Discover what made the future: Hip Hop Music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop or rap music, is a music genre developed in the United States by inner-city African Americans in the 1970s which consists of stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip-hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching with turntables, break dancing, and graffiti. Other elements include sampling beats or bass lines from records (or synthesized beats and sounds), and rhythmic beatboxing. While often used to refer solely to rapping, “hip hop” more properly denotes the practice of the entire subculture. The term hip hop music is sometimes used synonymously with the term rap music, though rapping is not a required component of hip hop music.

In 1990, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet was a significant success with music critics and consumers. The album played a key role in hip hop’s mainstream emergence in 1990, dubbed by Billboard editor Paul Grein as “the year that rap exploded”. In a 1990 article on its commercial breakthrough, Janice C. Thompson of Time Magazine wrote that hip hop “has grown into the most exciting development in American pop music in more than a decade.”Thompson noted the impact of Public Enemy’s 1989 single “Fight the Power”, rapper Tone Lōc’s single Wild Thing being the best-selling single of 1989, and that at the time of her article, nearly a third of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 were hip hop songs.

Hip-hop music has reached the cultural corridors of the globe and has been absorbed and reinvented around the world. Hip hop music expanded beyond the US, often blending local styles with hip hop. Hip hop has globalized into many cultures worldwide, as evident through the emergence of numerous regional scenes. It has emerged globally as a movement based upon the main tenets of hip hop culture. The music and the art continue to embrace, even celebrate, its transnational dimensions while staying true to the local cultures to which it is rooted. Hip-hop’s impact differs depending on each culture. Still, the one thing virtually all hip hop artists worldwide have in common is that they acknowledge their debt to those African-American people in New York who launched the global movement