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HOMEHIPHOP B-BOY/GIRLS MUSIC GRAFFITI ARTISTS EVENTS GUEST BOOK THANK YOUS CONTACT LINKS
Early 70's: The music side of Hip Hop started with by a DJ called Kool Herc.
Moving from Kingston, Jamaica to the Bronx he developed a collection of club reggae and funk records. Mixing both musical styles he created a new style of music which we now know as Hip Hop.
He used to speak to the crowd over the record in tune with the song. At first he would say meaningless lines shouted at the crowd to encourage them to dance, but over time he started to rhyme over the song, then the rhymes would turn into complete verses.
Late 70's: By the late 70's the DJs each had there own MC to speak/rap to the crowds while the DJ concentrated on the music. Kool Herc also found that people danced (b-boy/girl) mostly in the instrumental breaks in his funk records so he would loop these breaks with two turntables and a mixer. This style of music was a success with everybody in the Bronx who finally had something that was theirs, something different from the disco's. Hip Hop MUSIC WAS ESTABLISHED.
Along with the B-boys/girls and the graffiti artists the hip hop culture was burn. But it was hardly known in some parts of New York outside of the Bronx let alone outside of the city itself.
Late 70's: The first Hip-Hop or Rap single to be released was the funk group The Fatback Band's song "King Tim III (Personality Jock)." It featured a relatively unknown Brooklyn DJ King Tim III and reached the top 30 of the R and B chart in America in 1979. It was really nothing much more than a disco song with rapping but it set the ball rolling for Hip-Hop.
80's: However, at the turn of the decade a succession of Hip-Hop singles gained commercial success without losing sight of the original style of Hip-Hop created by Kool Herc. The first song was "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Released in 1982, the song featured the repeated instrumental break of early Hip-Hop but it had a serious theme The next single to achieve similar success was "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force. It was a fusion of breakbeats from European electronic bands like Kraftwerk the early 80s progressed with Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa creating popular Hip-Hop songs along with other artists like Kurtis Blow, who had a hit with his song "The Breaks", and Whodini, who had successful songs throughout the 80s.
80's till the early 90's: The next stage of hip hop was created by Run DMC who mixed rock with hip hop. They made a collaboratin with Aerospace of their song "Walk this Way" and achieved credibility with both hip hop people and rock fans. This made way for hip hop on the East Coast America right into the 1990s. With the help of MTV showing Hip-Hop videos regularly, artists like LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and the unforgettable Public Enemy, with their chaotic sounding political records, enjoyed tremendous commercial success.Other groups like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, EPMD, Eric B. and Rakim and Schoolly D all crossed over to suburban audiences while achieving critical acclaim at the same time. But while the East Coast had cemented itself a strong and diverse foundation for its Hip-Hop community to thrive on, the West Coast only started to break through with its own style in the late 80s.
Late 90's: Another song which achieved commercial success, but on an even greater scale, was The Sugarhill Gang's 1997 hit "Rapper's Delight". "Rapper' Delight" featured the rapping of three MCs (Wonder Mike, Master Gee and Big Bank Hank) over Chic's disco classic "Good Times". "Rapper's Delight" was a huge success, crossing over into the pop chart and becoming a hit outside of New York.
Other artists who helped make Hip-Hop sell so well to the mainstream during 1999 are DMX, still quite a hardcore rapper who nevertheless sells well to the white mainstream, Foxy Brown, Redman, Method Man, part of the hugely successful group Wu-Tang Clan, Busta Rhymes, Eminem and Will Smith who, unlike the other artistes mentioned, aims to be 'pop'. These artistes as well as many others helped produce sales of Hip-Hop music that reached $4 billion a year.
Now that Hip-Hop seems to have stabilised, it is quite clear that while various styles and controversies have occurred there has always been an underbelly of brilliant and original songs that may not always have been commercially successful but which achieved critical acclaim and which helped push Hip-Hop forward into the 21st century. Proof that Hip-Hop is here to stay is to be found in the way it has merged with other genres and in the way that MCs regularly rap over other styles of music. Examples of new Hip-Hop hybrids include rap/rock with bands like Limp Bizkit; hip house, exempified by Jason Nevins' remix of Run D.M.C.'s song "It's Like That"; and instrumental Hip-Hop which is a collection of different genres. Instrumental Hip-Hop sounds a lot like Kool Herc's instrumental Hip-Hop and is best exemplified by DJ Shadow whose "Endtroducing" album was a landmark for all of Hip-Hop.