What Is Hip Hop? Four Elements and the Music That Took Over the World

The South Bronx of the early 1970s had been cut in half by an expressway, emptied by landlords who found arson more profitable than rent, and abandoned by the city; a third of its housing burned in the decade. Its young people, black and Puerto Rican, had gang affiliations, no money and no clubs that would have them, and the parties in parks and community rooms, powered by sound systems plugged into street lamps, were what they made instead. Herc brought the Jamaican sound-system tradition of the DJ as the star and the toaster talking over the record; Afrika Bambaataa, a former gang leader, organised the crews into the Zulu Nation and turned the parties into a self-conscious culture; and Grandmaster Flash turned the switching between records into a precise technique, cutting and scratching on the beat.

Bambaataa named four practices as the pillars of the culture, and they developed together:

• •DJing: extending the breaks, mixing records, and scratching the vinyl under the needle as a percussion instrument
• •MCing: the master of ceremonies who hyped the crowd over the DJ's beat in rhymed, rhythmic speech, which became rapping
• •Breaking: the acrobatic dancing done during the breaks, by b-boys and b-girls, which went to the Olympics in 2024
• •Graffiti: the spray-painted names and murals on subway trains that carried the crews' identities across the city

For six years hip hop existed only live and on cassettes passed hand to hand, because the people making it did not think it could be a record. The first hit came from outside: in 1979 a New Jersey producer assembled the Sugarhill Gang and released Rapper's Delight, fifteen minutes of rhymes over a replayed disco bassline, and it sold millions. The Bronx originators followed, and in 1982 The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, showed that rap could describe the neighbourhood it came from rather than just party over it. Run-DMC in the mid-1980s stripped the sound to drum machine and voice, wore what the street wore, and crossed to rock radio with a version of Walk This Way; the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, whose Chuck D called rap the black CNN, and Eric B. and Rakim, whose rhymes turned the MC into a poet, made the late 1980s the form's first golden age.

The 1990s spread it and split it. Sampling, the building of tracks from fragments of old records, gave producers a new instrument and the courts a new problem, since every sample had to be paid for after 1991. The West Coast answered New York with the gangsta rap of N.W.A. and Dr. Dre's smooth, funk-derived G-funk; the two coasts' rivalry ended in the murders of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and the Notorious B.I.G. in 1997; and the South, from Atlanta, Houston and New Orleans, took over the sound in the 2000s with the sparse, bass-heavy trap that still underlies most of the charts. Along the way rap became the mainstream. Lauryn Hill, Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and Drake sold in the tens of millions, Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2018, and in 2017 hip hop overtook rock as the most consumed genre in the United States for the first time.

The form's basic unit is a rhymed verse spoken in rhythm over a repeating beat, and the craft is in the flow: the placement of syllables against the pulse, the internal rhymes, the switches of speed and the pockets a rapper finds between the drums. A beat is typically built from a drum pattern, a bassline and a sample or synthesised melody, looped, and the producer is as much an author as the rapper; the credits on a hit list both. The lyrical content has always run from boasts and party calls to reportage, protest, comedy and confession, and the argument about which of those hip hop should be is as old as The Message. What has not changed is the origin in a technique, a DJ keeping a break going so that people could dance, and the fact that a form made by teenagers with no money and two turntables became the way the world's young people talk over music.

The break that Kool Herc looped was a short stretch of a funk or soul record where the other instruments dropped out and the drums played alone, and a few such breaks became the foundations of a whole musical era. The best known is the Amen break, a few seconds of drumming from a 1969 track by a soul group called the Winstons. It was sampled on hip hop records in the 1980s and then chopped and sped up to become the backbone of jungle and drum and bass in the 1990s. The drummer on James Brown's Funky Drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, played another of the most sampled patterns ever.

The machines shaped the sound as much as the records did. Early samplers held only a few seconds of audio, so producers sped records up to fit more in and then slowed them back down, which gave some classic beats their gritty, slightly crunchy texture. Later drum machines with pads let producers play samples by hand, adding the swing and slight unevenness that makes a beat feel human. The people who played those original breaks were rarely paid for their reuse, which is one reason the sampling debate is about fairness as well as law.

Most hip hop is in four-four time, four beats to a bar, and classic East Coast tracks of the late 1980s and 1990s usually sit somewhere around 85 to 100 beats a minute. The drum pattern typically puts a kick drum on the first beat and a snare on the second and fourth, and rappers count their verses in bars. A standard verse is sixteen bars long, which is why rappers talk about writing a sixteen, and a common song structure alternates three such verses with a hook of eight bars repeated between them.

Within those bars, the history of flow is partly a history of where the rhymes land. Many early rappers placed a single rhyme at the end of each bar, falling on or near the fourth beat, so the structure was easy to hear. From the mid-1980s rappers such as Rakim pushed rhymes inside the line and across several syllables, so that they fell on unexpected beats and the phrasing ran across the bar lines. Later styles changed the rhythmic division itself: in the 2010s the triplet flow, three syllables to each beat instead of two or four, spread widely after the group Migos used it on a string of hits.

Breaking, the dance style that grew up alongside DJing and rapping in the Bronx in the 1970s, became an Olympic event at the Paris Games in 2024. Dancers known as b-boys and b-girls competed in one-on-one battles, improvising to music chosen by the DJ and judged on technique, creativity, musicality and execution.

The debut drew huge attention and some controversy, as many in the culture debated whether turning a street art form into a judged sport would change it. Breaking was not included in the programme for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. Its brief appearance still marked how far hip hop had travelled, from block parties in one New York borough to the world's biggest sporting event in about fifty years.

Hip hop is a culture that grew from Bronx block parties in the 1970s, where DJs looped the drum breaks of records, MCs rhymed over them, dancers broke during them and writers painted the trains, and its music, rap over a beat, went from Rapper's Delight in 1979 through the golden age of the late 1980s, the regional styles of the 1990s and the trap of the 2000s to become the most popular genre in America and the shared language of youth music worldwide.