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When I say hip-hop, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Rap! Isn’t it!
Let’s clear the air one for all on this! I’ll take you
through the journey of Hip-Hop, how it emerged, how it got famous, its true
meaning… everything!
Hip hop is a culture and art movement that began in the Bronx
in New York City back in the 1970s. It gained widespread popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Also, the backing music rap, the musical style incorporating
rhythmic speech, became the movement’s most lasting and influential art form.
Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc are the founders of hip
hop movement. They decided to confront the scourge of criminality and violence,
by which most of the youngsters were affected in those days. These youngsters
were primarily Afro- Americans. Afrika Bambaataa and Herc put forward an
artistic alternative to deal with the problem. To give this idea a direction,
they started organizing festivals and block parties by gathering people.
Hip hop culture was born out of such block parties…
People indulged in rapping, music, dance, graffiti, etc.
With the success of the purpose the block parties, Afrika Bambaata organized the Zulu Nation,
which is an informal structure with an aim to promote this hip hop movement, by
gathering a large number of gang members into block parties and made twenty
laws every Zulu member had to abide by.
The basic ideology
behind hip hop movement and Zulu nation proceeds from the affirmation of black
Americans in the face of white domination and to make the dancers come together
and express themselves in a creative way!
Afrika Bambaataa once said, “Hip hop has crossed many
boundaries and racial barriers, breaking them down for people to come together,
to listen to the music or come out of their own social ills in each of the
countries that it has gone to. Thanks to my traveling, and keeping up from
place to place, and pushing our ideology- peace, love, unity, and having fun-
it has worked.”
Now, let's see how hop-hop gained widespread popularity…
Though hip hop originated in the United States, France
is considered after it as the second homeland of hip hop. It increased at a
very fast pace in France in those days.
There were many reasons for the fast implantation of hip hop
in France. First is the extreme conditions that France was facing that time
by which mostly the young people were getting badly affected. It was due to
mass unemployment, of which the lower class people and the youngsters were the
hardest hit. And also because of the prevailing biases on the basis of race,
national identity, a lot of people were affected deeply.
So at that time, the youth had two choices, to choose the
political modes of action to express their anger against the injustice, which
some people did opt, or to choose hip hop, which was original, more accessible
means of expression. A lot of people from disadvantaged neighborhood opted for
this way as it suited them the most.
Gradually, the hip hop gained the attention of the media and
through that platform, it got huge recognition among the people of France.
Studies on the socio-demographic aspects of the hip hop dancers and the origin
of hip hop were also very prevalent in those days and this promoted hip hop on
a large level.
Initially, hip hop dance was long associated in the minds
of French people’s imagination as a dance representative of dangerous classes
and frightening youth culture, which today, decades after its introduction in
France has been accepted as a form of art and that too contemporary form of
dance, all over the globe.
The shift of attitudes of people regarding hip hop was
also a consequence of the way media was portraying the hip hop dancers. The sociological studies no longer focused
just on the socio-demographic conditions of the dancers but became an art critic
and focused on hip hop as an art form.
It is the cultural capital owners at
the head of legitimate cultural institutions who made hip-hop an object worthy
of interest for the intellectual factions of the ruling classes and the middle
classes. Festivals also played a crucial role in structuring the cultural environment of hip hop as a whole.
But gradually, the whole hip hop scenario lost its fame
due to the disappearance of media from the scene. After the hip hop fad, there were
only a few people left who kept on practicing their art and those are the people
who realized a strong need to legitimize hip hop, in order to keep their art
form alive.
In order to gain legitimacy, it was important for the hip
hop culture to go through the process of “artification”, which would ultimately
pave the way for the legitimization of hip hop. Artification is the process of
conversion of non-art form into an art form.
This process actually took place in France due to the
political circumstances that saw the election of a socialist president,
Francois Mitterrand.
Beginning in 1980, the new leaders set up public
action mechanisms and a policy aimed at the democratization of culture and
integration through culture. This policy took place in two phases: initially, it
was confined to the field of social or socio-cultural action and in its second
stage it undertook the process of artistic legitimation and artification.
After the process of artification, it was important to
make hip hop more professional. It is about the development of a hip hop dancer
into an independent artist or-author who can choreograph a totally different,
creative form of art. The process of professionalization completes at a point
when a learner, an educational choreographer becomes individual artists
gradually and assert themselves by forming their own companies.
Hybridization, crossbreeding in hip hop is what
helped hip hop to maintain its legitimacy in the long run. The ability or the flexibility that this art form has when it comes to mixing various cultures
and art forms together to bring out something totally unique and new is
what makes it different from other forms of art.
In the end, I’d like to quote Afrika Bambaataa.
He said, "I'd like to see people pay attention to the science of hip hop. The knowledge part, the political side of what hip hop could do, or where hip hop is gonna go..."
So, next time when you talk about hip hop, remember it not just as an art form that has evolved out of creativity but also remember it
as a movement, an expression that gave the deprived, the oppressed, a voice and
platform to raise their voice against the system!
Written by – N. Nargis Fathima
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