Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

From its birth in 1970s New York to the present day, rap or hip hop music has evolved from a local practice to a complex global phenomenon affecting the lives of millions. The label “rap music” alone has limited meaning since the genre encompasses a wide spectrum of expression from the explicitly political to the seemingly apathetic. Accordingly, there are multiple ways musicians, fans, and scholars conceive of rap music as social protest: as part of a culture that transformed New York's ghettos; as music that provides listeners with a resistant cultural sensibility; as popular culture capable of conveying subversive content; as a legacy of the civil rights movement; and as the cultural glue of a nascent political coalition. In the 1970s, New York's Bronx neighborhoods were a symbol for the nation's woes. Devastated by deindustrialization and the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway (I–95), the area became an increasingly blighted and violent ghetto. Nightly news reports painted a bleak picture of abandoned and burned tenement buildings. Rather than succumb to their environment, however, many of the Bronx's African American and Puerto Rican youth used rap music, one element of New York's emergent hip hop culture, to take control of the way their neighborhoods were used and imagined. During the summer of 1973, Bronx resident DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) began hosting dance ... log in or subscribe to read full text