The History of Hip Hop: More Than Just Rapping

Hip hop is way more than just rapping and also more than just music. Hip hop was first born from a subculture with the music at its centre and, like most subcultures, started as an underground movement before going mainstream. Hip hop first grew up in America in the seventies and didn’t cross the pond to Europe until around a decade later. In this blog, we offer up a quick hip hop history lesson.

More Than Rapping

Most un-schooled people will associate hip hop with rapping which, if you’re not aware, is the spoken or half-sung rhythmic recitation of words over instrumentals. The heavy association with rap is understandable, because of all of the ingredients that come together to make hip hop, rap is one of the most prominent and is also the region of hip hop that has managed to penetrate deepest into mainstream pop. Rap now appears in other genres, but when you look at hip hop – especially in its original form – there’s far more going on than just rap. We’re talking about an underground subculture made up of many different elements, and as the genre grew to become a mainstream phenomenon, all of those different elements went on to follow their own paths.

So what are the different elements of hip hop? Generally, the pillars are considered rapping (including beat-boxing), DJ-ing, graffiti and break dancing. According to some experts on the subject, hip hop encompasses even more than the list above: hip hop is a fully fledged culture in its own right and comes with its own way of thinking and living. Afrika Bambaataa, one of the early grandparents of hip hop said that peace, unity, love and having fun were the core values of hip hop. So hip hop is definitely not just one thing, it’s more like a philosophy.

We had a chat about hip hop with Jeffrey Roberts, one of the pioneers of European hip hop who is also a dance and music teacher and choreographer. In the early ‘80s, Jeffrey, along with a group of other young people, introduced the Netherlands to hip hop without even knowing that it was called hip hop. “We were just copying what we saw the American kids doing. It was only later than we learned that what they were doing was called hip hop.”

The South Bronx

Hip hop first started growing its roots in 1970s New York, or more precisely, the deprived neighborhoods of the Bronx, which at the time, were largely populated by African American and Latino communities. This is where the subculture developed before spreading across the rest of the United States and on, to the rest of the world. The basic foundations of hip hop actually started in Brazil, before being taken to Jamaica and from there to the United States. At the time, disco music dominated the mainstream, all while the underground was busy getting to know the customs and rituals of Rastafari, a faith that originated in Jamaica. One of these rituals was ‘toasting’, where people improvise fast rhythmic speech along to instrumental backing. Toasting is where the roots of rap lie.

Looking at it from a historical perspective, you can also say that the real roots of hip hop actually lay further back in time. In the 1930s, for example, there were dances that included clear elements of what would later become break dancing. Rap also has earlier ancestors. In a lot of early blues music, the words weren’t fully sung but spoken rhythmically and in fact, something very similar had already been going on in African countries centuries before that. But it wasn’t until all of these elements had a chance to blend together in the South Bronx in New York that things really started for hip hop. Of course, the name came much later and while it’s hotly debated as to where it really came from, the most popular ‘myth’ is that hip hop didn’t become ‘hip hop’ until Keith ‘Cowboy’ Wiggins said so in the track he released as part of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

DJ Kool Herc

The ‘godfather’ of hip hop was the Jamaican-born DJ Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc. He moved to the Bronx when he was thirteen years old and later, became a DJ and started organising block parties. Block parties have a very specific function, both in Jamaica and in the Bronx, because they weren’t just parties, but had everything to do with gang culture. Gangs would regularly be at war so, rather than fighting each other, gang members would turn up to block parties and take part in dance battles. In this respect, DJ Kool Herc wasn’t just an incredibly unique DJ but an incredibly unique individual. Musically speaking, while most of the other DJs around were playing nothing but disco, Kool Herc was playing everything else including funk, rock and Latin music, and he didn’t just ‘play’ the records, he would pick out the breaks in the records and mix them together. The ‘break’ is the part of a track where everything else falls away, leaving the drums coming through loud and clear. The breaks were basically the danceable bits and it’s these danceable bits that would later give break dancing its name. It wasn’t just the breaks that made Kool Herc so special. As well as spinning records, he would also MC (which historically stood for Master of Ceremonies and later ‘Mic Controller’). In hip hop, MC-ing is essentially rapping, which was a take on Jamaican toasting.

Turntablists

Kool Herc’s parties were such a big deal that other DJs started following the same blueprint, including some of the big names like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash who put on block parties in other parts of the Bronx. Without knowing it at the time, Kool Herc’s block parties created an arena in which all of the elements of what would become hip hop culture could come together. The very first rappers or MCs performed at Kool Herc’s parties. Dancers, called the Kool Herc B-Boys and B-Girls danced to the breaks that he played and all of the flyers and posters were drawn graffiti-style. Kool Herc himself pretty much developed hip hop DJ-ing, an artform that would develop and grow in multiple directions later on. Scratch DJ-ing – also-known-as turntablism – is the most obvious offshoot. However, we need to mention here that scratching was invented by another of hip hop’s grandparents, Grand Wizard Theodore who actually discovered it by accident. The effect of pushing and pulling the record to rip the needle forwards and backwards through the groove and do it with rhythm, was a revolution. Scratch DJs don’t just scratch, but by manipulating the record and the turntable, scratching is combined with other techniques, like beat-juggling to create unique rhythms on the spot. These DJs would often support rappers, perform the scratching on hip hop records and collaborate with musicians from other movements.

Hip Hop in Europe

It’s also interesting to look at how hip hop was exported to Europe, or more specifically to the Netherlands where hip hop pioneer Jeffrey Roberts moved when he was 12 years old, from Suriname where he was born. “When I was a kid, I was really into dance and music. I loved the way that James Brown, the godfather of funk, seemed to move so smoothly and effortlessly.” Towards the end of the ‘70s, funk and the dance style associated with it was booming in the Netherlands. Shortly after, the various elements of hip hop started to trickle in from America to Europe so, as a dancer Jeffrey was fascinated by B-Boying which, at the time, was known as the electric boogie and would later become break dancing. “Around the same time, American-style graffiti started to appear on the streets,” Jeffrey tells us. “Kids from Amsterdam and Rotterdam were really into graffiti. It seems that the reason all of this influence started coming in was that a lot of Dutch parents were pretty well off, so could afford to take their kids on holidays to the US. It was there they saw all of these new things that the Americans were doing, or their parents would pick up graffiti books for them. Because there was more money in Amsterdam, it kind of tracks that the graffiti in Amsterdam was more famous than the graffiti in Rotterdam.”

On the Leidseplein

The elements of hip hop that had made the journey to the Netherlands were largely picked up by Surinamese kids. “Usually, you were really into one or two bits of the culture,” Jeffrey tells us. “I was really focussed on the dancing, the rapping and the graffiti. I remember that we were all really inspired by the dancing in the film Wild Style, which came out in 1982.” Everything that these young Dutch kids were doing was still really underground, but that would all change pretty quickly. “In 1982, our group was given the opportunity to perform on Leidseplein, which is the central square in Amsterdam and it made quite an impact. A photographer from a national magazine was there and published an entire photo report on the performance. Then it was like something exploded, and we suddenly found ourselves on one of the most popular Saturday night TV shows of the time. Then, we called ourselves The Perfect Combination, but we changed it later to Electric Boogie Men and then much later, to Dynamic Rockers. It was like, in the space of just one show, we went from underground to mainstream. It really was overnight.”

Money Talks

During the eighties, hip hop grew from an obscure underground subculture into a mainstream phenomenon. The success came with consequences. Record labels suddenly woke up to the commercial potential of hip hop and, by the early nineties, while the music was getting into the charts worldwide, the dance side of hip hop had retreated back to the underground. Rap was part of the boom, and soon branched off and away from its hip hop roots. Even now, it’s the rappers that are making the big money. Moving away from the more humble attitude of the hip hop artists of the eighties, nineties artists were unabashed, flashing their wealth at every opportunity, and all that ‘new money’ was and is famously ostentatious.

At the start of the nineties, Dutch hip hop was going through a more difficult period. While the immense wealth of American rappers was constantly thrust in their face, they were often struggling to scrape enough money together to set up their own production studio. “Some took a bad route to get the money,” remembers Jeffrey. “That really damaged the image of Dutch hip hop. It was a dark time.” In short, in the early years of the 1990s, people across the world were questioning the integrity of hip hop and everything related to it. But by around 1995, that would all change.

One of the big game-changers was Run D.M.C. who, in 1986 had already scored a hit with Walk This Way. In 1997, they released the smasher It’s Like That and essentially flipped the hip hop table. “Run D.M.C. pulled break dancing back out of the underground,” states Jeffrey. “More than that, it brought many different demographics together, putting hip hop back on its original path. Around the same time, you saw that element of fun returning to hip hop. For example, in the emergence of a rap style that was actually funny.”

Blending

The four central pillars of hip hop (rapping, DJ-ing, graffiti and break dancing) have each developed massively over the years and taken on a life of their own. They’ve also managed to blend with other music styles and artforms. “That’s just brilliant,” smiles Jeffrey. “Artforms should be able to blend with one another. That’s the only way you get something new. It’s the way it’s always been.” Components of hip hop have even managed to penetrate Dutch cultural education. These days, Jeffrey is a dance and music teacher at various colleges, where he teaches students the principles of the various disciplines that make hip hip what it is.

Start At the Beginning

Any newcomers to hip hop might be overwhelmed by the number of sub-movements that exist under the same umbrella. “Yeah, for anyone who doesn’t know, everything within hip hop can look the same. But when you dig deeper, you see the differences.” What’s also striking is that hip hop is very often about precision, which is pretty rare in movements that first started out as underground subcultures. “The discipline involved in hip hop comes with quite a lot of rules and a lot of training,” Jeffrey agrees. “But that’s because you want everything that you do to come across; you want to make sure that you’re 100% understood and that your style is immediately recognizable. As young kids who were around when it all started, we had to learn it all backwards, which is often the case with less privileged communities. You see something and try to do the same thing, using the limited resources you have. Great things can come out of that, but it’s not the most efficient way of learning. These days, you can go on the internet and find plenty of information and courses to start with so you can get results quicker – with pretty much anything. But if you want to make hip hop or anything related to it, then you need to start by doing what you want to do. This takes things closer to where hip hop started when it was underground.”

Hip Hop Dance

Hip hop dance is actually enormously varied. For example, while popping and electric boogie is performed on your feet, break dancing is performed on the ground. The three biggest dance styles within hip hop are popping, locking and breaking. Popping and locking were born in Los Angeles while breaking was born in New York. By the way, locking was actually invented by Don Campbell, when he tried to learn the popular dance the funky chicken and… well, failed. Popping is all about making a lot of small isolated movements by locking and releasing your muscles.

Rap, Rhyme & Slang

Rapping is undeniably an artform, but largely, it only happened because many of the first groundbreaking rappers couldn’t sing very well. Jamaican toasting, which we’ve already mentioned, uses a lot of slang, as did a lot of blues music. Initially, this was so that enslaved Africans and Carribeans could communicate with each other without their captors understanding. Rapping is also written almost exclusively in rhyming schemes. Black figureheads like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali would also speak in rhyme. “When you speak in rhyme, people listen more closely and, more importantly, remember what you said,” comments Jeffrey. Within rap, of course, you also have countless sub-genres, like hardcore rap, gangster rap and political rap.