What is Hip Hop culture?

What is Hip Hop culture?


Hip Hop Culture:
Too many people are unclear as to what Hip Hop Culture really is and tend to use the term frivolously. Hip Hop Culture is commonly recognized by its main elements: Graffiti, Djing, Breakdancing (B-boying), Mcing, and Beatboxing. However, these elements are simply forms of art designed to express a deeper meaning. At its core, Hip Hop is so much more than mere art and entertainment. Hip Hop is the constantly evolving spirit and consciousness of urban youth that keeps recreating itself in a never-ending cycle. It is joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, victory, defeat, anger, happiness, confusion, clarity, humor, intensity, dream, nightmare, life, death, and everything else in between. It is the spirit that connects the past to the present and lays a path towards the future. The spirit of Hip Hop is the same as Jazz, Reggae, Blues, Doo-wop, Be-bop, and a multitude of other types of expressions. Hip Hop Culture cannot be assimilated, integrated, diluted, watered-down, sold for profit, or pimped. It will always exist, in this incarnation or another.

What the mainstream promotes as being Hip Hop, or Hip Pop, is the product being sold to you and your children by mainstream media that pollutes the mind and makes impressionable individuals think that being a pimp, player, thug, ho, bitch, gangster, baller, or hustler is the thing to do. It is the poison being fed to you by mainstream rappers who say that it’s not their job to be anyone’s role model while they depend on 13 to 20 years old fans to buy their music. It’s the studio thug telling your children to represent thug life while his children are well provided for and attend private school. It’s some female rappers who encourage their young female listeners to stay in school and out of trouble when speaking at junior highs across the country while their music gives the same kids the opposite message.

You get the point. Hip Hop is life and all it has to offer; Hip “Pop” is death served to you on a shiny silver platter. This knowledge lays the foundation for all those who thought of Hip Hop as nothing more than entertainment.

Spread the word!