What Is Hip Hop? Four Elements and the Music That Took Over the World
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On 11 August 1973 a Jamaican-born teenager called Clive Campbell, DJ Kool Herc, played a back-to-school party in the recreation room of an apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and instead of playing records straight through he played only the drum breaks, switching between two copies of the same record to keep the break going while dancers took the floor. That is the conventional birth of hip hop, and for once the convention is close to right. Within fifty years the music made from that trick was the most listened-to genre in the United States and a global language, and it began as one of four things rather than the main one.
The Bronx in the 1970s
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.
The four elements
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
From party to record
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.
Regions, sampling and the mainstream
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.
How it works
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 takeaway
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.