UNITED STATES NEWS

Hip-hop turns 50, reinventing itself and swaths of the world along the way

Aug 9, 2023, 4:09 AM

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.”

___

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.

___

Over the years, hip-hop has been used as a medium for just about everything. Mainstream America hasn’t always been ready for it. though.

Coming from America’s Black communities, that has also meant hip-hop has been a tool to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world in “ The Message,” about the stresses of poverty in their city neighborhoods.

And Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” became an anthem when it was created for filmmaker Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing,” which chronicled racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood.

Some in hip-hop pulled no punches but often those messages have been met with fear or disdain in the mainstream. When N.W.A. came “Straight Outta Compton” in 1988 with loud, brash tales of police abuse and gang life, radio stations recoiled.

Hip-hop (mainly that done by Black artists) and law enforcement have had a contentious relationship over the years, each eyeing the other with suspicion. There’s been cause for some of it. In some forms of hip-hop the ties between rappers and criminal figures were real, and violence spiraled out, as in high-profile deaths like that of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and The Notorious B.I.G. in 1997. But in a country where Black people are often looked at with suspicion by authority, there have also been plenty of stereotypes about hip-hop and criminality.

As hip-hop spread, a host of voices have used it to speak out, like Bobby Sanchez, a Peruvian American transgender, two-spirit poet and rapper who has released a song in Quechua, the language of the Wari people that her father came from.

“I think it’s very special and cool when artists use it to reflect society because it makes it bigger than just them,” Sanchez says. “To me, it’s always political, really, no matter what you’re talking about, because hip-hop, in a way, is a form of resistance.”

___

When hip-hop first started being absorbed globally, it often mimicked American styles, says P. Khalil Saucier, who has studied its journey across the Africa continent. These days, homegrown hip-hop can be found everywhere.

“The culture as a whole has kind of really rooted itself because it’s been able to now transform itself from simply an importation, if you will, to now really being local in its multiple manifestations, regardless of what country you’re looking at,” says Saucier, a professor of critical Black studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

That’s to everyone’s benefit, says Rishma Dhaliwal, founder of London’s I Am Hip-Hop magazine.

“Hip-hop is … allowing you in someone’s world. It’s allowing you into someone’s struggles,” she says. “It’s a big microphone to say, `Well, the streets say this is what is going on here and this is what you might not know about us. This is how we feel, and this is who we are.’”

Hip-hop has also gone into other spaces and made them different.

For Usha Jey, hip-hop was the perfect thing to mix with the classical South Asian dance style of Bharatanatyam. The 26-year-old French choreographer created videos last year showing the two styles interacting with each other.

Hip-hop culture “pushes you to be you,” Jey says. “I feel like in the pursuit of finding yourself, hip-hop helps me because that culture says, you’ve got to be you.”

Hip-hop is “a magical art form,” says Nile Rodgers, legendary musician, composer and record producer. He would know. It was his song “Good Times,” with the band Chic, that was recreated to form the basis for “Rapper’s Delight” all those years ago.

“The impact that it’s had on the world, it really can’t be quantified,” Rodgers says. “You can find someone in a village that you’ve never been to, a country that you’ve never been to, and all of a sudden you hear its own local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and have made it their own.”

___

Associated Press Entertainment writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Hajela is a member of the AP’s team covering race and ethnicity.

United States News

Associated Press

Heavy fighting across Gaza as Israel presses ahead with renewed US military and diplomatic support

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Heavy fighting raged overnight and into Sunday across Gaza, including in the devastated north, as Israel pressed ahead with its offensive after the U.S. blocked the latest international push for a cease-fire and rushed more munitions to its close ally. Israel has faced rising international outrage and calls for a […]

2 hours ago

Pauline Golodoff, left, and George Kudrin hold an iPad featuring images of their deceased spouses, ...

Associated Press

Death of last surviving Alaskan taken by Japan during WWII rekindles memories of forgotten battle

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Gregory Golodoff spent most of his years on a quiet Alaska island, living an ordinary life, managing a co-op store, fishing for crab and serving as the village council president. But Golodoff’s recent death at the age of 84 has reopened a chapter of American history and stirred up memories of […]

5 hours ago

Associated Press

3 people killed and 1 wounded in shooting at Atlanta apartment building, police say

ATLANTA (AP) — A shooting in Atlanta killed three people and left one victim wounded Saturday evening, police say. The Atlanta Police Department said officers responded to an address on Peachtree Road NE in the city’s Buckhead district around 6:25 p.m., WANF-TV reported. Police said three victims in their 20s were pronounced dead at the […]

6 hours ago

Heisman Trophy finalists, from left, LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, Ohio State wide receiver Marvi...

Associated Press

LSU QB Jayden Daniels overcomes being outside CFP race to win Heisman Trophy with prolific season

NEW YORK (AP) — LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night, becoming the first player since 2016 to win college football’s most prestigious player of the year award as part of a team that did not play for a conference championship. The fifth-year player, who transferred from Arizona State to LSU […]

8 hours ago

Associated Press

Homes damaged, power knocked out as severe weather rakes Tennessee

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — An apparent tornado tore roofs off homes and knocked out power to thousands in Tennessee on Saturday as a line of severe storms raked the state. Police and firefighters in Clarksville were responding to multiple reports of damage in the northern part of the city, which is north of Nashville near […]

10 hours ago

Associated Press

The NRA has a surprising defender in its free speech case before the Supreme Court: the ACLU

NEW YORK (AP) — In a case of politics making strange bedfellows, the National Rifle Association will be represented by frequent nemesis the American Civil Liberties Union in an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. The New York-based civil liberties group confirmed Saturday that it would provide legal representation for the gun-rights group in its […]

11 hours ago

Sponsored Articles

Follow @KTAR923...

Valley residents should be mindful of plumbing ahead of holidays

With Halloween in the rear-view and more holidays coming up, Day & Night recommends that Valley residents prepare accordingly.

...

Desert Institute for Spine Care

Desert Institute for Spine Care (DISC) wants to help Valley residents address back, neck issues through awake spine surgery

As the weather begins to change, those with back issues can no longer rely on the dry heat to aid their backs. That's where DISC comes in.

...

Midwestern University

Midwestern University: innovating Arizona health care education

Midwestern University’s Glendale Campus near Loop 101 and 59th Avenue is an established leader in health care education and one of Arizona’s largest and most valuable health care resources.

Hip-hop turns 50, reinventing itself and swaths of the world along the way