Hip Hop: Escalating from underground to mainstream

Hip Hop was a movement of different artistic forms that was originally formed by marginalized subculture in the South Bronx and Harlem in the New York among the mix of young Latino and black youth in the early 1970’s. Hip Hop has different characteristics which are made up of four elements: Rap music which is oral, turntablism which is DJ’ing, Breaking which was a form of dance and graffiti art. Despite their cold-hearted ideas of execution the thing most people that are into Hip-Hop have in common is their relatable story of struggle of poverty and violence which outlining the historical context that gave birth to the culture.

Hip hop as a music cultured started during the 1970s when street parties became very popular in the New York City, especially among African youth living in the Bronx. Street parties/block parties merged DJ’s, who played famous genres of music, particularly funk and soul music – because of the positive reception a lot of DJs began dividing the percussive breaks of popular songs. Hip hop’s early development into a form diverse from R&B also, it wasn't coincidentally, it happened around the time that sampling the technology and drum-machines became marginally available to the general public at a price that was affordable to the average consumer.

In 1990, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet was a major success with music critics and consumers. It was extremely contributory to hip hop’s mainstream emergence in 1990, dubbed by Paul Grein as “the year that hip hop exploded” In a 1990 article on its commercial revolution, Janice C. Thompson of Time wrote that hip hop “has grown into the most exciting development in American pop music in more than a decade”. However, hip hop was still met with resistance from Black radio, including urban contemporary, of which Russell Simmons said in 1990, “Black radio hated rap from the start and there still a lot of resistance to it”. In Europe, Africa and Asia, hip hop began to move from the underground to mainstream audiences. In Europe, hip hop was the territory of both ethnic nationals and immigrants. British hip hop, for example, turned into a genre of its own and produced artists such as Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets and many more.

Hip hop influences also found their way gradually into mainstream during the early 2000s, as the Los Angeles style of the 1990s lost power, Nelly’s debut LP, Country Grammar sold over nine million copies. In the 2000s, crunk music, an unoriginal style of Southern hip hop, gained popularity due to the likes of Lil Jon, Ying Yang Twins. Jay-Z represented the cultural victory of hip hop. As his career progressed, he went from performing artists to label president, head of clothing line, club owner and market consultant –along the way breaking Elvis Preseley’s for the most number one albums on the Billboard magazine charts by a solo artist. In addition to the mainstream success, USA also saw the success of alternative hip hop in the form of performers such as The Roots, Dilated Peoples, Gnarls Barkley and Mos Def, who accomplished major acknowledgement.