Gangster Rap and Its Social Cost: Exploiting Hip Hop and Using Ra ...

Chapter 2

What is Hip Hop?

Origins

If one wants to perturb most music listeners over the age of 40, one need only ask them whether they enjoy rap music or know what hip hop is. Many will respond by criticizing rap and the young people who listen to it. There will not be a word about hip hop. Again, if one asks young rap listeners what hip hop is, they will have a hard time defining it. How is it that neither group can define hip hop or articulate what they like or dislike about it? Wikipedia defines hip hop as “both a musical and cultural genre or movement that was developed predominantly by African Americans and Latinos in urban communities, starting in the 1970s” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop). This description is partly accurate, but it does not define hip hop; it only identifies who created it.

Though both popular and academic sources have published a substantial amount of information on hip hop and rap, most writers have not defined hip hop much more completely than Wikipedia has. The term hip hop itself arose quite by accident and is generally attributed to a South Bronx disc jockey, Lovebug Starski, who habitually called out at parties, “Hip hop you don’t stop that makes your body rock” (Keyes, 2002). But what is