Roughly forty years ago, ghettos of New York City were brought alive by a developing culture we’d later know as HipHop. Right now, we draw the origins of this way of life to Afro-Americans and Latinos who lived in the city’s less fortunate neighborhoods in the early seventies. This was way more than a way of life for the gangster-inspired neighborhoods and pigeonholes back then. Hip Hop as a slowly building up culture was then declarative of the colored people’s unrest due to discrimination issues that allegedly took form in police brutality, political speeches and other social patterns believed to be deliberately perpetrated by the whites against their dignity. More than anything, Hip Hop was a way for these communities to express their objections to what they perceived to be the dehumanization of their skin. As a medium, those who lived this newly evolved culture were using music to convey their message to society. In the early seventies, New York DJ’s started playing a different brand of music which gave rise to unconventional dance moves which nevertheless clicked and soon, African-American and Latino rap were born. This revolution of sort had its get-gos in Bronx, Brooklyn and every nearby area where the music jocks explored their creativity and ended up with a characteristically different funky music that was defined by interjections of nonmusical sounds, the most famous of which was scratching. What characterized this evolving genre more were the rhythmic drum breaks that became characteristic of Hip Hop music, giving it more personality and power to soon gain fame among the club-going youth. So, Hip Hop grew massively and began to be a major force in the world of music. Its attention-getting beats and rhythms drew such great and enthusiastic crowds each time DJ’s were performing. It even got to a point when anybody who wanted a shot at stardom could crank out a Hip Hop beat and almost make it instantly. It was then that this lifestyle started to grow uncontrollably, especially with the introduction of breakdance and graffiti artists who were then the most interesting personalities of that period. In fact, Hip Hop grew so big that it overpowered whatever universal resistance existed between white and colored races in America. As the 1970s drew to a close, recording companies run by whites couldn’t ignore the enormity of the Hip Hop influence and started producing Hip Hop music in no time. Today, this culture is a way of life that could be captured through Latino rap or Spanish rap, both of which are synonymous with equally popular rap music produced by African-Americans whose roots comprise the other half of the Hip Hop movement nearly four decades ago.
Tags: Latino rap, Spanish rap