Info about Hiphop
The Ingredients of Hip Hop Culture
Ask anyone today and they always associate Hip Hop with Rap music. Interestingly this is true as well as false. It is true because rap is a part of the Hip Hop culture. It is false because hip hop is not just about rapping. As the name suggests Hip Hop is a culture and there are many facets to it. When you take them all together you get the real hip hop.
Any culture is primarily about expression of ideas. Now there are many ways you could express your emotions like writing, singing, playing or dancing. Interestingly the hip hop culture has all these four ingredients.
The hip hop equivalent of singing is rapping or emceeing as it is called. What rap song really is, is a set of lyrics that are speaking lyrics in rhythm. This technique of singing has its roots in traditional African music where the singers tend to speak in tune. Of course the modern rap songs have a good set of musical instruments to accompany the song too.
The next is playing music. In this case, the Hip Hop has taken a different turn. Instead of playing musical instruments the hip hop people play existing songs in different manner and fashion. We all know this popularly as DJing. DJ or the disc Jockey is a person who has a disc player and a huge collection of discs. By playing parts or sections of different music at different times the DJ is able to come out with a great composition of his own.
The next aspect of Hip Hop is dancing. One of the most popular forms of dancing even today is the break dancing. Depending on whether a boy or a girl dances we have terms like B-boying and B-girling. The break dancing is a combination of typical moves that create a unique flow of motions. The four main styles of break dancing are top rock, down rock, freeze and power moves.
The last form of expression is the Graffiti. While this is typically associated with bad connotations by many people, the graffiti is truly a work of art. If it is looked at from that perspective it really is away of expression for the person.
What is interesting is that hip hop culture is really not a new culture at all. In fact it is one of the few cultures to have be born in completely urban settings of the contemporary era .the origins of Hip Hop date back to the 1970’s in Bronx area of the New York city.
However, the hip hop culture we have today is a transformed version of the original culture. The primary reason for this being the commercialisation of this culture. Given how popular this was with the teenagers and young adults, it has a very good market and pretty soon it was commercialised.
Purists do believe that today’s hip Hop culture is a shadow of the richness and creativity that the original culture had, but given how popular it is, no one is complaining.
Hip hop culture has transformed American culture, and it will become the number one musical genre in the world if enough people are involved in it. More and more people from different cultural and demographic groups are unexpectedly getting involved in, and picking up, hip hop culture.