HIP-HOP GENRE

Hip-Hop Artists

Jay Z Kanye West Eminem Dr Dre

Rick Ross The Notorious B.I.G

Definition of Hip-Hop

• Hip-Hop is a music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing, break dancing, and graffiti writing. Other elements include sampling and beatboxing.

History of the Hip-Hop genre

• In the 1970s an underground urban movement known as "hip hop" began to develop in the South Bronx area of New York City focusing on emceeing, breakbeats, and house parties. Starting at the home of DJ Kool Herc at the high-rise apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the movement then spread across the entire borough. Rap developed both inside and outside of hip hop culture, and began in America in earnest with the street parties thrown in the Bronx neighborhood of New York in the 1970s. The lyrical content of many early rap groups focused on social issues

The Hip-Hop genre and the media

• Hip Hop culture has had a heavy influence in the media, especially in television. There have been a number of television shows assigned to or about hip hop. For example, BET (black entertainment television) was the only channel likely to play hip hop, but in recent years the mainstream channels such asVH1 and MTV have added a considerable amount of hip hop to their play list. With the development of the Internet a number of online sites began to offer hip hop related video content.

Conventions of the Hip-Hop genre• Rhyming

• Swearing (occasionally)

• Jewellery

• Casual clothes (occasional baggy clothing)

• Close ups of artist

• Alcohol

• Drugs

• Urban dancing

• Hot women

• Ernest Morrell and Jeffery Duncan Andrade compare hip hop to the works of great “canon” poets of the modern era, who use imagery and mood to directly criticize society. As quoted in their seminal work, ‘Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth Through Engaging Hip Hop Culture’:

“Hip hop texts are rich in imagery and metaphor and can be used to teach irony, tone, diction, and point of view. Hip hop texts can be analyzed for theme, motif, plot, and character development. Both Grand Master Flash and T.S. Eliot gazed out into their rapidly deteriorating societies and saw a "wasteland." Both poets were essentially apocalyptic in nature as they witnessed death, disease, and decay.”