Since hip-hop emerged out of New York City, it has spread around the country and the world. This year is being marked as its 50th anniversary.
Hip-hop was born in the break – that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage.
At the hands of the DJs, that break moment became more: a composition in itself. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes. So did the dancers, b-boys and b-girls. Graffiti artists took it to the streets of New York City.
Hip-hop spread around the country and the world. At each step: change, adaptation. Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business: Hip-hop has impacted them all.
In hip-hop, “when someone does it, then that’s how it’s done. When someone does something different, then that’s a new way,” says Babatunde Akinboboye, a Nigerian-American opera singer and longtime hip-hop fan in Los Angeles, who creates content on social media using both musical styles.
Hip-hop “connects to what is true. And what is true, lasts.”
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Those looking for a starting point have landed on Aug. 11, 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc around the Bronx, deejayed a party. Campbell had started extending the musical breaks of records and speaking over the beat. It wasn’t long before the style could be heard all over the city.
And then in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang put out ” Rapper’s Delight ” and introduced a rap record that would reach as high as 36 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart list.
Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright says he knew the song was “going to be big. “I knew it was going to blow up and play all over the world because it was a new genre of music,” he tells The Associated Press.
And Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien says, “If you couldn’t sing or you couldn’t play an instrument, you could recite poetry and speak your mind. And so it became accessible to the everyman.”
Female voices took their chances, like Roxanne Shante, who became one of the first female MCs to gain a wider audience. Other women have joined her, from Queen Latifah to Lil’ Kim to Nicki Minaj to Megan Thee Stallion and more.
