time when block parties were becoming popular. A Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) was one of the first to pioneer a ‘sound system tradition’ and to use a dub style of mixing. Herc’s speakers were really loud and became known as ‘Herculoids’ and this helped make people aware of his parties and his style of music.  Herc brought from Jamaica the tradition of ‘toasting’ which means reciting improvised rhymes over instrumental sections of records.

Through his unique style he reconstructed and also deconstructed music.
Herc is known as the founding father of hip-hop. The word hip-hop is derived in part from turning from one turntable to another to create breaks. Hip-hop music has four stylistic features: rapping, DJing/scratching, sampling and beat boxing. The spoken word is an important part of the power of hip-hop music. The early origins of hip-hop can be found in African-American music. The griots have a vocal style very similar to rappers. The African griot (storyteller) has a significant role to play in the oral traditions of poetry. They conveyed the history of the village and surrounding areas to the citizens using a mixture of music, rhythm and poetry. The griot speaks words of implicit authority and they are central to cultural life in West Africa. Geneva Smitherman states that rap music is rooted in the ‘black oral tradition of tonal semantics, narrativising, signification, playing the dozens, Africanised syntax and other communicative practices’.
Hip-hop music is created with a mixture of ‘scratching’ and electronic drums behind a rap vocal. Grand Wizard Theodore invented the scratch accidentally and this has turned out to be one of the greatest moments in Hip-Hop history. Apparently, he was trying to stop a running disc after being told off by his mother. The record produced a scratching sound and the term ‘scratching’ or ‘needle drop’ was created. Scratching is an important tool for every hip-hop DJ. Scratching involves moving a record back and forth while it is playing. The record doesn’t literally get scratched as the needle is in a groove.
Digital sampling now largely supersedes scratching. Sampling involves a producer using portions or remixing other songs often without consent from other artists (although copyright laws are stricter nowadays). DJ is short for Disc Jockey and a DJ can choose, play and even may write and produce music. Some rappers write or improvise their own lyrics. The subject of Hip-Hop songs is usually politics or society and words are spoken rather than sung. A DJ will often have multiple turntables and may back up one or more MCs. A MC is short for the master of ceremony.
Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler) another hip-hop pioneer brought DJing to a new level as he introduced the techniques of back spinning and cutting. He also pioneered the cross-fader which involves cutting back and forth between records, dicing and slicing them, and overloading the mixer’s channels with loud noise. This guy had turntable skills and he made the turntable become like a percussion instrument.
Beat boxing is the art of urban vocal percussion. It involves producing drum beats and rhythms using your mouth, lips, tongue, voice, throat and/or nasal passage. Beat boxing is not limited to hip-hop culture and has its origins many centuries ago in a variety of cultures e.g. troubadours of France and Jazz, Blues and even Barbershop music all featured some element of vocal percussion. The beat box was born out of necessity as drum machines could not be afforded in the ghettos and the Mc needed something to rap over so the human mouth was used. Human beat boxing is still very popular today with beat box battles and competitions happening regularly throughout the world. Beat boxing is also becoming more main stream now as it is used by artists such as Bjork and Justin Timberlake.
Hip-hop music provided a ‘voice’ for the young people living in deprived areas. The hip-hop music scene and its use of metaphorical lyrics gave the world insight into the harsh social, political and economic realities of these people’s lives.