7/08/2014

A History Of Underground Hip Hop And Popular Music

By Todd S. Braun


Hip Hop music has its roots in the black funk and soul music of the 70's. Rap originated from the R&B tradition of which is complemented by the sampling and scratching which began in black ghettos of the United States. Hip Hop refers to not only a musical genre, but also the youth culture characterized by elements of rap (MCing), DJing, breakdancing, graffiti writing and beatboxing.



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.

With the beginning of the 1990s, the rarely used music genre term Hip Hop increasingly replaced the previously used term rap. With the advent of NWA and Public Enemy, the era of gangsta rap began in earnest. Other so-called West Coast artists including Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and 2Pac also emerged, and for the first time New York (the East Coast) was no longer the center of Hip Hop.

In 1970, the album by the Last Poets whose political rap was influenced by the language of Malcolm X and the poet Amiri Baraka was unleashed onto the market; they are generally regarded as the fathers of rap music. The actual rapping developed regardless of MCs. The pioneers of Mcing were the deejays from Jamaica.

Around the 1990s, artists such as Nas Illmatic, The Infamous Mobb Deep and the Wu-Tang Clan reached milestones for rap music and thus defined the East Coast sound. The Gangsta Rap had now taken the lead and the following years were marked by the feud between east and west coast (where the assignment was not always strictly geographical). The commercial rise of Hip Hop around the 1990s was still bullish.

The mid-1990s witnessed a kind of proxy war between 2Pac (West Coast) and Notorious BIG (East Coast) escalate. Eventually, 2Pac and Notorious BIG were shot. In the same year, various rappers from both coasts declared at a joint meeting that the confrontation had ended. Some notable releases by 2Pac include All Eyez on Me and California Love (Tupac Shakur feat Dr. Dre.).

Musically, it was in the second half of the 1990s that major innovations really happened. The beats became more complex, you could hear the influence of styles such as reggae and dancehall (raggamuffin Hip Hop), but also the old-school hip-hop and electro funk from the 80s. In addition, the style of Hip Hop continued to grow along with soul and R & B right through to the early 2000s, the influence again reached the normal pop music. Significant albums include Wyclef Jean (The Carnival, 1997) and Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1998).

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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