4 Interesting Facts You Didn't Know About Hip Hop

Whenever someone mentions the word Hip-Hop, every person who knows at least one song of this genre will start jamming to timeless notes and tunes. However, it is an inevitable fact that Hip-Hop, as a musical form, has become overwhelmingly popular in the last twenty years or so and has slowly become a huge trend, or more precisely, the one that dominates pop music. When you go further than that, this music form was still being referred to as “rap music” and had censors all over the lyrics because they talked about the themes with the vocabulary, unlike back-then-known music.

While Hip-Hop is connected to the type of music in the minds of people nowadays, actually, rap music is the music of the culture of Hip-Hop, which gave birth to some other art forms such as graffiti in art and breakdance in dance. Hip-Hop is a culture, a tradition that will take you a lot of time to investigate and research, so we have prepared a couple of interesting facts you didn't know earlier.

A Word Hip-Hop Has a Definitive Origin

Some of the Hip-Hop elements, such as rapping, breakdancing, and DJing, were called by these names long before anyone outside of New York City knew what they meant. But, for many years, the culture itself had no name. Once it got one, it was the word describing the culture, and it was named by a young MC, Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins, one of the first MCs, who was making fun of his friends and suddenly started chanting this word during one of his songs while mimicking the soldiers marching.

Hip-Hop Existed Long Before Rap

Hip-hop culture has always had strong roots in music and elements of culture tied to it. For that matter, the association with music began in the late 60s with Black Spades, aka street gangs, and their members blaring music from their ghetto. In the beginning, this music was censored because of the intense vocabulary used for the lyrics, which eventually led to the creation of uncensored hip-hop art forms. It was a lot of hassle before we got to read Hip Hop News Uncensored and experience this culture as it is. Interestingly enough, traditional Hip-Hop started with a Greek man named Demetrius. As a teenager, he started writing his nickname all over the streets, and he is also known as the founder of the new art form-graffiti.

Hip-Hop Has a Birthday: August 11, 1973

At that time, a lot of parties were thrown by a 16-year-old Jamaican whose name was Clive Campbell in the rec room of his apartment. A muscular, tall boy with the nickname Kool Herc was the first to experiment with the sound by isolating the drum breaks. Dancers would wait for the moment when the breaks happened so that they could show off their best moves. Herc figured out that extending these breaks would make people dance more, and he was at the same time the first person ever to refer to these folks as “break boys” or “b-boys” who were the founders of the new dancing style “break dancing.”

DJs Were Stars, Not Rappers

The aforementioned Herc and DJs were the first and early stars of Hip-Hop before MCs started rapping or doing anything more than hype DJs up and keep the crowd dancing. The MCs did not have a chance to move toward the center of the stage until the late ’70s. During that entire time, DJs were the main characters, bringing the crowd together and making them move. The second on the pedestal was the B-boys who got to bring the music made by DJs together and synergize it with dance. Those were the off-sets of hip-hop and the golden age of this tradition.

Hip-hop is not only the genre; it is the culture many people live in, even nowadays. Traces and tendencies of this culture can be found everywhere, from music to art. After Hip-Hop came onto the scene, nothing was the same anymore.