The main features of Hip Hop culture are emceeing or rapping, DJing, grafitti or urban inspired art, breakdancing also known as b-boying, beatboxing, slang and an eccentric bling bling fashion. This article speaks about the most important hip hop elements which are considered to be the social and political activism, hip hop lifestyle, slang and double dutching, which consist in an urban inspired form of rope skipping.
The hip hop culture is a nonconformist and spontaneous one. MC is short for Master of Ceremonies. An MC plays a very important role as he is the person who entertains the crowd by making jokes between songs or by returning acid rhymes to its opponents. There are some big names in the history of hip hop such as MC Rakim, KRS or Big Daddy Kane.
Fans agreed that these people have a great gift in using words and rhymes and an endless vocabulary spiced with spontaneity.
Doug E. Fresh is considered to be the wonder kid of hip hop as he managed to popularize Beatboxing. Beatboxing is an important hip hop element, which consists in vocal percussion, the art of creating rhythms and beats using only the vocal cords. The name of this hip hop technique derives from the beatboxes, the first generation of drum machines.
In the 1980's beatboxing had an enormous success and hip hoppers such as Biz Markie or Darren Robinson were very popular. By the end of the '80s, beatboxing was left behind and ten years later, in the late '90s was informally launched all over again by Rahle of The Roots with his 'Make the Music 2000'.
The TV program 'Style Wars' from mid '80s and the 1984 'Subway Art' book were the first ways through which the large public was familiarized with the graffiti art. This urban inspired form of art was very well received by people and it shortly became popular all over the world. Nowadays graffiti art is well spread all over the globe, especially in Japan, Europe, Australia or South Africa, although in the beginning most local authorities disagreed with this artistic phenomenon. Even now, there are many places where it is forbidden to create graffiti on public property and it is considered a criminal offense.
Breakdancing also known as B-boying or B-girling and it is a complex style of dance with dynamic and difficult elements. Well known breakdancers at DJ Kool Herc's parties gave birth to the B-boy term. During these parties, dancers were keeping their best moves for the break part of the song. There are some well documented films about Breakdancing and reviewers and B-boy fans agree that 'The Freshest Kids' released in 2002 is by far the greatest one. Among these type of movies, 'Beat Street' and 'Style Wars' have also had some great reviews.
B-boying was born is South Bronx almost simultaneously with the other hip hop basic elements. During the '80s, it was very common and popular to see groups of young people with a cassette player, performing a B-boying show on the streets. Usually, there were two or more teams in the informal competition, doing their best, trying to impress their audience and win the dance combat.
Hip hop and rap appeared, like many other musical innovations, in New York, particularly in the Bronx. Although it’s fairly common to associate this music with the black community as well as with the latino community, both the genre and the culture associated with it have, in time, spread all over the world. Hip hop performances have come to the point of varying greatly in style and content, and are often associated with actions known as “elements", such as beat boxing, break dancing or DJing.
It’s very important to precisely distinguish hip hop and rap. It’s definitely not a mistake to refer to a particular artist by using either word, as the two concepts are interdependent and interconnected. However, although this area is under strong dispute, the basic difference between hip hop and rap is as follows.
Hip hop, before being internationally known as a musical genre, was a culture. It’s from the associated culture and background that it emerged, but it never quite became detached from it. Break-dance, for example, is definitely the best known dance associated to it. Its beginnings are quite controversial in their essence. Some claim that battling through dance was a form of minimizing street violence between gangs, while some deny this ever had anything to do with gang rivalry. Considering it’s an activity based primarily on dance (although highly athletic), it emerged from any limits of a subculture and became accepted worldwide. Graffiti is the oldest recorded element of all, and only in time did it gain in complexity and become associated with the movement.
Turntables have led to the development of DJing, another one of the elements which are powerfully associated with the hip hop culture. It’s a way of creating specific sounds using a turntable. The use of the term is extremely recent, perhaps even more recent than the practice itself: it appeared as late as 1994. A DJ used it in order to make the difference between touching the records in order to produce sounds and simply playing them, while someone else did the rapping.
Thus, hip hop and rap are not one and the same, but rap or rapping is one of the elements of the hip hop culture. It’s a combination between poetry, talking and song, deriving mainly from the works of West African poets. It also has roots in the dancehall of the 1970’s. The success of groups like Run DMC had a major contribution to making rap commercially popular in the mid 80’s. Things evolved rapidly over the years, leading to, among other things, the art of freestyling. This means delivering rhymes that have been written beforehand, but not necessarily with a well-defined backbone or making up rhymes on the spot.
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