10.1. The origins of hip hop

The problem with disco was its paradoxically insular nature: the music and the dancing took place in clubs, bars and designated “discos”, out of reach for anyone under the age of 21 and yet had such a large gay following, with musicians and fans of the culture very much “out and proud”. Early hip hop music, on the other hand, catered for all ages and occurred in the streets and in block parties, most notably in New York City. The term “hip hop” has numerous origin stories with no official account of who coined it first, although it is said to be between hip hop emcee Busy Bee Starski, DJ Hollywood and pioneer Afrika Bambaataa (Smitherman, 1997). The overall term “hip hop” encompasses every aspect of hip hop culture – breakdancing, graffiti, MCing (also known as rapping, although they can be different), DJing and all the fashions and language it as absorbed. Cobb described hip hop as having “black roots” and being “literally a product of the African Diaspora”, black being a reference to cultures derived from Africa (Cobb, 2007, p.7). But hip hop wasn’t exclusively African or black. Many of its early innovators were of Hispanic origin, such as DJ Disco Wiz, Rock Steady Crew and Charlie Chase (Keyes, 1996, p.231) and later, groups like Cypress Hill achieved commercial success in the 90s

The music has since taken hold of the umbrella name due its commercial success over the past couple of decades. Making do with what little they had, the inhabitants of New York’s most impoverished areas would come together for their love of music and art, forming the basis of hip hop. Each decade had its own political soundtrack for the black population and hip hop represented the sound of the 80s. Rappers, the root verb original holding sexual connotations (Smitherman, 1997), echoing those of jazz, were the political commentators of their community and their age, telling the stories of the street for the voiceless. All the fundamental aspects of hip hop culture had already existed in some form or another by the late 70s but it was the borrowing of Jamaican dancehall culture that simultaneously helped the music and the culture early on (Miyakawa, 2012). DJ Kool Herc often spun with two turntables, each with records of breakbeats he would seamlessly switch between while the “MC” would speak over them, known in Jamaica as “toasting” (O’Brien Chang and Chen, 1998). The MC’s role was to generate hype amongst the audience with lyrical wordplay that would eventually grow and evolve over the years. Groups like The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five took this further (the former prompted Crocker to refuse the track airplay as described in Chapter 3)