Hip-Hop Culture and Movement

Overview

Hip-hop is a musical genre and associated cultural movement that emerged in the early 1970s among African American and Afro-Caribbean communities in New York City, built around rapping, DJing and turntablism, breakdancing, and graffiti art as interconnected creative practices. The culture’s origin point is well documented: hip-hop grew directly out of block parties in the Bronx, where DJs began isolating and extending the instrumental “breaks” of popular records after noticing how those breaks electrified crowds — the extended breakbeats that resulted created space for both breakdancers and early rappers to perform, and became hip-hop’s foundational musical building block.

From the Bronx to a Golden Age

What began as disco-inflected “old-school” hip-hop in the 1970s diversified rapidly: the mid-1980s brought electro-influenced “new school” hip-hop, and the period from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s became known as hip-hop’s “golden age,” earning widespread critical acclaim and major commercial success. Distinct regional scenes flourished simultaneously across the country — the East Coast, West Coast, and a Southern scene spanning Houston, Atlanta, and Memphis — each developing its own sound, from G-funk and gangsta rap to the jazz-influenced, socially conscious hip-hop associated with the Native Tongues collective.

A Word With a Long History

The phrase “hip hop” itself long predates the genre: it appears as early as 1671, in playwright George Villiers’s The Rehearsal, describing an awkward exit “off hip hop, hip hop,” and by the 19th century the related “hippity hop” was common in children’s skipping-game rhymes. An early musical usage appears in The Dovells’ 1963 dance song “You Can’t Sit Down” (“you gotta slop, bop, flip flop, hip hop, never stop”), and 1970s disco DJs used similar exhortations before the emerging genre, originally called “disco rap,” eventually took the phrase as its own name.

Legacy

Hip-hop’s evolution continued through the club-oriented “bling era” of the late 1990s and 2000s, the internet-driven “blog era” of independent artists building direct audiences online, and the trap and SoundCloud rap movements of the mid-to-late 2010s — a genre in continuous reinvention for over five decades. In 2017, hip-hop officially became the best-selling genre of music in the United States, surpassing rock for the first time. From its origins as a grassroots Bronx block-party culture built by Black and Afro-Caribbean youth with turntables and microphones, hip-hop has grown into one of the most commercially and culturally dominant art forms in the world, a direct testament to the creative power of the communities that built it from nothing.