Hip hop and rap appeared, like many other musical innovations, in New York, particularly in the Bronx. Although it’s fairly common to associate this music with the black community as well as with the latino community, both the genre and the culture associated with it have, in time, spread all over the world. Hip hop performances have come to the point of varying greatly in style and content, and are often associated with actions known as “elements”, such as beat boxing, break dancing or DJing.
It’s very important to precisely distinguish hip hop and rap. It’s definitely not a mistake to refer to a particular artist by using either word, as the two concepts are interdependent and interconnected. However, although this area is under strong dispute, the basic difference between hip hop and rap is as follows.
Hip hop, before being internationally known as a musical genre, was a culture. It’s from the associated culture and background that it emerged, but it never quite became detached from it. Break-dance, for example, is definitely the best known dance associated to it. Its beginnings are quite controversial in their essence. Some claim that battling through dance was a form of minimizing street violence between gangs, while some deny this ever had anything to do with gang rivalry. Considering it’s an activity based primarily on dance (although highly athletic), it emerged from any limits of a subculture and became accepted worldwide. Graffiti is the oldest recorded element of all, and only in time did it gain in complexity and become associated with the movement. Read more...
