Hip Hop And Urban Culture

Mike Martini

Professor Busch

AMS 205

December 6, 2015

Hip hop culture has articulated black marginality in many ways since artists like Grandmaster Flash helped pioneer hip hop. Even though the culture was new and focused on life in the city, it still stayed consistent with keeping African American traditions including variety of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical practices and dance forms. The local streets on which people lived, turned into the face for hip hop. With the help of music videos, rap artists showed what life was like in their place of urban decline. Hip hop is mostly related to African American culture, due to the fact that most of the pioneers in hip hop were of that origin. With the deindustrialization of cities

The culture showed life experiences through a variety of ways, “Hip hop replicates and reimagines the experiences of urban life and symbolically appropriates urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style, and sound effects” (Rose, 22). Graffiti, breakdancing, and rap music all developed a relationship that depended on one another. Hip hop songs included lyrics of local posses and subways while urban noise was played in the background. Graffiti artists would spray paint or “tag” an area on public property to mark their territory. Music videos by rappers in hip hop songs displayed all of these things. Unlike other videos that used live footage from their concerts, hip hop videos often shot their videos in local areas around the city, including public parks, sidewalks, project buildings, and intersections. Also most videos included the rapper being followed around by his local gang or posse. Through the use of music videos, hip hop was able to show what everyday life was like in locations of urban decline.

The hip hop movement was closely related to music types like jazz, blues, and R&B which were already heavily associated with African American Culture. There were many similarities between the genres of music, “It vigorously erases the contradictory stance towards capitalism, raging sexism, and other non-progressive elements that have always been part and parcel of jazz, the blues, and

Many of the people involved with creating rap music were trained in maintaining new technologies for people with money to afford them. These new technologies were put to use in hip hop culture as primary tools for the creation of rap music that included original black culture, “This advanced technology has not been straightforwardly adopted; it has been significantly revised in ways that are in keeping with long-standing black cultural priorities, particularly regarding approaches to sound organization” (Rose, 63). Digital samplers played a key role in the development of rap music, but they often gained legal attention. DJ’s would often mix and match different pieces of music together to create a rhythm, but this often violated copyright laws and posed questioning to the legal boundaries of using musical property and phrases. These samplers helped formulate beats of songs that were hybrids from multiple sources of music. The rhythms and sounds that were created from this new sampling technology were consistent with the historic narratives of Afro-diasporic