Preface:

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a flowering of urban music and art forms that would come to be known as “hip hop.” These included rap music, break dancing, and graffiti writers created masterpieces of the “wild style.” On subway cars as their canvas, graffiti writers created masterpieces of the “wild style.” On the street, new dance forms appeared, with innovators like Jimmy D and Crazy Legs from Rock Steady Crew battling one another to perform new feats of agility and stamina. Today, hip hop aesthetics dominate youth culture, with rap supplanting rock ‘n’ roll as the pre-eminent musical idiom among young people of many races, ethnicities and geographic regions.

In this seminar, we examined the origins of the hip hop style. We noted, for example, the debt rap owes to previous musical genres, including jazz, funk, soul, reggae, and African forms. We also looked at the post-modern universe in which hop hop emerged, the influence of pop culture, television, emerging digital technologies, and the fascination with borrowing (“appropriation”) that was very much a feature of 1980s art.