The Golden Age Of Hip Hop

Hip hop started in the sixties and seventies and the way in which hip hop came about, was to tell a message from the people of the streets and the struggles they had to endure. Although there were and still are hip hop songs that people would dance and express their body freely to, hip hop was initially supposed to be a therapeutic way for inner city young people, primarily black people to express themselves and convey their story of struggle in a lyrical fun way.
Hip-hop’s roots in the 1970s can be traced back to New York’s South Bronx neighbourhood. The genre was founded by young African-American, Caribbean and Latino communities who started MCing and breakbeats. The person widely credited as the father of the movement, DJ Kool Herc, based

In the 1970s, the genre was still mostly relegated to block parties and underground all-night dance parties in New York’s African-American neighbourhoods, but it would soon go big over the next decade. Not only did hip-hop spread outside the South Bronx, it also hit other countries across the world. DJs from UK to Japan started spinning hip-hop records, each bringing a slightly different style to their own subgenre of hip-hop. In the USA, this decade was the “Golden Age of Hip-Hop”– nicknamed like that because of the quality, innovativeness and diversity of music being created around this

‘New’ school hip-hop started with Run-DMC and LL Cool J, influenced partly by rock and featuring rappers aggressively delivering boasts, taunts, and some social commentary. Gangsta rap was also in its early experimental phase at this time, with Ice-T and later N.W.A. pioneering very violent and profanity-filled songs meant to rock the established genre and musically enhance the establishment. However some artists used their platform to discuss political topics and urge enlightenment. A well-known female act within the hip hop scene, Queen Latifah, dressed in African inspired clothing and also delivering an inspiring message not just to her fans but to common listeners. Other acts, most notably Public Enemy, displaying social activism within their music by speaking about the frustrations of the African American community and putting it on vinyl for the world to hear, this alone shows the way in which hip hop grew from the inner city youth using hip-hop as a way to express their feelings with one another to groups and individuals using this new recognised talent as a way to communicate and express themselves and their story to the