Hip Hop Didn't Stop And Now It's Taking Over; Is Hip Hop the New Blues?
By: Bridget Morris - The Sunday Herald
June 2nd 2003 1:35pm
She may be the princess of pop, but even Britney Spears can't
compete with hip hop's domination of the American and British music
charts. Last week Spears announced that she is planning not only to
sing but to rap on her next album.
Spears is the latest in a long line of mainstream pop acts to
jump on the hip hop bandwagon. Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lopez,
Christina Aguilera and Beyonce Knowles have already collaborated
with MCs. Meanwhile Rapper 50 Cent's most recent album, Get Rich Or
Die Tryin', was the fastest-selling debut album ever, with a little
less than a million records sold in its first week of release.
"[Hip hop's] influence is all over the place now," says Conor
McNicholas, editor of NME. "You can't ignore it."
And its influence extends far beyond music. Hollywood films these
days don't look fully cast without at least one rapper among the
actors, and products from trainers to soft drinks are marketed by
hip hop stars - a Jay-Z edition of some 10,000 pairs of Reeboks sold
out in hours last month.
All of which is a long journey for a music genre with roots in
the ghettos of New York. As Patrick Neate, author of Where You're
At: Notes From The Frontline Of A Hip Hop Planet, puts it: "It
started in New York in the mid to late 1970s. A guy called Kool Herc
was DJing at block parties in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and he created
this idea of 'the break', where you break a record down into the
best bits and just play them repeatedly so people really boogie.
"Then Sugarhill Records started up: Sugarhill Gang made Rapper's
Delight, and the style was picked up quite early by people like
Blondie and Malcolm McLaren. And now, after 25 years, it's all-
pervasive."
Neate's book describes journeys to cities as diverse as Tokyo,
Johannesburg and Rio, where he meets young, often desperately
deprived people, who have adopted the music and manners of hip hop
as their own.
"Hip hop," he says, "is now both the biggest-selling musical form
in the USA and the voice of alienated, disenfranchised urban youth -
a cultural dialectic that takes quite some explaining."
That a genre that is supposed to give voice to a minority has
monopolised the mainstream might seem strange. But, as Mike
Connolly, producer of the forthcoming BBC documentary The Hip Hop
Generation, says, a very similar thing has happened before: "Blues
music is from an even more obscure place. Down in the southern
states of America, this bizarre, atonal 1930s music of black
sharecroppers took over the world in the same way, so there is a
precedent for it."
David Toop, music expert and author of Rap Attack: African Rap to
Global Hip Hop, agrees that there's nothing unusual about the way in
which rap music has moved beyond the niche audience to whom it
directly speaks. "It's very popular with kids who would never
normally come into contact with the primary hip hop environment," he
says. "And to some extent that's always been true through the whole
history of popular music, that it's been a slightly vicarious
experience for many people.
"But then there's a large element of fantasy in any popular
music. If you look back at the history of hip hop, fantasy is one of
the roots of the music - it was people who had very little,
fantasising about what they would like to have. If you go back to
records like Rapper's Delight, it was kids who were working in pizza
parlours saying that they had limousines and they were drinking
champagne."
The Hip Hop Generation is on BBC1 later this month
 (C) 2003 The Sunday Herald. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
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