The Hip Hop Background

*Thanks to Google for the pictures

The hip hop culture is a movement that started a long time ago by Afro-Americans and Lateen youth.

This youth developed the hip hop culture in NY, and since then it is common all over the world.

The term ‘hip hop’ is a combination of two words – “Hip” – as something that is modern, and “hop”, for the dance move called hopping.

The definition of the words “hip-hop” has become to many people an equal definition to the concepts ‘Rap’ and ‘hip hop music’, but these definitions are definitely not the same, but only a little part of the whole Hip-Hop world.

Hip-hop culture is built by 4 main components:

Graffiti

Graffiti is the artistic part of the hip hop culture, it is mostly expressed by paintings and writing.

In most cases, the paintings are made without permission of property owners – and thus, the painters break the law (vandalism).

The term Graffiti has come from one of two sources:

The Italian source – Graffito (scratched), or the Greek source – Graffin (writing).

Graffiti used to be the way of street gangs to express their social or political opinions by protests, and was also used to mark territories.

Breakdance

Breakdance (also known as Bboying), is a type of an acrobatic dance.

The breakdance is divided to 5 types of dancing that are almost likely to be used in each routine of dancing or free-styling:

Toprock – the toprock is the part when the dancer is doing his dance in standing position.

Footwork – dancing with his whole body close to the ground, using mostly both feet and hands, and the rest of the body.

Freezes – likely to be used when the beat stops or breaks. The dancer “freezes” his body in a cool or original position.

Power moves – definition of moves which are usually need to be practiced and requires power to be done.

Acrobatics – using flips or such things to improve the dance.

Breakdance in the past used to be the way of crews to solve their conflicts without using any violence, expressing their feelings in the dance.

MCing

MCing is actually mostly known as Rap, but it also includes Beatboxing.

The term MC (hick name for Master of Ceremonies) is connected to Rap and Beatbox.

Rap used to be, and sometimes still is, a way to express a human’s feeling in his own words and making a song out of it in combination of background music.

Beatbox, is the art of creating beats and sounds using only the human’s mouth.

Over the years MCing began to spread across the world, and today MCing is an integral part of Hip Hop culture and music.

DJing

DJ is an abbreviation of the words ‘disc – jockey’ – refers to a man that chooses and plays pre-recorded music for his audience.

The DJing culture in hip hop started developing in New-York streets, where Afro-Americans gathered and started manipulations in hip hop music:

Some of them were dancing breakdance, rapping and beatboxing through the music.

In summary, the hip hop is an old street culture that started many years ago by Afro-American people and includes different components that these Afro-Americans used to dance, sing or paint.