Hip-Hop Culture Crosses Social Barriers: Musical artists tell America’s story in rap

13 May 2006
By Carol Walker
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington – African-American and Latino teens with a turntable and time on their hands in the 1970s invented hip-hop — born in the USA and now the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world.

Hip-hop began 30 years ago in the South Bronx, a borough of New York City, a neighborhood that seemed to exemplify the bleakness of poor urban places.

Using turntables to spin old, worn records, kids in the South Bronx began to talk over music, mostly on the streets and in basements in what were called block parties, creating an entirely new music genre and dance form. This “talking over,” or MCing (rapping) or DJing (audio mixing or scratching), became the essence of rap music, break dance and graffiti art, according to Marvette Perez, curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, which is planning a new exhibit on the history of hip-hop.

“Out of this forgotten, bleak place, an incredible tradition was born,” Perez said in a Washington File interview.

From the beginning, style has been a big element of hip-hop, Perez said. “Hip-hop tells the story of music but also of urban America and its style.”

“With the significant contributions from the hip-hop community, we will be able to place hip-hop in the continuum of American history and present a comprehensive exhibition,” Brent D. Glass, director of the museum, told the Washington File.

The museum’s multiyear project will trace hip-hop from its origins in the late 1970s, as an expression of urban black and Latino youth culture, to its status today as a $4 billion industry. Perez said the museum already has received collections from such hip-hop artists as Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, Ice T, Fab 5 Freddy, Crazy Legs, and MC Lyte.

“Hip-hop is the most important contribution to the American cultural landscape since blues and jazz,” said hip-hop artist and promoter, filmmaker and producer Fab 5 Freddy, born Fred Brathwaite, in an interview with the Washington File. “It is dominant in every youth culture in every country.”

HIP-HOP CUTS ACROSS RACIAL LINES

“One thing that is applicable to every generation of teenagers is urgency,” music producer and film director Mark Shimmel said. Everything about hip-hop — the sound, the lyrics, the style, the language — conveys that sense of urgency.

The sociological and cultural impact of rock and roll pales in comparison to what hip-hop has been able to accomplish, Shimmel said.

“Hip-hop is the singular most important melding of black and white cultures that has ever existed in the United States,” Shimmel said. Hip-hop is a story about music, but it is much more than that. Urban music, like Motown, “worked for white audiences,” Shimmel said, but you did not see blacks and whites together at live concerts.

Hip-hop changed that, Shimmel said, because it was about fashion and language from the beginning, and — most importantly — captured a sense of urgency that teenagers in the suburbs and in the cities could relate to.

“When hip-hop artists wrote about the world they saw in the inner city, black and white teens recognized that the isolation of suburbia was not much different,” Shimmel said.

Today, Ebony magazine reports, two out of every 10 records sold in America are hip-hop; 80 percent of buyers are white.

Fab 5 Freddy, host of Yo! MTV Raps in the 1980s, said hip-hop is successful because the music is “infectious” and because it allows people to express themselves in a positive, dynamic and consciousness-raising way. “Hip-hop is for everybody with an open ear,” he said.

In 1985, when Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock became the first hip-hop record to “go Platinum,” an award given by the Recording Industry Association of America to a musical or performing artist for the sale of a million records, CDs, or cassettes, Shimmel said it was apparent that hip-hop had crossed over from African-American and Latino urban music into white culture. In 2005, Outkast’s Grammy for Album of the Year was a first for a hip-hop album.

Shimmel said hip-hop today is not much different from its South Bronx roots. “Every musical form evolves,” Shimmel said. “Hip-hop started in New York, and it was interpreted differently in Los Angeles, and then the South added another element,” he said. “It has evolved, but it hasn’t changed.”

LOOKING PAST ANTISOCIAL ELEMENTS TO GLOBAL IMPACT

Perez acknowledged that some hip-hop music is notable for its disrespect of women, adding that the museum does not plan to dismiss this aspect of hip-hop. The so-called “gangsta” rap in the 1990s, with lyrics promoting drug use and violence and tagging, a form of graffiti used to mark gang territories, is a component of the hip-hop culture that cannot be ignored, Perez said.

“I don’t judge it,” Perez said. “It is what it is. On the whole, the majority of hip-hop is creative and positive; it just happens that the worst of it can also be the most commercial.”

There is no way to ignore the fact that hip-hop is a way of walking and talking, Perez said, or that hip-hop’s influence both musically and culturally is global. “The technique resonates throughout the United States and the world,” Perez said.

For additional information about life in America, see U.S. Life and Culture.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)