60 Facts About Hip hop

Hip hop music or hip-hop music, known as rap music, is a genre of popular music that originated in New York City in the 1970s.

Hip hop music was not officially recorded for play on radio or television until 1979, largely due to poverty during the genre's birth and lack of acceptance outside ghetto neighborhoods.

Old school hip hop was the first mainstream wave of the genre, marked by its disco influence and party-oriented lyrics.

Hip hop continued to diversify at this time with other regional styles emerging, such as Southern rap and Atlanta hip hop.

Hip hop became a best-selling genre in the mid-1990s and the top-selling music genre by 1999.

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The United States saw the success of regional styles such as crunk, a Southern genre that emphasized the beats and music more than the lyrics, and alternative hip hop began to secure a place in the mainstream, due in part to the crossover success of its artists.

The creation of the term hip hop is often credited to Keef Cowboy, rapper with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Musical genres from which hip hop developed include funk, blues, jazz and rhythm and blues recordings from the 60s, 50s, and earlier, including several records by Bo Diddley.

Many of the people who helped establish hip hop culture, including DJ Kool Herc, DJ Disco Wiz, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa were of Latin American or Caribbean origin.

Hip hop extended the beat of a record by using two record players, isolating the percussion "breaks" by using a mixer to switch between the two records.

Hip hop dubbed his dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls.

For inner-city youth, participating in hip hop culture became a way of dealing with the hardships of life as minorities within America, and an outlet to deal with the risk of violence and the rise of gang culture.

The new style influenced Harry, and Blondie's later hit single from 1981 "Rapture" became the first single containing hip hop elements to hit number one on the US Billboard Hot 100—the song itself is usually considered new wave and fuses heavy pop music elements, but there is an extended rap by Harry near the end.

Female rappers appeared on the scene in the late 1970s and early 80s, including Bronx artist MC Sha-Rock, member of the Funky Four Plus One, credited with being the first female MC and the Sequence, a hip hop trio signed to Sugar Hill Records, the first all female group to release a rap record, Funk You Up.

The first hip hop record is widely regarded to be the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", from 1979.

Indeed, "Funk You Up", the first hip hop record released by a female group, and the second single released by Sugar Hill Records, was performed by the Sequence, a group from Columbia, South Carolina which featured Angie Stone.

Hip hop music became popular in Philadelphia in the late 1970s.

Hip hop music was influenced by disco music, as disco emphasized the key role of the DJ in creating tracks and mixes for dancers, and old school hip hop often used disco tracks as beats.

Hip hop had largely emerged as "a direct response to the watered down, Europeanised, disco music that permeated the airwaves".

The earliest hip hop was mainly based on hard funk loops sourced from vintage funk records.

Ironically, the rise of hip hop music played a role in the eventual decline in disco's popularity.

Artists such as Melle Mel, Rakim, Chuck D, KRS-One and Warp 9 revolutionized hip hop by transforming it into a more mature art form, with sophisticated arrangements, often featuring "gorgeous textures and multiple layers" The influential single "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is widely considered to be the pioneering force for conscious rap.

Early 1980s electro music and rap were catalysts that sparked the hip hop movement, led by artists such as Cybotron, Hashim, Afrika Bambaataa, Planet Patrol, Newcleus and Warp 9.

Greg Wilson was the first DJ to introduce electro hip hop to UK club audiences in the early 1980s, opting for the dub or instrumental versions of Nunk by Warp 9, Extra T's "ET Boogie, " Hip Hop, Be Bop by Man Parrish, Planet Rock and Dirty Talk.

Radio Nova helped launch other French hip hop stars including Dee Nasty, whose 1984 album Paname City Rappin' along with compilations Rapattitude 1 and 2 contributed to a general awareness of hip hop in France.

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Hip hop has always kept a very close relationship with the Latino community in New York.

Japanese hip hop is said to have begun when Hiroshi Fujiwara returned to Japan and started playing hip hop records in the early 1980s.

Japanese hip hop generally tends to be most directly influenced by old school hip hop, taking the era's catchy beats, dance culture, and overall fun and carefree nature and incorporating it into their music.

Hip hop became one of the most commercially viable mainstream music genres in Japan, and the line between it and pop music is frequently blurred.

Hip hop music became commercially successful, as exemplified by the Beastie Boys' 1986 album Licensed to Ill, which was the first rap album to hit No 1 on the Billboard charts.

Hip hop's "golden age" is a name given to a period in mainstream hip hop, produced between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, which is characterized by its diversity, quality, innovation and influence.

Williams views this development as the beginning of hip hop's own "album era" from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, during which hip hop albums earned an unprecedented critical recognition and "would be the measuring stick by which most of the genre's greats would be judged".

Gangsta rap is a subgenre of hip hop that reflects the violent lifestyles of inner-city American black youths.

However, hip hop was still met with resistance from black radio, including urban contemporary radio stations.

The main reasons why hip hop culture secured its subcultural authority despite becoming a part of the mass media and mainstream industries can be summarized as follows.

Atlanta hip hop artists were key in further expanding rap music and bringing southern hip hop into the mainstream.

Previously, alternative hip hop acts had attained much critical acclaim, but received relatively little exposure through radio and other media outlets; during this time, alternative hip hop artists such as MF Doom, the Roots, Dilated Peoples, Gnarls Barkley, Mos Def, and Aesop Rock began to achieve significant recognition.

Glitch Hip hop contains echoes of 1980s pop music, Indian ragas, eclectic jazz and West Coast rap.

Glitch hop is a fusion genre of hip hop and glitch music that originated in the early to mid-2000s in the United States and Europe.

Glitch Hip hop artists include Prefuse 73, Dabrye and Flying Lotus.

Wonky is a subgenre of hip hop that originated around 2008, but most notably in the United States and United Kingdom, and among international artists of the Hyperdub music label, under the influence of glitch hop and dubstep.

Some put the blame on hip hop becoming less lyrical over time, such as Soulja Boy's 2007 debut album souljaboytellem.

Alternative hip hop movement was not limited only to the United States, as rappers such as Somali-Canadian poet K'naan, Japanese rapper Shing02, and Sri Lankan British artist M I A achieved considerable worldwide recognition.

Hip hop cites new jack swing producer Teddy Riley and funk artist Roger Troutman's use of the Talk Box as inspirations for his own use of Auto-Tune.

Hip hop music expanded beyond the US, often blending local styles with hip hop.

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Hip hop has globalized into many cultures worldwide, as evident through the emergence of numerous regional scenes.

Hip hop first developed in the South Bronx, which had a high Latino, particularly Puerto Rican, population in the 1970s.

In many Latin American countries, as in the US, hip hop has been a tool with which marginalized people can articulate their struggle.

Hip hop grew steadily more popular in Cuba in the 1980s and 1990s through Cuba's Special Period that came with the fall of the Soviet Union.

An annual Cuban hip hop concert, beginning in 1995, held at Alamar in Havana helped popularize Cuban hip hop.

Brazilian hip hop is heavily associated with racial and economic issues in the country, where a lot of Afro-Brazilians live in economically disadvantaged communities, known in Brazil as favelas.

Sao Paulo is where hip hop began in the country, but it soon spread all over Brazil, and today, almost every big Brazilian city, including Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Brasilia, has a hip hop scene.

Haitian hip hop has recently become a way for artists of Haitian backgrounds in the Haiti and abroad to express their national identity and political opinions about their country of origin.

In Europe, Africa, and Asia, hip hop began to move from the underground to mainstream audiences.

In Europe, hip hop was the domain of both ethnic nationals and immigrants.

Israel's hip hop grew greatly in popularity at the end of the decade, with several stars both Palestinian and Israeli.

In Portugal hip hop has his own kind of rapping, which is more political and underground scene, they are known for Valete, Dealema and Halloween.

Russian hip hop emerged during last years of Soviet Union and cemented later, with groups like Malchishnik and Bad Balance enjoying mainstream popularity in the 1990s, while Ligalize and Kasta were popular in the 2000s.

In former Yugoslavia hip hop first appeared during the 1980s mostly with Serbian hip hop with performers such as B-boy, the Master Scratch Band, Badvajzer, and others.

In Tanzania in the early 2000s, local hip hop artists became popular by infusing local styles of Afrobeat and arabesque melodies, dancehall and hip-hop beats with Swahili lyrics.