Hip hop or rap music, is a music genre developed in the United States by inner-city African Americans in the 1970s which consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping, DJing/scratching with turntables, break dancing, and graffiti writing. Other elements include sampling beats or bass lines from records (or synthesized beats and sounds), and rhythmic beatboxing.
Janine Francois explores Hip-Hop as a genre that disrupts the westerns colonial linear routines – by artists who grew up in a post-colonial environment. Janine highlights how the transatlantic slave trade plays an important part in the expression of hip-hop as well as the discrimination against black people – both racially and economically within western inner-city environments. Without this trade the existence of hip-hop as we know it may not have existed. Enslaved people were stripped of their culture, customs, religions and identities and forced to adopt European names, cultures and religions by white slave masters, which shapes the identity of Hip-Hop.
Music has continued to be an important venue for the expression of Black politics and the denunciation of racism and colonialism into the 21st century. Two of Fela Kuti’s children, Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti have continued to use afrobeat as a venue for expressing Pan-African, anti-colonial politics. In the United States, hip hop artists like The Coup, Immortal Technique, and Kendrick Lamar have continued to produce politically charged music, picking up where groups like N.W.A. left off.
One of the things I learned about was the use of the drum is a motif of African rebellion – showing how important it is in the development of breakbeats and rhythm that’s so prevalent in hip-hop. The tempo of the drum is usually what shapes the genre – some of my favorite songs using samples using Jazz or soul breakbeats e.g The Notorious B.I.G. – Suicidal Thoughts uses the drums from ‘ Outside Love ‘ by Brethren.