Aesthetics Of Hip Hop

884 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: History of hip hop music

Hip hop is a modern day American dance form that originated from a combination of African-American or more specifically Afro diasporic, and Latino cultural influences. Hip hop obtains many commonalities with the aesthetics of African dance. These aesthetics include polycentrism, and ephebism being incredibly evident in hip hop styles, and the curvilinear aspect being observed as well. However at the same time hip hop has americanized aspects that set it apart from african dance. An important americanized aspect is the concept of competition which is observed in hip hop battles, creating a different sense of community and purpose of the dance. African aesthetics traveled across the globe due to the african slave trade and africans being taken to the Caribbean. This then traveled to New Orleans and resulted in Jazz and later the development of hip hop. As discussed in Osumare’s article The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip Hop: Power Moves, hip hop did not originate solely from African-American influences but rather Afro-diasporic influences, “owing contributions to Caribbean immigrants in the Bronx”. In addition, hip hop grew as an outlet for youth to deal with marginalization and social issues, including police brutality occurring in the Bronx. It developed as a way to …show more content…

This aesthetic is described as one’s vitality and youth when dancing. Ephebism “encompasses attributes such as power, vitality, flexibility, drive and attack” which are all very important in hip hop dance. This sense of youthfulness can be observed in the hip hop battle between J Boogie and the LES Twins in the dancers wild facial emotions at 3:15 in the video. One can also observe ephebism in the Hip Hop 2017 dance battle in all the dancers facial expressions and movements. Ephebism is extremely evident at 13 minutes in the video in not only the main dancer but the other individuals on stage being involved in the

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of From Mambo To Hip-Hop

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    The movie ‘From Mambo to Hip-Hop’ is a great documentary about a revolution in the entertainment industry. It talks of evolution on Salsa music and Hip-Hop culture in suburbs of New York. South Bronx is a ghetto neighbourhood. The people living in the area are challenged economically. There is a record of high cases of violence that exist in the streets due to high crime rate and drugs being traded as a means of survival (Gordon, 2005). Most of the people living in the area are descendants of African immigrants who could trace their origin in the Caribbean islands with a large number Latin American population too.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of From Mambo To Hip Hop

    741 Words  | 2 Pages

    The movie ‘From Mambo to Hip-Hop’ is a great documentary about a revolution in the entertainment industry. It talks of evolution on Salsa music and Hip-Hop culture in suburbs of New York. South Bronx is a ghetto neighbourhood. The people living in the area are challenged economically. There is a record of high cases of violence that exist in the streets due to high crime rate and drugs being traded as a means of survival (Gordon, 2005). Most of the people living in the area are descendants of African immigrants who could trace their origin in the Caribbean islands with a large number Latin American population too.

    Read More

  • Keeping Their Own Identity in Black Nationalism

    851 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hip-hop culture has been a global phenomenon for more than twenty years. When introduced into the American culture, the black culture felt that hip-hop had originated from the African American community. The black community was being denied their cultural rights by the supremacy of the white people, but hip-hop gave the community the encouragement to show their black pride and televise the struggles they were facing in the world. The failure and declining of the movements, the influential, rebellious, and powerful music is what reshaped Black Nationalism, unity and to signify the struggle. The African Americans who suffered from social and political problems found that they similar relations to the political movements, which allowed the blacks to be able to voice their opinions and to acknowledge their culture openly.

    Read More

  • The African American Post-Soul Generation

    1334 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...nt to an African American child than Roosevelt or Kennedy. Hip-hop culture began to embrace other subversive forms of expression, such as graffiti, whose popularity soared in the mid 70s throughout the South Bronx . After a decade spent trying to gain favor with a supposedly “superior” white middle class, African Americans turned to hip-hop as a direct response to this apparent white incompatibility with black culture. No longer unequal, by the end o the 70s it had become clear that there was no reason to mold the black racial identity in an easily digestible package for America’s white middle class. This method of forgetting, which resulted in yet another decade of black marginalization, was thus largely rejected, as the America’s African American urban youth turned to hip-hop to remember, preserve, and create a new telling of the black historical identity.

    Read More

  • Hip Hop America

    525 Words  | 2 Pages

    George covers much familiar ground: how B-beats became hip hop; how technology changed popular music, which helped to create new technologies; how professional basketball was influenced by hip hop styles; how gangsta rap emerged out of the crack epidemic of the 1980s; how many elements of hip hop culture managed to celebrate, and/or condemn black-on-black violence; how that black-on-black violence was somewhat encouraged by white people scheming on black males to show their foolishness, which often created a huge mess; and finally, how hip hop used and continues to use its art to express black frustration and ambition to blacks while, at the same time, refering that frustration and ambition to millions of whites.

    Read More

  • Hip hop wars

    951 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hip hop is a culture, it is a way many people use to connect to one another, it allowed many African Americans to express their own point of view in their story. But in the early 2000’s it became commercialized and went from storytelling from many perspectives like a party, politics, self-celebration, and gangstas to consisting of mainly of the lives of hustler, pimps, and hoes. Though it has become quite profitable and a successful form of music it cause arguments in American of whether it is more detrimental than beneficial to black community. Hip hop is in fact in a crisis and critics of hip hop believe it is just angry stories of black males and females but do not see it as proof that black behavior was created from the condition of living in a ghetto.

    Read More

  • Hip-Hop: A Voice for the Chican@-Latin@ Community

    2213 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the words of rapper Busta Rhymes, “hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It’s a platform where we could offer information, but it’s also an escape” Hip-hop is a culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York, during the early 1970s. Hip-Hop was a result of African American and Latino youth redirecting their hardships brought by marginalization from society to creativity in the forms of MCing, DJing, aerosol art, and breakdancing. Hip-hop serves as a vehicle for empowerment while transcending borders, skin color, and age. However, the paper will focus on hip-hop from the Chican@-Latin@ population in the United States. In the face of oppression, the Chican@-Latin@ population utilized hip hop music as a means to voice the community’s various issues, desires, and in the process empower its people.

    Read More

  • Th Future of Hip Hop

    1612 Words  | 4 Pages

    From its conception in the 1970's and throughout the 1980's, hip hop was a self-contained entity within the community that created it. This means that all the parameters set for the expression came from within the community and that it was meant for consumption by the community. Today, the audience is from outside of the community and doesn’t share the same experiences that drive the music. An artists’ success hinges on pleasing consumers, not the community. In today's world, it isn’t about music that rings true for those who share the artists' experiences, but instead, music that provides a dramatic illusion for those who will never share the experiences conveyed. This has radically changed the creative process of artists and the diversity of available music. Most notably, it has called in to question the future of hip hop.

    Read More

  • Hip-Hop as a Cultural Movement

    1580 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hip-Hop is a cultural movement that emerged from the dilapidated South Bronx, New York in the early 1970’s. The area’s mostly African American and Puerto Rican residents originated this uniquely American musical genre and culture that over the past four decades has developed into a global sensation impacting the formation of youth culture around the world. The South Bronx was a whirlpool of political, social, and economic upheaval in the years leading up to the inception of Hip-Hop. The early part of the 1970’s found many African American and Hispanic communities desperately seeking relief from the poverty, drug, and crime epidemics engulfing the gang dominated neighborhoods. Hip-Hop proved to be successful as both a creative outlet for expressing the struggles of life amidst the prevailing crime and violence as well as an enjoyable and cheap form of recreation.

    Read More

  • In The Black Arts Movement

    870 Words  | 2 Pages

    The hip-hop community has been greatly influenced by the Black Arts Era. Both groups have addressed social, political issue as well as giving voice to the emotional discord of the black man. These groups push the boundaries using words meant to inflame the black man and shock the Caucasians.

    Read More

  • Effects of Hip-Hop Culture on the Youth

    1789 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hip hop culture has been around since the 1970s. Multiple sources all come down to the South Bronx in New York City, as the origin of hip hop culture. The culture began to take its shape within the African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities. The father of the start of this culture was a Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell but also known as DJ Kool Herc. He brought forth a new sound system and the Jamaican style of “toasting.” Toasting was when Jamaicans would talk or rap over the music they played. This whole new style soon brought what is now known as DJs, B-Boys, MC’s, and graffiti artists (Kaminski).

    Read More

  • The History of Hip Hop Music and Its Transition to Popular Music

    893 Words  | 2 Pages

    This will then open up the discussion about the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music. Hip hop originated in the ghetto areas of New York during the 1970’s and is a mixture of DJ, MC, B boy and Beat boxing. In his studies of defining hip hop, Jeffries concluded that these mixtures of art forms do not define hip hop but rather that hip hop itself is a culture of these elements. “Hip-hop is like a culture, it’s a voice for black people to be heard. Our own style, our own music” (Jeffries). 2011; 28).

    Read More

  • African American Culture: Hip Hop And Black Culture

    862 Words  | 2 Pages

    Black culture in our society has come to the point where it is allied with pop culture. The most popular music genres, slang terms, to dance forms it all comes from black culture. Hip hop emerged from black culture, becoming the soul of it that is seen in the media. Hip hop helped the black community by creating new ways of expressing themselves, from breakdance, graffiti, rap and other music, to slang. This culture was rooted in their tradition and created from something new. Hip hop created a new form of music that required the use of turn tables, ‘cuts’, loops, rhythm, rhyme, stories, and deep-rooted emotions, but also incorporated black oral forms of storytelling using communal authors.

    Read More

  • The Effects of Hip Hop on Today's Youth

    1578 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hip-hop music is portrayed by an entertainer rapping over a track that regularly comprises of loops or specimens of other music woven together (Selke INT). Hip-hop originally appeared in the Bronx around the 1970s and steadily turned into the predominant mainstream music structure by the 1990s, representing a multi-billion dollar industry today (Selke INT). Hip-hop music can additionally have some positive impacts. For example, its verbal imagination can motivate audience members to play with dialect, and acknowledge musicality and rhyme (Selke INT). Just like poetry, hip-hop can be a way of expressing oneself.

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Footwork

    1853 Words  | 4 Pages

    Like hip-hop, footwork is not just a genre of music but a tightly affiliated group of cultural practices. hip-hop's four elements were rapping, DJing, B-boying or breakdancing, and graffiti tagging. Footwork's elements are similar: Music production replaces rapping, DJing emerges much the same, and B-boying is transposed into the eponymous "footwork" dance style. As in Hip-Hop, "battles" are popular, here taking place as competitive,

    Read More

More about Aesthetics Of Hip Hop

Open Document