Hip-Hop's Influence On American Culture

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It was owing to this kind of attitude and purpose that Blues had such a strong vitality. Originally, Blues only expressed the sentimental and depressive feelings of the black people. But when it stepped into the popular music circle, it began to express some sentimental and sorrowful feelings that all the human beings held. And its early themes concerned about hard life, unfair fate, undone dream and broken love affair of Afro-Americans. And later some new elements were added into it, which was the production of industrial civilization, such as the lonely soul, the pressure from the fast paced life, as well as the fear of death and the helpless feeling about life, and so on. In a word, sentimental and sorrowful feeling was the eternal theme …show more content…

Break-dance became a very popular form of Hip-Hop dance in the 1980s. The formation of Hip-Hop had some links with Rock & Roll. With the growing segregation of radio formats and the dominance of mainstream rock by white male performers, the place of black artists in the rock world diminished. By the late 1990s, no major popular black successor to Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix had emerged in Rock. These trends, combined with the rise of “safe” dance disco by white bands (the Bee Gees), black artists (Donna Summer), and integrated groups (the Village People), created a space for the culture that produced Hip-Hop music. In some ways a black counterpart to the spirit of white punk, Hip-Hop music also stood in direct opposition to the polished, professional, and less political world of soul. Hip-Hop’s combination of social politics, swagger, and comic lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in Blues, R&B, Soul, and Rock & Roll. Like punk, Hip-Hop was driven by a democratic, nonprofessional spirit—accessible to anyone who could talk or rap in street dialect and cut or sample records on a turntable. Hip-Hop deejays emerged in Jamaica and New York, scratching and re-cueing old reggae, disco, soul, and rock albums. As dance music, Hip-Hop developed MCs (master of ceremony) who used humor, boasts, and “trash talking” to entertain and keep the peace at parties. Today the term “Hip-Hop” was most commonly used as a synonym for rap music, whereas Rap was just one remarkable style of Hip-Hop music. In fact, Rap mixed with a bit R&B was the previous existence of Hip-Hop music. Rap, as a word, was slang from the black people, which meant “talking”; as one music style, it was very popular in America and famous with the young people. It had a wide infection for modern international music circle. Rap music influenced the tendency of pop music, and even in Asia, the

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